ORDER FROM: Nightboat Books | Bookshop
| Amazon
Cover of Eduardo Kac's Porneia, Nightboat
Books, Brooklyn, New York, 2022.
- Title: Porneia
- Date: 2022
- Specifications: Paperback, 200 pages, color
images, 7 x 9" (25.5 x 18.5 cm).
Language: Portuguese/English
Publisher: Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York
Description: Porneia features works realized in the
context of the Porn Art Movement, a vanguard that emerged in
1980 under a military dictatorship in Brazil and which, for
two intense years, straddled the line between relentless
formal experimentation and the outlying demimonde where
boundary-busting gender reinvention took place. Through
performances, poetry and visual works, as well as through
interventions in daily life, between 1980 and 1982 Kac carried
out a radical body-based program that upturned the semiotics
of normative pornography at the service of activism and
imagination.
ISBN: 9781643620268
Interview with Eduardo Kac, author of Porneia!
October 4, 2022
Nightboat’s Director & Publisher Stephen Motika speaks to Eduardo about the Porn Art Movement, Brazilian history, his teenage years at Ipanema Beach, the history of visual poetry, and more!
Eduardo Kac reads from Porneia at Artists Space, New York, October 15, 2022.
Eduardo Kac in conversation with scholar Tie Jojima about Porneia, at Dia Art Foundation, New York, October 16, 2022.
Essay by literary scholar Wilberth Salgueiro about Kac's poem Filosofia (and about the book Porneia) [Portuguese].
Eduardo Kac's PORNEIA was a Finalist for the Anna Rabinowitz Award, given by the Poetry Society of America for "venturesome, interdisciplinary work combining poetry and any other art or discipline."
Special Mention
I also wish to recognize Eduardo Kac's Porneia (Nightboat Books), which arrives like the last bus from the twentieth century, raunchy with possibility. The Movimento de Arte Pornô, of which Kac was ringleader, for two years countered a military dictatorship with nudity, guerilla performance, nude guerilla performance, slogan tee-shirts, goofy phallic masks, cheerfully graphic cartoons and photos, primitive computer graphics, and a cosmic pink miniskirt—whose pinkness must be imagined, and thereby perfuses the entire trove with its buoyancy. Kac's Porneia entails a joyful toolkit for collaboratively countering the latest diktat with an endless gozo of possibility.
Joyelle McSweeney, Juror
There’s a density of wordplay in these [works], sonic and semantic, which is even more exciting when you look back and forth between Kac’s English translation and his Portuguese original. And the joy of these poems isn’t just the delight of a child yelling dirty words in the supermarket. The play is too dense, too complex, and they slip between too many points of reference. They are everything and nothing, deep and cheap. Even an awareness of the political stakes here—the thought of that penal code—doesn’t eclipse the poems ’ gorgeous lightness of soul. I feel them crack me open, and “a haphazard happy girl / inside me awakens.”
Kac’s work gives language body. His energy feels restless and rigorous; tender, sexy, and deep. In what he calls the “Visual Works,” Kac treats the materiality of the page—its texture, rips, curls—as part of a linguistic poem.
And then there are the typographic experiments, versions of the then-nascent ASCII art, in which images are composed of standardized keyboard characters. Kac’s experiments lean on the more textured layering that becomes possible on a typewriter. I can feel Kac’s hands on the materials he has available, pushing, kneading, seeing how far he can take what he has.
As for the fart poems... I bow to their wild sublimity.
“The Glitter from her Bones,” review of Porneia by Agnes Borinsky (excerpt), The Anarchist Review of Books, Issue #5, Winter/Spring 2023, p. 6.