Owen Hatherley, The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity
reviewed by Benjamin Noys
Moaning about Britain is a very British thing to do. The national ideology of ‘muddling through’, of compromise and moderation, is usually accompanied by a moaning about the misery of these compromises. The British, or perhaps that should be the English, are never so happy, it seems, as when they are queuing and complaining. Owen Hatherley’s Ministry of Nostalgia brings to bear his considerable polemical gifts to analyse a particular instance of ‘muddling through’: the emergence of... [read more]
Annebella Pollen, The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians
reviewed by Anna Neima
A dissonant, disquieting collection of over 100 images – many of them previously unseen – accompany art and design historian Annebella Pollen’s account of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: eye-catching, brightly coloured, Kandinsky-style designs; black and white photos of solitary, near-naked figures posed ritualistically out-of-doors; groups of young people dancing, hiking and camping in a heterogeneous range of costumes, some reminiscent of Robin Hood: Men in Tights and the modern craze... [read more]
Paul Fischer, A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power
reviewed by Stephen Lee Naish
It is no coincidence that North Korea seems to exist as an almost real-time movie. The country comes across in weird combination of gangster films like The Godfather, and Once Upon a Time in America, and the old science fiction adaptations of 1984 and Brave New World, played out over a seventy year period with no end credits in sight. The Kim dynasty, thus far including Kim Il-sung, his son Kim Jong-Il, and since 2011, Jong-il's young son Kim Jong-un, are the main stars of the picture, prima... [read more]
At the tail-end of spring nine years ago, my uncle, who I hated and barely knew, boarded a train from London to Hastings. At the station in Hastings, he walked to the beach. At the beach, he slashed his wrists and walked into the sea. At some point he stopped walking and, we can only surmise, the water gradually lifted his feet from the sea bed and carried his body further from the shore. Perhaps the tide beat him back towards the land, and he was forced to swim out to his fate. Perhaps the... [read more]
Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey & Suhail Malik eds., Realism Materialism Art
reviewed by Hatty Nestor
Realism Materialism Art is an anthology of essays published by the Centre of Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York, in conjunction with Sternberg Press. To uncover the relationship between realism and materialism within the sphere of art, the editors have selected a rich combination of exhibitions, talks and theorists through which to discuss current questions in critical theory. Featuring essays by Graham Harman, Boris Groys, Christoph Cox and Susan Schuppli, Realism Materialism Art... [read more]
Barricades are even more old-fashioned than Jeremy Corbyn. They belong to an age before opinion polls and focus groups, when people simply took to the streets to fight for what they believed were their rights. Barricades were a means of defence, but they could be more than that, enabling a rebel population to trap forces with superior weaponry. In 1588 the inhabitants of Paris erected a network of barricades ‘so dense that soldiers were caught as if in a net, under fire from the barricades... [read more]
Harry Harootunian, Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capital
reviewed by Marie Louise Krogh
The 7th of October 1917 marks the date of a ruptural reconfiguration not only of the social, economic and political history of Russia, but also of the intellectual landscape of Western Europe. Until this point European Marxists had – following some of Marx's own suggestions – seen the most 'advanced' capitalist economies as the inevitable site of the coming revolution. With the overthrow of the Tsar and the subsequent failure of the Bavarian Council Republic, all this changed. Western... [read more]
Rachel Price, Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island
reviewed by Dunja Fehimović
Rachel Price's Planet/Cuba is a timely, insightful and innovative study of contemporary Cuban culture. Nevertheless, the eye-catching cover and strikingly stark title of this significant text turn out to be its first stumbling blocks, establishing unfair and false expectations regarding the kind of relationship between Cuba and the world that it develops and that constitutes one of its most innovative proposals. The slash that separates the two nouns, also known by the telling technical name of... [read more]
Francis O'Gorman, Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History
reviewed by Phil Jourdan
The quiet agony of worrying is a familiar topic for this reviewer. It feels necessary to state this outright, though I couldn't say why. This defensiveness, however, is quite in keeping with the spirit of Francis O’Gorman’s Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History. Its worried author spends the first dozen or so pages of his book on worrying mostly worrying about how tricky the act of writing about worrying has proven and will continue to prove to be. This book is itself an act of... [read more]
Paul Brighton, Original Spin: Downing Street and the Press in Victorian Britain
reviewed by Elliot Murphy
While its title may not be entirely accurate – given that its chronological span also encompasses a considerable chunk of the late Georgian period and the reign of William IV – Paul Brighton’s Original Spin: Downing Street and the Press in Victorian Britain is a perceptive and comprehensive account of how successive British prime ministers from Pitt the Younger to Rosebery dealt with the numerous problems and possibilities the emerging print media presented. As the three major Reform Acts... [read more]
