JJ

Collected here are texts by the writer-art critic-performer-zbeuleuse feminist-lesbian Jill Johnston mostly appeared in The Village Voice between 1962 and 1993. We come across dancers, hordes of dykes and pedals, Meredith Monk, the Radicalesbians, Pauline Oliveros, beds of dried up rivers, Yvonne Rainer, Lois Lane, the Gay Liberation Front and more Agnes Martin. A central figure in the artistic avant-garde of the 1960s in New York, Jill embraces her lesbianism after the Stonewall riots of 1969. If her critical writing allows itself to be contaminated by the works it observes for deviating towards experimental forms, her writing as a lesbian writer vibrates, trembles, laughs, twirls, jumps, detonates. She prolongs the choreographic gestures who have marked it and draws them into political and collective spaces. It makes a splash, Jill's language splashes the shores of art and activism. Translated by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Nina Kennel and Rosanna Puyol Boralevi, the texts are introduced by Pauline L. Boulba, accompanied by the drawings by Aminata Labor as well as an article and an interview with Clare Croft.