Books
Books
Who Are You Dorothy Dean?
The first book devoted to the late writer and actress Dorothy Dean.
This second edition of Who Are You Dorothy Dean? brings together a wider selection of Dean's writings, including correspondence and excerpts from her journal. It shines light on her friendships with Edie Sedgwick, Rene Ricard, Harvey Milk, Taylor Mead, Boyd McDonald, and others. Included are their letters and photographs, as well as stills from Dean's appearances in Warhol's films.
Dorothy Dean (1932–1987) was a key figure in the 1960s New York underground scene—starring in six of Andy Warhol's films and inspiring the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Robert Creeley. Said to be the first woman hired as fact-checker at the New Yorker, Dean held shortlived editorial and proofreading positions at publications such as Vogue before launching her own bulletin of film reviews, the All-Lavender Cinema Courier.
New expanded edition of the book first published in 2024 (ISBN 978-2-9581084-1-0).
Edited by Anaïs Ngbanzo.
Foreword by Collier Schorr.
Texts by Dorothy Dean, Edie Sedgwick, Robert Creeley, Gerard Malanga, Rene Ricard, Taylor Mead, et al.
Translated from the English (American) by Dennis Crowch and Héloïse Esquié.
Machines Wear Costumes
This book offers the first comprehensive overview of Anna Franceschini's practice. Organized around recurring themes, it explores animation, the body, machines, ghosts, desire, and windows through commissioned contributions and selected writings. Its associative structure reflects her interest in repetition, transformation, and unstable images.
Machines Wear Costumes is Anna Franceschini's first monograph, bringing together works made between 2007 and 2025. Rather than a chronological account, the publication offers an in-depth look at the artist's oeuvre through a specialized lexicon.
This glossary is organized around six core entries—Animation, Body, Machine, Ghost, Desire, and Window—which are further articulated in subentries that refine their meaning in relation to the artist's work. Newly commissioned texts by Mohamed Almusibli, Attilia Fattori Franchini, Ilaria Gianni, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Jeppe Ugelvig, and Marianna Vecellio are expanded by a constellation of quotations from previously published texts to offer a composite yet coherent interpretation.
Indebted in structure to Walter Benjamin's Das Passagen‑Werk, and in visual approach to Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, the book favors juxtaposition and recurrence over linear narrative, mirroring Franceschini's own practice of repetition, rotation, and animation. By resisting a fixed reading order, the volume invites an open and recursive engagement, functioning as a "desiring machine," activated anew through each act of looking and reading.
Edited by Attilia Fattori Franchini, Anna Franceschini, Ilaria Gianni.
Texts by Chiara Agradi, Mohamed Almusibli, Fabio Cherstich, Liv Cuniberti, Gioia Dal Molin, Bernardo De Souza, Vincenzo di Rosa, Attilia Fattori Franchini, Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, Ilaria Gianni, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Beniamino Marini, Nick Mauss, Giacomo Mercuriali, Alice Motard, Tabea Panizzi, Tobias Perse, Jennifer Teets, Roberta Tenconi, Jeppe Ugelvig, Joel Valabrega, Marianna Vecellio.
Catalogue Raisonné
This is the very first book on the influential American choreographer and dancer Trajal Harrell. In an entertaining, far-reaching conversation with curator Daniel Baumann, Harrell covers all of his choreographies and performances, as well as his influences, successes, and failures, addressing how he transforms and transgresses the history of dance.
The conversation with Swiss curator Daniel Baumann unfolds along the multiple trails blazed by Harrell's career. It brings into sharp focus not only the artist's interests and influences but also his own creative practice, encompassing both successes and failures. With disarming frankness and a tangible sense of vulnerability, Harrell walks the reader through the history of dance: He explains how he fought with it, how it has shaped him (and vice versa), and how he has gradually carved out a space of his own within it.
Edited by Daniel Baumann.
Interview with Trajal Harrell by Daniel Baumann.
Shop Signs in Kharkiv and Other Writings
Maik Yohansen, Eugene Ostashevsky
The second volume of the sdvig series, dedicated to translingual avant-garde writing, brings together the writings of the Ukrainian modernist poet Maik Yohansen from the 1920s and 1930s, translated into English.
