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Lavery, JaneElizabeth. The Art of Ana Clavel: Ghosts, Urinals, Dolls, Shadows, and Outlaw Desires., Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 53, Issue 3, July 2017, Pages 375–376, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqx027
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Extract
This is an important book about an important artist. Working in a range of media such as art installations, photography, short stories and novels, and consistently fusing diverse media in the same performative space, Ana Clavel has been producing potent and provocative art since the mid-1980s, gaining popularity (and notoriety) beyond her native Mexico. Not only is she a more significant artist than has hitherto been critically acknowledged, but, Lavery argues, she contributes to – and in many respects surpasses – a cultural wave in Mexico and Spanish America known as the boom femenino. Whilst sharing certain features with other writers of this movement, her work is too challenging and her media too hybrid to be thrown into the pile of ‘best-sellers’ and ‘literatura light’, as dismissive commentators are wont to do with, for example, Ángeles Mastretta and Isabel Allende. Clavel’s art cuts new furrows in this ill-defined cultural field as she consistently explores the murky waters of transgression and taboo, the unmentionable, the unthinkable and the offensive.