Sweat is a sign of both attraction and struggle, joy and excess; it relays fear and illness; it is evidence of exertion and expenditure. As a residue of physical vitality, sweat modulates temperature while enlivening the senses and smoothing the friction among conjugating bodies. Published alongside the eponymous exhibition Sweat at the Haus der Kunst Munich, this book gathers together over thirty artists and writers—including new commissions and pathbreaking works from the seventies and eighties—to connect historical perspectives on and contemporary struggles for radical social emancipation. Traversed by an ethics of and through pleasure, these sensual acts help to materialize narratives that have been silenced or rendered invisible, insisting instead on a politics and poetics of bodies becoming shameless.
Sweat is a sign of both attraction and struggle, joy and excess; it relays fear and illness; it is evidence of exertion and expenditure. As a residue of physical vitality, sweat modulates temperature while enlivening the senses and smoothing the friction among conjugating bodies. Published alongside the eponymous exhibition Sweat at the Haus der Kunst Munich, this book gathers together over thirty artists and writers—including new commissions and pathbreaking works from the seventies and eighties—to connect historical perspectives on and contemporary struggles for radical social emancipation. Traversed by an ethics of and through pleasure, these sensual acts help to materialize narratives that have been silenced or rendered invisible, insisting instead on a politics and poetics of bodies becoming shameless.