The Line of Beauty: Bad Girls by Isabel Lloyd
Spring Issue, 2011
The Economist: The Intelligent Life (US)
Death becomes her. Disease, too. And insanity. They have been Galás’s inspirations since th e1980s, when she began performing quadraphonic jazz anthems of doom with titles such as “The Litanies of Satan” and “Plague Mass”. Nice girls don’t do this. Nor do they transform themselves into a vision that Bram Stoker might have had after bingeing on absinthe and raw pork chops. But Galás is a serious figure – a film-mkaer, too, whose “Schrei 27”, co-created with Davide Pepe, is something remarkable: an uncompromising experiment exploring those master-themes of mortality, morbidity and madness. You might sum up her life in the same phrase.