Maik Yohansen was a witty and innovative modernist writer in 1920s Ukraine. This small selection of his work includes How to Write Short Stories, a whimsical guide to the art of short-story writing, informed by Formalist and Marxist criticism the author can't help lampooning. It also includes Shop Signs in Kharkiv, a short and irreverent essay on language politics in Soviet Ukraine a decade after the fall of the Russian Empire. And it includes an autobiography and a selection of Yohansen's masterful poetry in the original and translation.
Everything that Yohansen did—whether fiction, or cultural criticism, or linguistics, or screenwriting, or even autobiographical sketches—he did as a poet, listening to and playing with language. He dedicated his life to achieving equality for Ukrainian as a medium for world literature. In 1937 Maik Yohansen was shot on trumped-up terrorism charges in the mass purge of authors whom Ukrainians now call "the Executed Renaissance."
Translated by poet Eugene Ostashevsky, Yohansen's writings are introduced by Galina Babak, scholar of Ukrainian Formalism.
Maik Yohansen (1895–1937) was an Ukrainian modernist writer, poet, playwright, translator, critic and linguist. He was one of the founders of the literary union VAPLITE (Vilna Akademia Proletarskoi Literatury).
Love Days
Ettie Stettheimer bares all in Love Days, inviting us into the Stettheimer family’s salon of avant-garde artists. Meet Ettie’s alter ego, Susanna Moore, a ravishing Greek scholar. Susanna has no trouble deciphering arcane texts, but when it comes to matters of the heart, she’s lost in translation. Her desire for love, knowledge, and the company of great artists takes her from New York to Berlin to Capri to Paris. She can only run from herself for so long. . . .
Henrietta “Ettie” Stettheimer (1875-1955) was a writer and one of the “Stetties,” a trio of artistic sisters who lived between Europe and New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With Carrie, the architect of an elaborate dollhouse, and Florine, a painter whose iconoclastic canvases have made their way into the modernist canon, Ettie hosted a salon frequented by the day’s avant garde. In a time when it was still unusual for women to pursue higher education, Ettie graduated from Barnard College in 1896, received a master’s degree at Columbia in 1898, and earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Freiburg in 1908. Ettie published two novels, Philosophy: An Autobiographical Fragment and Love Days, under the pseudonym “Henrie Waste.”
The Story of Avis
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps paints a tragic portrait of Avis, a would-be artist whose promising career is subsumed by the obligations of marital life. Against the backdrop of the Civil War, Avis battles her conflicting desires: life with the man she loves or the pursuit of artistic greatness. Ultimately, instead of paints and palettes, Avis fills her days with thoughts of doilies and daycare. Following Avis’s struggles to balance her passion with her duties, Phelps proves that artistic ambition is not extinguished by love, but slowly eroded by the constraints of nineteenth-century womanhood.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1844-1911) was an incorrigible reformer, advocating at various points for dress reform, feminism, social reform, temperance, and an end to the practice of vivisection. In 1874, she penned a rousing call for women to burn their corsets, anticipating the bra-burning feminists of the following century. Her writing career began at 19, when she published a short story about the Civil War titled “A Sacrifice Consumed” in Harper’s Magazine. During her lifetime, she authored 57 volumes of fiction, poetry, and essays. She is perhaps best remembered for the trilogy of Spiritualist novels that she published in the wake of the Civil War—the first of which, The Gates Ajar, had sold 180,000 copies in the US and England by 1900.
Falastiniyyat: A Century of Palestinian Feminisms
From early pioneers to modern-day revolutionaries: the resilience and centrality of feminists in the Palestinian Liberation Movement.
Women have been central to every phase of Palestinian resistance. Here Nada Elia recovers the long-suppressed story of Palestinian women’s organizing from 1929 to the present. Far from being a Western import, local feminism consistently linked personal empowerment with collective liberation, anticolonial struggle with social transformation. In the time of the Mandate, Matiel Mogannam confronted British imperialism through the Arab Women’s Congress. In the following decades, Camille Odeh built Arab American solidarity networks. Their legacy continues today in the work of contemporary activists fighting femicide and pinkwashing throughout the world.
