Dirty Looks is excited to launch our inaugural publication, Dirty Looks Volume 1, in conjunction with the LA Art Book Fair, screening A One Man Show, Grace Jones’s remarkable concert video. In 1982, Jones collaborated with photographer Jean-Paul Goude, translating their iconic and trailblazing album artwork for the new, home video format. A thrilling showcase for the former disco diva-cum-New Wave chanteuse, the tape combines rock ribaldry with avant-garde theater, tearing asunder racial and g...
Dirty Looks is excited to launch our inaugural publication, Dirty Looks Volume 1, in conjunction with the LA Art Book Fair, screening A One Man Show, Grace Jones’s remarkable concert video. In 1982, Jones collaborated with photographer Jean-Paul Goude, translating their iconic and trailblazing album artwork for the new, home video format. A thrilling showcase for the former disco diva-cum-New Wave chanteuse, the tape combines rock ribaldry with avant-garde theater, tearing asunder racial and gender stereotypes.
Jones writes of the tape in her memoirs, “It was like the invention of a new genre, related to the musical, to opera, to circus, to cinema, to documentary, to the art gallery… It was about rejecting normal, often quite sentimental and conventionally crowd-pleasing ways of projecting myself as a black singer and female entertainer, because those ways had turned into clichés, which kept me pent up in a cage. I wanted to jolt the adult world that is traditionally left bland by white men, to shatter certain kinds of smugness through performance and theater.”
The publication features essays on Jones by Jack Halberstam and Brontez Purnell, in addition to an illustrated overview of Jones' discography and additional contributions by Malic Amalya, Gregg Araki, Amelia Bande, Katherine Brewer Ball, Dennis Cooper, Guy Hocquenghem, G. B. Jones, Jonesy, Andrew Kachel, Theodore Kerr, Clara López Menéndez, Karl McCool, Bradford Nordeen, Jill Reiter, Alice Royer, Greta Snider, Charles Theonia, Scott Treleaven and Greg Youmans.
Chapters include the programs Hardcore Home Movies; Grace Jones: A One Man Show; Sesión Continua: a porn theatre in Echo Park; Maldito Sea Tu Nombre Libertad, Guy Hocquenghem + Lionel Soukaz's La Race D'ep!; and Gregg Araki's Totally F***ed Up.