October 20, 2020
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In this issue:
Ça m’est égal: The Involution of Desire
“The crux of this desire is embedded in impossibility. […] It’s a political economy of unflinching disavowal, a running from the present chasing an illusion, at once thoughtful and stupefying.” Estelle Hoy ponders our pursuit of “the good life,” and its proximity to fantasy, if not unattainability, through the lenses of Jacques Lacan, Lauren Berlant, and Lewis Carroll.
How to Dissect God?
Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou review the oeuvre of Hervé Guibert, a literary and artistic icon of the 1980s, who died of AIDS at age thirty-six—an icon of a then-invisible community linked by the disease. In a constant oscillation between photography, literature, and cinema, Guibert never ceased to anatomize the relationship between the self and the image, the principle of desire and the aesthetics of its disintegration.
New Pictures for the Old Ceremony
For Mónica Belevan, “Julien Nguyen is a regenerate poet, which is why we should expect trouble from him, and why we should encourage it.” Connoted by a form of representation of extreme compression and symbolic density, Belevan acknowledges Nguyen as “a cold painter, for whom work in confined possibility spaces—Russian icon, Byzantine mosaic, individual tile, microchip—looms large.”
A Melancholic Dance of Joy, One Cut at a Time
Andrew Berardini pens his alliance with artist, writer, and Semiotext(e) coeditor Hedi El Kholti through his manifold projects—including the zine Animal Shelter and lately his collages, which, summoning impossible orgies of art, music, film, and literature, show an exquisite appreciation for the rare and the strange, the beautiful and the broken.
An Incontinent and Percolating Substance Runs Through
Dora Budor revisits Tsai Ming-liang’s filmic production—epics of the precarious and marginalized, depicted through the dead time that dominates so many lives under an economic order in which occasional and precarious labor, infrastructural failings, and wageless life are increasingly the norm.
Nothing Independent of Its Circumstances
Wendy Vogel retraces the history and practice of Rosemary Mayer (1943–2014). An artist, writer, and one of the founding members of A.I.R., New York’s first all-women cooperative gallery, Mayer developed a unique feminist approach to lyrical abstraction and public art that would flourish in the alternative-space heyday of the 1970s. Fifty years later, her under-known work is having a resurgence.
A Promise and a Practice
In their writing and artwork, Carolyn Lazard addresses the structural violence experienced at the intersection of disability with blackness and queerness. Richard Birkett analyzes questions around value, labor, and presence, and the ways in which Lazard’s work emphasizes the pleasure of life as shaped by stillness, intimate dependency, and care.
At the Edge Of
Vietnamese-born filmmaker and cofounder of The Propeller Group Tuan Andrew Nguyen converses with Rahel Aima about world-building, rebranding communism, people unmoored from their own countries, resisting colonial erasure through storytelling, and the magic of extinction scenarios.
Post-Performance Painting: The Bad, the Worse, the Better … Style as a Weapon
Following her research on Post-Performance Painting, Marie de Brugerolle focuses on a group of artists whose practices have bloomed in parallel. The author analyzes the performativity of speech acts and the literal space of the viewer, with a consciousness of painting as not a neutral object, but a critical tool and a liminal field.
Tidbits:
Cici Wu by Billy Tang; Anne Libby by Philipp Hindahl; Rodney McMillian by Jennifer Piejko; Hadi Fallahpisheh by Kristian Vistrup Madsen; ektor garcia by Jeppe Ugelvig; Mimosa Echard by Charles Aubin; Matt Paweski by Chris Sharp; Nikita Gale by Harry Burke; Brandon Ndife by Michael Eby; Naoki Sutter-Shudo by Sabrina Tarasoff; Jean Katambayi Mukendi by Stephanie Cristello; manuel arturo abreu by Camila McHugh; Jeremiah Day by Axel Wieder.
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