Here are 11 books that Perform, Repeat, Record fans have personally recommended if you like
Perform, Repeat, Record.
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We are artists who met as PhD researchers while individually undertaking research in different areas of drawing – each sharing an interest in process-based and expanded methods of working. In addition to our individual artistic practices, since 2008 we have collaborated on a range of performance drawing projects that address the relationship between the body and presence, and time and space through working with graphite and charcoal, light, sound, and animation. We have exhibited and lectured internationally on the topic of performance drawing and have curated programmes and workshops. Working together collaboratively in this way we aim to contribute to the creative process underpinned by generations of feminist art practice and defy traditional notions of authorship.
This book was important for us because it was the first time the live method of drawing was first described as performance drawing(s).
The term ‘performance drawing’ first appeared in the subtitle of Catherine de Zegher’s Drawing Papers 20: Performance Drawings, in particular with reference to Alison Knowles and Elena del Rivero. This volume accompanied a series of five solo exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York (2001) of work that "explored the interrelation of drawing and performance." Since then, performance drawing has compellingly become an operational term – a trope and a thread of thinking to describe the process dedicated to broadening the field of drawing through resourceful practices and cross-disciplinary influence, including dance, audio, moving image, and technology. It made a big impact on our research.
We are artists who met as PhD researchers while individually undertaking research in different areas of drawing – each sharing an interest in process-based and expanded methods of working. In addition to our individual artistic practices, since 2008 we have collaborated on a range of performance drawing projects that address the relationship between the body and presence, and time and space through working with graphite and charcoal, light, sound, and animation. We have exhibited and lectured internationally on the topic of performance drawing and have curated programmes and workshops. Working together collaboratively in this way we aim to contribute to the creative process underpinned by generations of feminist art practice and defy traditional notions of authorship.
As today’s artists are shifting boundaries of genres, creative debates are opened up and generate transformative methodologies. This book was instrumental for us, in instituting and revealing the relationship between drawing and performing, Butler, and de Zegher’s catalogue, demonstrates artworks at the forefront of the progressively vibrant and forward-thinking approach to art that contributes to the expanded field of drawing.
On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century explores the radical evolution of drawing that took place during the last century and through to the present day, as numerous artists subjected the traditional concepts of the medium to a critical examination. In a revolutionary departure from the institutional definition of drawing, and from reliance on paper as the fundamental support material, artists instead pushed the line across the plane and into real space, expanding the medium in relation to gesture and form and connecting it with painting, sculpture, photography, film and dance. Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of…
We are artists who met as PhD researchers while individually undertaking research in different areas of drawing – each sharing an interest in process-based and expanded methods of working. In addition to our individual artistic practices, since 2008 we have collaborated on a range of performance drawing projects that address the relationship between the body and presence, and time and space through working with graphite and charcoal, light, sound, and animation. We have exhibited and lectured internationally on the topic of performance drawing and have curated programmes and workshops. Working together collaboratively in this way we aim to contribute to the creative process underpinned by generations of feminist art practice and defy traditional notions of authorship.
At times, it may seem apparent that successive generations of artists reinvent the wheel and explore performance drawing across a range of disciplines; it was in particular, Tania Kovat’s writing in The Drawing Book, that gave us the broad contextualization of things – it seemed to reach into diverse yet significantly relevant references of historical predecessors that excited us. The book is complete with brilliant replications of artworks and quotes by a collection of artists.
The works in "The Drawing Book", by artists, architects, sculptors, scientists, filmmakers and thinkers of all descriptions, attest to the versatility and immediacy of drawing. From first thoughts to finely wrought, elaborate artworks, from the lightest sketch in pencil to bold, gallery-wall installations, the medium is shown as an essential vehicle for creativity. The recent prominence of artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Chris Ofili, Rachel Whiteread, Ellen Gallagher, and a host of others who use drawing as a final means of expression, is addressed in both the works shown and essays by curators Kate Macfarlane and Katharine Stout,…
We are artists who met as PhD researchers while individually undertaking research in different areas of drawing – each sharing an interest in process-based and expanded methods of working. In addition to our individual artistic practices, since 2008 we have collaborated on a range of performance drawing projects that address the relationship between the body and presence, and time and space through working with graphite and charcoal, light, sound, and animation. We have exhibited and lectured internationally on the topic of performance drawing and have curated programmes and workshops. Working together collaboratively in this way we aim to contribute to the creative process underpinned by generations of feminist art practice and defy traditional notions of authorship.
