The Spirit of Rebellion and How It Loves Everything: The Visual Art of Patti Smith

This paper traces the imagery and conceptual activity of Patti Smith in her visual art, with an emphasis on the kinetic, and corporeal methods that Smith employs within the spectrum of her artistic production, and the sense of reverence for beauty and the ecstatic as a conception of value that does not ignore the painful, political, or abject. This paper looks at texts such as ‘A Conversation with Patti Smith,’ contributed to the book Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper, Smith’s writing in Woolgathering, her memoir Just Kids, and the work of Antonin Artaud, as well as other artists whose creative output involves the merging of the ecstatic and temporal with the visual and the graphic as a means of passionate expression.