Intellect Live – serie

Lois Weaver is one of the world's leading figures in feminist and lesbian performance, a true pioneer in the growing field. This book offers the first book-length assessment of her career and work, tracing its history, aesthetics, principles, inspirations, innovations and more. Contributors include Weaver's most important collaborators from throughout her career, as well as many of the leading feminist theorists, journalists, and performers of the past forty years. The book also includes interviews not just with Weaver, but also with her partner, in life and performance, Peggy Shaw, and groundbreaking theatre maker Muriel Miguel. The result is a book that is truly unprecedented, a lavishly illustrated and expertly curated celebration of an incredible career.

Adrian Howells (1962–2014) was one of the world’s leading figures in the field of one-to-one performance practice – the act of staging an event for one audience participant at a time. Developed over more than a decade, Howells’s award-winning work demonstrated not only his enduring commitment to this genre of performance, but also his determination to find new challenges and innovations in performance art, 'intimate theatre' and socially engaged art.It’s All Allowed, edited by Deirdre Heddon and Dominic Johnson, is the first book devoted to Howells’s remarkable achievements and legacy. Contributors here testify to the methodological, thematic and historiographical challenges posed by Howells’ performances. Citing his permissive mantra as its title, It’s All Allowed includes new writing from leading scholars and artists, as well as writing by Howells himself, an extensive interview, scores and visual materials, which together reveal new insight into Howells’s groundbreaking process.

The works of interdisciplinary artist Kira O’Reilly use the uncertain boundaries of bodies as the starting point for their enquiry. Specifically, O’Reilly asks what kind of societies become possible in collaborations across species, organisms and bodies, and she explores these questions through sustained and experimental engagements with politics, biopolitics, change (social, corporeal, chemical, reactive) and the complex relations between the human and the non-human. This book is the first to offer an in-depth engagement with her many works across diverse formats. Bringing together writings by major artists and thinkers, such as Marina Abramović, Shannon Bell and Tracey Warr, alongside extensive documentation of the artist’s work from two decades of practice, the contributions engage with such topics as ideas of performance, feminist political aesthetics, biotechnical practices, image-making and the intersections of humans and animals. The book also includes interviews, archive material and O’Reilly’s own writings. Publication Forum (Finland) lists this book as a Level 2 publication, where ‘the highest-level publications are directed as a result of extensive competition and demanding peer-review’. For Intellect’s full listings in this catalogue, please click here.

Anne Bean: Self Etc. is the first major monograph about the performance work of artist Anne Bean, a noted international figure who has been working actively since the 1960s. Part of the Intellect Live series, co-published with the Live Art Development Agency, this book includes extensive visual documentation of Bean’s performances, critical essays by leading scholars of art and performance and a series of new visual essays by the artist. Additional contributions include documentation of collaborations with influential artists, such as Bean’s Drawn Conversations, made at Franklin Furnace, New York, in collaboration with Harry Kipper, Karen Finley, Kim Jones and Fiona Templeton; and TAPS: Improvisations with Paul Burwell, involving numerous artists, including Paul McCarthy, Steven Berkoff, Evan Parker, Brian Catling, Carlyle Reedy, Rose English, David Toop, Lol Coxhill, Jacky Lansley and Maggie Nicols. Lavishly illustrated and including previously unseen images, Anne Bean explores and expands the nature, form and contexts that artistic collaboration can take.

Joshua Sofaer works across boundaries, borders and disciplines to create artworks that engage with all levels of society. In cultural institutions or on the street, for art galleries or personal homes, staged as operas or cast as golden sculptures, Sofaer’s work weaves with and through social fabric to consider the ideas that hold us together. Co-published with the Live Art Development Agency, this lavishly illustrated volume is the first in-depth study of the artist’s work, featuring discussions with producers and participants, documentary images and a new photographic essay, interviews with the artist himself, and thirteen commissioned essays by scholars, curators and artists from the perspectives of performance studies, archaeology and opera criticism. With a mixture of intellect, humour and striking design, Joshua Sofaer: Performance | Objects | Participation analyses the artist’s oeuvre in the contexts of liveness, visual art and participatory practices. It explores the binding aesthetics of his approach as a model for contemporary practice, and it considers the impact of his work on audiences, institutions and pedagogy, as well as on fine art and performance ecologies as a whole.

Throwing the Body into the Fight is the first English-language publication dedicated to the German choreographer Raimund Hoghe. Curated and edited by Mary Kate Connolly, the book operates as a collage, drawing together a variety of international voices to create a fragmented portrait of the artist. Lavishly illustrated with photographs by Rosa Frank, who has collaborated closely with Hoghe for two decades, this book will be welcomed by all who admire a man described by the New York Times – in its review of Hoghe’s 2012 'Pas de Deux' with Japanese dancer Takashi Ueno – as 'a lover of romance and beautiful things.'