Nick Mauss

An aesthetic and social history of art and dance in mid-20th-century New York interpreted by contemporary artist Nick Mauss. 

Over the past decade, Nick Mauss (b. 1980) has pursued a hybrid mode of working that melds the roles of curator, artist, and scholar. This catalogue leans heavily into the scholarship side of his practice, building on his 2018 Whitney Museum exhibition with a closer look at the relationship between modernist ballet and the New York avant-garde. In the 1930s through 1950s, ballet was introduced to a popular audience in New York and was simultaneously influenced by developments in Europe in painting, photography, fashion, music, and poetry. Mauss reflects on this period of rich cross-media production and synergy, ultimately arguing for the inseparability of dance and art history.

Dispersed Events brings together for the first time Nick Mauss’ essays from the last fifteen years. Shimmering with the urgency of a new generation of queer thinkers, Mauss’ writing refracts contemporary art through histories of decorative art, film, theater, and dance.

An artist renowned for critically and poetically reconfiguring inherited genealogies and hierarchies of visual culture and art history, Mauss engages writing as a space for relentlessly activating counter-histories, repositioning the voice of the artist and the readers along the way. Whether he considers the practice of artist Lorraine O’Grady, the radical fashion of Susan Cianciolo, the anarcho-vaudevillian theater of Reza Abdoh, or the potential for textiles to disclose a different way of thinking, Mauss insists on the intense power of forms and feelings in their actual rather than enforced prehistories. Reevaluating experiments in fashion, dance, and the decorative arts on the same plane as painting, sculpture and cinema, he locates art as taking shape in the middle of conversations—“between art history and any afternoon.”

“Among what might initially appear, following Mauss, ‘a wildly inscrutable web of lineages,’ the reader quickly perceives unexpected, unheralded, conjunctions: affiliations, alignments, and affinities. . . . It generates a conviction that, in the best sense, is partisan. Singular, independent, illuminating.” — from the foreword by Lynne Cooke

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.

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.