Falastiniyyat rescues Palestinian feminism from obscurity. Furthermore, Elia argues that these activists were pioneers of a uniquely intersectional, anti-imperial feminist politics.
River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation
"Translation, here, is decolonial feminist work." – from the Foreword by Françoise Vergès
What are the histories, constraints, and possibilities of language in relation to bodies, origins, land, colonialism, gender, war, displacement, desire, and migration?
Moving across genres, memories, belongings, and borders, these luminous texts by poets, writers, and translators invite us to consider translation as a form of ethical and political love – one that requires attentive regard of an other – and a making and unmaking of self.
Wednesday
Duck is back! When Cat hits Duck’s handball out of the park, it boing boing boings all the way from the court to outer space to a sewer and bonks a giant Alligator on the head! Follow Alligator search through city streets for the mysterious owner of the missing ball. Eugene Terry returns to his endearing characters for the second installment in the series. Sprinkled with easter eggs for all ages throughout the soft and intricate illustrations, Terry whimsically weaves a tale of friendship and discovery.
Mutt Art Review: Issue Four
SPRING/SUMMER 2026
FEATURES
David Joselit and Janine Iversen in conversation, Mirror Trick: On the self-regenerating oeuvre of Bettina by Cecilia Bien, INSIDE THE PEARL II:Inframince, the Message in Miniature (Conceptual Commodities and N-Dimensional Translation) by Matilda Lin Berke
PORTFOLIO
Bettina (1927-2021)
ON DUCHAMP
Trevor Winkfield, Jutta Koether, Charles Gaines, B. Wurtz, Mark Polizzotti, Nolan Simon, H.P, Timothy Baum, Yasumasa Morimura
POETRY
"7 Delays for Marcel Duchamp" by Terrence Arjoon
REVIEWS
Margaret Kross on Haynes Riley at Coin, Justin Kamp on Josiane M.H. Pozi at American Academy for Arts and Letters, William Corwin on Come Together: 3,000 Years of, Stories and Storytelling at the Morgan Library and Museum, Kimberlean Donis on Sophie Rivera at El Museo del Barrio, Jonah James Romm on Heaven is a Train Car, Q/R Trains
Mutt Art Review considers the encounter with a work of art to be a starting point for a new literary work of its own. Four times per year, they print essays, fiction, poetry, reviews, diaries, and experiments. They foster writing that is sharp, alive, and takes risks in attempting to evaluate what is meaningful in the art experience.
CHUBZ: The Demonization of my Working Arse
Newly reprinted, Chubz: The Demonization of my Working Arse utilises Huw Lemmey's caustic wit to drive politics and fanfiction to the smutty edge.
YOUTH RAGE! YOUTH VIOLENCE! YOUTH ORGASMS! FEAR OF A GAY UNDERCLASS – ARMED – DANGEROUS — SICK FUCKS. Andy ‘Chubz’ Wilson is just another NEET on the street, spending his summer days sucking dick and chilling in the park, one hand on his touchscreen, the other down his pants. That is, until he meets charming left-wing journalist and cute crypto-twink Owen whilst trawling Grindr for sex. But what starts as a quick, breathless hookup ends up changing Chubz — and London — forever. Whilst Owen battles poppers-mad PM Nigel ‘Nige’ Farage, our cock-hungry comrade wages his own 'ass war', and is left wondering: just what exactly is it he’s fighting for? Socialism? Barbarism? Or just cheap kicks?
‘It’s smut, but it’s not just smut…If you watch the news after reading Chubz, it’s hard not to wonder about the secret desires that lurk behind the eyes of David Cameron or Ed Miliband. Hard not to see sex—and power, which always follows hotly on its heels—lurking in every interaction. It provides an easy way of asking: how might those in power be lying to us? What might they be concealing?’
