LIBRARY TALK #1: Nick Mauss

LIBRARY TALK #1: Nick Mauss

in conversation with Robbrecht Desmet and Camiel van Winkel

Nick Mauss (New York, 1980). Over the past decade, Mauss has pursued a hybrid mode of working that merges the roles of curator, artist, and scholar. In 2018 he made the exhibition Transmissions for the Whitney Museum in New York, a multidisciplinary work exploring the relationship between modernist ballet and the avant-garde visual arts in New York from the 1930s through ’50s. This year Mauss published the book Dispersed Events: Selected Writings, collecting a selection of essays from the last fifteen years. Shimmering with the urgency of a new generation of queer thinkers, Mauss’ writing refracts contemporary art through histories of decorative art, film, theater, and dance. An artist renowned for critically and poetically reconfiguring inherited genealogies and hierarchies of visual culture and art history, Mauss engages writing as a space for relentlessly activating counter-histories, repositioning the voice of the artist and the readers along the way.