Throughout this book, the artist and editor, Avis Newman converses with the editor Catherine de Zegher about the practical process of drawing. This approach was also important and also most impactful. In the book, de Zegher asks Newman "What happens in the space between the gesture and its landing on the page?" And we love all conversations around the artist’s “doing” and “thinking." Following this conversation, the book gives the reader a window into how the drawer is thinking in the process of making and illuminates a link between performance and drawing by revealing how a drawing is performative as it comes into the world.
This work presents a selection of over one hundred important works from the Tate Collection, from William Blake to Andy Warhol, selected by the British artist Avis Newman. The presentation of rarely-seen drawings by so many major artists will make fresh and startling connections between their work and give new insights into their creative processes.
Scotland’s greatest poet since Burns, Hugh MacDiarmid, said that there were no traditions in writing, only precedents. He was thinking that, were traditions followed, adhered to, applauded, and praised, and prized too highly, then the danger of slavish repetition rather than creative divergence was too high. We need the mad moments, when all bets are off and something truly unpredictable will happen. I write with Scots modernist, postmodernist, and experimental precedents in mind. I want there to be Scots literature that reflects a divergent, creative nation, willing to experiment with words and life, and, in Alasdair Gray’s formulation, “work as though in the early days of a better nation.”
A Trocchi renaissance, including a film of Young Adam starring A-Listers Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, and Emily Mortimer, added to a growing reappraisal of Trocchi as a great Scottish writer, his reputation having been tarnished, fairly or unfairly, with drug use, indolence, and writer’s block.
Young Adam is a Scots crime novel the way James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a high-jinx picaresque, which is to say only technically, and on the understanding that Hogg and Trocchi sit head, shoulders and in fact a full body length above these genres. But moment of madness there is, and arrest, trial, judgment, and condemnation. But the twist is that Trocchi’s own judgment and condemnation of society is what matters.
Set on a canal linking Glasgow and Edinburgh, Young Adam is the masterly literary debut by one of the most important British post-war novelists. Trocchi's narrator is an outsider, a drifter working for the skipper of a barge. Together they discover a young woman's corpse floating in the canal, and tensions increase further in cramped confines with the narrator's highly charged seduction of the skipper's wife. Conventional morality and the objective meaning of events are stripped away in a work that proves compulsively readable.
I am a teacher, a college professor, and a lifetime reader. I came from a small town, went to college to study writing, ended up getting graduate degrees in theatre, became a theatre director, and then went back to my first love, writing. Throughout my childhood, I bonded with my siblings, and we often feared our mother, who was a fascinating creature but often rough on us. She expected perfection and wasn’t in tune with her childhood. So even then, stories of children in danger—abandoned or scolded or shamed—have resonated with me.
I’ve read it multiple times and also listened to an audiobook. Of course, there are movies, too. I read it on my own out of pure interest as a young woman and then again repeatedly as an adult.
I get wildly involved in Dickens’ plots. (Most of his novels would fulfill my category of children overcoming odds.) David is bereft, having lost his father. He has a loving but weak mother. He experiences beatings, hunger (Oh, I hate hunger), and loneliness as he is tossed about the world. And yet he never loses his humanity, that is, his native kindness.
Somehow, Dickens finds ways to leverage all the pain with comedy. Amazing. I love his strange characters (Peggoty, Mr. Dick) and thrill to his evil characters (Uriah Heep) because Dickens has the gift to often make them comic.
Now a major film directed by Armando Iannucci, starring Dev Patel, Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, Peter Capaldi and Ben Whishaw
'The greatest achievement of the greatest of all novelists' Leo Tolstoy
In David Copperfield - the novel he described as his 'favourite child' - Dickens drew on his own experiences to create one of his most moving and enduringly popular works, filled with tragedy and comedy in equal measure. It is the story of a young man's adventures on his journey from an unhappy childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of…
Mike Thorn is the author ofShelter for the Damned,Darkest Hours, andPeel Back and See. His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and podcasts, includingVastarien,Dark Moon Digest, andThe NoSleep Podcast. His books have earned praise from Jamie Blanks (director ofUrban LegendandValentine), Jeffrey Reddick (creator ofFinal Destination), and Daniel Goldhaber (director ofCam). His essays and articles have been published inAmerican Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper(University of Texas Press),Beyond Empowertainment: Exploring Feminist Horror(Seventh Row),The Film Stage, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick.
Like its classic predecessor,The Cipher, Kathe Koja’s second novel brilliantly navigates artistic and romantic movements between the somatic and the transcendent, the erotic and the morbid, and ultimately between creativity and destruction. The book centers on metal sculptor Tess’s burgeoning relationship with Bibi, a transgressive performance artist whose radical visions aspire to an extreme embodiment of posthuman aesthetics.
