“an apple and a woman”: pranks and capers in the audio-visual works of Moniek Toebosch

Dutch visual, sound, and performance artist Moniek Toebosch (1948-2012) from the late 1960s onward created experimental works that are impossible to categorize. Besides defiance of disciplines and conventions, constant factors in her diverse oeuvre are the female voice, improvisation, and humor. Though Toebosch’s work reached a large and varied audience in the Netherlands through such channels as museums, theaters, public space, LP’s, television, and radio, it has received little to no scholarly attention, in part because her work does not neatly fit within any one discipline. This paper will analyze the role of the comedic in a number of Toebosch’s early works through the lens of theorists like Hélène Cixous and Nicholas Holm as well as from the perspective of the artist’s own later writing and poetry, which help identify the function of her work’s comedic ingredients as cathartic, subversive, and empowering. The focus will be on those works of the artist in which the comedic element is woven into the dialogue between (female) courage and vulnerability, and between exaltation and the diabolic. The paper will inevitably construe an image of Moniek Toebosch as a “female pope, a daredevil, a queen, fresh and contrary, an apple and a woman,” words she would employ towards the end of her life to describe women she herself admired.