Louise Lawler’s A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture

From November 27 to December 3, If I Can’t Dance will be hosting the Performance Days festival in Amsterdam. This occasion will also see the launch of four new books that have resulted from “Performance in Residence” research projects by Gregg Bordowitz, Jacob Korczynski, Grant Watson and myself. My publication, Louise Lawler’s “A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture,” was edited together with Tanja Boudoin and contains an introduction by Frédérique Bergholtz and Tanja, short texts by Eve Dullaart, Debbie Broekers and Daniël van de Poel, as well as my own extensive article—not to mention plentiful visual documentation of Lawler’s A Movie project plus related pieces, thanks to archival excavations by Louise and by Kenneth Pietrobono.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again at a moment when the crisis of the Dutch universities’ humanities departments is rapidly deepening, and any form of meaningful activity may soon be made impossible by our Stalineoliberal overlords: it is heartening to see that small art organizations, however precarious their own position may be, invest in research and in critical practice.