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DOPE PRESS
K8 Hardy: How To
Untitled Runway Show
Edited by K8 Hardy, Dorothée Perret. Text by Cheryl Donegan, K8 Hardy, John Kelsey, Elisabeth Sussman, Oscar Tuazon.
How To: Untitled Runway Show is an artist’s book that presents K8 Hardy’s performance Untitled Runway Show, created for the 2012 Whitney Biennial. For this work, Hardy orchestrated a live fashion show performance on the fourth floor of the Breuer building that rivaled the sort of presentations made during a Paris or New York fashion week. How To follows the apparatus of professional fashion and is organized around three sections: The Show (lookbook), Backstage and The Campaign. For each of these sections, Hardy specifically created a new series of images. Also included are essays by five contributors, many of whom were involved themselves in the original performance. The variety of the writing in this book and the perspectives on the piece bring a fresh understanding and richness to Hardy’s incredible performance and unconventional work in general.
Featured image is reproduced from K8 Hardy: How To.
"Screaming, posing, menstruating and reportage are existential transmissions that bring us news of the body and its world," writes John Kelsey in K8 Hardy: How To: Untitled Runway Show. "In Hardy's performances, the body makes itself a transmitter in order to update and queer the world with its broadcasts. When energy lapses, communications pauses, and the body might disappear in bed for a while to gather strength before the next transmission, action or pose. Training her camera on herself, Hardy improvises a hybrid medium, a performance-photography that often monkeys with the cool, reifying gaze of fashion in the mode of camp horror. When, in comically corpse-like poses, the body performs its own commodification as a funny living death in drag, even these energy failures are energetic." Signed copies of the book are available at the ARTBOOK @ MoMA PS1 Magazine Store during the NYABF, while they last! continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 7.5 x 10.5 in. / 144 pgs / 68 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $38.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $50 ISBN: 9782953978827 PUBLISHER: DoPe Press AVAILABLE: 3/31/2014 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by DoPe Press. Edited by K8 Hardy, Dorothée Perret. Text by Cheryl Donegan, K8 Hardy, John Kelsey, Elisabeth Sussman, Oscar Tuazon.
How To: Untitled Runway Show is an artist’s book that presents K8 Hardy’s performance Untitled Runway Show, created for the 2012 Whitney Biennial. For this work, Hardy orchestrated a live fashion show performance on the fourth floor of the Breuer building that rivaled the sort of presentations made during a Paris or New York fashion week. How To follows the apparatus of professional fashion and is organized around three sections: The Show (lookbook), Backstage and The Campaign. For each of these sections, Hardy specifically created a new series of images. Also included are essays by five contributors, many of whom were involved themselves in the original performance. The variety of the writing in this book and the perspectives on the piece bring a fresh understanding and richness to Hardy’s incredible performance and unconventional work in general.
