Published in conjunction with the exhibition Inverted Odysseys, this book places Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, and Cindy Sherman in dialogue through performance, self-invention, masquerade, photography, film, and the instability of identity. Contributors include Lynn Gumpert, Lucy Lippard, Jonas Mekas, Ted Mooney, Shelley Rice, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau.
A useful late-1990s exhibition publication connecting Surrealist self-fashioning, experimental cinema, and postmodern photographic role-play. The object sits between catalogue, reader, and visual archive: three artists treated through the image as mask, mirror, fiction, and transferable self.
Central to the book is Claude Cahun’s “Heroines” — fifteen stream-of-consciousness monologues written in the voices of major women of literature and history, including the Virgin Mary, Sappho, Cinderella, Penelope, Delilah, and Helen of Troy, translated by Norman MacAfee and appearing here in their English-language debut.
Format: Softcover with dust jacket
Pages: 180
Dimensions: Approx. 20.5 × 28 cm
Illustrations: Throughout in black-and-white and colour
Publisher: MIT Press / Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 1999
Edited by: Shelley Rice
Condition: Good used condition. Dust jacket shows surface wear, edge rubbing, softened corners, and light handling marks. Interior pages clean and complete.
Shipping and handling included in listed price.
