Put together in secrecy from late 1980 until early 1982 GONE is a tour de force into Dennis Cooper’s most private obsessions and forbidden fantasies. We’ve never seen him exposed like this before, without leaning on (or hiding behind) his remarkable craft. Cooper mingles picture- and text collages, prose and poetry with news reports and pornography. The tabloid killings of William Bonin, Dean Corll and John Wayne Gacy – the victims catalogued repeatedly like Warholian icons – bleeds into the late 70s/early 80s teen stars and anonymous, forgotten porn actors in a crude, yet rigorously composed collage of Sadeian proportions. This is the template of the inner drives that later would spawn the masterpiece “The George Miles Cycle”.
With a foreword and an interview with the artist written and conducted by Martin Bladh.
GONE Scrapbook 1980 - 1982 by Dennis Cooper
ISBN 978-0-9927366-0-6
Hardbound
196 pages, 210x280mm
3rd edition, June 2021 limited to 200 copies
Dennis Cooper
Was born on January 10, 1953 and grew up in the Southern California cities of Covina and Arcadia. In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts, God, Jr and The Marbled Swarm. Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries. He is a regular collaborator with the French theater director Gisele Vienne, for whom he has written six works, most recently The Pyre (2013). His most recent work is a collaboration with the artist/director Zac Farley, a feature film entitled Like Cattle Towards Glow. He lives in Paris.