— James Butler, VICE
Huw Lemmey (b. 1986) a.k.a. Spitzenprodukte, is a novelist, artist and critic living in Barcelona. He is the author of four books, including Bad Gays: A Homosexual History and Unknown Language, and his debut film, Ungentle, was released in 2022. He writes the regular essay series “Utopian Drivel” at huw.substack.com, and writes on sex, culture, history and cities for numerous magazines and journals including the London Review of Books, Frieze, New York Review of Architecture, Tribune and Architectural Review.
The German Teacher
A dirty lil tale written and translated by Amalia Ulman in which a woman gets a job in El Cobrador del Frac, thanks to the gender equality policy executed by the government to diversify the workforce. This seemingly fair opportunity quickly devolves into a comical display of function-like men, working for a Spanish company with extensive experience in the collection of unpaid debts, also notorious for its scams. Every book contains a bootlegged business card as a proof of her position.
Amalia Ulman is an artist and filmmaker based in New York. Her first film, El Planeta, premiered at Sundance 2021 and was selected for the opening night at MoMA's New Directors/New Films the same year.
Red Tory: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell
Newly reprinted, Huw Lemmey's caustic wit drives fanfiction to the edge in the smutty political satires, Red Tory: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell and its predecessor Chubz: The Demonization of my Working Arse.
Tom Buckle is an ambitious young moderate Labour apparatchik, rising happily through the party bureaucracy on a diet of bottomless brunches, legitimate concerns and drug-fueled Blairite sex parties. That is until he meets Otto, a charismatic young radical whose urge for cocks, communism, and a mysterious plot for the victory of the holetariat opens his eyes to a changing world. Finding himself thrown into a chaotic new political landscape of pigfucking PMs, frog-frenzied neonazis and falafel-throwing communists, Tom has to pick a side. Will he manage to find a third way to a safe seat, or will Corbyn’s terrifying red horde make his moderate mission impossible? And can Tom resist the most seductive of all highs — pure, high-grade socialism, main-lined straight into London’s clogged and throbbing veins?
So much for a kinder, gentler form of politics!
‘Gifted both with a vivid erotic imagination and sharp political insight, Huw Lemmey has created a satire adequate to the bleak fears and wild hopes birthed by our times. This novel is a sweet love story, an acidic political parody and a bell tolling for centrism, a multisensory post-Brexit romance radiating wild communist dreams.’
— Hannah Black
Huw Lemmey (b. 1986) a.k.a. Spitzenprodukte, is a novelist, artist and critic living in Barcelona. He is the author of four books, including Bad Gays: A Homosexual History and Unknown Language, and his debut film, Ungentle, was released in 2022. He writes the regular essay series “Utopian Drivel” at huw.substack.com, and writes on sex, culture, history and cities for numerous magazines and journals including the London Review of Books, Frieze, New York Review of Architecture, Tribune and Architectural Review.
Movement Research Performance Journal
Issue #57 - Work
Josh Lubin-Levy, John Arthur Peetz and 1 more
Issue 57 of the Movement Research Performance Journal (MRPJ) takes up the keyword “work.” Given that Movement Research has a history of being an organization of artists laboring for and with one another, we invited contributors to consider, revise, or push against questions like: how are things working today? What is the condition of labor in the field of dance and performance? What does it mean to be or have a body that works, on which work is (or isn’t) projected? How do idealizations of the laboring body and/or the ethos of collective practice relate to or obscure the lived experience of making dance works, working in dance, or balancing artistic production with the productive demands of one’s so-called “survival job”? To work in dance (or the arts in general) is indisputably to be exploited. But the contributors to this issue both directly and obliquely take up the experience of working as both enervating and energizing (in often contradictory ways), and draw from their different experiences of working work’s uneven distribution across the globe, the abelism that belies work’s regimentation, and the on-going struggle to find solidarity among arts workers.
More than thematically linked, the issue’s three sections also reflect a desire to address how this publication itself asks artists to work. Artist-run since 1990, the burden of administering a publication like the MRPJ was (perhaps) once outweighed by the promise of what this kind of project could do to shape the field of dance and performance. Today, that editorial and administrative labor dovetails all too well with what has become naturalized as an expectation of practicing artists—that they write about what they are doing or want to do in grant applications, that they create content to be used both for educating and marketing to audiences, and that they develop a discourse that signifies the value of their work in relation to any number of fields other than dance.
