The Lives of the Artists

Responses to Untitled (eye with comet) (c.1985) by Paul Thek is the sixth and final anthology in a series that gathered responses to works of art made during a period of the ongoing AIDS Crisis, from the identification of the virus in 1981 to the introduction of life-saving drugs in 1996.  

In this sixth iteration, responses were sought to the painting Untitled (eye with comet) by Paul Thek. The work was found in his storage after his death from AIDS in 1988. 

List of contributors in order of appearance:

E.R. De Siqueira
Ben Estes
João Motta Guedes
Lucy Swan
Jon Rainford
Louis Shankar
Amy Evans Bauer
Hattie Morrison
Sammy Paloma
AN Grace
James Horton
Nick Wood
Sophie Paul
Jae Vail
Elizabeth Zvonar
Lars Meijer
Clay AD
Michel Kessler
Pablo Miguel Martínez
Emma Harris
Dylan McNulty-Holmes
Kitya Mark
Katherine Franco
Ainslie Templeton
Alistair McCartney
John Brooks
Jesse Howarth
jimmy cooper
Felix Pilgrim
Nicholas Chittenden Morgan
Murphy O’Neir
Rachel Cattle
Isabel Nolan
Susan Finlay
Ted Simonds
Brooke Palmieri
Kate Morgan
Ashleigh A. Allen
Diogo Gama
JP Seabright
Hugo Hagger
Amanda Kraley
Brendan Cook
Matt Bailey
Charlotte Flint
Rodney Schreiner
Lucy Price
Morgan Melhuish
Jordan Weitzman
Jaakko Pallasvuo
Alex Fiorentino
Harald Smart
Marguerite Carson
loll jung
Richard Porter
Nicholas Kalinoski
Hedi El Kholti
Edmund Francis English
Ted Bonin

It’s fall (or autumn) 2018. The Trump administration wants to fortify the United States-Mexico border, Robert ‘Beto’ O'Rourke is running for Senate, and British grifter Nicki Smith has just secured a “low-paid glamour job” at the University of Texas’ Jacques Lacan Foundation. In between sleeping with the air-conditioning repair guy (or man) and watching Kate Moss make-up commercials (or advertisements) Nicki completes the first ever American-English translation of Lacan’s newly discovered and highly controversial notebook – without knowing any French.

An Anglo-American comedy of manners about identity and class The Jacques Lacan Foundation reveals—and revels in—the numerous pretensions that surround academia and authorship, and the institutions that foster them.

Pure fiction is a reader that examines how fiction-based writing and narrative building functions in contemporary artistic context.

Edited by Lisa Lagova and Manon Fraser with contributions by Susan Finlay, Manon Lutanie, Kristina Stallvik, Jonathan Blaschke, Nadia de Vries, Lisa Lagova, Ivan Cheng, Fadi Houmani, Nour Ben Saïd, Chris Kraus and Manon Fraser.

Garréta’s first novel in a decade follows the mania that descends upon a family when the father finds himself in possession of a concrete mixer. As he seeks to modernize every aspect of their lives, disaster strikes when the younger sibling is subsumed by concrete.

Through puns, wordplay, and dizzying verbal effect, Garréta reinvents the novel form and blurs the line between spoken and written language in an attempt to confront the elasticity of communication.

Anne F. Garréta is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, received her License de Lettres at the Université Paris 4 (Sorbonne), her Maitrise and her D.E.A at the Université Paris 7 (Diderot), and a PhD at New York University. The author of six novels, Garréta was coopted to the Oulipo in 2000. Her first novel, Sphinx (1986), which caused a sensation when Deep Vellum published its first English translation in 2015, tells a love story between two people without giving any indication of grammatical gender for the narrator or their lover. She won France’s prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002 and the Albertine Prize in 2018 for her book, Not One Day, which was also nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Garréta teaches regularly in France at the Université Rennes 2, and more recently at Paris 7 (Diderot), and is a professor at Duke University.

In Dodie Bellamy's imagined "sequel" to Bram Stoker's fin de siècle masterpiece Dracula, Van Helsing's plain Jane secretarial adjunct, Mina Harker, is recast as a sexual, independent woman living in San Francisco in the 1980s. The vampire Mina Harker, who possesses the body of author Dodie Bellamy, confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four vastly different men through past letters. Simultaneously, a plague is let loose in San Francisco-the plague of AIDS.

Bigger-than-life, half goddess, half Bette Davis, Mina sends letter after letter to friends and co-conspirators, holding her reader captive through a display of illusion and longing. Juggling quivering vulnerability on one hand and gossip on the other, Mina spoofs and consumes and spews back up demented reembodiments of trash media and high theory alike. It's all fodder for her ravenous libido and "a messy ambiguous place where pathology meets pleasure." Sensuous and captivating, The Letters of Mina Harker describes one woman's struggles finding the right words to explain her desires and fears without confining herself to one identity.

Thirteen stories explore domestic horrors and everyday violence, providing an intimate and unflinching portrait of twenty-first-century Latin America.

Named one of the ten best fiction books of 2018 by the New York Times en Español, Cockfight is the debut work by Ecuadorian writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero.

In lucid and compelling prose, Ampuero sheds light on the hidden aspects of the home: the grotesque realities of family, coming of age, religion, and class struggle. A family’s maids witness a horrible cycle of abuse, a girl is auctioned off by a gang of criminals, and two sisters find themselves at the mercy of their spiteful brother. With violence masquerading as love, characters spend their lives trapped reenacting their past traumas.

From artist and activist Derek Jaman, a visual and narrative exploration of his singular, paradisiacal garden, set in a most inhospitable place. Derek Jarman, a passionate gardener from childhood, combined his painter's eye, horticultural expertise, and ecological convictions to produce a landscape that combined flints, shells, and driftwood to create a unique paradise. 

This book is Derek Jarman's own record of how this garden evolved, from its earliest beginnings in 1986 to 1994, the last year of his life. More than 150 photographs taken by his friend and photographer Howard Sooley capture the garden at all its different stages at every season. For both gardeners and admirers of this extraordinary man, this 30th anniversary edition, with a foreword by Jamaica Kincaid, marks three decades of the book as a gardening classic, and the ongoing impact of Jarman's transformative garden—proof of the garden space as one of ideas, philosophy, and myth—more than just a place of retreat.

Night Philosophy is collected around the figure of the child, the figure of the child not just as a little person under the tutelage of adults, but also the submerged one, who knows, who is without power, who doesn’t matter. The book proposes a minor politics that disperses all concentrations of power. Fanny Howe chronicles the weak and persistent, those who never assimilate at the cost of having another group to dominate. She explores the dynamics of the child as victim in a desensitized era, when transgression is the zeitgeist and the victim–perpetrator model controls citizens. 

With an afterword by Chris Kraus.