Paul Foss – författare

In 1982, the American-born anthropologist Eric Michaels went to Australia to research the impact of television on remote aboriginal communities. Over the next five years, until his death, he became a major intellectual presence in Australia. Unbecoming is Michaels’s gritty, provocative, and intellectually powerful account of living with AIDS-a chronicle of the last year of his life as he became increasingly ill. Michaels’s diary offers a forceful and ironic rumination on the cultural phenomenon of AIDS, how it relates to his concerns as both an anthropologist and a gay man, and the failure of medical and governmental institutions to come to terms with the disease. Like the AIDS testimony of artist David Wojnarowicz and filmmaker Derek Jarman, Unbecoming provides a view of the AIDS epidemic from a distinctly new vantage point.

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press Modeled after the famed TV sci-fi series The X-Files, The &-Files gathers together a covert body of documents following the long and often controversial career of Art & Text, one of the landmark contemporary art magazines of the 1980s and 1990s. Founded in Melbourne, Australia, in 1981 by Paul Taylor (1957–92), who soon moved to New York City to make his mark as an art critic, the magazine went on to become one of a handful of international art magazines that succeeded in capturing the turmoil and passing brilliance of that period of postmodernism. Perceived through the eyes and ears of its longtime publisher and editor Paul Foss, The &-Files is comprised of an open letter, a lengthy interview, two questionnaires, and other commentaries and bibliographies, offering a unique insider account of the extraordinary advantages and pitfalls of publishing an art magazine.