How do the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art? How does art affect our relationship to our bodies? T. Fleischmann uses Felix Gonzáles-Torres’s artworks as a path through questions of love and loss, violence and rejuvenation, gender and sexuality.
Fleischmann is not wringing their hands but instead leaning into the world, constantly pressing at the corners of language ... I am astonished by how Fleischmann folds written language, as constrictive and limiting as it can be, into an open form ... Watchful of its context and position, this book is able to pose increasingly interesting, urgent, and difficult questions. It holds us accountable to the world. What are we doing about our global climate crisis? How can we pay reparations? How and when are we complicit in state violence? How do we move forward?
... a balancing act of various genres ... The narrative keeps a consistent thread of hunger and searching that is never frustrating and always disarming ... The political and social commentaries don’t feel saturated, even though they are a great part of what the author wanted to stress with this work ... Controversies and conflicts are present but T. Fleischmann speaks very naturally about them, regarding them as just another part of day to day life, and not dwelling on the topic ... We end up cheering for their resilience and esthetic stamina, their contagious impetus that exhorts us to go out and change the world. Or at the very least, try to.
A sharp memoir that explores gender, identity, and other complex, timely matters ... Throughout the book, identity remains as fluid as gender, as the author investigates both in interesting way ... Both provocatively and evocatively written, the book illuminates the process of becoming.
