This publication, conceived as an extension of the eponymous exhibition, paying tribute to Léon Bakst, the greatest set designer of the modern era. Viewing theatre as a total artwork in which choreography, music, costumes and sets were of equal importance, Léon Bakst (1866–1924) worked closely with artists such as Serge Diaghilev, Vaslav Nijinsky, Jean Cocteau, Ida Rubinstein and Igor Stravinsky, transforming the perception of ballet.

The book and offers a detailed presentation of Bakst’s drawings, costume and textile designs, previously unpublished writings on ornament and fashion, new scholarship on Bakst’s sources and the impact of his vision, as well in situ views of the scenography created by Nick Mauss for the exhibition.

Second edition.

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.”

Including Jay Chung, Claire Fontaine, Josef Strau, Alain Guiraudie, Bernadette Van-Huy, Helmut Draxler, Henrik Olesen by Thomas Duncan, Heji Shin by Benoît Lamy de la Chapelle, Marcel Proust by Yves-Noël Genod, Merlin Carpenter by Annie Ochmanek, Josephine Graf, Helmut Draxler, Megan Francis Sullivan and Nick Mauss, Dylan Byron and Isabelle Graw, Benjamin Lignel and Anne Dressen, Clément Rodzielski.

The concept of transcorporeality (Stacy Alaimo) builds on the thesis that all bodies are permeable, open-ended systems in constant exchange with their environment and other biological, technological, economic, and sociopolitical realities. With works by Jesse Darling, Flaka Haliti, Trajal Harrell, Paul Maheke, Nick Mauss, Park McArthur, Oscar Murillo, and Sondra Perry, Transcorporealities critically examines the permeability of bodies-including the museum-at the interfaces between subject, object, and space. It focuses on urgent (institutional) questions of visibility and accessibility as well as the possibilities and limits of representation: What is inscribed and attributed to bodies? Who is looking at whom? What is meant when we say “we” and “they”?

With texts from Stacy Alaimo, Yilmaz Dziewior, Park McArthur, Leonie Radine & Nora Sternfeld.

The tenth issue of the biannual journal-collection that brings together academic writings, interviews with artists, critical essays and artists’ interventions in the form of inserts.

With & about Sara de Chiara, Rafael Corcostegui, Moyra Davey, Pierre Dulieu, Guillaume Dustan, Jana Euler, Sylvie Fanchon, Jim Fletcher, Alexander García Düttmann, Jeanne Graff, Gary Haller, Alex Hay, Martin Laborde, Daniel Lentz, Mina Loy, Liz Magor, Nick Mauss, Nicolas Moufarrege, Baptiste Pinteaux, Richard Rezac, Clément Roussier, Edith Schloss, Albert Serra, Pierre Thévenin, Belén Uriel, Charles Veyron, Robin Waart, Emily Wardill, Román Yñán.

Edited by Alice Dusapin, Martin Laborde, Baptiste Pinteaux, Alice Pialoux. Designed by Marc Touitou & Robert Milne.

This book extends into book form Nick Mauss’s 2018 exhibition Transmissions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which was heralded by the New York Times as “an installation, a collage of several art forms, a revisionist investigation of New York modernism and sexual expression, and an essay in queer theory…”

Including never-before published reproductions of documents and artworks by Eugene Berman, Ilse Bing, Paul Cadmus, Maya Deren, Walker Evans, Peter Hujar, George Platt Lynes, Elie Nadelman, Isamu Noguchi, PaJaMa, Dorothea Tanning, Pavel Tchelitchew, Carl Van Vechten, and many more. The essays consider subjects of ballet and the body, Mauss’s work as artist and exhibition maker, performance and historiography, and dance in museum spaces.