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Body High: Death, Drugs, and Eva Hesse
How do we medicate ourselves, and why can’t we cure the people we love? In Body High, encounters with lurid bodily sculptures from the '60s offer remedies to the author’s own illness and malaise.
In Body High, the introduction to lurid sculptural practices from the 1960s and the author’s own experience in proximity to opiate use will be used to offer a surreal and unsettling, yet seductive landscape where wider universal themes are How do we medicate ourselves, and why can’t we cure the people we love?
Dripping latex and collapsed rubber tubes were among the provocative materials that signaled an aesthetic turn in European and American sculptural practices starting in the late 1960s. Objects became they responded to gravity in ways suggestive of exhaustion, offered sensual form, and confronted viewers with the ephemeral realities of our bodies through viscosity and deterioration.
This book analyses the objects by women within that movement, which explored maternity and mortality to capture the body under or after medical care. It argues that in these works, art-making served as a therapeutic strategy to re-claim bodies being manipulated at molecular levels.
In Body High, the introduction to lurid sculptural practices from the 1960s and the author’s own experience in proximity to opiate use will be used to offer a surreal and unsettling, yet seductive landscape where wider universal themes are How do we medicate ourselves, and why can’t we cure the people we love?
Dripping latex and collapsed rubber tubes were among the provocative materials that signaled an aesthetic turn in European and American sculptural practices starting in the late 1960s. Objects became they responded to gravity in ways suggestive of exhaustion, offered sensual form, and confronted viewers with the ephemeral realities of our bodies through viscosity and deterioration.
This book analyses the objects by women within that movement, which explored maternity and mortality to capture the body under or after medical care. It argues that in these works, art-making served as a therapeutic strategy to re-claim bodies being manipulated at molecular levels.
160 pages, Paperback
Published April 8, 2025
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26 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 6, 2025
I could not stop reading this.
I learnt the term autotheory from this book and now I exclusively want to read autotheory.
This mixes art (Eva Hesse and lots more) with memoir and pretty hard going stuff about Donnelly's boyfriends addiction. I was just willing her to leave him throughout the whole thing.
I learnt the term autotheory from this book and now I exclusively want to read autotheory.
This mixes art (Eva Hesse and lots more) with memoir and pretty hard going stuff about Donnelly's boyfriends addiction. I was just willing her to leave him throughout the whole thing.
July 12, 2025
Visceral art criticism memoir
—
I’ve just read three of these Repeater longform essays and this was the one that instantly spoke to me. Given that I’m not a woman musician/art historian with a penchant for bad boys, it seems a bit of a stretch, but I think what I’m really referring to is the introspective nature of this book, that connects the working practice of women artists to their self-care, their bodies and their health.
It seems a collision of writing modes, art criticism and visceral memoir, but it’s all connected by the body: the bodies of the artists, whether healthy or ill, and how they depict bodies, bodily fluids, the visual cues of the healthy body and the unwell one; and the body of the writer herself and that of her addict partner as they both unravel under their respective demons. The artists reject the meanings that others place on to their bodies, reclaiming the sole authorities of their lived experiences; and so it is for the writer as she navigates a precarious relationship that derails her for a year (this is what I empathised with most as I too had a year of bad choices) until she begins to reclaim her own autonomy, her body and her practice.
A wonderful, challenging book: four and a half stars
—
I’ve just read three of these Repeater longform essays and this was the one that instantly spoke to me. Given that I’m not a woman musician/art historian with a penchant for bad boys, it seems a bit of a stretch, but I think what I’m really referring to is the introspective nature of this book, that connects the working practice of women artists to their self-care, their bodies and their health.
It seems a collision of writing modes, art criticism and visceral memoir, but it’s all connected by the body: the bodies of the artists, whether healthy or ill, and how they depict bodies, bodily fluids, the visual cues of the healthy body and the unwell one; and the body of the writer herself and that of her addict partner as they both unravel under their respective demons. The artists reject the meanings that others place on to their bodies, reclaiming the sole authorities of their lived experiences; and so it is for the writer as she navigates a precarious relationship that derails her for a year (this is what I empathised with most as I too had a year of bad choices) until she begins to reclaim her own autonomy, her body and her practice.
A wonderful, challenging book: four and a half stars
April 11, 2025
Body High is a fierce, poetic dive into desire, heartbreak, and the emotional chaos of living in a body. Ryann Donnelly blends memoir with cultural critique in a voice that's raw, intimate, and often electrifying. At times the structure feels a bit fragmented, but it suits the book’s pulsing, confessional energy. A powerful, punk-infused exploration of identity and obsession—definitely worth the ride.
May 17, 2025
This book was beautiful. It was a quick & very satisfying read. I got the honor of attending the book launch in Seattle & hearing Ryann read from it; I came in with a lot of anticipation & this book did not disappoint.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews