Artist Talk: Nick Mauss

Nick Mauss is an artist based in New York. His exhibition Transmissions at the Whitney Museum of American Art catalyzed a new poetics of the archive and historiography through highly innovative work with dancers, curators, art historians, conservators, artworks, collectors, librarians, artists, costume makers, exhibition designers–where the entire infrastructure of making exhibitions was treated through the lens of performance. Recent exhibitions include Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc. at Kunsthalle Basel (2019); and Intricate Others at Fundação de Serralves, Porto (2017). Mauss has intervened in exhibitions including the 2012 Whitney Biennial; Transcorporealities at Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2019), Florine Stettheimer at the Lenbachhaus, Munich (2014), and Designing Dreams: a Celebration of Léon Bakst (2016) and Christian Bérard: Eccentrique Bébé (2022) at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. As part of the 2019 Performa Biennial, Mauss participated in the reconstruction of Yvonne Rainer’s 1965 Parts of Some Sextets, dancing the role originated for Robert Morris, and realizing a book with Rainer and Emily Coates about the complex process of restaging a work of dance in a way that brings historical paradigm shifts to bear visibly in the present. Mauss’ most recent book (co-authored with Angela Miller), Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa, has just come out from University of California Press; and a volume of his selected writings is forthcoming from After 8 Books, Paris.