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1. Interview
Adrian Piper
in conversation with Lauren O’Neill-Butler
“When living honorably is more important than staying alive, you’re ready to fight effectively for what you believe in.”
2. Interview
Frank B. Wilderson III
in conversation with Aria Dean
“The essential antagonism is not between the workers and bosses but between the Humans and the Blacks.”
3. Interview
Christopher K. Ho
in conversation with Dawn Chan
“The paradigmatic Hongkonger, especially from the generations between 1949 and 1997, is transnational and neoliberal.”
4. Interview
Sarah Schulman
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“Historically, queer women have been on the front lines of every progressive movement, but not always openly.”
5. Interview
Nell Painter
in conversation with Lauren O'Neill-Butler
“Things improving for old women artists is like things improving for Black Americans. Things improve. But things stay shitty.”
6. Interview
Ruba Katrib
in conversation with Dawn Chan
“The modern manifestation of the museum has its origins as a colonial and disciplining institution.”
7. Interview
Mimi Thi Nguyen
in conversation with Lauren O’Neill-Butler
“One mantra in particular strikes me in this moment—and it is from John Waters's Female Trouble—‘crime is beauty.’”
8. Interview
Mark Wigley
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“Architecture is not about the wellbeing of humans at all. It doesn't simply house the human, it remakes the human.”
9. Interview
Howardena Pindell
in conversation with Lauren O’Neill-Butler
“There will be gradual changes in the art world, but the arts are often the last to change.”
10. Interview
Hal Foster
in conversation with Aria Dean
“Even though I don't see criticism as art, I don't see it as secondary to art. I see it as a practice parallel to it.”
11. Interview
John Akomfrah
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“We don't need to go beyond blackness. It's not a before and after question.”
12. Interview
Amie Barrodale
in conversation with Dawn Chan
“The idea of three-act structure is in my head a lot, destroying my stories before they really begin.”
13. Interview
Andrea Long Chu
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“I experienced my transness as a shape the Internet made when it looked at me.”
14. Introduction
Volume 1: On L'Informe
"Rethinking contemporary aspects of the informe—related to technology, gender, disease, and race—in a Bataillean key."
15. Roundtable
Unfinished Work: A Roundtable on L’informe
with Aria Dean, Bruce Hainley, Ruba Katrib, Emmanuel Olunkwa, and Lauren O'Neill-Butler
“It’s easy to recognize specters of Bataille’s thought today, for better and for worse.”
16. Interview
Matthew Barney
in conversation with Aria Dean
"At the core, I think of my creative language as being rather formless."
17. Interview
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
in conversation with Valerie Midlin
“L’informe comes out of WWII, the atomic bomb, and the Holocaust.”
18. Interview
Michael Taussig
in conversation with Nancy Goldring
“Sacrifice is a pointed instance of dépense, an exquisitely sacred combustion, and one that runs throughout Bataille’s economics.”
19. Essay
Catharsis in Ten Fragments
by Lauren O'Neill-Butler
"I've never understood catharsis."
20. Essay
Black Bataille
by Aria Dean
“Blackness presents the possibility of a thoroughly anti-Idealist aesthetic and theory of objects.”
21. Interview
Elizabeth Diller
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“I can’t think of architecture as anything other than a performative art form.”
22. Interview
Gregg Bordowitz
in conversation with Lauren O'Neill-Butler
"I decided to schmear my queer Jewish pinko self in schmaltz and go out and grease up the stage."
23. Roundtable
Knobkerry Roundtable
with Charles Daniel Dawson, Kyle Dancewicz, Carmen Hammons, Joanne Robinson Hill, Svetlana Kitto, Kathleen McDonnell, Seret Scott, and Ken Tisa
“The store was about conversations between worlds and how those conversations meshed together and only Sara could do that.”
24. Interview
Dodie Bellamy
in conversation with Lauren O'Neill-Butler
“My attention tends to focus on the micro, on what’s right in front of my face—be it a memory or on a screen or some fragile blip of the ‘real’—and I let associations spiral out from there.”
25. Roundtable
Anarchic Archive: Godzilla Roundtable
with Tomie Arai, Dawn Chan, Howie Chen, Ricky Ruihong Li, Lauren O'Neill-Butler, and Paul Pfeiffer
“‘Asian American’ identity may be a construction but the social and psychic life of racialized people in America is very real.”
26. Interview
Sianne Ngai
in conversation with Alec Recinos
"We could say that the entire enterprise of art has a gimmick problem."
27. Interview
Hito Steyerl
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“If I ever reached a milestone I would run away in horror.”
28. Essay
Three Poems on Art
by Yxta Maya Murray
"They stood around, laughing,
while drugs crumbled in their blood."
29. Interview
Dennis Cooper
in conversation with Ryan Mangione
“I was already the enemy to a lot of the activists, because I wasn't representing gays in a positive way.”
30. Roundtable
Love and Rage: A Roundtable on bell hooks
with Lyle Ashton Harris, Dawn Chan, Ricky Ruihong Li, Parissah Lin, Darla Migan, Emmanuel Olunkwa, and Aliza Shvarts
“Not having moments to grieve is a combination of raced, classed, and gendered positionality.”
31. Interview
Lena Dunham
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
"People sometimes thought I cared more about myself than I did."
32. Essay
Abortions Will Not Let You Forget
by Aliza Shvarts
"At this edge of legibility, we can find new language, frameworks, and tools."
33. Interview
K Allado-McDowell
in conversation with Dawn Chan
"There's something freeing about not owning every word."
34. Introduction
Wordplay
by Emmanuel Olunkwa
“We are forever circling the drain.”
35. Essay
Our Most Haunted Place
by Dawn Chan
"Simulation faced the same unceremonious end as its referent."
36. Essay
The Environmental Self
by Alexandra Tell
"Torture and therapy here are not antipodal."
37. Essay
Where the Skin Ends
by Quang Truong
"It’s too easy to be curious, but not optimistic; or optimistic, but not curious."
38. Interview
Susan Schuppli
in conversation with Ricky Ruihong Li
“The ecological is a sensibility.”
39. Interview
Tom Burr
in conversation with Blake Oetting
"I like to be both inside and outside."
40. Interview
Dan Graham
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
"My work is about staging and confronting our reality with fiction."
41. Interview
McKenzie Wark
in conversation with Ryan Mangione
"Trans women have never really had a consolidated, ongoing, well-documented, accessible, aesthetically varied, intergenerational, interracial culture."
42. Interview
Christoph Cox
in conversation with Valerie Mindlin
"I'm interested in all the forces that liberate and constrict sound."
43. Interview
Lucy Sante
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa and Lauren O'Neill-Butler
"All my life I’d been having arguments with myself that I couldn't properly solve within the jurisdiction of myself."
44. Interview
Jussi Parikka
in conversation with Isabelle A. Tan and Ricky Ruihong Li
“What matters is not only the writing of time as history but the writing processes of technologies.”
45. Interview
Hélène Cixous
in conversation with Lauren O'Neill-Butler
"I spent my youth in a world of women who were, and who insisted to be, witnesses to the fate of women."