*PDF EBOOK* MOUTHS by Claire Marie Stancek

"Activist aesthetic practices, as they unfold in the context of contemporary social and environmental precariousness, demand more than a radical rethinking of assumptions. As Claire Marie Stancek insists, in her brilliant inaugural poetic project Mouths, activist art demands that we challenge the reliability of common sense. She begins by demanding that we expand our understanding of who and what produces that sense, who and what coexist in ongoing commonality. And she does this to devastating, as well as invigorating, effect. Sense and life are coexistent, and perhaps synonymous. But then senselessness and lack of life must abound at the same time. Amatory sucking and murderous sucking can’t be independent of each other. Perhaps this is fine: perhaps we cannot love without knowing of its dangers. Stancek goes further, proposing that we cannot love humanity without loving far beyond the human sphere, loving the nanosystems and macrocontexts on which love depends. Or perhaps we cannot love at all. Meanwhile, beauty prevails. Mouths does not eschew anguish, but it abounds in beauty—uncommon beauty, but beauty that invites us to an ever broader commonality, and an ever better sense." - Lyn Hejinian