Incorporating Tess’s metal sculptures into her performances, Bibi explores increasingly intense modes of expression through self-mutilation, cutting, and scarification, and the book plunges fearlessly into the parallel arcs of an eroding love and an increasingly deadly obsession. Koja’s prose bristles with a violent passion channeled into hyperfocus, deftly bounding between her characters’ intense interiorities and vivid descriptions of environments and embodied experiences.
As a sculptor of metal, Tess is consumed with the perfection of welds, the drip of liquid metal, addicted to the burn. Her solitary existence ends when she meets Bibi. A self-proclaimed "guerilla performance artist," Bibi pushes her body to the utmost in her dancing, sculpting it into a finely tuned machine. But the limits of her body frustrate her. With Tess, she creates a performance art of mobile, bladelike sculptures and human dance that becomes increasingly violent and dangerous. Still this is not enough for Bibi. Her desire to grow and transform leads her to body piercing, then to…
I am a writer and educator, originally from the British Isles. Perhaps because of this, I am more than usually aware of the distraction and speed of contemporary American life. As a long-time meditator, and the author of World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down, I am encouraged and inspired by any book that draws attention to our “hurry sickness” and offers practices or suggestions to help us to slow down.
Ursula K.Le Guin is perhaps best known as a novelist and science fiction writer. But her non-fiction is very much worth reading too. I love her values, her courage, her clarity, her persistence. Right to the end of her very long life (she died in 2018 at the age of 88), she was thinking about the art and craft of writing. I find myself deeply inspired and encouraged by Le Guin, and in particular, this book.
Join Ursula K. Le Guin as she explores a broad array of subjects, ranging from Tolstoy, Twain, and Tolkien to women's shoes, beauty, and family life. With her customary wit, intelligence, and literary craftsmanship, she offers a diverse and highly engaging set of readings. The Wave in the Mind includes some of Le Guin's finest literary criticism, rare autobiographical writings, performance art pieces, and, most centrally, her reflections on the arts of writing and reading.
I am a queer transgender woman living in the Appalachian South. When I moved here in 2015 I threw myself into doing community-based LGBTQ history. I co-founded the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project, an ongoing queer public history initiative based in Roanoke, Virginia. As a historian and an avid reader, I am fascinated by how queer and trans people think about the past, how we remember and misremember things, and what role historical consciousness plays in informing the present and future.
Queer theory can sometimes be head-scratching, but the first time I readCruising Utopia (on a camping trip in the mountains), I found myself gazing anew at the trees above me and my lover by my side. The late great theorist pushes us to reconsider how queerness is experienced and remembered in quotidian times and spaces. From sharing a bottle of Coke with a lover to memorializing abandoned toilets in the New York City subway, Muñoz revels in the ecstatic potential of “queer utopian memory” and queer world-building. Cruising Utopia is a marriage of critical theory and thoughtful storytelling, giving readers a much-needed injection of hope in these thoroughly anti-queer times.
A 10th anniversary edition of this field defining work-an intellectual inspiration for a generation of LGBTQ scholars
Cruising Utopia arrived in 2009 to insist that queerness must be reimagined as a futurity-bound phenomenon, an insistence on the potentiality of another world that would crack open the pragmatic present. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Jose Esteban Munoz argued that the here and now were not enough and issued an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.
On the anniversary of its original publication, this edition includes two essays that extend and expand the…
I’m a debut novelist who loves a good family drama. I’m a fiction professor at the University of Memphis, where I teach a course on the dysfunctional family novel featuring books on this list. I’m also an atheist, a bisexual, and a father to a one-year-old—all of which influenced my book. In addition to the novel, I’ve written a story collection called Quantum Convention. My stories have aired on Public Radio International’s Selected Shorts and appeared in American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, and Electric Literature, among other journals. I also have a new essay up at Lit Hub about channeling my bisexuality through queer characters.
Wilson’s novels often interrogate art and morality in a hilarious fashion.
In this book, siblings Annie and Buster struggle to overcome their childhood personas of Child A and Child B in their parents’ performance art pieces. When Caleb and Camille disappear under mysterious circumstances, Annie and Buster must investigate to find out if their parents are really dead or if this is yet another elaborate scheme in the name of art.
What is real? What is artifice? Can they escape the myth of their parents’ making and find a healthier way to make their own art?
Mr and Mrs Fang called it art. Their children called it mischief. Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang dedicated themselves to making great art. But when an artist's work lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise well-adjusted children. Just ask Buster and Annie Fang. For as long as they can remember, they starred (unwillingly) in their parents madcap pieces. But now that they are grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it difficult to cope with life outside the fishbowl of their parent’s strange world.
When the lives they’ve built come crashing down, brother and…
