Future Imperfect

Following the publication of Centrefold in Artforum, November 1974, Benglis says that Penthouse wanted to use the image, but instead she proposed ‘a take-off on a traditional pieta, depicting a beautiful girl as the Madonna with a nude man on her lap’. They refused, ‘we cannot do that, we cannot allow artists to make a centrefold.’

Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of that Centrefold, and shifting between 1970s New York and Los Angeles and the Corbyn years in Tower Hamlets, London, this Centrefold enacts an ambivalent ‘full accounting’ of Lynda Benglis’s Artforum spread, as well as her gender ‘mockeries’ and Secrets series. Taking in nursery privatisation, artworld silencing and censorship, maintenance art, muddled Marxism, performances of motherhood, and masturbation, Louise O’Hare weighs up the various impacts and forms of disciplining at play in both column and dildo inches.

The straplines of a number of advertisements drawn from magazines of the 1950s are turned into drawings, as though a particularly vain and narcissistic woman speaks (as of course she does), She is ‘en pleine forme’ of her beauty. (2016).

Looking at pictures, she was reminded of the lack of time. And anyway, where did all the time go?

In Day Book a woman artist looks at time in an address to quotidian events and their unfolding. Exploring motherhood, unpaid labour, childcare, and the time of the artist, she reads the work of contemporary women filmmakers through the earlier works of filmmakers, writers, and photographers, including Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras, Natalia Ginzburg and Christa Wolf, Bertien van Manen and Bernadette Mayer. The inability to capture the accumulation of days emerges—a form without form, day after day after day.

A synthesis of dreamwork and bookwork, combining collaboration with dream-vision report, creative writing, and AI—a “Media Archaeology of Dreams.” Its central character is the author’s voice in this process through ekphrasis. What/where is the separation between the ekphrastic object, the dream, and its description?

For nearly two years the author collected phrases from the exhibition press releases she received through email, posting certain of them on Facebook in a rather unsystematic way (that is to say, when she felt like it), with only one change, that of the personal pronoun, so each statement appeared vainglorious, absurd, even tragic. She supposes the measure was if they made her laugh or gasp or used words she deplores when thinking or writing about art. The posts gathered quite a following. Some people still mention them to her, and others have asked her to look at their own press releases before circulation.

These extracts have provoked laughter, disbelief (especially when performed as public readings, when she has  been obliged to swear to their veracity), self-recognition, and yes, shame.

She had only three rules: 1) She would not quote the press release of anyone she knows (certainly she could have done—she must admit that both a friend and someone she dislikes intensely have slipped in, and she fervently hopes neither ever reads this book); 2) She would not alter anything except the pronoun (this is largely true; however, for this book, she corrected some errors of punctuation and spelling, changed spellings to their English form, and employed her beloved Oxford comma); and 3) She would not use anything the artist had written (this, too, is true, save for one exception that was too wonderful not to include).

Finally, she  gathered a collection of endorsements, some along the way, others when she indicated this work was done. She is still alive and she continues to labour in obscurity. 

Impossible Princess is the third collection of gay short fiction by PEN Award–winning San Francisco–based author Kevin Killian. A member of the “new narrative” circle including Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, Killian is a master short story writer, crafting campy and edgy tales that explore the humor and darkness of desire. A former director of Small Press Traffic and a co-editor of Mirage/Periodical, Killian co-wrote Jack Spicer’s biography, Poet Be Like God, and co-edited three Spicer books, including My Vocabulary Did This To Me: Collected Poems. His latest book, Action Kylie, is a collection of poems devoted to Kylie Minogue.

Honey Mine unfolds as both excavation and romp, an adventure story that ushers readers into a lesbian writer's coming of age through disorienting, unsparing, and exhilarating encounters with sex, gender, and distinctly American realities of race and class. From childhood in Chicago's South Side to youth in the lesbian underground, Roy's politics find joyful and transgressive expression in the liberatory potential of subculture. Find here, in these new, uncollected and out-of-print fictions by a master of New Narrative, a record of survival and thriving under conditions of danger.

Murder is Danielle Collobert’s first novel. Originally published in 1964 by Éditions Gallimard while Collobert was living as a political exile in Italy, this prose work was written against the backdrop of the Algerian War. Uncompromising in its exposure of the calculated cruelty of the quotidian, Murder’s accusations have photographic precision, inculpating instants of habitual violence.

Born in Rostrenen in 1940, Danielle Collobert left Bretagne for Paris at the age of eighteen where she worked in an art gallery and self-published her first poems in a book entitled Chants des guerres (1961). Both of Collobert’s parents, and her aunt, who survived deportation to Ravensbrück, were members of the Résistance during World War II. Herself a supporter of Algerian independence, Collobert joined the FLN (the Algerian National Liberation Front), precipitating her exile in Italy, during which time she completed work on Meurtre, first published in 1964 by Éditions Gallimard with the unwavering support of Raymond Queneau. She worked for Révolution africaine, a short-lived journal created at the end of the Algerian war. Collobert’s extensive travels, to Czechoslovakia, Indonesia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Mexico, Spain, Greece, Egypt, etc., did not prevent her from becoming a member of the group formed around Jean-Pierre Faye and the journal, Change. Her other works include Dire I et II (1972), a radio play the following year, Polyphonie, aired by France Culture, Il donc (1976) and Survie (1978). Upon her return from a trip to New York, Danielle Collobert took her own life in a hotel in Paris on her thirty-eighth birthday. Her complete works, in two volumes, edited by Françoise Morvan, augmented by several unpublished texts, were published by P.O.L. in 2005. Collobert’s works available in English include In the Environs of a Film (Litmus Press, 2019), Notebooks, 1956-1978 (Litmus Press, 2003) and It Then (O Books, 1989).

