The Life of Pierre Guyotat

Scholar Noura Wedell, philosopher Catherine Malabou, painter Paul McCarthy, and scholar Donatien Grau discuss the life of writer Pierre Guyotat and creative life in the context of our new social reality.

Noura Wedell is a writer, scholar, translator, and an editor for Semiotext(e). She edited Investigations: the Expanded Field of Writing in the Works of Robert Morris (Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2015), and has translated six books, including theoretical texts by Toni Negri and Guy Hocquenghem, and three autobiographical narratives by Pierre Guyotat. She has also published a book of poetry, Odd Directions (Opera Prima, 2009). Currently she teaches at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. (Source)

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). (Source)

Paul McCarthy earned a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969, and an MFA in multimedia, film and art from USC in 1973. For 18 years, he taught performance, video, installation, and art history in the New Genres Department at UCLA, where he influenced future generations of west coast artists and he has exhibited extensively worldwide. His work has been shown extensively worldwide including exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and KODE, Bergen (2020). Previous solo exhibitions include M WOODS, Beijing (2018); Fundació Gaspar, Barcelona (2017); the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2016); The Renaissance Society (2015); the Monnaie de Paris, Paris (2014); the Park Avenue Armory, New York (2013); Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2010); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2006); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2005); Tate Modern, London (2003); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2000). He lives and works in Los Angeles.

In the Rail:

• Paul McCarthy-ism
• Personal Private Public
• The Liquid is the Flux

Donatien Grau is a scholar of 19th and 20th century art, literature, and culture. He was a close collaborator of Pierre Guyotat, with whom he conceived a conversation book titled Humains par hasard (Humans by Chance), on whom he has written and edited a number of publications. He is also an Editor-at-large of the Rail.

In the Rail:

• New French Theory: Not New, Not French, Not Theory
• Theoretical Brutality: Cézanne And Gauguin
• Beyond Contested Memories

The New Social Environment — Daily conversations with artists, writers, filmmakers, poets around the world where we discuss creative life in the context of our new social reality.