The Life of Pierre Guyotat

Writer, scholar, translator, and mother Noura Wedell is an editor for Semiotext(e). She has translated six books for Semiotext(e), including texts by Toni Negri and Guy Hocquenghem and three autobiographical narratives by Pierre Guyotat. She edited Investigations: the Expanded Field of Writing in the Works of Robert Morris (Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2015), and has published a book of poetry, Odd Directions (Opera Prima, 2009).

Catherine Malabou is a professor in the philosophy department at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University and of European languages and literatures and comparative literature at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (2012) and Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (2016), and most recently, Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains (2019).

Widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists, Paul McCarthy was born in 1945 and raised in Salt Lake City. He first established a multi-faceted artistic practice which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work through performance, photography, film and video, sculpture, drawing, and painting. For 18 years, McCarthy taught performance, video, installation, and art history in the New Genres Department at UCLA, where he influenced future generations of west coast artists. He has exhibited extensively worldwide.

Head of contemporary programs at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Donatien Grau holds doctoral degrees in French and comparative literature from the Sorbonne, in philological and historical sciences from the École des Hautes Études, Paris, and a DPhil from Oxford University. He served as advisor to Azzedine Alaïa for the couturier’s not-for-profit exhibition space, the Galerie (2014–17), and curated the inaugural exhibition of the reopening of the Getty Villa, Malibu, Plato in L. A. (2018). He is an Editor-at-Large of Purple Fashion Magazine and the Brooklyn Rail. He has published widely on the arts and culture of the Roman Empire, on 19th and 20th literary and art history, as well as on contemporary art and culture.