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.”

A key figure in the New York art scene, Amy Sillman is renowned for her singular approach to painting and drawing. Her writings extend a practice that challenges traditions and theoretical frameworks with criticality and humor, and advocates subjectivity: she reevaluates Abstract Expressionism with a queer eye, explores the meanings of color and shape, and discusses in depth the work of other artists—from Delacroix (and Cézanne!) to Maria Lassnig to Carolee Schneemann to Laura Owens. In Faux Pas, a collection of her most recent essays, alongside her cartoons and original drawings, art—as personal as it is political—is a practice that responds to today’s struggles.

Angharad Williams’ book Eraser, concludes a two-year process of writing and has existed in the form of an exhibition, a performance, and now a book. Eraser is as much about the categorical boundaries of our consensual reality—between self and other, human and non-human, waking and dreaming consciousness—as it is about an urge to overcome them. The book’s main protagonist undergoes multiple transformations via psychic and physical transferences with elementary forces—involving a trout and a magpie, among other things—that unsettle the idea of the “stable” self. Eraser proposes a perspective in which the categorical distinctions between individual self, others, and non-human life slowly begin to dissolve. Other worlds of consciousness—of animals, plants, and organic matter—here embody a form of social organization free from the hierarchies of tradition and liberal progress.

Designed by Dan Solbach.

Estelle Hoy offers a wry exploration of the seductive allure of tropes and cliché in the art world and politics in this novella, which documents the story of Pisti, a leftist Hungarian activist and her anarchist collective based in Paris. In the course of one night in a Belleville apartment, old friends and new lovers converse about contemporary politics, activism and art, violence, and queer issues. The book is also an experiment in writing, teasing the reader with namedropping and appropriation. Whole phrases are lifted from other texts and woven seamlessly into the narrative. Based in Berlin and Paris, Hoy is a feminist writer, socially engaged artist, political activist, and academic.