For Issue 57, the MRPJ editorial team (Josh Lubin-Levy, John Arthur Peetz, and Nicole Bradbury) gave the keyword “work” to three artists designated as “Contributing Editors” (nora chipaumire, Jerron Herman, and Alex Rodabaugh). nora, Jerron, and Alex were each invited to invite three to five other participants to join the discussion but also encouraged to pass on the administrative and editorial labor to the MPRJ staff.
Issue 57 is only the beginning of thinking about how the structure of a journal on and by artists needs to adapt to an era in which content creation exists in overdrive.
Movement Research Performance Journal
Issue #61 - Dramaturgy
Ligia Lewis, Joshua Lubin-Levy
Theories of dance dramaturgy can be found in a growing body of literature on the field (see our incomplete reading list in this issue). But for Issue #61 of the Movement Research Performance Journal the editors decided stay in the not-knowing by inviting contributions from those whose work touches on dance dramaturgy with curiosity, anxiety, anarchy, as well as a conviction for the intimacy it requires and a resistance to its history of institutional/state authority.
At the heart of the issue is a special section by Contributing Editor Ligia Lewis. Across Lewis’ works there are not only a range of dramaturgs, but the role of dramaturgy shifts and morphs in relationship to the differing works and over time. The reinvention of the dramaturg that Lewis’ work articulates is something that has proliferate throughout the field of contemporary dance. The rest of the issue includes a range of texts, some from practicing dramaturgs, others from to those who have reluctantly accepted this title, and still more who reject the role outright — all exploring a simple question: why has there been an explosion of interest in, perhaps even desire for, dramaturgs in contemporary dance? The explosion I’m thinking of is not about a growing professionalization of dance dramaturgy (though that is certainly happening…). I mean simply that more dance and performance artists are including dramaturgs as part of their process, and at the same time seem to be continually reinventing what the dramaturg is meant to do. What can we make of the desire for the dramaturg as well as the desire to continually reinvent this figure and its function?
DDA Exchange
A facsimile reprint of the CIA's never-before-seen internal employee newsletter.
DDA Exchange collects, for the first time in public print, the CIA's internal employee newsletter from the 1970s and 1980s. Created in the wake of Watergate and the revelations of the Church Committee, DDA Exchange was the CIA's internal propaganda organ meant to boost employee morale and instill an esprit de corps among members of 'the Company.' The newsletter, featuring a contemporary avant-garde layout and style, kept employees informed of the vast array of Agency business such as remote-viewing health care options, prudent retirement strategies, the latest in terrorism signal processing, and how to use the Agency's brand-new Media Center.
Included in this facsimile reprint is the original design document in which the Agency discusses font choices and graphic elements to be used for their newsletter. A metatextual art book as well as an institutional zine compilation and aesthetic reference, DDA Exchange offers a rare glimpse into the gears and cogs which turn the odious machinery of the shadow state.
Sexe trois
L’amour que je porte à quelqu’un·e me ramène inévitable ment à mes propres limites, et me révèle combien je suis, en réalité, différente de ce que j’aimerais être. Je suis un peu plus lâche que ce que j’aurais cru.
Oscillant entre poème, journal et fragment théorique, Camille Kingué interroge ce que c’est qu’aimer et désirer quand on est un corps de femme, un corps noir et/ou un corps queer ; ce que le corps donne à voir et ce qu’il dissimule ; ce que le langage manque toujours de l’autre.
Sexe trois est suivi d’une postface de l’artiste K. Desbouis.
Scent is Present
Michaela Cagáňová, Marta Lopes Santos and 1 more
Scent is Present is an experimental publication exploring the ephemeral notion of olfaction. Through essays, exercises, and artistic contributions, it challenges the limits of language, inviting readers to engage with scent as a non-linear, sensory, and embodied phenomenon. Contributors including olfactory artists, scent designers, and sound artists share their practices and reflections that foreground smell in political and ecological contexts.
