ABOUT THE BOOK
Le Confort Moderne has the pleasure to announce the publication APOCALYPSTICK by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and writer Lise Haller Baggesen (DK 1969) to accompany the artist’s first major solo exhibition in France.
The richly illustrated publication focuses on two of Baggesen’s main bodies of works –Mothernism and WIP[FOTZEPOLITIC] – bookending ten years of production centering on intergenerational feminism, alternatively combining D.I.Y fashion, painting, science-fiction, disco, and care work, with body politics and philosophy, to fly a feminist freak flag, cleverly and tenderly inscribing its own story.
This bi-lingual volume contains contributions from APOCALYPSTICK curator Kathy Alliou, alongside original texts by Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Matt Morris, Lotte Løvholm, Laetitia Sadier, and Eleanor Ross and new writing by Lise Haller Baggesen. Texts run the gamut from the academic to the chit-chatty, via interviews, letter writing, and poetry, centering on the body as a site for transformation and inserting the artist’s work into bigger conversations about fashion, art history, cyber- and eco-feminism, motherhood, and activism.
The title – as penned by Serge Gainsbourg and sung by Jane Birkin – is a double invocation and an apparent paradox: APOCALYPSTICK asserts its necessary frivolity, even (and particularly) during apocalyptic times. Within it is embodied a generous and rebellious spirit, and confidence in the attributes of femininity to bandage the world. A high-femme deep-tissue massage of the connective tissue of humanity.
A crafty self-reliance sets the tone for a femi-futurist costume drama for the 21st century, inspiring us to fail more glamorously, more celebratory: celebrate the young girl on the ruins of civilization – celebrate the old hag that is the ruin of civilization!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lise Haller Baggesen (1969) is a Danish born, Amsterdam trained, Chicago based, interdisciplinary artist. Her hybrid practice includes writing, installation, performative, sartorial, and textile-based work. She is the author of Mothernism (2013) and exhibits internationally, most recently with the multi-media show A Space Where Your Voices Can Live, at Malmö Konstmuseum (S) and Roskilde Festival (DK), and the solo exhibition APOCALYPSTICK at Le Confort Moderne (F) in 2023.
RESPONSES TO THE BOOK
In the work of Lise Haller Baggesen, there is no dominant or single ideology, no lineage preferred to another. Rather, her practice weaves together, again and again, activism with mythmaking, individual lineage with cosmological purpose, in a polycephalous artistic practice, coming from those places underneath that, in the absence of an outside, invite us to a collective celebration of what is there, already given, blossoming from all sides, and yet remains invisible to those who would only seek to observe it from far above.
Ingrid Luquet-Gad
Lavish and punk like a Vivienne Westwood, Baggesen melds the boutique with a battle barracks from which a luscious pleasure activism on behalf of women, femmes, mothers, daughters, witches, crones, dreamers, artists, and lady lovers may be waged.
Matt Morris
Lise connects body and mind, or as she would put it “the bibliotheque (pointing to her head) and the discotheque (pointing to her hips).”
Lotte Løvholm
We’ve established that there is some kind of apocalypse going on, but when things collapse, and as they collapse, you’re also recreating and planting seeds for fruits to come. We have an opportunity. We are dreaming and hallucinating collectively, and we have these awful narratives of fear, doom, and gloom. And you have to figure out how to be informed without absorbing these narratives and being traumatized. It’s important. To not be scared to imagine the best possible situation.
Laetitia Sadier
She thinks we deserve nice things.
And for fashion to love us back.
Our visions of Utopia
costumed with polaroid flash
And a brand-new retro-future.
Eleanor Ross
It’s a hit in my heart!
Kathy Alliou