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.

The Earth Dies Streaming collects the best of A. S. Hamrah's film writing for n+1, The Baffler, Bookforum, Harper's, and other publications. Acerbic, insightful, hilarious, and damning, Hamrah's aphoristic capsule reviews and lucid career retrospectives of filmmakers and critics have taken up the mantle of serious American film criticism pioneered by James Agee, Robert Warshow, and Pauline Kael and carried it into the 21st century.

Taken together, these reviews and essays represent some of the best film criticism in the English language. The Earth Dies Streaming showcases a remarkable critical intelligence while offering a cultural history of the cinema of our times.

Written according to its own dictum, "language is the universal inebriant," these epistolary essays, personal narratives, meditations on avant-garde writers, and unorthodox forays into the "narco-imaginary"—the habits and conventions surrounding literary and cultural representations of drug use—attend to the residue of transient impressions that remain, long after the delirium of creative activity subsides.

Ramsey Scott teaches at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His essays, poems, and fiction have appeared in various print and online publications, including the Southwest Review, the Seneca Review, The Massachusetts Review, Shampoo, Tarpaulin Sky, Confrontation, and Mirage #4/Period(ical). The Narco-Imaginary is his first book.

Hatred of Translation thinks through translation with an emphasis on its disaggregation. These pieces address, sometimes obliquely, often with effrontery, the works of René Char, Hervé Guibert, Hilda Hilst, Danielle Collobert, Frankétienne, Mizoguchi Kenji, Ingeborg Bachmann, Kobayashi Masaki, and Marguerite Duras. Resolutely resistant to anything resembling a theory of a thing, these pieces provoke a persistent commitment to thinking in the place of theorizing. Where the French pensée means both of aphoristic thought and of the pansy, Hatred of Translation seeks a garden in the midst of body such as it is occupied by language.

Nathanaël is the author of more than a score of books written in English or in French, including Pasolini's Our (2018), Feder (2016); L'heure limicole (2016) and Sisyphus, Outdone. Theatres of the Catastrophal (2012). The French-language notebooks (2007-2010), gathered together in N'existe (2017), were recast in English as The Middle Notebookes (2015), which received the inaugural Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. The 2009 essay of correspondence, Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book) was first published in French as L'absence au lieu (2007). Nathanaël's work has been translated into Basque, Greek, Slovene, and Spanish (Mexico), with book-length publications in Bulgarian and Portuguese (Brazil). The recipient of the Prix Alain-Grandbois for ...s'arrête? Je (2008), Nathanaël has translated works by Catherine Mavrikakis, Frédérique Guétat-Liviani, and Hilda Hilst (the latter in collaboration with Rachel Gontijo Araújo). Nathanaël's translation of Murder by Danielle Collobert was a finalist for a Best Translated Book Award in 2014. Her translation of The Mausoleum of Lovers by Hervé Guibert was recognized by fellowships from the PEN American

"May '68 in France expressed a fundamental version of freedom: not freedom to succeed, but freedom to revolt. Political revolutions ultimately betray revolt because they cease to question themselves. Revolt, as I understand it—psychic revolt, analytic revolt, artistic revolt—refers to a permanent state of questioning, of transformations, an endless probing of appearances. In this book, Julia Kristeva extends the definition of revolt beyond politics per se. Kristeva sees revolt as a state of permanent questioning and transformation, of change that characterizes psychic life and, in the best cases, art. For her, revolt is not simply about rejection and destruction—it is a necessary process of renewal and regeneration."

Essential writings from the downtown New York legend and polymath, pioneer of both structural film and drone music.

Tony Conrad (1940-2016) was a legendary multidisciplinary artist known for his groundbreaking contributions in experimental film, music, and video. Upon moving to New York City in 1962, he began making music with John Cale, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela in the Theatre of Eternal Music, a group that helped shape what would come to be known as minimalist music. He later went on to perform with Lou Reed in a pre-Velvet Underground band called The Primitives and cut a classic 1972 record with the German Krautrock band Faust that set a new standard for drone music.

A collection of Dan Graham's interviews and conversations with a wide array of individuals from various backgrounds and disciplines.

