RaveAstra MagazineIn the first of eight short chapters that move between anecdotes of a tender friendship and close readings of individual paintings, interpolated by letters from the artist, Feld puts forward his own proposal as to the ethos of Guston’s work...It is their legacy of a painterly abstraction that is absolutely pure, autonomous, and self-referential that Guston was accused of having betrayed...In what might be a tribute to Guston’s superficially ramshackle but structurally complex late compositions, Feld builds his thesis on the relationship between art and the world out of the clutter of everyday life...We see Guston in his natural environment of home and cheap New York eateries: charming, articulate, mischievous, difficult but not exceptionally so, weak, garrulous, wholly dependent on his wife, generous, self-destructive, all too human.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
RaveArt ReviewReaders of The Sympathizer will be familiar with Nguyen’s trademark combination of high theory with low genre fiction, and Vô Danh’s transformation into drug dealer for ‘bobo’ Parisian society provides plenty of opportunities to sneak postcolonial philosophy in under the cover provided by shootouts between Arab and East Asian gangs. We could say that this tension between high and low is only one of the many binaries reconciled through Nguyen’s dialectical method, or we could say that sandwiching a cocaine-fuelled orgy in which Catholic priests and corrupt politicians do unspeakable things to nubile girls from the global south in between discourses on Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969) and Hélène Cixous’s Le Rire de la Méduse (2010) is having your cake and eating it. Either way, it’s a lot of fun. That Nguyen can get away with these and other absurd plot devices...is a near-miracle of style.
Toshiki Okada
PositiveArt ReviewThe central theme of movement across bodies and minds – and the blurring of lines separating the individual from the collective – is realised in virtuoso shifts of narrative perspective. A startling opening passage, resembling a long tracking shot, moves from a disembodied description of the passage of a group of drunken men through Tokyo into the consciousness of a single character, from where it moves, in a spectacular coup de théâtre, into a first person monologue by a girl of their fleeting encounter two days earlier. Her intrusion into the story – and the fact that she doesn’t reappear, or at least not in the same guise – thoroughly disrupts the conventional unity of place and time that Okada seems initially to observe. It’s exhilarating. The story is both highly constructed – at one point, a character explains her use of a punctuation mark, flagging up to the reader that this is a written and mediated account – and disrespectful of conventional boundaries. The narration flows from one body into another, back and forth in time, creating a space in which anything seems possible and everything is in play. Whether or not this is a mere illusion of freedom is for the reader to decide.
James Bridle
PositiveArt ReviewThe sense of powerlessness that this reliance on invisible infrastructures engenders is, Bridle proposes, at the heart of recent social unrest and political upheaval in the West. It shouldn’t be surprising that voters suffering from the unequally distributed effects of automation, globalisation and climate change, and told by their elected governments that it is impossible to effect structural change in a global economy, are vulnerable to the simplifying falsehoods put forward by the far right. It is in the interests of those who profit from them to render these vast infrastructures invisible and illegible, in order that discussion over such change can be stonewalled ... Bridle\'s efforts to reconcile the limited capacity of the individual with the possibility of agency lead the author to an old-fashioned conclusion: that to effect meaningful change, it is necessary to share knowledge and build coalitions. Rather than disentanglement, New Dark Age argues convincingly for a more informed integration with the technologies we have created, made possible by new solidarities between citizens armed with the facts.
