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Studio Voltaire London 9 September to 5 November
'I'm here this month to distract you. In this column you are about to read - or skip over - some useless but interesting trivia, some topics of conversation, some well guarded but cheap baubles, some dime-store details about some insignificant information about art. All of it is worthless but all of it is true, and that is something.' This partial disclaimer by Cookie Mueller, from her highly quotable seven-year tenure as art columnist for Details magazine, is indicative of her disarmingly casual writing style. Mueller sought to be both participant and observer of the subjects she fixed upon, specifically the messy excesses - from houses burning down to being kidnapped by rednecks - of the drug-induced lives around her in 1970s Baltimore and New York's downtown art scene in the 1980s. Appearing both in early John Waters films and Nan Goldin's photographs, notably Cookie Portfolio, 197789, she gained a cultish reputation throughout her life. From today's perspective, Mueller has achieved pin-up status for the bad boys and girls of queer theory, yet her writing - such as the novella Fan Mail, Frank Letters and Crank Calls and the collected short stories Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black - bears the imprint of a generation lost to Aids and a city now unrecognisable through gentrification.
These histories are visible - painful, occasionally exultant and delirious - in Mueller and her husband Vittorio Scarpati's 'Putti's...