Dan Graham was a contrarian. His art confronted viewers with a multiplicity of possible perceptions and intersubjective experiences. Some Rockin' was his last project and—through conversations with friends, artists, architects, curators, and former assistants—articulates his sensitivity to context, media, and people. The interviews address rock music and urbanism, humor and astrology, history and the hybrid form. Mediating historical and social experience was a major concern of his. "The Museum in Evolution," an essay he finished just before his death, and published here, highlights that nothing is final in becoming. Rather, it allows for: Some Rockin'.

Anne Carson's remarkable first book about the paradoxical nature of romantic love. Since it was first published, Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson's lyrical meditation on love in ancient Greek literature and philosophy, has established itself as a favorite among an unusually broad audience, including classicists, essayists, poets, and general readers.

Beginning with the poet Sappho's invention of the word "bittersweet" to describe Eros, Carson's original and beautifully written book is a wide-ranging reflection on the conflicted nature of romantic love, which is both "miserable" and "one of the greatest pleasures we have."

French/English paperback with essays by Raymond Bellour and Laurent Roth on Chris Marker's Immemory. 

'Chris Marker's CD-ROM Immemory is most easily imagined as a digitally stored attic room, divided into zones of memories. Those zones show (fragments of) photographs, engravings, paintings, films, texts, edited or annotated, which are plotted along a number of virtual trajectories that one can traverse: Le Voyage, Le Musée, La Mémoire, La Poésie, La Guerre, La Photo, Le Cinéma.

The central question, borrowed from Marcel Proust, is also the heading of the La Mémoire section: "Qu'est-ce qu'une madeleine?" What charges something with the affect of memory? Why is that one detail, that one book, poem or painting the emotional and essential among all others?' (Witte Raaf 1999)

Yves Gevaert publisher, co-published with the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

A new revised version of the notebook of the legendary American dancer, artist and choreographer Simone Forti in which she shares her poetry as well as her thoughts on dance, the body, writing, the state of the world. A collection of experimental texts, imagined dialogues, news animations and poetic thoughts on life and politics. The book contains an afterword by Fred Dewey and a postscript by poet and Fluxus artist Jackson MacLow.

American dancer and choreographer Simone Forti (born 1935 in Florence, Italy) has been a leading figure in the development of contemporary performance over more than fifty years. Artist, choreographer, dancer, writer, Forti has dedicated herself to the research of a kinesthetic awareness, always engaging with experimentation and improvisation. Investigating the relationship between object and body, through animal studies, news animations and land portraits, she reconfigured the concept of performance and dance. Forti emigrated from Italy with her family via Switzerland to Los Angeles in 1938, where she subsequently studied for four years with choreographer Anna Halprin and has since spent most of her life. She joined the experimental downtown art scene in New York during the emergence of performance art, process-based work and Minimal Art and spent a fruitful time in Rome in the late 1960s, where she used the spaces of L'Attico to study and perform. Her work is seen as a precursor of the famous Judson Dance Theater—a group of artists experimenting with dance, including Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer—and Minimal Art, although she prefers to be referred simply as a "movement artist."

Combining art and activism, semiotics and capitalism, art and finance, control and subversion, Monitoring Control by Paolo Cirio represents a critique of the social manipulation imposed by new technologies, while examining the counter-control that individuals can implement to dismantle these forces, sabotage them, and protect themselves.

The book presents a collection of ten texts by Paolo Cirio, artist, hacktivist, one of the most attentive investigators in the artistic field of the effects of the information society. With a text by Bruce Sterling and a conversation between Christian Marazzi, Marco Scotini, and Paolo Cirio himself, it gives visual and verbal form to all the forces that control our existence: new media such as Instagram, Facebook, mugshot websites, Google Street View, etc., highlighting the overt yet covert ways in which these tools control our daily activities and lives.

The volume is accompanied by a gallery of images representing some of the thousands of patents of algorithms collected by Cirio on the web to highlight the tools used on the Internet and by artificial intelligence for surveillance and social manipulation.

This volume both gathers and expands on the results of the research project “Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions” held at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, and proposes to draft a history of exhibitions sourced from a wide corpus reaching beyond the framework of art institutions. It undertakes a transdisciplinary history, at the nexus of art history, science studies, and philosophy, exploring the role the exhibition played in the construction of the conceptual categories of modernity, and outlines a historiographical model that grasps the exhibition as both an aesthetic and epistemic site.

Contributions by Etienne Chambaud, Elitza Dulguerova, Anselm Franke, Tristan Garcia, Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Yuk Hui, Pierre Huyghe, Sami Khatib, Jeremy Lecomte, Stéphane Lojkine, Rafael Mandressi, Vincent Normand, Peter Osborne, Filipa Ramos, Juliane Rebentisch, João Ribas, Pamela Rosenkranz, Anna-Sophie Springer, Lucy Steeds, Olivier Surel, Etienne Turpin, Kim West, Charles Wolfe.

Whether he's describing Tracy Emin or Warhol, the films of Barbet Schroeder ("Schroeder is well aware that life is not a narrative; that we impose form on the movements of chance, contingency, and impulse....") or the installations of Barbara Kruger ("Kruger compresses the telling exchanges of lived experience that betray how skewed our lives are..."), Indiana is never just describing.

Indiana champions shining examples of literary and artistic merit regardless of whether the individual artist or writer is famous; asserts a standard of care and tradition that has nothing to do with the ivory tower establishment; is unafraid to deliver the coup de grãace when someone needs to say the emperor has no clothes; speaks in the same breath-in the same discerning, insolent, eloquent way-about high art and pop culture. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, it's also political, plus it's a riot of fun on the page

GARY INDIANA is a novelist and critic who has chronicled the despair and hysteria of America in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century. From Horse Crazy (1989), a tale of feverish love set against the backdrop of downtown New York amid the AIDS epidemic, to Do Everything in the Dark (2003), "a desolate frieze of New York's aging bohemians" ( n+1), Indiana's novels mix horror and bathos, grim social commentary with passages of tenderest, frailest desire. In 2015, Indiana published his acclaimed anti-memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love, following it up in 2018 with Vile Days, a collection of his art criticism for the Village Voice. Called one of "the most brilliant critics writing in America today" by the London Review of Books, "the punk poet and pillar of lower-Manhattan society" by Jamaica Kincaid, and "one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche" by the Guardian, Gary Indiana remains both inimitable and impossible to pin down. 

Here the mirror image of the almost hallucinatory, heart-rending loss of the familiar is literary defamiliarization. Arsanios both mourns and blasts apart the notion of the mother tongue, reminding us that for each “mother tongue” at least another tongue is silenced. Desire propels her genre-defying writing, which grief notwithstanding still manages to tongue languages, and that is her genius. — Mónica de la Torre

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, and Guernica, among others. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. She teaches at Pratt Institute and holds an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. Arsanios currently lives in New York where she was a 2016 LMCC Workspace fellow, and an ART OMI resident in fall 2017. With Rachel Valinsky, she coordinated the Friday night reading series at the Poetry Project from 2017–19.

In what ways have women artists come together to investigate their own image? This publication delves into histories of feminist and queer collective practice, expanding on the various ways women claim agency of their identity, via collaborations that connect intergenerational and far-away friendships. Each chapter features artistic and theoretical case studies that discuss images produced by women artists, about women artists; proposing that to gaze upon someone represented with care and autonomy provides more affirmative ways to relate to ourselves. It discovers that to pay homage to overlooked knowledge of women artists builds a case for the artist as researcher. Only by engaging in both roles can we unveil what is not taught in the mainstream and inspire a more inclusive, generous future.

Each aspect of the book’s design is a collaborative endeavour, expanding the notion of individual authorship. It is with this sentiment that creating the publication became research in itself, via collaboration with both direct peers and an extended genealogy.

“Women Looking at Women Looking at Women” is designed by Marijn van der Leeuw, Esther Vane, India Scrimgeour, Hannah Williams and Annemarie Wadlow.

Annemarie Wadlow (1993, UK) is a research-led artist working between moving image, writing and photography. Her work explores the middle ground between image and imagination, questioning notions of inheritance, personal identity and belonging. She is the co-founder of Nice Flaps, an artist initiative that hosts experimental life drawing sessions.

« La société n’existe pas » : la formule de l’ancienne Première ministre britannique Margaret Thatcher est restée célèbre. On connaît moins ses ramifications en images, de la guerre civile anglaise du XVIIe siècle jusqu’à l’art contemporain en passant par la culture populaire en Grande-Bretagne. De photographies en affiches, de manuscrits en frontispices, ce livre traverse l’histoire pour cerner les échos visuels du thatchérisme. Son point de départ est une pièce de l’artiste Jeremy Deller : la reconstitution d’une bataille ouvrière entre mineurs grévistes et policiers survenue en 1984. Maxime Boidy en extrait une série de scènes qui sont autant d’infléchissements de l’idée de « corps politique ». Ce faisant, il dessine la discrète et brûlante actualité de ces formes symboliques, à l’heure de la guerre civile qu’a imposé le thatchérisme globalisé.

Maxime Boidy est enseignant-chercheur en études visuelles. Il s’intéresse principalement à l’histoire des savoirs de l’image et à l’iconographie politique sous toutes ses formes.

Une récente enquête menée dans les écoles d’art et de design francophones aboutit à un constat étonnant : beaucoup d’étudiante·s affirment que l’artisanat est l’avenir de l’art et que les sorcières détruiront le patriarcat. Iels s’approprient un imaginaire composite mêlant fantasy et moines copistes, herboristerie médiévale et communalisme. Dans le même temps, des slogans en latin sont tagués sur les murs par de jeunes révolutionnaires. Des remèdes au capitalisme pourraient-ils se trouver dans le monde qui précéda son avènement ? Pour sonder cet imaginaire politique et artistique construit sur un passé lointain, Clovis Maillet et Thomas Golsenne analysent des œuvres contemporaines, des sources médiévales et la pensée de Silvia Federici et William Morris qui, chacun·e à leur endroit, proposent une vision du Moyen Âge émancipatrice.

Maître de conférences en histoire de l’art et études visuelles à l’Université de Lille, ancien directeur de l’unité de recherche Bricologie à la Villa Arson à Nice, Thomas Golsenne a publié Carlo Crivelli et le matérialisme mystique du Quattrocento (2017).

Professeur·e d’histoire et théorie des arts dans les écoles d’art d’Angers et de Genève, Clovis Maillet est aussi artiste performeur·euse en duo avec Louise Hervé et médiéviste. Iel est l’auteur·ice du livre Les Genres fluides : de Jeanne d'Arc aux saintes trans (2020).

Lorsqu’Allen Ginsberg s’enregistre sur un magnétophone et capte fortuitement des émissions de radio, le souffle du vent et des conversations, des agents du FBI et de la CIA l’écoutent, à la recherche d’aveux involontaires. En considérant ces agents comme de sérieux théoriciens de la poésie, Lytle Shaw montre qu’ils s’inspirent des expérimentations d’avant-garde et transforment une technique libératrice en un outil répressif.

Lytle Shaw enseigne la littérature à l’Université de New York. Il a publié Frank O’Hara : The Poetics of Coterie en 2006 (University of Iowa Press) et Fieldworks : From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics en 2013 (University of Alabama). En 2021, est paru New Grounds for Dutch Landscape (OEI).

Craig Owens (1950-1990) a bouleversé la théorie de l’art en une décennie d’intense travail. À la fin des années 1970, aux États-Unis, il s’engage dans l’aventure intellectuelle postmoderne, en quête d’alternatives à un discours moderniste cramponné aux problèmes formels. Owens se penche sur des pratiques artistiques conçues à la croisée des médiums, comme celles de Robert Smithson ou de Trisha Brown. Lecteur des philosophes poststructuralistes, il soutient que les oeuvres se composent de signes ouverts à l’interprétation. Owens place ainsi les spectateur·ices au premier plan, tout en apportant une inscription théorique inédite aux performances de Laurie Anderson et aux oeuvres postconceptuelles de Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine ou Martha Rosler. Attentif au genre des artistes et inspiré par des réflexions sur le pouvoir du regard masculin, Owens écrit ensuite sur le féminisme et la domination. Ses essais prennent une tonalité sociale et politique. Ils touchent aussi à des questions ouvertes par les études postcoloniales. Autant de recherches interrompues par le sida, dont Owens meurt en 1990. 

