Citizens of the Cosmos

Produced on the occasion of Leslie Thornton's major solo exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center as well as a recent solo exhibition at Kunstverein Nurnberg, this richly illustrated volume is the first monograph on this important artist and filmmaker, offering essential, foundational scholarship on Thornton's influential work in film and video.

Since the mid-1970s, American avant-garde filmmaker and artist Leslie Thornton (born 1951) has produced an influential body of work in film and video. Thornton's early encounters with experimental, structuralist, and cinéma vérité traditions fueled her iconoclastic take on the moving image and gave shape to her practice of weaving together her own footage and voice with archival film and audio. In part through her forceful and dynamic use of sound, Thornton exposes the limits of language and vision in her works, while acknowledging the ways that language and vision nevertheless remain central to scientific discourse and narrative in general. Her work consistently interrogates modes of representation and the violence of looking, pushing beyond critiques of the gaze to consider biases in perception, or the way voice and sound can undermine an otherwise dominant visual narrative.

The collected writings of artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz, along with the stories behind them told by Alexis Vaillant.

Marc Camille Chaimowicz was an acclaimed visual artist known for his performances, installations and curatorial flair. He was also a writer. This volume, the first comprehensive collection of writings by the artist, includes seminal interviews, chitchats, jokes, performance reports, insightful statements and letters in essay form, as well as rare documents, such as early surviving leaflets, typewriter handouts and hard-to-find articles. Spanning 1971–2023, the book unlocks the work of an artist considered to be a refreshing role model for a new generation of culture mavens and style savants.

Drawing from literature, modernist architecture, interior design, art theory, glam rock and camp culture, the collection reveals the artist's inner self alongside the art, social flânerie and the goings-on of his time. Entertaining and witty, the texts stand out brilliantly with their early acumen and inclusivity, while setting a new template for an expression of queerness through writing. With access to Chaimowicz's personal material and photographs, curator and editor Alexis Vaillant is a guide to the artist's writings. Vaillant provides behind-the-scenes commentary and context—a time capsule of pleasure featuring Andy Warhol, Des Esseintes, Josef Frank, David Bowie, Vito Acconci, Eileen Gray, Alex Kapranos, Jean Cocteau, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jean Genet, Bob Dylan, Emma Bovary and Roger Cook, among others.

Edited by Alexis Vaillant.

A monograph / artists' book that engages with the recent film installations of Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Installation shots, research material, scripts, and film stills give an insight into the artists' investigation of performance in film and their dense net of references to experimental film, the history of photography, sound, and underground (drag) performances.

The book's title alludes to an interest in opaque events that are belated, left backstage or off-screen. A number of (fictitious) letters to friends and collaborators such as Sharon Hayes, Yvonne Rainer, Ginger Brooks-Takahashi, and Jack Smith place the work of Boudry & Lorenz in a context of debates around temporalities, activism, the archival, decolonizing practices, and queer histories. Published following the exhibition “Patriarchal Poetry” at the Badischer Kunstverein, September 27– November 24, 2013.

Thirty texts by cultural critic, auto/biographer, and lesbian icon Jill Johnston.

Jill Johnston was renowned as a writer on dance, especially on the developments around Judson Dance and the 1960s downtown New York City scene, and later as the author of the radical-feminist classic Lesbian Nation (1973). This book collects thirty texts by Jill Johnston that were initially published in her weekly column for The Village Voice between 1960 and 1974. The column provided a format in which Johnston could dissolve distinctions between the personal, the critical, and the political. Her writing took turns and loops, reflecting its times and contexts, and set a stage for the emergence of Johnston as a public figure and self-proclaimed radical lesbian that defied any prescribed position.

Johnston's original texts are accompanied by three new contributions by Ingrid Nyeboe, Bruce Hainley, and Jennifer Krasinski, as well as an appendix with archival material related to a panel Johnston organized in 1969, titled “The Disintegration of a Critic: An Analysis of Jill Johnston.”

Edited by Fiona McGovern, Megan Francis Sullivan, Axel Wieder.
Texts by Jill Johnston; contributions by Bruce Hainley, Jennifer Krasinski, Ingrid Nyeboe.

Retrospective monograph: a journey through over two decades of intersectional and queering practices in film, performance, sculpture, community work, and textiles.

In Daschner's textile-based works, threads are minimal yet highly visible, akin to the pinch needed to wake up from a dream. These works—as well as her collages—merge with her confronting yet inviting image politics: she cuts and pastes stories of love and pleasure, violence and resilience, death and rebirth.
The written contributions reflect on Katrina Daschner as part of a hardworking generation of queer artists and makers who have been responding to the major conceptual shifts and gender upheavals happening in contemporary art since the 1990s, especially in New York and London. They highlight Katrina Daschner's longstanding line of intersectional queer interest that continues to undermine (neo-)liberal, heteropatriarchal conceptions of sexuality, gender, subjectivity, and relationships

Edited by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu.
Texts by Amelia Groom, Tim Stüttgen; foreword by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu; interviews by Rike Frank.

An edifying immersion into Vicuña’s creative wellspring as well as her decolonization and ecofeminist ideals.

Beautifully designed, with a special reverence for her humanitarian heart, Dreaming Water is the most thorough monograph dedicated to the work of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña to date. Vicuña coined the term “Arte Precario” in the mid-1960s as a new category for her works composed of debris and structures that disappear in the landscape, and which also include her quipus (“knot” in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space.

Dreaming Water brings together over 200 works—including paintings, drawings, screenprints, collages, textiles, videos, photographs, installations, poetry, artist books and performances—created throughout the artist’s remarkable career. It also features several stimulating texts—a lengthy epistolary piece by curator and editor Miguel A. López as well as new essays by anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli, curator Catherine de Zegher and art historian José de Nordenflycht. Vicuña herself contributes two texts, reflecting on her drawings from the “Palabrarmas” project and the activism of the group Artists for Democracy, which she cofounded in 1974. A rousing conversation between Vicuña, anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena and curator Camila Marambio also figures in the book, blending the artist’s voice with those who are experts in fields pertinent to her practice.

Centré sur la mise en jeu du corps filmé et du corps filmant dans leurs pratiques cinématographiques respectives, la Conversation de Laure Cottin Stefanelli et Peter Snowdon a commencé par une présentation croisée de leurs films à Bozar en discussion avec Septembre Tiberghien et s'est cloturée par une exposition intitulée INNER SENSE - Bodies At Work, à la galerie de l'ERG de décembre 2018 à janvier 2019. 

This DVD includes three seminal early films: 
Key, 1968, 10 min.
Clouds, 1969, 10 min.
Room Film 1973, 1973, 55 min. 

Peter Gidal's films have been an influence on several generations of artists. An important theorist and writer as well as a filmmaker since the late 1960s, Gidal was a pioneer of 'structural-materialist' film and his work has been shown around the world, including retrospectives at the ICA in London and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. You can read more about Peter Gidal on LUX Online.