Dispersed Events: Collected Writings

Reevaluating experiments in fashion and decorative arts, Mauss shows how art takes shape in open-ended conversation–“between art history and any afternoon”

This collection brings together for the first time Nick Mauss’ writing, shimmering with the urgency of a new generation of queer thinkers who are opening the relations between contemporary art, decorative arts, film, performance and dance. An artist renowned for projects that critically and poetically reconfigure inherited genealogies and hierarchies of visual culture and art history, Mauss engages writing as a space for relentlessly activating counter-histories, continuously repositioning the voice of the artist and the reader along the way. In his essays, he considers the foundational practice of artist Lorraine O’Grady, the radical turn-of-the-century fashion of Susan Cianciolo, the anarcho-vaudevillian theater of Reza Abdoh and the needlepoint appropriations of Nicolas Moufarrège, and rethinks queer cinema against its clichés. This volume gathers texts written over the past 15 years, including previously unreleased pieces, notably the transcript of a conversation between the artist and Fran Lebowitz about the Whitney exhibition Transmissions. It also features drawings by Mauss: graphic works that are an integral part of his research, as a line may become a letter or a figure on the page.
New York-based artist and writer Nick Mauss (born 1980) is known for an expanded use of drawing that traces unexpected arcs into a multidisciplinary practice.