A Practice of Pleasure: Joanna Frueh’s Performances and Writings, 2005-11

A Practice of Pleasure is an intimate and panoramic entrée into the life and work of Joanna Frueh (1948-2020), an art historian and performance practitioner for whom life and art were inseparable. Written during a key transitional moment in her life and work (2005-2012), the volume makes available primarily unpublished performance texts and writings that give an intimate insight both into Frueh’s everyday life and the thinking of an artist and scholar well known for offering her personal experiences as a means of embodying and speaking about pleasure. A self-described ’pleasure activist’, Frueh’s book offers a highly original perspective on pleasure--frank, scholarly, philosophical, romantic, and conversational. Taken together, the texts comprising A Practice of Pleasure are an ode to pleasure in the widest sense: female pleasure, sexual pleasure, and the pleasures of prosaic and domestic beauties, such as enjoying the reality of her own body and the luxurious simplicities of the senses.

Joanna Frueh (1948-2020) was a performance artist, writer, scholar, and teacher. For more than twenty-five years, she performed one-woman shows throughout the United States and abroad. She was Professor of the Practice of Art at the University of Arizona and Professor of Art History Emerita at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her authored works include Swooning Beauty: A Memoir of Pleasure; Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love; Erotic Faculties; and Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective.