The Disintegration of a Critic

I Want reviews the eponymous duo's double-projection film installation examining issues of gender, sexuality and performativity—and inspired by the words of punk poetess Kathy Acker and convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. This publication documents the major film installation I Want (2015) by collaborative artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, which was presented at their 2015 solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich and Nottingham Contemporary.

The double-projection film installation is based on a script that borrows texts from American punk-poet Kathy Acker (1947-1997), as well as chats and materials by convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning that speak of her reasons for revealing nearly one million secret military and diplomatic documents through WikiLeaks, at the same time exposing her transgender identity to her superiors.

Through poetic gestures of appropriation and recombination, Boudry and Lorenz examine issues around gender, sexuality, the performance of identity, and the nature of collaboration. Alongside generous color documentation, written contributions by Gregg Bordowitz, Laura Guy, Dean Spade, and Craig Willse unpack and reflect upon both the historical context and contemporary significance of this multivalent work.

The collected writings of artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz, along with the stories behind them told by Alexis Vaillant.

Marc Camille Chaimowicz was an acclaimed visual artist known for his performances, installations and curatorial flair. He was also a writer. This volume, the first comprehensive collection of writings by the artist, includes seminal interviews, chitchats, jokes, performance reports, insightful statements and letters in essay form, as well as rare documents, such as early surviving leaflets, typewriter handouts and hard-to-find articles. Spanning 1971–2023, the book unlocks the work of an artist considered to be a refreshing role model for a new generation of culture mavens and style savants.

Drawing from literature, modernist architecture, interior design, art theory, glam rock and camp culture, the collection reveals the artist's inner self alongside the art, social flânerie and the goings-on of his time. Entertaining and witty, the texts stand out brilliantly with their early acumen and inclusivity, while setting a new template for an expression of queerness through writing. With access to Chaimowicz's personal material and photographs, curator and editor Alexis Vaillant is a guide to the artist's writings. Vaillant provides behind-the-scenes commentary and context—a time capsule of pleasure featuring Andy Warhol, Des Esseintes, Josef Frank, David Bowie, Vito Acconci, Eileen Gray, Alex Kapranos, Jean Cocteau, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jean Genet, Bob Dylan, Emma Bovary and Roger Cook, among others.

Edited by Alexis Vaillant.

Exhibition catalogue of filmmaker, visual artist, and writer Pedro Neves Marques's solo project "Vampires in Space" at the Portuguese Pavilion, 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2022.

"In space it's always night." A family of vampires travels through space, carrying life to a faraway planet. Alone, they recall their past, offering an open-ended narrative about the role of fiction in our lives, with a special care for transgender experiences.

This book includes an interview, film scripts and poetry by Neves Marques, curatorial texts by João Mourão, Luís Silva, alongside visual documentation and other contributions by Manuela Moscoso and Filipa Ramos.

The work of Pedro Neves Marques (born 1984 in Lisbon, Portugal) combines anthropological research, cinema, publishing, poetic and fictional writing. Their hybrid aesthetic, that blends science fiction and documentary realism is influenced by the history of feminist and queer sciences, and projects us into futures that question the control of our bodies, our desires and the world around us beyond the register of dystopia. In doing so, they explore how we might transform our imaginaries of gender, new technologies, ecology and postcolonial issues.

A career-spanning catalogue featuring excerpts from Raven Chacon’s scores, musical prompts, and drawings interspersed with full-color documentation and descriptive texts of installations, sculptures, and performances. Raven Chacon is a composer and artist creating musical experiences that explore relationships among land, space, and people.

In an experimental practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music, Chacon breaks open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined. In 2022, Raven Chacon became the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2023.

Texts by Raven Chacon, Lou Cornum, Aruna D'Souza, Candice Hopkins, Anthony Huberman, Ingir Bål Nango, Marja Bål Nango, Dylan Robinson & Patrick Nickleson, Eric-Paul Riege, Sigbjørn Skåden, Ánde Somby.

Foreword by Katya García-Antón and Stefanie Hessler.

Valerie Solanas's rarely published, legendary play, Up Your Ass, explodes social and sexual mores and the hypocritical, patriarchal culture that produces them through her signature irreverence and wit, incisiveness and camp.

The play, whose full title is Up Your Ass Or From the Cradle to the Boat Or The Big Suck Or Up from the Slime, marches out a cast of screwy stereotypes: the unknowing john, the frothy career girl, the boring male narcissist, two catty drag queens, the sex-depraved housewife, and a pair of racialized pickup artists, among others. At the center is protagonist Bongi Perez—a thinly veiled Solanas—a sardonic, gender-bending hustler who escorts us through the back alleys of her street life. The fictionalized predecessor to SCUM Manifesto, the play shares the same grand, subversive, implicative language, equally spitting and winking, embracing the margins, the scum, and selling a trick along the way.