Ce recueil, établi, introduit et traduit par Gaëtan Thomas, permet de suivre les expérimentations d’une oeuvre portée par une réflexivité exceptionnelle.

Gaëtan Thomas est historien (médialab Sciences Po, Paris). Il a établi le recueil Pictures: S’approprier la photographie, New York 1979-2014 (Le Point du Jour, 2016) qui rassemble des textes de Douglas Crimp.

Immutable: Designing History explores the banal genre of the document and its entanglement with statecraft and colonial(ism/ity). This is framed as a ~5,000 year chronology, imbricating the developments of money and writing — from Mesopotamian clay tablets to distributed ledgers, like the blockchain. Immutability figures as a design imperative and hermeneutic for considering a variety of techniques (material, technological, administrative, etc.) of securitization against the entropy of a document's movement through space/time, and the political.

This project is driven by a contrast: design educators tend to teach forms like logos, books, websites, etc., but not passports, money, property deeds, etc., in spite of these being, I contend, design's most profoundly consequential forms.

As an alternative historiography, Immutable gestures both towards anthropologist Laura Nader's call to "study up" (on those in power), and the radical educator Paolo Freire's recognition of the "limit situation" as a generative condition for emancipatory praxis. The book's aim is to orient graphic design towards the vocation of imagining, naming, and remembering beyond the horizons of its role as a managerial, administrative, and colonial instrument that imposes a rationality of vision and accountability upon what is knowable, thinkable and sayable.

Chris Lee is a graphic designer and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. He is a graduate of OCADU and the Sandberg Instituut. His research/studio practice explores graphic design's entanglement with capitalism and colonialism/ity through the banal genre of the document. He is also currently developing a typographical project that narrates the oscillating status of Asians between the "model minority" and "yellow peril" as a function of the consolidation of Euro-American settler identity. Chris is an Assistant Professor in the Undergraduate Communications Design Department at the Pratt Institute.

What does it mean to acknowledge one’s closeness to, enmeshment in or even kinship with the material world? And what does it mean to question family structures – the way they organise, coerce and make deviant certain lifeforms – and dwell in other possibilities of kin-making?

Not just a jolly rethinking of objects or a polyamorous romp through relationships, The Material Kinship Reader reckons with the extractavist histories of materials and the social relations that frame much of contemporary life.

Spanning fiction and theory, the collection of texts expand the idea of an artist’s book by bringing words into conversation with an aesthetic proposition. Clementine Edwards’ artwork is the visual weft to the book’s written net. From colonial conquest to climate collapse, The Material Kinship Reader tells toxic and tender stories of interdependence among all things sentient and insentient.

Including contributions by Sara Ahmed, Hana Pera Aoake, Roland Barthes, Joannie Baumgärtner, Heather Davis, Kris Dittel, Clementine Edwards, Ama Josephine B. Johnstone, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Sophie Lewis, Steven Millhauser, Jena Myung, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Michelle Murphy, Ada M. Patterson, Kim TallBear and Michelle Tea

Isabelle Graw reflects on the purposes and struggles of friendship in competitive social milieus.

By focusing on her own social milieu—the art world—Graw demonstrates how friendships are neither totally disinterested nor reduceable to their use. Written in the intimate form of a fictional diary, this book laments useful friendships while praising true friendship in all its forms. For Graw, friendship is an existential necessity—if only because it points to how we relate to and depend on others. Friendship, she finds, is as important as the air we breathe—with it, we are able to fully live.

"On the Benefits of Friendship strangely calls to mind the fictional schoolboy-diary format Robert Walser staged to deliver his first novel. Aware of its own performance while successfully assuming its desired voice, Graw's diaristic story is a clever vehicle for social critique of utility friendships." 
— Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You

"Isabelle Graw has written the Elective Affinities for the twenty-first century, as a feminist novel and a dysfunctional family portrait set in the contemporary art world."
— Violaine Huisman, author of The Book of Mother

Isabelle Graw is Professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule), Frankfurt am Main, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism. She is an art critic and co-founder ofTexte zur Kunst in Berlin.