The Lives of the Artists

a memoir by Susan Finlay

Susan Finlay frets about writing a memoir “in case I come across as unlikeable, or worse still boring”. She is very far from boring. Witty, smart and original, she is a multiplicity of selves and practices like light refracted through a prism, she appears as an artist, a writer, a poet, a daughter, a worker, a teacher. She is glimpsed in fragments of observation, her likes: Electroclash, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Andrea Dworkin, and Georgia O’Keefe’s double entendres; her dislikes: Sylvia Plath “I’ve never been hot for her”, Norman Mailer, Jeremy Clarkson and pricks; her tastes “slapstick or lofi or not remotely Donald Judd”.

There is a fluidity of identity as she moves between practices – art, poetry and writing. With clay encrusted nails and switching names Susan, Susie, Sue, Susan Sontag, and Susan Vernissage, Finlay’s nom de plume for a soft porn script writer arriving at Cannes in 70’s “Yves Saint Laurent. Le Smoking tuxedo, realised in off-white silk”, a fantasy of being, “because I am your name in mirror writing”.

Finlay rebukes an editor for not understanding multiplicity “She also changed every mention of ‘younger selves’ to ‘younger self’ because she didn’t understand that there could be more than one of them” like the lives of the artists of the title.

Her many selves write through shifting locations.’ I’m there – or here – now actually”. Appearing there or here in Nottingham, London, Berlin, Vienna, Athens, LA,  Moscow, Jakarta sometimes with ‘someone else’ or  ‘then-friends’, or family.  “I lived in 16 places in 15 years” “3 or 4 jobs at any given time”. This is the lives of the artists. A complex of selves and experiences.

Single sentence paragraphs and colloquialisms give a breezy style and her quick wit, as a teen “most of my battles were eyeliner related” belies the more serious concerns around representation and self portraiture.

The book has 13 self portrait colour plates by female (all but one) artists from the 16th to the 20th century. These serve as chapter front pieces. We are looking at an assortment of artists picturing themselves. A self portrait requires careful observation through glimpses that could well describe Finlay’s methodology for a memoir. The Lives of the Artists is as much an experiment in self portraiture as it is a memoir. This book is the work of art.

The book is £12 and launches on 1st May. available in shops and on line at Joan Publishing where it is available to pre-order