Badpuppy Gay Today |
Monday, 12 January 1998 |
Perhaps better known for her series of lesbian parodies of girl detective Nancy Drew, Mabel Maney's first career and creative anchor is as a visual artist. The Nancy Clue novels from Cleis Press, The Case of the Not-So-Nice Nurse and The Case of the Good- For-Nothing Girlfriend have made Mabel a household name in camp-appreciating circles, but Mabel's visual art is the springboard and touch stone of her creative life. Entertaining and sketchy about the details of her childhood, Mabel printed this tale of her youth in the "About the Author" page in both her handmade and trade paperback books: After her parents were lost at sea, Mabel took up residence with her Great Aunts Maude and Mavis Maney, who had as young women earned their living as bareback riders in a traveling circus before settling in the farm town of Appleton, Wisconsin to write their memoirs, Circus Queens. |
Mabel actually was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1958, but the aunts are a figment of her imagination and her parents are very much alive. In fact, she is one of four siblings from a working class Irish Catholic family, and she grew up in Ohio. Mabel received a Bachelor in Fine Arts from Ohio State University in 1985, concentrating and film. In 1991, she received a Masters in Fine Arts from San Francisco State University, with an emphasis in book arts. Mabel has lived in San Francisco ever since she moved there from Ohio in the late 1980s. Mabel has shown her work throughout the Midwest and San Francisco, artwork that has consisted of beautifully-crafted and politically-charged handmade books. Her "Nancy Clue/Cherry Aimless" and "Hardly Boys" handmade art books were included in the prominent group exhibition, "Bad Girls," shown at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum in the early 1990s. Other examples of her "books" (a shorthand term for mixed media pieces that incorporate both image and text) have been exhibited at the San Francisco Camera Works, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Eye Gallery in San Francisco, and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. In helping to define the label of "book" for her work, Mabel states that her art pieces are experiments in image/text combinations, materials, narrative form, and voice. |
My art pieces all have that same relationship to the formation of a book, although they may take completely different forms. Essentially, the works are mixed-media pieces combining image and text, and occasionally they end up looking like real, honest-to-goodness, bookshelf books. Cleis's publisher saw a showing of Mabel's work and liked the art books so much that she asked Mabel if she would develop one into a full-length novel. The result was The Case of the Not-So-Nice Nurse, published in 1993, which marked the beginning of Mabel's career as a novelist and expert satirist. Even though her novels are created in a different medium than her visual work, many of the same themes and concerns run throughout both. "My primary concern," explains Mabel, "is to examine the role of The Girl within the confines of the institution of the home and the limitations of cultural gender roles." She does this by drawing upon her personal experiences as a girl growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, and by positioning that personal experience in a cultural context. The thrust of my work is really a critique of the idea of the nuclear family as the perfect unit. Creating female heroes is what all the "book-work" is about. Mabel's "books" have been as large as forty feet long, made out of linen and curtain fabric from the l950s, and as small as one-inch boxes. Regarding the former, she used the fabric as the page of her book because of the unmistakable femaleness and the domestic quality associated with fabric. |
Fabric reads as female no matter who works it. And a lot of the undercurrents in my work are about the undercurrents of terror in the home. In that piece, the fabric page symbolized the home, and the story between the lines of the text placed upon the fabric points to the there. Mabel notes that she is also concerned with issues of nostalgia in her work, particularly surrounding post-World War II and middle-class culture. My early work was very small. It was all family stories told from a little girl's point of view. I used real books and retold my story on top of it, juxtaposing an old image and old text with a new image and new text, and offsetting the cultural story with the real story. But some of Mabel's stories just couldn't be told in the small, diminutive spaces of books (no matter how creatively altered), and hence she began explorations into room-sized, installation books. For instance, she created a giant one-day installation at San Francisco State University called "The Amnesia Victim," which consisted of wall-sized pages of a pseudo-psychiatric text of a woman's amnesia problem. "The Amnesia Victim" was the first part of a large-scale project Mabel planned called "The Family Museum." It was to be the story of the nuclear family, with each member to get his/her own story told in gripping reality. Exposing the story of the mother, "The Amnesia Victim" was the only part ever completed, and Mabel has subsequently translated it into a limited-edition offset book. Regarding her art, Mabel states, "The images don't illustrate the text, they provide the environment for it. The images and the material of the pages are really whole world that collapses and gets put away. It's all about the World of Girls." And this is exactly the name Mabel gave her publishing company when she self-published the handmade artist books about Nancy Clue and the Boys: "World O' Girls Books." (These works are still available in art bookstores such as Printed Matter in New York City and Artist Space in Washington, D.C.) |
Mabel's last project was the third novel in the Nancy Clue series, entitled The Hardly Boys in a Ghost in a Closet. It features a twist on the Hardy Boys, Joe and Frank Hardly, and looks to capture a gay male following the way Nancy and Cherry have captivated lesbians, which was published by Cleis in 1995. Currently, Mabel has signed a three-book deal with a major publisher and will be coming out with a new book -- currently under top-secret wraps -- at the end of this year or in early 1999. So, if you're not familar with Mabel's work, do yourself a favor and start reading the three Nancy Clueless and Hardly Boys novels from Cleis. It will give you something meaningful to do until Mabel's next book comes out. Courtesy of <http://altmedia.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa010598.htm> -- |
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