The publication stems from a workshop by the same name, carried out in Petrohradská kolektiv in the summer of 2025 by Sleepy Press and Michaela Cagáňová. The workshop accompanied holo-collective’s exhibition ‘AUTOCHORA’ at Jeden Dva Tři Gallery in Prague.
Workshop Participants: Magdalena Škerenčák, Nela Pietrová, Eva Fajčíková, Františka Blažková, Jasmína Horváthová, Karolína Kučerová Dunja, Varya Starodubova, Ondrej Trhoň, sof, Gabriele Sláma, Kristýna Šuleková, Iman, K, Lucy, Maëlle Magnin-Feysot.
Independent Contributors: Romana Klementis, Lila Tesla, Elektra Stampoulou, Maria Ilieva, Lucia Holásková, Michaela Cagáňová
In collaboration with holo-collective and Petrohradská Kolektiv
Designed by Markéta Skalková and Kamila Valešová
Hospitality Playbook
Fern Ling Chettle, Lucia Holásková and 1 more
Hospitality Playbook aims to re-imagine the stereotypes associated with the artist as hospitality worker, serving to interrogate the precarity of work in the arts and cultural industries in the Netherlands. The publication gathers contributions from 20 Amsterdam-based artists and cultural workers working in hospitality, who share stories of, or inspired by, their work experiences, navigating the intersection between labour, personal value, cultural work, and the concept of ‘hospitality’ itself.
Contributions by Alina Lupu, Anielek Niemyjski, Breaking Bread (yawen fu, Augustina Cai) & Fern Ling Chettle, Bryan Zhang, Catalina Reyes Navarro, Inka Hilsenbek, iulia aionesi & Zeo Mancini, Klara-Emilia Kajdi, Leah Jasmine Nogueira, Lucia Holásková, Malte Hultgren, Matija Stojanovic, Maya Asad, Nati Rijo, Parel Joy, Rozan Aversteeg
Designed by Özgür Deniz Koldaş
Pussy Studies
The discursive pussy of Zoe Tuck’s Pussy Studies is a portal into yearning for a Divinity that is “rich, thick, fecund, and plural.” The study of Pussy Studies is a living series of questions and propositions which leave the trace of their passage in the sensuous medium of the sentence. Written within the context of queer sociality, these linked prose poems have a devotional intertextuality and espouse the belief that, “‘Paradise now’ could be more than a dream some of us had.”
Dealey Plaza
In this illuminated manuscript—poems and illustrations—poet and artist Mark He "leaves himself in a bathtub / to visit the world's fair of america" so that he might show us, too, the desolate and fucked fairgrounds of the West's cannibalistic afterparty. It's a Rossano Gospel for the Costco Era, this "unheimlich weather" of microplastics, "art" scrubbed of its social and cultural technologies, Fordist and post-Fordist systems running beyond capacity to replace our memories of the previous world, fertilizer, tanning beds, cigarette butts, "the Chinese virus," probiotics. As John Weiffenbach screams over a barreling freight train of a band on first track of the legendary 1982 Void/The Faith split: "I was raised to respect their ways / Now they've got me caught in their maze / So many questions come up to me / But which one of us is the one to see." In Dealey Plaza, He lets us all know: we all gotta see this shit at some point—lucky we have this book as flashlight and compass.
“In Dealey Plaza, Mark He performs a very dry stand-up routine about getting to the party just as it’s ended. In these poems, so-called ‘Western civilization’ and romantic love stand side by side as washed up enterprises, while diasporic identity is a mixed up language for decoding the truth of the situation.The evocative and often comical objects that populate these poems — pomegranates, ribbonfish, nature’s necropolis, the pelvic ear — serve as possible metaphors for inhabiting the present, but in the end, He shows us that it’s best to just keep moving even when we feel most trapped. These poems pair unmatched deadpan with sudden explosive lyricism: ‘corpus christi, a city / of lights / body of christ / in oil-slicked machinery.’” — Laura Jaramillo
“Reading Mark He’s Dealey Plaza brings to mind a line from the late Lyn Hejinian: ‘The West is confined to infinity.’ In this witty book documenting He’s quotidian ruminations and existential dread, the West is ever present — ‘a moving, writhing mass / of complexes / the process of the end, / but it will never end” despite it being “a land of the dead.’ There are trips to Costco, encounters with glib crowds of fellow artists, and accounts of the loosening of tradition in He’s diasporic culture — and all feel like smart, frank encounters with the doom inhered in the west. Dealey Plaza is very much in the tradition of Steve Benson’s The Blue Books, and is exactly the sort of socially forceful yet lyrically astute poetry we need in this time of many knives.” — Ted Rees
Mark He is an artist, poet, and researcher who lives in Queens, NY.
