Mousse #82

Winter 2023

In this issue:

Rehearsal
“In Western society, the perception of much of our bodies has gone missing. This loss is not accidental. It occurred because intolerable psychic conflicts are suppressed when an individual under-responds (and eventually fails to respond) to their instinctual needs. Such needs might have been obstructed and replaced by performance principles, principles that proceed, perhaps, from the chronormative swing of a pendulum clock in 1657, from the timely running of British trains in 1840, to the French prison timetable in 1838, to Hollywood’s frame rates, to Instagram refresh rates—all regulating goods, images, prisoners, and people with a Western undulation, not elicited from the bodies it holds and measures.” In the second episode of a five-essay series examining temporalities that defy and eclipse the standardizations driving individual and societal bodies to perform toward an entirely metric-oriented future, Cally Spooner advances in disclosing what is ultimately less like an essay and more like a cartography of performance.

Focus on: Anita Steckel
Reconsidering Anita Steckel in the Age of Heteropessimism
Anita Being Anita
A pivotal figure in the feminist discourses that fed the flames of the early-1970s New York art scene, Anita Steckel (1930–2012) developed a practice that tested the limits of bourgeois etiquette by adopting openly erotic imagery. An essay by Wendy Vogel outlines what Steckel’s work tells us about the stakes of erotic art today, amid an invigorated debate on feminist representation. Dodie Bellamy and Betty Tompkins, in a conversation moderated by Rachel Middleman, take Steckel as a starting point to open up about their experiences of censorship, female power, appropriation, and the autobiographical voice.

Manhattan Marxist: I’ve Got Principles, and If You Don’t Like Them, I’ve Got Others
“Change will cost us, but we’re willing to give this a shot. We’ll all be dead soon, anyway.” Ontological incertitude pervades the art-world parties and email correspondence fictionalized by Estelle Hoy, who ponders extinction, capitalism, and liberation in a “Mentor-Futurism” manifesto.

Primitive Man
Primitive Man: such a cringeworthy, politically incorrect title by today’s standards. Amy Gerstler’s story, published by Francesco Clemente and Raymond Foye’s Hanuman Books in 1987 and here reprinted, tells of the waxing and waning of being twelve and not fitting in at Sabbath school.

The Margins of Events
Elisa R. Linn and Lennart Wolff pore over Bruno Serralongue’s approach to photography as chronicle, bound up as it is with questions of absence, distance, and delay. Here, photographer and subject engage in a complex encounter that ushers in a new understanding of images as catalysts of events, effectively reversing the fundamental character of news.

Tale of Tales
Reading Seyni Awa Camara’s practice feels very much like relating to a global tale made of many tales. Some are endemic to the place where the Senegalese artist was born; some are more globally African; some are emblematic of the countless stories Western art history needs to feed its narrative of non-Western artworks. Among these paths, maybe somewhere at the crossroads, stand Camara’s clay statuettes—the artist’s meditations on the maternal, mothering body. By Eva Barois De Caevel.

Being without Ego
Melike Kara’s pictorial atlas stratifies and regenerates a history and an identity by articulating an unofficial archive of the Kurdish diaspora. Conversing with Sohrab Mohebbi, Kara delves into the continual struggle for memories and narratives passed on from generation to generation to evade oblivion.

Tidbits
Jordan/Martin Hell by Alex Bennett; Scott Covert by Sabrina Tarasoff; Erin Calla Watson by Jennifer Piejko; Stéphane Mandelbaum by Krzysztof Kościuczuk; Abbas Zahedi by Alessandro Rabottini; George Tourkovasilis by Nicolas Linnert; B. Ingrid Olson by Brit Barton; Dala Nasser by Amy Jones.

Book reviews by Jenna Sutela.