Elissa Auther – författare

In the heady and hallucinogenic days of the 1960s and ’70s, a diverse range of artists and creative individuals based in the American West-from the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest-broke the barriers between art and lifestyle and embraced the new, hybrid sensibilities of the countercultural movement. Often created through radically collaborative artistic practices, such works as Paolo Soleri’s earth homes, the hand-built architecture of the Drop City and Libre communes, Yolanda LÓpez’s political posters, the multisensory movement workshops of Anna and Lawrence Halprin, and the immersive light shows and video-based work by the Ant Farm and Optic Nerve collectives were intended to generate new life patterns that pointed toward social and political emancipation. In West of Center, Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner bring together a prominent group of scholars to elaborate the historical and artistic significance of these counterculture projects within the broader narrative of postwar American art, which skews heavily toward New York’s avant-garde art scene. This west of center countercultural movement has typically been associated with psychedelic art, but the contributors to this book understand this as only one dimension of the larger, artistically oriented, socially based phenomenon. At the same time, they reveal the disciplinary, geographic, and theoretical biases and assumptions that have led to the dismissal of countercultural practices in the history of art and visual culture, and they detail how this form of cultural and political activity found its place in the West.A companion to an exhibition originating at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, this book illuminates how, in the western United States, the counterculture’s unique integration of art practices, political action, and collaborative life activities serves as a linchpin connecting postwar and contemporary artistic endeavors.

Machine Dazzle, to my mind, [is] a true theatrical genius who has created some of the most inventive costumes and sets I have ever seen. —Hilton Als, The New YorkerMachine Dazzle is the much-in-demand designer and artist behind popular cabaret, drag, and performance stars such as Taylor Mac and transgender icon Mx. Justin Vivian Bond. For the first time, his over-the-top stage creations, made for himself and others, are collected here alongside stage environments, ephemera, and photos from his career. In Machine Dazzle’s world, costumes are transformative objects with world-making capacity. The artist’s “queer maximalism” encapsulates a more-is-better attitude to making and creating, which looks to counter elitist notions that spectacle and extravagance are vapid. For him, these associations are embraced as queer for their affirmation of hybridity and the rejection of hierarchies of every kind. On the occasion of a major exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design, curator Elissa Auther brings together an expansive collection of essays and reminiscences from fellow performers, historians, and cultural critics that consider every aspect of Machine Dazzle’s rich body of work.