Valerie Solanas (1936-1988) is an American radical feminist intellectual, known for her SCUM Manifesto—a pamphlet with which she declares the power of women and imagines a political future through the margin—, and for having tried to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Edited by Leah Whitman-Salkin.
With a contribution by Paul B. Preciado.
Graphic design: Roxanne Maillet.

A re-examination of Yvonne Rainer's Parts of Some Sextets, a radical performance and pivotal piece in the American choreographer's career, which led her to theorize her conception of dance in the 1960s, before being revived in 2019.

Parts of Some Sextets, Yvonne Rainer's 1965 performance for ten people and twelve mattresses, represents a turning point in the American choreographer's oeuvre. "My mattress monster," as Rainer calls it, was built in her formative years with the experimental downtown New York group Judson Dance Theater. In this work, she asserted her exploration of "ordinary" actions as well as her disregard for narrative constructions to create an intricate choreography that unfolded with a new scene every thirty seconds.

More than half a century after its premiere, Rainer, in collaboration with choreographer and dancer Emily Coates, directed the 2019 revival of the piece for the Performa 19 Biennial in New York, grappling with the changing contexts of a new presentation of her radical performance. Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019 delves into every aspect of this dance, from its original manifestation to its reconstitution.

This book, designed by visual artist Nick Mauss, includes previously unpublished archival images and documents from the 1965 stagings at the Judson Memorial Church in New York and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Texts by Emily Coates, RoseLee Goldberg, Jill Johnston, Kathy Noble, Yvonne Rainer, David Thomson, Lynne Tillman, and Soyoung Yoon, as well as a new interview with Rainer, pose questions about the trajectories of artworks, performers, and audiences, all while tracing the life—and afterlife—of a dance.

Edited by Emily Coates. 
Texts and contributions by Emily Coates, RoseLee Goldberg, Jill Johnston, Kathy Noble, Yvonne Rainer, David Thomson, Lynne Tillman and Soyoung Yoon; conversation between Yvonne Rainer, Emily Coates and Nick Mauss.

Contributions by: Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, Georgia Sagri, John Kelsey, Matthew Pang, Cathy Wilkes, Sarah Rapson, Nick Irvin, Gene Beery, Anne Dressen, Anne Pontégnie, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Sara Deraedt, Anne Rorimer, Kari Rittenbach, Olga Balema, Maria Nordman, Louise Lawler, Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Adrian Morris, Matt Browning, John Miller, Envers Hadzijaj, Enzo Shalom, Bedros Yeretzian, Morag Keil, Helmut Draxler, Gianna Surangkanjanajai, Steve Cannon, Rae Armentrout, Zoe Hitzig, Pierre Guyotat, Lola Sinreich, Fanny Howe, Hélène Fauquet, Marie Angeletti, Richard Hawkins, Andy Robert, Alexander García Düttmann, Daniel Horn, El Hadji Sy, Henrik Olesen, Aurélien Potier, Richard John Jones, Stéphane Barbier Bouvet, Nora Schultz, Peter Fend, Megan Francis Sullivan, Jill Johnston, Sturtevant, Tonio Kröner, Bernard Bazile, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Jérome Pantalacci, Gérard Traquandi, Gladys Clover, Maria Wutz, Jimmie Durham, Richard Sides, Camilla Wills, Michael Callies, Steven Warwick, Matthew Langan-Peck, Dan Graham, Nina Könnemann, Hans Christian Dany, Valérie Knoll, Win McCarthy, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Anna Rubin, Heji Shin, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Inka Meißner, Simone Forti, Morgan O’Hara, Angharad Williams, Ye Xe, Lily Van Der Stokker, Yuki Kimura, Peter Wächtler, Eva Steinmetz, Michael Van den Abeele, Marc Kokopeli, Bradley Kronz, Robert Grosvenor, Samuel Jeffery, Charlotte Houette, Adam Martin, Wade Guyton, Chloe Truong-Jones.

Edited by Marie Angeletti with Gianmaria Andreetta and Camilla Wills.

Printed in December 2022.
416 pages, Edition of 840.
© 2022 Claude Balls Int. / the author(s).

In a single seventeen-page paragraph, Jill Johnston describes an odyssey in and out of a not-yet-described identity in this excerpt from her 1973 bestseller, "Lesbian Nation".