This enchanting convening of texts and images, diaries and epistles celebrates a unique voice and ongoing dialogue around the erotics of art.
"The madness that spun me into Huguette Caland's art the first time around felt as if falling off a rollercoaster headfirst into a mountain of frosting. Surrendering to the sumptuous curve of pink hues, they gradually began to tessellate forming an orbit, a tender crossing of blue."
Lebanese-born artist, Huguette Caland was a path-breaking figure in late modernism. The only daughter of the first Lebanese president, Bechara El Khoury, she produced a singular body of art that spanned media and continents. Working for more than five decades, her art is recognized for its embodied aesthetic and its unique sensuality.
In this searching critical biography, author and curator Omar Kholeif disentangles the seeming madness, velocity, and the interiority of Caland's life. Both an epistolary memoir and a biography, Kholeif interleaves the affective experience of encountering the artist over a period of 18 years, as readers are summoned on a journey through clouds of bristling color. Here, Caland's fields of light are set to lyric prose and poetry, fashioning a scene for looking at and experiencing the erotics of art anew.
Imagine/otherwise presents critical biographies of underrepresented
queer, non-binary, or
female-identifying artists. Edited by
Omar Kholeif, the series emphasizes the concept of "female worlding" with books that serve as field guides into previously unexplored, overlooked, or inaccessible artistic lives. The overall proposition of the series (to "imagine" a world "otherwise") stems from the desire to find a different way of writing and reading about art. Can art be examined unreservedly, unburdened of the limits imposed by the dominant hand of hegemony?
Current editorial advisors for the series include
Skye Arundhati Thomas, Zoe Butt, Carla Chammas, Alison Hearst, and Sarah Perks.
Omar Kholeif (born in Cairo, lives and works in Chicago and London) is a writer, curator, editor, and broadcaster. He has written extensively on art in a global context, focusing on art that intersects with the Internet, as well as works of art from emerging geographic territories that have yet to be seen in the mainstream. He is the author and or editor of over two-dozen books and his writing has appeared in
The Guardian,
Wired,
frieze, and
Artforum,
Mousse, among numerous publications. Media organs such as,
The New York Times, BBC,
Financial Times,
The Wall Street Journal,
GQ,
The Economist,
The Art Newspaper,
Vice,
The New Scientist, and others, have profiled his work.
Huguette Caland (1931-2019) was a Lebanese artist considered, along with Shafic Abboud,
Etel Adnan, Yvette Achkar and
Helen Khal, to be one of the leading figures of contemporary
Lebanese art.
Born in Beirut, the only daughter of the first post-independence president of Lebanon Bechara El Khoury, Huguette Caland observed the blossoming of Lebanon's creative and cultural scene as Beirut become a metaphorical jewel and the seat of many conjured mythologies. Following her father's death, and now married to Frenchman Paul Caland and with three children, she completed her first painting in 1964 and informally enrolled in art and design classes at the American University in Beirut (AUB). During this formative period she began a lifelong friendship with the bold and brilliant artist, educator, gallerist, and author Helen Khal, one of the many notable friendships of her career. In 1970, Caland left Beirut for Paris and there began one of her most storied collaborations, with the fashion designer Pierre Cardin who invited her to design a series of dresses and caftans. Having relocated again to Venice, California, in 1987 she became a doyenne of the Los Angeles art scene, regularly hosting fellow artists at her home, including
Larry Bell,
Chris Burden, and one of her dearest comrades, Ed Moses.
For Caland, the body was an unceasing point of obsession and a centrifugal point of investigation. Lithe in outline, her art—erotic compositions on paper, expressive collages, layered self-portraits, and her celebrated 'Bribes de corps' paintings cumulatively manifest a composite image of a body in perpetual motion. Hers is a figure that refuses to be contained by logic or ideology, a self that is not prescribed by others but instead open to all of life's possibilities, its people, and their interpretations.
