Writings and Interviews

The collected writings of artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz, along with the stories behind them told by Alexis Vaillant.

In parallel with an astonishing interdisciplinary art practice, London-based artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz has written texts that intersect and transcend the genres of artistic literature, criticism, and cultural anthropology. Written between 1971 and 2022, the sixty-eight texts reproduced in Writings and Interviews include early surviving leaflets and typewriter handouts, performance reports, literary reflections, flashes of illumination, and letters as essays. Divided in three sections--＂Transcripts of interview,＂ ＂Criticism,＂ and ＂Texts＂--they are chronologically organized within the sections, and Alexis Vaillant, the editor of the publication, tells the stories behind them.

Embarked on a pursuit of pleasure, Marc Camille Chaimowicz addresses a multiplicity of topics that range from the agility of a jumping dog and the evocation of the color orange as torture, to the idea of feminized architecture and the description of Vienna as a rare city in which we can both work and dream. This source book provides a unique insight into the artist’s pioneering aesthetics of camp. Randomly witty and humorous, and overtly charged and frivolous, the non-conclusive, compelling ＂writings＂ of Marc Camille Chaimowicz set a new template for the expression of queerness through writing. They are not only remarkable for the singularity of their wording and their acumen to inclusivity, but for the skillful way in which they illuminate the range of thinking of their author. First, in close dialogue with his work and the self-contained interiority that is in it; then, in connection with the fragmented cultural context the artist has taken part in from 1971 onwards; but ultimately, as points of contact with the socio-political dimension of the present.

Increasingly influential for younger generations of artists, Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s cross-disciplinary work raises questions about public and private dichotomies, design and art boundaries, identifications based on gender. It speaks to the basic units by which we trade private desires with social hopes in order to build the texture of a communal existence to which his singular artistic language has been taking part in since 1971.

Alexis Vaillant is a curator and writer currently based in Lisbon. Since the mid-1990s, he has worked at Mamco (Geneva), Toasting Agency (Paris), and CAPC, Museum of Contemporary Art (Bordeaux) as Chief Curator. His curatorial work coalesces at the intersection of political realities: where intelligence and instinct are one.