CONVERSATIONS
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ESSAYS
The Sleeping Beauty Concept Works
Like Lord Alfred Tennyson, might we imagine the Briar Rose as perfect form, not for the sake of objectifying a sex, but for the details that adorn her enchanted sleep? Could we too be tricked into slumber for a hundred summers, where for lack of a “conscious” self, surface might be allowed to reign? In “The Day-Dream” (1842), Sleeping Beauty awaits her kiss within a Baroque tableau: she is recumbent on her chaise above a “purple coverlet,” body contoured beneath a “silk star-broider’d coverlid,” “gold-fringed pillow lightly prest.”1 In all this dazzle and wicked texture, Tennyson is asking us to daydream not only of the Sleeping Beauty, but of the beauty of her sleep’s circumstances: its artifice, tactility, and transformations.
Mousse 71
Mother Is a Woman: Jes Fan
In Jes Fan’s treatment of melanin, the biological pigment responsible for color in human hair and skin is artificially grown in a laboratory. The organic pigment, once separated from the human body, appears tepid and unassuming as a solitary substance
CURATORS
The Paradox of Performing: Pierre Bal-Blanc
“The Paradox of Acting” is an essay that Denis Diderot wrote as a monologue in 1769, and then transformed between 1773 and 1777 into a dialogue between a First and Second Interlocutor. Here in the present text, “The Paradox of Performing,” one enacts another such alteration.
Mousse 71
All That Is Solid: Aki Sasamoto
Equally at ease in galleries and on theater stages, Aki Sasamoto excels in more undefined spaces such as this sanctuary—a fully functioning chapel whose regular religious services are interspersed with experimental dance programs (or perhaps the other way around).