Guest edited by artist Helen Marten and literary agent Harriet Moore with Matthew Stuart, this volume of the journal considers what it means for a publication to be an allegorical container. A simple box in which to gather multiple things, an economical set of permutations — rational in one sense, yet defiantly flexible to move. Contributors were approached with an open invitation; some explored the multiplicities of containing or containers, while others filled the printed vessel with their own ongoing preoccupations. The following pages perform as envelope, bag, shell, net, fold, alarm, letter and instruction. There are holes to disappear within; smoke to knot and wind; shadows to unfold — a context that takes in and binds, finding new kinships from unforeseen proximities.

THE FIRE FLOWERS AND THE FLOWER LIGHTS UP –
Lucy Mercer
(spine)

WE SHALL GREET THE MOON AGAIN
Walter Price
(front cover)

BACK PAGES OF ALGIERS DIARIES 2018
Lydia Ourahmane
(inside front & inside back cover)

AN INTRODUCTION TO / NOTES ON / INSTRUCTION FOR THE FRONT NOVEL
Eliza Barry Callahan
(pp.1–16)

SATURDAY MORNING
Kathryn Scanlan
(pp.25–29)

KILLDEER
Jason Schwartz
(pp.33–38)

ALARMS AND EXCURSIONS
Rosmarie Waldrop
(pp.45–61)

"THE BATHROOM"
Najwa Barakat
(pp.67–76)

ARMY ROLLS, A CIRCUMSCRIPTION
Roy Claire Potter
(pp.81–91)

CONCHOMANIA
Felix Bernstein
(pp.95–109)

O-POEM
Line-Gry Hørup
(pp.113–129)

THIS MUSCLE
Cally Spooner
(pp.133–153)

STERLING PARK IN THE DARK
Susan Howe
(pp.159–179)

COCONUTTERY
Mathelinda Nabugodi
(pp.183–193)

YOUR SELF CONFIDENT BABY
Aurelia Guo
(pp.197–206)

BIOGRAPHY OF A NET: HOLDING A VOLUME
Daisy Hildyard
(pp.211–225)

A GUIDE TO THE POETRY OF LI HO
Eliot Weinberger
(pp.229–235)

WOMEN SMOKING
Charline von Heyl
(throughout & p.239)

INFRATHIN
Marcel Duchamp
(throughout & p.239)

THE MAZED WORLD
Rachael Allen
(bookmark insert)

UNTITLED
Helen Marten
(back cover)

Insula est un roman d’anticipation aussi intime que spéculatif qui mêle autofiction, confession intime, esthétique queer, jeu vidéo, et une formidable vision apocalyptique du monde contemporain. Insula (île, en latin), c’est d’abord le nom d’un jeu clandestin de réalité augmentée d’un nouveau genre : il suffit d’ingérer une pilule stupéfiante et illégale pour accéder à la simulation. Théo, le narrateur, en apprend l’existence lors d’une fête de cruising queer, au sommet d’un immeuble désaffecté du centre de Londres, dans une atmosphère d’apocalypse. Un garçon s’effondre à ses pieds quelques minutes après avoir consommé la substance, et pleure des larmes de sperme. Mais Théo doit tout interrompre pour se rendre au chevet de son père mourant, dans un hôpital parisien. C’est le moment de la dernière nuit, du dernier souffle et des derniers aveux. Le mot insula revient, cette fois dans la bouche des médecins, pour désigner une partie flottante du cerveau ravagée par la maladie, comme une île qu’on a dans la tête. Alors que les médias annoncent la disparition de plusieurs personnes qui auraient pris une pilule d’insula, l’étau se resserre sur Théo qui se résout à son tour à prendre un cachet prohibé avec l’intuition que les avatars ne sont que des fantômes, et qu’il pourra ainsi retrouver son père dans l’autre monde.

Ce roman aux accents dantesques (vision d’un enfer digital qui n’est que le double du monde réel), entre vertige technologique et exploration du désir, est marqué par la pensée critique du réel et la pop culture (Final Fantasy, Kanye West). Il ouvre un univers parallèle pour raconter l’histoire d’une traversée intime, convoquer des époques, des territoires et des identités multiples, dans une seule et même histoire qui navigue entre témoignage et fantasme. Dystopie, histoire d’amour et de fantômes, enquête et cauchemar, Insula est un portail entre plusieurs dimensions, le vrai et le faux, le réel et le digital, la vie et la mort.