Published by Walther König, Köln. Text by Wai Chee Dimock, Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, Quinn Latimer, Timothy Morton, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Moritz Wesseler.
New York–based artist Rachel Rose (born 1986) approaches visual storytelling as a sensory experience informed by key elements of the human experience: our relationship to landscape and the belief systems that have developed around ideas of mortality. Entrenched in historical references and culled from a variety of sources from soul music to space walks, Rose’s composite video installations are created to question what it is that makes us human and how we continue to find ways to alter and escape that designation.
Published on the occasion of Rose’s first large-scale solo shows in Germany and France, this volume documents a variety of her video installations and a new series of sculptures at the Fridericianum, Kassel, and at the Lafayette Anticipations, Paris. Contributing authors include Wai Chee Dimock, Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, Quinn Latimer, Timothy Morton, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Moritz Wesseler.
Since it first appeared in Screen in 1975, Laura Mulvey’s essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" has been an enduring point of reference for artists, filmmakers, writers and theorists. Mulvey’s compelling polemical analysis of visual pleasure has provoked and encouraged others to take positions, challenge preconceived ideas and produce new works that owe their possibility to the generative qualities of this key essay. In this book, the celebrated New York-based video artist Rachel Rose (born 1986) has produced an innovative work that extends and adds to the essay’s frame of reference. Drawing on 18th- and 19th-century fairy tales, and observing how their flat narratives matched the flatness of their depictions, Rose created collages that connect these pre-cinematic illustrations to what Mulvey describes in her essay—cinema flattening sexuality into visuality.
Rachel Rose: Laura Mulvey