Dennis Cooper

63

Dennis Cooper : biography

1953 –

After moving to Los Angeles from New York in 1990, Cooper collaborated with a number of artists, including composer John Zorn, painter Lari Pittman, sculptors Jason Meadows and Nayland Blake, and others. For several years, he was a contributing editor and regular writer for the rock music magazine Spin. In 1994, he founded the "Little House on the Bowery" imprint for the independent publisher Akashic Books, which has published works by Travis Jeppesen, Richard Hell, James Greer, Trinie Dalton, Benjamin Weissman, Derek McCormack and others. He completed his ten years of writing the George Miles Cycle with the novel Period in the year 2000. The cycle has now been translated into 17 foreign languages and is the subject of numerous academic studies. They include two volumes of critical essays devoted to the cycle: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004), edited by Leora Lev, and Dennis Cooper: Writing at the Edge (2008), edited by Paul Hegarty and Danny Kennedy. Since then he has written three novels: My Loose Thread, God Jr., and The Sluts (winner of the 2007 Prix Sade in France and the 2005 Lammy Award for best book of gay fiction).

Since the summer of 2005, Cooper has spent most of his time in Paris. While there, he has worked on his blog, which Cooper considers his current major artistic project, and has collaborated with French theater director Gisele Vienne, composers Peter Rehberg and Stephen O’Malley, and the performer Jonathan Capdevielle on six works for the theater, I Apologize (2004), Un Belle Enfant Blonde (2005), Kindertotenlieder (2007), a stage adaption of his novella Jerk (2008), This Is How You Will Disappear (2010), and Last Spring, a Prequel (2011). These theater works have been highly acclaimed and continue to tour extensively in Europe, the UK, and Asia. While in France, Cooper finished a new book of poetry, ‘"The Weaklings, which was published in a limited edition by Fanzine Press in March 2008, a collection of short fiction titled Ugly Man (Harper Perennial, 2009), and Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries (Harper Perennial, 2010).

In 2011, Cooper completed his ninth novel, The Marbled Swarm. He played a small role in Christophe Honore’s feature film Homme au Bain. The year saw the publication of three books by Cooper: The Marbled Swarm (Harper Perennial, November), Jerk/Through Their Tears (DisVoir, March), a book/CD collaboration with Gisele Vienne and Peter Rehberg, and the reissue of his and the artist Keith Mayerson’s 1997 graphic novel Horror Hospital Unplugged (Harper Perennial). Them, a performance art work Cooper originally created in 1984 with choreographer/director Ishmael Houston-Jones and composer/ musician Chris Cochrane, was restaged very successfully in New York and Utrecht. Them won a 2011 Bessie Award for best performance of the year, and it will be touring Europe and the United States in 2012.

In 2012, Cooper and his frequent theater collaborator Gisele Vienne co-curated a section of the annual Un Nouveau Festival at the Centre Pompidou in Paris entitled TEENAGE HALLUCINATION, featuring art exhibitions, films, lectures, live performances, concerts, an installation of the visual components of Cooper/Vienne’s works to date, and performances of their theater pieces Last Spring, a Prequel (2011), Jerk (2008), and Cooper/Cochrane/Houston-Jones’ Them. Last Spring, a Prequel also appeared in the 2012 edition of the Whitney Biennial. From March to June, Kunstverein Amsterdam hosted CLOSER: The Dennis Cooper Papers, a three-month celebration of Cooper’s five-novel sequence The George Miles Cycle featuring an exhibition of Cycle-related materials, artworks especially commissioned for the occasion, lectures, performances, and the publication of a book.

2013 will see the publication of Cooper’s latest poetry collection, The Weaklings (XL), by Sententia Books. The Pyre, his seventh theatrical collaboration with Vienne, composers Stephen O’Malley and Peter Rehberg, and lighting designer Patrick Riou, had its world premiere at the Centre Pompidou in May and is currently touring internationally.