Covers letterpressed on Pistachio Colorplan cardstock, with embossed and tipped-in drawings. Interiors printed on Cougar Vellum 70# text. First edition of 350. Printed, assembled, and bound in “Kingston, New York,” the unceded and currently occupied lands of the Haudenosaunee, Mohican, Munsee Lenape, and Schaghticoke tribes. Designed by The Aliens.
An Embroidered Suit (Escape of the Sacrifice)
"How distant are these songs from your life Have they capitulated to those in power or do they exist in a shadow culture an invisible mythology that’s the country’s undercurrent an underground river And if a shadow culture how have they fought off assimilation I don’t see them in the playlists of those who could destroy us and get away with it"
In the recent past, probably in the "United States," a fugitive is aided by an otherworldly figure. As they escape by rowboat, they seek a mythology through old ballads. They also attempt to transform their violent past into a fantastic outfit embroidered with their obsessions and crimes: a disguise to evade capture, something like camouflage. "An Embroidered Suit (Escape of the Sacrifice)" is part of a long narrative poem in progress titled Twa Corbies.
Elliptical, cascading, epic, "horrible or ingenious;" this book signals and broadcasts its changing subjectivities as the cuckoo does: "Don't place your affections on a sycamore tree…for the top it will wither, and the roots they will die," which seems like an apt way of setting the table to tell the story of "America." From Bristol, Tennessee to Compton's Cafeteria, Kennedy pulls these long myths out of his sleeves like silk scarves, colorful, brilliant, and helixed, waving in the air of the song.
Interiors printed on Mohawk Felt Natural 70# text weight stock. Covers printed on Mohawk White 110# cover stock. Printed, assembled, and bound in “Kingston, New York,” the unceded and currently occupied lands of the Haudenosaunee, Mohican, Munsee Lenape, and Schaghticoke tribes. First edition of 200. Designed by The Aliens.
Pina #3
Exhibitions by American Artist and CB Evans, conversations with Che Gossett and Dean Spade, and short stories by Lola Olufemi and Orion J Facey.
Pina is a printed, portable exhibition space. We function as a commissioning platform, collaborating with artists to create exhibitions existing solely within the pages of a magazine.
The Pastoral Concert
The Pastoral Concert marks the first English translation of enigmatic filmmaker Jean-Claude Rousseau’s early written work Le Concert champêtre, begun in 1968, some fifteen years before his debut film.
Rousseau continued shaping the work as a screenplay until its rejection by the Centre National de la Cinématographie in 1983, whereupon he turned his efforts to the production of Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre (1983) instead. Unrealized, Le Concert champêtre became the matrix from which Rousseau’s subsequent films would emerge.
Taking its title and three central characters (A, B, and C) from the eponymous painting long attributed to Giorgione and now to Titian, The Pastoral Concert begins as a letter written by a young man to his cousin in the countryside on the eve of her wedding, before mutating into a diary entry, a screenplay, and finally a film imagined through the failure of its own realization. Through this instability of form, The Pastoral Concert expresses, in the words of Jean-Marie Straub, “something magnificent [and] entirely different from a screenplay or a découpage.”
Translated from the French by artist and filmmaker Kevin Weil, this edition includes an extensive appendix of extra-diegetic materials written by Rousseau, as well as correspondence with contemporaries such as Dominique Noguez, Marcel Hanoun, and Jean-Marie Straub, which form a picture of the work’s early reception.