The Universe as Performance Art, Colby Smith’s first short fiction collection, is a disquieting, panoramic gallery exhibition obsessed with art’s arranged marriage with Nature and the consequences of art itself. Here are stories of an epidemic of fossils repurposed as psychotropic drugs, the Marquis de Sade’s first orgasm, queer love nourished—and destroyed—through making and documenting graffiti, and others. The title story is at once a staged, Fluxus-esque creation myth and a structurally daring prose poem. The Universe as Performance Art is an indispensable contribution to the Neo-Decadent international art movement canon and a formidable short fiction debut by any standard.
"Colby Smith’s extreme and poetic vision—immense, psychedelic flowers!—is a cosmos driven by the lithified dead, the cannibalistic heavens, the revelry after the destruction of creation. These stories read like nerve ganglia lit by Ursa Minor, writ by hands tending to abnormal forms in a fatal garden."
—Paul Cunningham, author of Fall Garment and
The House of the Tree of Sores
Colby Smith was born and raised in southern West Virginia and is currently based in Cleveland, Ohio. A member of the Neo-Decadent international art movement, he is the author of The Ironic Skeletons (Snuggly Books, 2022) and, with prominent comix artist Josh Bayer, Fish Turn Colors Then Break In My Hands (Stone Church Press, 2023). His first poetry collection, No Moon, is forthcoming from Outlandish Press.
Follow on Facebook