Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Embodying the Fragments: A Refl ection on the Reluctant Auto-Biography of Brigid Brophy
- 2 Brigid Brophy’s Paradoxical World of Childhood
- 3 Intr oduction to ‘The Librarian and the Novel’
- 4 The Librarian and the Novel: A Writer’s View
- 5 Penetrating (the) Prancing Novelist
- 6 ‘Shavian that she was’
- 7 ‘Il faut que je vive’: Brigid Brophy and Animal Rights
- 8 Brigid Brophy’s Phenomenology of Sex in Flesh and The Snow Ball
- 9 Letter to Brigid
- 10 Encoding Love: Hidden Correspondence in the Fiction of Brigid Brophy and Iris Murdoch
- 11 ‘Heads and Boxes’: A Prop Art Exhibition Collaboration by Brigid Brophy and Maureen Duffy
- 12 Prancing Novelist and Black and White: Experiments in Biography
- 13 ‘Mo nster Cupid’: Brophy, Camp and The Snow Ball
- 14 ‘A Felicitous Day for Fish’
- 15 The Dissenting Feminist
- 16 A Certain Detachment?
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
11 - ‘Heads and Boxes’: A Prop Art Exhibition Collaboration by Brigid Brophy and Maureen Duffy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Embodying the Fragments: A Refl ection on the Reluctant Auto-Biography of Brigid Brophy
- 2 Brigid Brophy’s Paradoxical World of Childhood
- 3 Intr oduction to ‘The Librarian and the Novel’
- 4 The Librarian and the Novel: A Writer’s View
- 5 Penetrating (the) Prancing Novelist
- 6 ‘Shavian that she was’
- 7 ‘Il faut que je vive’: Brigid Brophy and Animal Rights
- 8 Brigid Brophy’s Phenomenology of Sex in Flesh and The Snow Ball
- 9 Letter to Brigid
- 10 Encoding Love: Hidden Correspondence in the Fiction of Brigid Brophy and Iris Murdoch
- 11 ‘Heads and Boxes’: A Prop Art Exhibition Collaboration by Brigid Brophy and Maureen Duffy
- 12 Prancing Novelist and Black and White: Experiments in Biography
- 13 ‘Mo nster Cupid’: Brophy, Camp and The Snow Ball
- 14 ‘A Felicitous Day for Fish’
- 15 The Dissenting Feminist
- 16 A Certain Detachment?
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
An attentive reader of The Times on 21 April 1969 would have been intrigued by this announcement in the entertainment small advertisements:
Heads and boxes: Prop Art. Brigid Brophy and Maureen Duffy, 19 to 31 May. Mason's Yard Gallery, 14 Mason's Yard (off Duke Street), St James, London, SW1.
Rather than featuring among other West End galleries in the Art Exhibitions section, this appeared under Exhibitions and Lectures, between the Buxton Antiques Fair and a London University science lecture, as if confirming the challenge of categorising a fresh departure by two established writers, each known for literary originality but not for visual art. The purpose was serious, the execution of it fun, but to launch a conceptual art exhibition, complete with manifesto about the Brophy–Duffy invention of Prop Art, was also daring. Tribune published the first advertisement, on 11 April, alerting progressive friends and sympathisers, but to announce it in The Times, then the newspaper of record, essential reading for opinion-formers, was to assert the claim of ‘Heads and Boxes’ to be taken seriously by a wider intellectual audience, including colleagues and contacts of the art historian Michael Levey, keeper of the National Gallery, to whom Brophy was married.
Despite the optimistic and innovative artistic climate of 1969, where experiment was welcomed in theory, any surprising initiative ran risks in practice, as Brophy was aware:
To be any kind of artist is a dangerous profession. There is a constant attempt to place limitations on the intellect and the imagination, and if someone comes up with something new – not newness of form which can become immediately fashionable, but newness of concept, people find this disturbing.
So they say that what you have done is a joke, or that you are not equipped, or that you are deliberately trying to shock, or that you ought to stick to what you know. And in our case, there is always one objection to fall back on, the one which says: you are a woman.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Brigid BrophyAvant-Garde Writer, Critic, Activist, pp. 162 - 181Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020