How To Live With An Artist
by Zach Udko
The world has known plenty of celebrated artist duos. Some have produced rich collaborations (Christo and Jeanne-Claude); others blossomed into nurturing mentorships (Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe), destructive disasters (Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain), fraught rivalries (James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow), and fascinating Freudian family dramas (Woody Allen and Mia Farrow).
Famous fruitful gay partnerships have included Merce Cunningham and John Cage, Susan Sontag and Annie Leibowitz, and Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Perhaps the most devoted gay literary couple — Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas — took the idea of collaboration to the next level, when, in 1933, Stein wrote an homage to her muse, written from Toklas’ point of view. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas became Stein’s first bestseller.
On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of Stein’s masterpiece, New-York based performance artist Filip Noterdaeme decided to revisit the form of the conceptual memoir to tell the tale of his love affair with the German cabaret entertainer Daniel Isengart. Noterdaeme’s The Autobiography of Daniel J. Isengart (published this month by Outpost19, with a Foreword by Penny Arcade) is a celebration of two gay artists carving out a most unusual and fulfilling life for themselves in New York City.
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