Transmissions

Nick Mauss's Transmissions is a hybrid art book that combines installation views, photographs, and reproductions of artworks, ballet programs, and fashion magazines to explore the social and artistic networks of mid-20th-century New York. It re-calibrates the standard narrative of American modernism to focus on performance, spectatorship, and the eroticized body, featuring documents and artworks by Paul Cadmus, George Platt Lynes, Dorothea Tanning, and many more.

\n Format: Paperback / softback
\n Length: 190 pages
\n Publication date: 03 April 2020
\n Publisher: Yale University Press
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Over the past decade, Nick Mauss (b. 1980) has pursued a hybrid mode of working that seamlessly blends the roles of curator, artist, and scholar. Following his highly acclaimed 2018 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition, Transmissions, this volume expands on the artist's intricate portrayal of mid-century New York as seen through the prism of modernist ballet. By pairing installation views of the exhibition with photographs of its daily performances by Paula Court and Ken Okiishi, alongside reproductions of artworks, ballet programs, and fashion magazines, Transmissions animates the vividly interconnected social and artistic networks that shaped both modern art and modern ballet. Through his emphasis on the collaborations and intimacies between models, dancers, photographers, choreographers, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, publishers, critics, amateurs, and devotees, Mauss recalibrates the standard narrative of American modernism to locate performance, spectatorship, and the eroticized body at its center.

Transmissions showcases reproductions of documents and artworks, several of which are published here for the first time, 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. Additional texts address the subjects of ballet and the body, Mauss's work as an artist and curator, and performance within museum spaces, while an extensive conversation with the sixteen dancers who participated in the Whitney exhibition provides rare insight into the labor of making performance-based work while navigating diverging legacies of emb.

\n Weight: 1086g\n
Dimension: 238 x 301 x 19 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9780300246841\n \n