Has anyone ever really been to a party? Have you? How did you know? Calling something a “party” is a descriptive statement and a value judgment. The host hazards their reputations, their relationships, their time and money—not just social capital, but material resources—to put on a party. The party as a one-night event is a microcosm of what we risk in coming together in community, in movements or political parties. A good host can create the conditions for a party to happen, but it’s the guests who make something feel like a party. Walking into a party means, on some level, that you are committing yourself to be a part of a project that exceeds you. It is a premature vote of confidence in the group’s ability to create a vibe.

Parties can be a space outside of time, a mutual entering into collective fantasy. Mikhail Bahktin called this festival atmosphere the “carnivalesque,” an inversion of normal rules that acts as a release valve for social pressures. “Party” is an emulsion of feelings whipped up in the air between bodies in motion: intoxicating (even if technically sober), disorderly, fun. Time moves slower in revelry, or can seem to pass in a moment of exaltation. A bad party can also be a space outside of time—when a group of individuals fails to emulsify, hell is once again other people. 

But good party or bad, the afterparty or the silence eventually comes. A secret and transgressive time, in which you discover the traces of lost civilizations in overturned glasses and trails of crumbs. Things have been otherwise, and now they’ve returned. Of course, the release valve is designed to support the functioning of the machine—every carnival ends up with its briefly inverted hierarchies flipped back into place and firmly affixed. Parties subvert but also assert cultural norms: anyone who has attended a party—be it an office Christmas party, a backyard barbecue, a rave, a wedding—can tell you that.

More important than asking if a party is successful, perhaps, is asking what work a party does. Party as Form assembles a group of artists and thinkers who attempt to do that work by taking up parties as an artistic medium. This issue comes out of a group residency at the Oslo-based arts organization PRAKSIS in the summer of 2024, hosted by Shannon Stratton and Kelly Lloyd. Building on Stratton’s previous syllabus, the residents made objects, texts, performances, and events about parties—some of which turned into real parties. Work by the residents—‘Tope Ajayi, Åste Amundsen, Sara Clugage, Tor Lukasik-Foss, Lexie Owen, Matilda Moors, Fergus Tibbs, and Banu Çiçek Tülü—continues here, hosted between Dilettante Army and PRAKSIS Presents. We’re joined by some artists and thinkers the residents invited to speak—Maike Statz, McKenzie Wark, Leo Felipe, and Brandon LaBelle. We think of providing this platform as a kind of hospitality, and so along with guest editor Matilda Moors, DA is delighted to extend invitations to such honored guests.

Shannon Stratton’s essay historicizes Party as Form and serves as a preface to this issue. Stratton created Party as Form as a class for Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency, guided by a syllabus that has since been taught and revised by other educators. Party as Form has also expanded to become an artists’ residency of its own, and now a magazine issue. Stratton’s work as an arts administrator has become, for her, a practice of hospitality that reaches its fullest creative form in the party. These parties draw studio practices out for communal play—at Ox-Bow, those take place every Friday night, with themes like “Fake Naked” and “Goth Prom.” We make parties because they give us something we need: a reset, a new connection, a dream state, productive discomfort with other people.

In “Vampire Clubs,” Sara Clugage, Matilda Moors, and Maike Statz bite into the architecture of vampire clubs in movies, literature, and LARPing. These spaces design our ideas about how we live (and die) together in public space. Three architectural elements test the boundaries—the threshold as a limit case for the invitation as a host-guest contract, the bar as a moving relation between vampires and those they drink from, and the stage as a magnifier for the feminized labor of sexual compulsion. Through them, vampire clubs offer the possibility of transgression through erotic encounters with violence—at the same time, the desire to consume these transformative experiences are fraught with the risk of being consumed ourselves.

An excerpt from Leo Felipe’s “A Universal History of the Afterparty,” newly translated by the author, combines critical analysis, autoethnography, social theory, agony, ecstasy, and pure, unadulterated fun in its exploration of how underground electronica in Brazil forms communities half-way between utopia and hell. Foucault might have called these vibrant spaces at the margins heterotopias but inhabiting Felipe’s writing is more like imagining what (Black, Brown, queer, non-binary) heterotopias in the Global South might call Foucault. Felipe deals with the party as almost the inverse of the classic aesthetic object—it’s not the kind of art that requires disinterested observation. Critical distance simply destroys it. To encounter this kind of party truly—to encounter it at all—you have to be in it and of it. Call it critical proximity. Call it immanent critique. Call it a poetics of joy and risk. Call it a good time with a bad hangover.  

Kelly Lloyd’s important new study on holi-delay, “a condition where people only get excited about holidays after they happen,” makes a case for understanding a shift in our expectations of communal celebrations (tracked through blogs and social media comments) since her first study on the condition in 2013. Focusing on the preparation phase before the party, Lloyd stipulates that people who experience holi-delay do not form normative expectations of holiday celebrations, without which they cannot experience the satisfaction of having those expectations fulfilled. Instead, those who experience holi-delay seek out spontaneous communal experiences that do not require planning. But with the growing shift to a precarious, unpredictable gig economy, plus pandemic isolation turning to long-term introversion, holi-delay has perhaps become the more successful approach to real celebration.

Synths and sequins shimmer in Banu Çiçek Tülü’s audio visual essay Henna Night/Kına gecesi/Şeva hineyê which contemplates the complexity of feeling brought about by Muslim wedding customs, specifically Kına gecesi (henna nights), a traditional celebration where the bride’s hands are hennaed. The lustre on the surface of this work soon gives way to darker undertones as cacophonous female voices and trilling percussion push through the dreamy body of the audio. An ASMR vocal brings to mind contemporary self care rituals whilst probing at the symbolic implications of marking a female body. The layers of the video bleed into each other, much like henna on skin, as Çiçek Tülü explores how celebratory traditions contain both the potential for liberatory connection and possibility of becoming complicit in our own oppression.

This issue is festively illustrated by party photos from Jen Monroe. Monroe’s work at the intersection of food, atmosphere, and critique shows the work of the host that makes the ease of the guest possible. Shapes and colors are offered by generous hands. Tabletop worlds draw you in. Her food straddles the line between appetizing and strange, offering adventure and delight but also the hint of risk that comes with so intimate an act as eating. 

The other half of Party as Form can be found at the online journal PRAKSIS Presents. Stop by their place to hear from Brandon LaBelle, Tor Lukasik-Foss, Lexie Owen, and McKenzie Wark.

You can also shop the Party as Form designs in our online store! (Suitable for party animals and edgefolk alike.)