"In our present age of extractions and casual exterminations, when we seem forced to endure the rancid logics of the early 20th century anew, it feels improbable that a survival kit should reach us in the form of modernism itself. Yet the last several years have seen the translation, reissue, and recirculation of an audacious clutch of work by modernist writers and artists, from Gabriel Pomerand's buoyant to Yi Sang's homophonic poetry, from Leonora Carrington's self-liberating oneirism to Joyce Mansour's reversed flight"
"Cahun and Moore's queer life-and-art-making included works of theater, costume, photography, text, domesticity, and even anti-Nazi sabotage. Theirs were many decades of refusal, disavowal, and glittering possibility. Cancelled Confessions is itself a work of refusal - a refusal to produce the linear memoir Cahun was initially invited to write by publisher Adrienne Monnier, who ultimately turned down the manuscript and left it to be taken up by a more radical publisher in 1930."
A kaleidoscopic collection of dialogues, sketches, and Blakean proverbs collapses genre boundaries into a fragmented memoir that refuses linearity. The name functions as invention, and identity appears as a construct to be snipped apart and re-stitched. Collaborative life with Marcel Moore encompassed theater, costume, photography, text, domesticity, and anti-Nazi sabotage during residence on Jersey. Formal disavowal of a conventional narrative produces inventive aphorisms and surrealist experiments that enact refusal. Recent translations and reissues of modernist works circulate counter-arsenals of dreams, positioning such fragments as resources for queer artistic and political survival.
Read at Hyperallergic
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