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Cover of Gay Betrayals: Two Works Series Vol. 5

Afterall Books

Gay Betrayals: Two Works Series Vol. 5

Leo Bersani , Hannah Quinlan , Rosie Hastings

€18.00

Bersani’s prescient and long unavailable polemic against gay assimilation, a plea for “antimonogamous promiscuity,” illustrated with artistic interventions
In 1997, during a symposium at Centre Pompidou, pioneering queer theorist Leo Bersani presented a prescient critique of the assimilative tendencies that made “gays melt into the very culture they like to think of themselves as undermining.” For Bersani, queer activism, mired in micropolitics, had relinquished the radical task of reconfiguring the horizon of the possible. Later published as “Gay Betrayals” in the pioneering (and now unavailable) collection Is the Rectum a Grave?, Bersani’s intervention champions a truly disruptive vision of homosexuality, one that betrays the relational, identitarian and communitarian foundations of bourgeois heterosexual respectability through “antimonogamous promiscuity.”

Building on artistic research into the politics of queer spaces and culture some 20 years later, British artist duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings revisit Bersani’s polemic with a response in three acts. Through a kaleidoscopic array of drawings, preparatory sketches and egg tempera paintings, a narrative of everyday (homo)sociality emerges.

Leo Bersani (1931–2022) was an American theorist best known for his books Is the Rectum a Grave?, Homos and Receptive Bodies. Born in the Bronx, he graduated from Harvard in 1952 and eventually joined the University of California, Berkeley, where he became an influential teacher, remaining there for the rest of his career.

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Cover of Joan Jonas

DABA

Joan Jonas

Joan Jonas

An extensive catalog dedicated to Jonas' under-explored drawing practice. 

The installation, performance and video works of American artist Joan Jonas (born 1936) are emblematic of the '70s-'80s downtown New York avant-garde. Jonas privileged form over content, generating rigorous pieces with thematic concerns such as time, space and feminine subjectivity. Significant as these works are, other parts of Jonas' diverse and dynamic oeuvre deserve their due attention. This book is the first comprehensive catalog to elucidate an under-examined component of the artist's practice. Fascinated by the tension between motion and transcription, Jonas developed "endless drawings" composed of lines that weave around themselves or through a grid. She also began to draw natural things – plants, animals, minerals – both from her own environment and from fiction.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Drawing Center, this volume examines several decades of Jonas' drawing practice, presented in chronological order. The drawings are accompanied by extensive images from the artist's notable performances and exhibitions.

Foreword by Annie Ratti, Fabio Cavallucci. Text by Marina Warner, Joan Jonas, Anna Daneri, Roberto Pinto, Cristina Natalicchio, Andrea Mattiello.

Cover of Touch Response

Infinitif

Touch Response

Lore Smolders

Touch Response is about lacking language and how to (not) interpret images. This is a book on vulnerability, as a description, prescription or side effect. It is made in a difficult period of fatigue and pain, mainly in the sofa in my living room, as a dialogue with myself and other invisible forces.

Drawings by Lore Smolders - visual artist
Interview with Birds WG - healer, writer, performance artist
Text editing by Isolde Vanhee and Joan Somers Donnelly

Cover of Against Morality

Floating Opera Press

Against Morality

Rosanna McLaughlin

Essays €17.00

A manifesto against the current moralizing trend in the arts.

Should art be determined by political ideals? In recent decades art institutions have sought to embody liberal values of universal equality and social justice. This move toward greater inclusivity has borne witness to a countervailing trend: artworks are increasingly scrutinized for their political implications, and artists must take care not to transgress particular moral fault lines.

Examining contemporary exhibitions as well as works of art and film, and the broader cultural reactions to them, Rosanna McLaughlin investigates the consequences of this moralizing approach to creative work. She invites us to rethink the connection between political values and art—and to ask whether a relationship between them should exist at all. In arguing against morality in the arts, McLaughlin lays the groundwork for a more expansive concept of difference in twenty-first-century art making.

"What if ambivalences were seen as productive, and not a danger to erase? Would we not begin to know ourselves better? What is it that we are so afraid of finding out? Art is a testing ground for ideas, a means of reaching. What a shame, if we use the space it offers to destroy it entirely."

Rosanna McLaughlin is a writer based in East Sussex and the author of Double-Tracking: Studies in Duplicity (2019) and Sinkhole (2023). Her writing on art and culture has featured in ArtReview, Frieze, Granta, The Guardian, and The White Review, among other publications. Between 2021 and 2023 she was co-editor of The White Review.

Cover of Just Us (hardcover)

Graywolf Press

Just Us (hardcover)

Claudia Rankine

Essays €30.00

As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.

Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine’s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces—the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth—where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.

Cover of Ten Skies

Fireflies Press

Ten Skies

Erika Balsom

Ten shots of the sky, each ten minutes long. That’s all it takes to describe James Benning’s film from 2004. And yet, this simplicity conceals a rich and absorbing drama, one of the great works of the American avant-garde. Scholar and critic Erika Balsom unfolds its hidden intricacies of meaning, extending its lessons with crystalline prose, a comparable sense of depths, and an exhilarating, maximalist intimation of what criticism can do and become. She brings you from the film itself into the mind of the artist, through philosophical musings and art historical scholarship. The book is part of a Decadent Editions series of 10 books about 10 films.