Lover

JJ brings together articles by cultural critic, auto/biographer, and lesbian icon Jill Johnston, translated into French for the first time, as well as texts, poems and drawings by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Nina Kennel and Rosanna Puyol.

Jill Johnston (1929-2010) was a dance critic, performer, writer, and feminist and lesbian activist. Her books include Marmalade Me (1971), Lesbian Nation (1973), Gullibles Travels (1974) and numerous articles in The Village Voice.

Texts by Jill Johnston; contributions by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Nina Kennel, Rosanna Puyol.

Translated from the English (American) by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Nina Kennel, Rosanna Puyol.

Graphic design: Sophie Demay & Maël Fournier-Comte (In the Shade of a Tree).

Jill Johnston began the 1960s as an influential dance columnist for the Village Voice and by the start of the next decade she was known as a keen observer of postmodern art and lesbian feminist life who challenged how dance, art, and women can and should be seen. The Essential Jill Johnston Reader collects dozens of pieces of her writing from across her career. These writings—many of which appeared in the Village Voice and the New York Times—survey the breadth of her work, braiding together her thinking, writing, and activism.

From personal essays, travel writing, and artist profiles to dance and visual art reviews as well as her infamous series of columns for the Voice in which she came out as a lesbian, these pieces demonstrate the evolution of her philosophies and writing style. Illustrating how Johnston drew on lessons from dance to reconsider what it means to be a woman, this collection brings a fascinating and brilliant voice of American arts criticism, radical feminism, and gay liberation back to contemporary audiences.

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".

Performer, activist, and writer Jill Johnston was a major queer presence in the history of dance and 1970s feminism. She was the first critic to identify postmodernism’s arrival in American dance and was a fierce advocate for the importance of lesbians within feminism. In Jill Johnston in Motion, Clare Croft tracks Johnston’s entwined innovations and contributions to dance and art criticism and activism. She examines Johnston’s journalism and criticism—in particular her Village Voice columns published between 1960 and 1980—and her books of memoir and biography. At the same time, Croft attends to Johnston’s appearances as both dancer and audience member and her physical and often spectacular participation at feminist protests. By bringing together Johnston’s criticism and activism, her writing and her physicality, Croft emphasizes the effect that the arts, particularly dance, had on Johnston’s feminist thinking in the 1970s and traces lesbian feminism’s roots in avant-garde art practice.

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.

Má dreams of wealth and grandeur, Hieu dreams of Finnish girls. The younger brother, always on the periphery, always an observer, gradually disappears into his schoolwork, mesmerised by his own intellect

The three of them form a solitary world in a small Ostrobothnian town on the west coast of Finland. Má and Hieu, constantly on a collision course with each other and the community’s suffocating social codes. They live among people who want to talk openly about everything, who don’t understand the necessity of sometimes remaining in the shade. 

In sensitive and transfixing prose that has the effect of a series of tableaux, and with chapter headings reminiscent of the intertitles in a silent film, Tran’s multi-award-winning debut is a moving story about love, the compulsion to create, and the meaning of family.

Winner of the Runeberg Prize 2022
Winner of the Borås Tidning’s Debutant Prize 2022
Winner of the Svenska Yle Literature Prize 2021
Shortlisted for the Katapult Prize 2022

Bricks from the Kiln is a semi-yearly journal and multifarious publishing platform established in mid-2015 to support critically minded and explorative writing on and around art, design and literature. Edited by Matthew Stuart and Andrew Walsh-Lister, the forthcoming issue, number five, begins with a single sentence:

blankets topologies in glistening snow and blood — produces instructional spattering, again and again — coughs up clotted network diagram hairballs of illegibility — parasitically draws on / from Thomas Browne’s quincunx — meets for The Big ROAR tomorrow, yesterday — lifts loud cows off the page, aloud — flips the coin of language, heads or tails? — politely speaks on writing heard yet seen — twists tongues, transliterates and teases — makes contact with ancestral spirits — traverses the foothills of La Marquesa, past and present — is the Spectre at the feast — (re)traces polymorphous concrete poems — dashes, gestures, speaks, breathes, moves, joyness — is, as ever, tentative, incomplete and inconsistent.

Contributions by Helen Marten, Rebecca May Johnson, Johanna Drucker, Louis Lüthi, Daisy Lafarge, Holly Pester, Ursula K. Le Guin, Quinn Latimer, Stefan Themerson, Slavs and Tatars, Ashanti Harris, Catalina Barroso-Luque, Kevin Lotery, Bronac Ferran with Greg Thomas and Astrid Seme with Alex Balgiu.

Arthur’s Whims is the tale of “a modern saint,” a love story born of a childhood dream of being “alone on a boat with a boy, a friend.” Arthur and his beloved Bichon—a young man who, after drinking Arthur’s tears, becomes pregnant with his child—drift through a stream of identities and circumstances: birdcatchers for a French taxidermist; sailors shipwrecked in an ice fortress; explorers of the Isles of Traitors, Babies, and Sadness; famous magicians in Oklahoma; religious and medical marvels. It is an anarchic, outrageous novel, in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Comte de Lautréamont, now available in English for the first time in translation by Dana Lupo. This edition includes Hervé Guibert’s essay “The Bear,” in which he compares his books to rooms in a house, writing: “Arthur’s Whims would be the library of the house, and the bedroom of a child who will never be.” It is “a true adventure novel in the tradition of the genre, or what I believed to be its tradition, with great journeys, disasters, shipwrecks, cataclysms.”

“This short novel, offered here along with an essay by Guibert, reads like a madcap picaresque—one in which bodies can transform, the pace is constantly accelerating, and geography proves to be malleable. A gloriously surreal account of an unexpected voyage.” — Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders

Hervé Guibert was a French photographer, critic, and author. Born in 1955, he published works of autofiction, novels, short stories, and essays, including many on photography. His writing was often deeply personal, ironic, and centered on illness and the body. Guibert died from complications of AIDS in 1991, at the age of thirty-six.

Dana Lupo is a writer and translator based in New York. Their work has appeared in Entropy, Bone & Ink Press, Arcturus (Chicago Review of Books), Apricity Press, and elsewhere. Arthur’s Whims is their first published translation.