CENTREFOLD 1974: A MEMOIR by Louise O'Hare

Following the publication of Centrefold in Artforum, November 1974, Benglis says that Penthouse wanted to use the image, but instead she proposed ‘a take-off on a traditional pieta, depicting a beautiful girl as the Madonna with a nude man on her lap’. They refused, ‘we cannot do that, we cannot allow artists to make a centrefold.’

Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of that Centrefold, and shifting between 1970s New York and Los Angeles and the Corbyn years in Tower Hamlets, London, this Centrefold enacts an ambivalent ‘full accounting’ of Lynda Benglis’s Artforum spread, as well as her gender ‘mockeries’ and Secrets series. Taking in nursery privatisation, artworld silencing and censorship, maintenance art, muddled Marxism, performances of motherhood, and masturbation, Louise O’Hare weighs up the various impacts and forms of disciplining at play in both column and dildo inches.

‘Writing, changing nappies, reading, making art, campaigning, buying wet wipes, talking, fucking: all are central to this collagic, mesmerising work of feminist research. Drawing together threads of theory, critical writing, and personal experience, Centrefold is a web of a text that defies categorisation; a scrappy, lucid, searching form of consciousness-raising that refuses to shy away from its own political commitments and their consequences.’
–> Helen Charman

‘It’s a thrill to read a book like this that’s been building for over a decade with art tales, anecdotes, critical study, archive research, motherhood, political activism, and friendships. The stories and insights move along witty cyclical tracks that flow between art criticism and memoir along a nervy conduit of a slant-gossiped, giddyingly referenced, eloquently personal body of work. O’Hare brilliantly shifts the roving shared focal points of a single artwork and local politics/disruption—campaigning for childcare provision, by gathering, gathering, gathering, and working with historical feminisms, but in a wickedly self-reflexive style.’
–> Holly Pester

Louise O’Hare is a researcher specialising in early years and social policy, based in Tower Hamlets, London. She is an organiser of Post Pandemic Childcare coalition, and part of the On the Record childcare oral histories project. She was an associate editor at Afterall from 2013 to 2017, co-curated ‘Safe’ at HOME, Manchester, in 2015, and founded the London Bookshop Map in 2011 as a platform to disseminate writing by artists. Her writing has been published by Art Monthly, Publication Studio London, the Socialist Educational Association, TANK, Tribune, and We Own It. Centrefold 1974 is her first book.