Considering the work of Virginia Woolf, Michel de Montaigne, Roland Barthes, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Georges Perec, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, E.M. Cioran, William Carlos Williams, and Maurice Blanchot, among others, Brian Dillon’s ESSAYISM—“a love letter to belle-lettrists, an account of the indispensable lifelines of reading and writing”—is out now.*
Brian Dillon, Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Non-Fiction (New York: New York Review Books, 2018).*
Elizabeth Hardwick.
John Douglas Millar’s BRUTALIST READINGS—“a significant intervention into recent debates on the place of literature and writing in the context of contemporary art”*—brings together ten new essays by the London-based writer.
Here is Millar on Pierre Guyotat, on “conceptual writing and its discontents,” on Paul [Beatriz] Preciado’s Testo Junkie and Lauren Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah, on the October generation and the novels of Chris Kraus, on the critical misreadings of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades as a “roadmap” to everything from Burroughs and Acker to surfing the web.
BRUTALIST READINGS concludes with a 2012 conversation between Millar and Simon Critchley, the author of The Ethics of Deconstruction, Very Little…Almost Nothing, Memory Theatre, and Bowie.
John Douglas Millar, BRUTALIST READINGS (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016).
Image credit: Sternberg Press.
Benjamin’s Arcades Project—the notes for which he left with Georges Bataille before killing himself on the Pyrenees in 1940 after leaving Nazi-occupied France—was made up of thirty-six folders on such subjects as “Fashion,” “Mirrors,” “Panorama,” “Dream City and Dream House,” and “Flâneur,” (a term Benjamin popularized). For THE ARCADES exhibition, curator Jens Hoffman (assisted by Shira Backer) has brought together works by Walead Beshty, Andrea Bowers, Chris Burden, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Andreas Gursky, Pierre Huyghe, Mike Kelley, Collier Schorr, Cindy Sherman, Taryn Simon, and James Welling.
THE ARCADES: CONTEMPORARY ART AND WALTER BENJAMIN, through August 6.
THE JEWISH MUSEUM, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, New York City.
thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/the-arcades-contemporary-art-and-walter-benjamin
*David Wallace, “Walter Benjamin’s Unfinished Opus, Revisted Through Contemporary Art,” The New Yorker, May 9, 2017:
newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/walter-benjamins-unfinished-magnum-opus-revisited-through-contemporary-art
