Kirill Medvedev, trans. Keith Gessen, Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill & Bela Shayevich, It's No Good
reviewed by Andre van Loon
BIG RUBBER COCK
I saw it every day on the way to school.
I know that’s not the best way
to start a poem,
but there’s nothing I can do about my memories,
I can’t take the rubber cock out of my mind and
replace it
with, say, a New Year’s Tree.
Welcome to the poetry of Kirill Medvedev, Russia’s ‘first authentic post-Soviet writer,’ in the words of his translator, Keith Gessen. We’re a long way from the lyricism of Alexander Pushkin or Mikhail Lermontov. Medvedev’s... [read more]
Vertigo, as with any fear, serves as a form of post-justification. It’s a condition termed to contextualise a feeling and ground an unknown – a cocktail of responsive atmospheres charted as a measurable phobia underneath the guise of a catchall term. The word fails, of course. We think of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and James Stewart’s face will always tell us more of the nature of his bodily response than would the term ‘vertigo’ alone; the sensation is something we can only ever... [read more]
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, The New Human In Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900
reviewed by Imogen Woodberry
By the early years of the 20th century the nature and boundaries of human identity had become increasingly destabilised. One of the many conceptual revolutions provoked by Darwinism was the recognition that the present state of humanity was temporary; this led to a volume of speculation on what could next lie in store for the human species. Despite Darwin’s charting of human development as an upward trajectory, a move from simpler sub-species to more complex entities, change, it was feared,... [read more]
Espen Hammer, Adorno's Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe
reviewed by Stuart Walton
The verdict passed on culture by the historical catastrophes of the twentieth century, that it had failed in its innermost core by failing to reach the innermost core of human beings, was one of Theodor Adorno's most non-negotiable contentions. What was left of culture after Auschwitz was pure ideology, or else the delusive puerility of the culture industry. It had failed according to its own criteria. Not only had it not exorcised the demons of social turbulence according to the Aristotelian... [read more]
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]
