A few years ago I created/conceived of a chapbook for V Places' factory series, called The Polished You, and Amaranth Borsuk wrote about the work for a piece on conceptions of authorship in the digital age for JEP. Writing The Polished You was an interesting experience for me, in that I conceived of using the Nancy Taylor book (which is the same book I used for my
Prices Upon Request performance) since I thought it'd be most compelling to appropriate another text as Place would be appropriating mine, and because the Nancy Taylor book's author was "unknown," raising further questions of authorship, and because using this text would allow readers to further the level of appropriation by adding in their own words in the survey section. I had people send in their images of "their" books to me, as was featured in
HTML GIANT.
Borsuk writes:
"This contradiction perhaps reaches its zenith in Vanessa Place’s Factory Series, a set of print-on-demand chapbooks written by her contemporaries to which she (with their permission) has affixed her own name. The project’s very title plays on Andy Warhol’s appropriative approach to art, which, like conceptualism, attributed as much value to idea as to artifact.[23] The project itself thus plays with notions of authorship. For example, The Polished You, contributed by performance artist and poet Kate Durbin, appropriates selections from a 1960s finishing school workbook from the four-volume Nancy Taylor Course. Durbin’s source text is aptly chosen for the ways it highlights questions of selfhood and authorship. The book takes the form of a survey inviting “a completely honest self-evaluation” by the reader in the interest of determining “what type of woman you are, and, more importantly, the type of woman you want to be.”[24] Questions range from analyses of one’s face, figure, and interests to considerations of how others perceive one, culminating in an objective “comprehensive picture of yourself.” In every case, the questions are subjective: for example, “Is your face pretty?”, “Do you enjoy making up your face and styling your hair?”, “What subject, other than yourself, are you most interested in?”, and “What do you want most out of life?”. Many also provide a limited range of potential answers: “How do you think you appear to others? Sophisticated? Clean-cut and wholesome? Sexy? Tomboyish? Why do you think you appear this way?” Still others hint at the author’s own values: “Describe the kind of environment you enjoy most. Casual? Plush? Intellectual? Sophisticated? Avant-garde? A combination of these? Some other? Why?” In juxtaposing these questions, the text highlights the absurdity of its own premise and encourages readers to reflect on how the self is constructed (“Do people consider you active, average, or passive? Do you agree with this? Why?”), and, by extension, how authorship is built. Each page provides several blank lines for the reader to respond to these prompts, further complicating questions of The Polished You’s authorship.
Whose text is this—the author listed on the title page, Vanessa Place; her surrogate, Kate Durbin; the reader who fills in the blanks; or the text’s original author Nancy Taylor, who may herself have been a pseudonym for another writer? According to Library of Congress records, the 1971 copyright entry (the edition Durbin used) lists “ITT Educational Services” as the applicant and “Taylor Career Programs” as the book’s author.[25] Was there ever a Nancy Taylor? The secretarial school bearing her name was founded in 1964 by an entrepreneur named Bert Schiff to provide vocational training and finishing classes to women, but Schiff transformed it in the 1970s into the Taylor Business Institute, which currently offers associate degrees in a range of skills including accounting, medical billing, and electronics engineering.[26] A note at the end of the chapbook acknowledges “the author of the texts is unknown,” pointing to the central question of the book: What does it mean to be known, and how do we know ourselves?"
You can read the entire article
here.
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