Staff Pick
"Fun and pleasure are productive places to start building resilience," Fleischmann writes, "which is good because the work of resisting should feel good when it can." They're talking here about kink culture, but the same could be said of this book: its transgressions of form and content are a radical refusal, and yes, it feels good. Ostensibly an essay about the work of conceptual artist Felix Gonzales-Torres, woven through are thoughtful diversions spanning a spectrum of gender performance, digital sexuality, and rural queerness. Is it an essay? Sure, but like a body it is many things at once — emotive grenade, pure punk poetry; it is a celebration of the many forms we take when caring for one another. Recommended By Thomas L., Powells.com
This is one of those pieces that makes you change the way you look at art, and in doing so, yourself: in and out of the art gallery, only ever seen from the bodies we are and experience from. At times confessional in the intimacy of their prose, T. Fleischmann has given us all a gift that I'm going to treasure for years. Recommended By Cosima C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
How do the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art? How does art affect our relationship to our bodies? T Fleischmann uses Felix Gonz les-Torres's artworks--piles of candy, stacks of paper, puzzles--as a path through questions of love and loss, violence and rejuvenation, gender and sexuality. From the back porches of Buffalo, to the galleries of New York and L.A., to farmhouses of rural Tennessee, the artworks act as still points, sites for reflection situated in lived experience. Fleischmann combines serious engagement with warmth and clarity of prose, reveling in the experiences and pleasures of art and the body, identity and community.
Synopsis
W. G. Sebald meets Maggie Nelson in an autobiographical narrative of embodiment, visual art, history, and loss.