Possessed by a galvanic intensity rarely encountered in contemporary art, the work of Lionel Maunz is exhibited in discursive arrangement with Peter Sotos’ thematically expansive commentary in this ingeniously layered collation. Whether it is approached as an archival showcase of Maunz’s viscerally assaulting gallery portfolio, or as an exegetical key to the personal histories and refractory obsessions that inform and inscribe an overarching psycho-aesthetic confrontation with suffering, violence and desire, Lionel Maunz Peter Sotos is an immersive and uniquely disquieting fusion of text and imagery. The forum is sick, the conversation corrupted by the audience.
Published by Amphetamine Sulphate in association with Nine-Banded Books, Peter Sotos’ Missed. Better Still. is neither an anthology nor a collage, but a conceptually trained arrangement of previously published texts selected and sequenced by the author.
Through the revisitation of a kept file of newspaper clippings, Peter Sotos blends formative personal history with an exacting analysis of criminal and victim case reports to render a pornographically freighted disquisition on sexual compulsion and desistance. Ingratitude is also a study of restitution set against and the perpetual churn of memory. “It’s so easy to think you’re worse than you are.”
In this prismatic and obliquely appreciative study of Antoine D’Agata’s photography, Peter Sotos arraigns the fraught vocabulary of gallery apologists — and of D’Agata himself — to locate a “finer definition of pornography” beneath the exigent demands of desire, transgression, and art.
In this unnerving book, cult author Peter Sotos examines the brutal murder of Lesley Ann Downey at the hands of British “Moors Murderers” Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. With frank, inimitable prose and self-deprecating wit, Sotos interweaves numerous accounts – culled from tabloids, memoirs, and television specials – of the sensational crime and its devastating aftermath with analogous excerpts from recent headlines, explicit erotic fantasies, and graphic descriptions of degrading, often-anonymous carnal encounters.
Peter Sotos recounts the abduction and murder of 8-year-old Sarah Payne, a crime that stunned England and spawned an aftermath of reactionary outcry and violent protest. Through news bites and tabloid clippings reassembled in reverse chronology, Sotos examines the media apotheosis of Payne’s parents in the wake of her disappearance, scrutinizes the hidden motives of reporters and citizens driven to hysterical excess by grief, vengeance, and opportunism, and illumines the insatiable lusts that govern the actions of sexual predators.
Opening with an excruciating set piece inspired by the crimes of Ian Brady, Tool unfolds through a sequence of vivid metafictional narratives that rain hard light on the blackest recesses of a Sadean abyss, limning a ferocious tableau vivant thronged with victims and whores and jaded cops, with grief-stricken mothers, writhing AIDS casualties, and abased gloryhole habitués.
Against a densely imbricated skein of documentary fragments and confessional annotation, Mine advances a sustained, interlocutory investigation into the ulterior etiologies and malignant narcissism of underground pornography.
