Thinking It Through Once We’re Dead

Alessandro Di Pietro: Ghostwriting Paul Thek, edited by Cornelia Mattiacci and Peter Benson Miller, is conceived as a compendium of texts and notes generated for the artist Alessandro Di Pietro as he developed the exhibition project Ghostwriting Paul Thek: Time Capsules and Reliquaries. The traveling exhibition—which appeared at the Watermill Center, New York; CAN Centre d’Art Neuchâtel, Switzerland; Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy; and Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome—presented pieces conceived in dialogue with the work of the legendary US artist Paul Thek (1933–1988). The texts, notes, and other original sources featured in the volume—ranging from essays to WhatsApp messages, diary entries, and newspaper pages—are presented in the languages in which they were contributed by the twenty-five authors involved (English or Italian). They re-create the intellectual context for the development of Thek’s/Di Pietro’s intertwined ideas, blurring fact and fiction and maintaining a certain ambiguity of authorship. The publication’s sole reprint comes from Chris Kraus’s Aliens & Anorexia (2000).