“My Hideous progeny”: creative monstrosity in the works of Kiki Smith, Abigail Lane and Cindy Sherman

Abstract

Maria Antónia Lima Universidade de Évora / CEAUL “My Hideous progeny”: creative monstrosity in the works of Kiki Smith, Abigail Lane and Cindy Sherman The expression “My Hideous Progeny” is widely known to be taken from Mary Shelley's preface to the revised (1831) edition of Frankenstein, in which she wrote, of the novel itself and of its creature, Frankenstein's monster, “And now once again I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper”. If the monster was not only the product of Frankenstein's “workshop of filthy creation”, but also the “child” from whom Frankenstein as parent recoils in horror, the works of Kiki Smith, Abigail Lane and Cindy Sherman, created out of body parts, can also be considered hideous progenies of female creativity. Like in Mary Shelley’s gothic novel, the body, in the works of these three American artists, is not only the raw material of their art, but also the screen on which we project our bad dreams, because as Christoph Grunenberg notes, in Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late 20th Century Art, postmodern Gothic takes the shape of “formless, horrendous, shocking images of mutilated and rotting bodies with limbs covered in boils and wounds,” of disjoined body parts uncannily “transformed into nightmares.” Through the art of Smith, Lane and Sherman, we can certainly feel the shudder of body horror that ripples through the Gothic canon from Frankenstein, whose manmade monster’s “yellow skin barely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath”, a monstrosity also common to Kiki Smith’s Virgin Mary, a sculpture where the woman's nude body is flayed, with the skin removed to reveal bare muscle tissue, which shows that the monstrous feminine in contemporary art can be grounded in a very famous hallmark work of Gothic literature.