Nick Mauss

The exhibition catalogue for Nick Mauss’ highly acclaimed Transmissions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, heralded by the New York Times chief dance critic Alastair MacAuley 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…. The juxtapositions show that Transmissions is a work of creative imagination as much as revelation.  You go to sample it as history, you absorb it as poetry.”

This book includes never-before published reproductions of documents and artworks – by Paul Cadmus, George Platt Lynes, Dorothea Tanning, Carl Van Vechten, Isamu Noguchi, Pavel Tchelitchew, Walker Evans, Ilse Bing, PaJaMa, Man Ray, Maya Deren, Marcel Duchamp, Elie Nadelman, Eugene Berman, Peter Hujar, and many more.  Photographs by Paula Court and Ken Okiishi conjure the dance that was produced live daily for the exhibition’s duration, and an extensive conversation among the dancers brings rare insight into the process of making performance-based work. 

Essays by exhibition curators Elisabeth Sussman and Scott Rothkopf, assistant curator Allie Tepper, as well as by Mauss and scholar Joshua Lubin-Levy touch on subjects of ballet and the body, Mauss’ work as artist and exhibition-maker, what performance does to historiography, and dance in museum spaces.
 

2020
192 pages, 11 3/4 x 9 1/2
430 color illus.
ISBN: 9780300246841
Paperback

 

Yale University Press, Dancing Foxes Press, and the Whitney Museum of American Art