In the 1980s and ’90s, Rivera photographed drag performers in Latinx gay bars, house parties in pre-gentrified Echo Park, and performers like Sade, Vaginal Davis, and Chaka Khan.
Semiotext(e)
Posted inBooks
Memoir as the Fragments of Memory
When Michel Leiris died in 1990 at age 89 he was a canonical figure in France, mainly for having remade the genre of memoir in his own image.
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The 1980s in New York
New books by Ingrid Sischy and Gary Indiana expand our understanding of a crucial decade.
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Revolutionizing the Erotics of Writing
For a writer whose life was so enmeshed with the experiences of being seen and talked about, Acker never truly established a fixed identity outside of language.
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Reader’s Diary: Robert Glück’s ‘Communal Nude’
Some of Robert Glück’s essays came my way in the 1980s via such publications as Poetics Journal.
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A Poetic Record of Creations Lost, Missing, or Destroyed
Rarely has a book been so dizzyingly impenetrable while being, at the same time, so eminently readable. Les Unités perdus (The lost unities), by the French poet Henri Lefebvre, manages to both live up to this paradox and flourish within its idiosyncratic ramparts.
Posted inArt
Semiotext(e) at the Biennial: An Interview with Hedi El Kholti
Semiotex(e) is widely known as the publisher that brought French theory to America. Initially a scholarly journal founded in the early ’70s by Sylvère Lotringer and others at Columbia University, Semiotext(e)’s reach expanded into the underground and downtown scenes, creating and reflecting affinities between high theory and experimental art, literature, and performance practices.