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Text of the page (random words):
at the time i can t help but feel certain affinities for the conceptual art produced in the period and the stories of the parties that went along with it i don t think of this as nostalgia i don t want it back or to inhabit it endlessly but i am interested in what it was damien hirst s work in particular has long been a puzzle to me i ve flip flopped it s genius the perfect commentary on the byzantine futures exchange of the art market it s shallow lowest common denominator stuff too direct the show of his blue paintings at the wallace collection was unforgivably forgettable yet the diamond encrusted skull for the love of god 2007 remains brilliantly ambiguous i can t help but admire the cleanly framed appalling conceit of a thousand years 1990 yet seeing a number of the vitrine pieces in the same room at the tate modern a couple of years back my daughter fled and i followed her why would anyone want to put so many dead animals in an art gallery with so much of it in one place the concept was deadening insufficiently complex to bear such repetition a goth rock teen spraying lyrics about death into your face regardless of the studio processes mimicking the factory spot paintings are workaday unreflective imitations of the formal wing of pop the pill bottles and the pharmacy riffs are for me richly suggestive of the more interesting pieces from the same movement and before as an entire body of work though i value it enormously precisely because it wrong foots me so frequently considered in its fullness as mediated process it s surely a masterstroke randall tells of a fictionalised yba an imagined inheritor to damien hirst s crown in an alternate future in which hirst has been hit by a train and it doesn t take us long to discover that the lead character is very very much like the provocateur in chief of the ybas preternaturally cock sure whipsmart a party monster and importantly well versed in art history and theory he nails his degree show with perfectly painted circles derived from japanese calligraphic practice he exploits his connections to wow a city collector with an improvised sculptural portrait from found materials he s super canny about the market mechanisms that will allow him to succeed in the contemporary art market and determined to play them gibbs s randall is completely and compellingly rendered i was hooked from the first few pages in which we discover that the narrator randall s city friend vincent has written a memoir of his time hanging out with this crew of imagined ybas and that sections of the memoir are alternated with sections narrating the present day vincent s the perfect observer implicated but outside and this is mirrored in the formal arrangement for the narrative the gradual reveal of the present tense legacy of randall backed up by the excitement of his past tense emergence the reader too is implicated observer randall s successes and failures and his disregard for the work or feelings of his friends that is perhaps simply an extension of his disregard for his own work and feelings unfold at the same time as we discover his marriage to and child with victor s ex and his conquering of the american market in traditional realist terms the execution of the whole is subtle and unfussy but profoundly affecting the writing on occasion pulls you up because it s so deftly turned the getting back together sex scene is the best sex scene i ve read in years up there with nick shay s encounter with donna in delillo s underworld it s tender awkward freighted with the carry on luggage of decades of missed intimacy perhaps the most impressive achievement of this novel though is the vividly imagined oeuvre of perfectly pitched conceptual art pieces that shock and bewitch the market and appal the general public in equal measure in relation to jonathan s delillo paper this is a novel brimming in ekphrasis exemplary of these are randall s breakthrough pieces the sunshines portraits and here i would like to be able to quote from the book but i urged my copy onto a friend a month ago so i ll have to manage without quotes the sunshines portraits are lurid coloured screen print copies of the sitter s used toilet paper an art making concept so apt for this fictionalised artist that i can entirely understand jonathan s affection for it and the punch line as with so many hirst endeavours comes in the title they re called sunshines because the sun shines out of randall s arse when i finished reading randall i felt that uniquely literary little death the text i d spent my waking hours rushing to return to for the past week was now used up the ingenious sleight of hand of the ending had given me one last deferred reading pleasure as i skimmed back through the last fifty pages to confirm my hunch regarding the location of randall s final greatest work but i wanted to spend more time in this world and so i went to the next best source on my shelves gordon burn s sex and violence death and silence his collected writings on art an intriguing commentator on british and american contemporary art burn was an enthusiast for damien hirst s work and became a close friend of the artist indeed not only was burn godfather to hirst s first child hirst gave burn his first ever line of coke a detail that crystallizes something of the nature of their friendship an implicated outsider perhaps unsurprisingly given the first few lines of this piece i m a big burn fan i ve not read everything yet perhaps the true fanatic will always keep something in reserve but i ve read most of it unlike jonathan and for reasons i can barely comprehend i am drawn to the dark material as well as the light though that s not to say that i enjoy reading it happy like murderers with its hirst designed cover is the only book i ve had to stop reading because i was alone this might seem absurd given that its horror is entirely other people though of course it s the fact that they re people not others that is what s truly horrifying when i re read the chapter in burn s book on damien hirst i was struck by the line jonathan has quoted in his blogpost like a good apophenic i thought i d spotted a source and tweeted to check it with the author when it turned out that jonathan hadn t consciously derived the sunshines from this throwaway remark i thought the connection even more compelling the author had successfully occupied the mindset of his character to the extent that he was imagining the same kinds of pieces his lived world analogue might whether this detail was imbibed unconsciously doesn t matter to me i m very aware of how that kind of process works in academic writing where you frequently find you ve inhabited someone else s thoughts so successfully that you think they re your own this is why we reference so neurotically there s something else i d like to remark that is both defence of apophenic reading and source sampling it seems to me that echo appropriation and influence are fluxions in the same field we couldn t work in creative isolation if we tried and neither should we we are constantly processing exterior sources in my own writing i choose to import those sources and to work directly with them the use of found materials has long been familiar practice for artists and if we re alert to the less well rehearsed or canonical aspects of the corpus for literary writers too the incorporation of such materials allows for distinct effects striking juxtapositions that generate fresh meaning or hilarity unexpected hierarchies of authority destabilisations of the apparently real in contemporary music it has led to entirely new forms and enabled important political and legal critique it seems to me that these processes are continuous with appropriation at the more granular level of sources while there is always a desire for originality and that in avant gardist terms is a much disputed notion i don t think we need to look for it only in ideas but believe that it can be generated in form in composition and in context the work that is purely sui generis has yet to be made but original works have frequently been composed from well worn sources the reason for this post is to respond to jonathan s but above all to urge anyone here to read randall in the hope that they ll get as much from it as i did tagged damien hirst jonathan gibbs randall jun 15 2015 leave a comment event the idea of death tagged austin collings i m jack pariah press jun 02 2015 leave a comment uncategorized a hierarchy of tone style and content may 29 2015 5 45 pm review by austin collings a chilling debut told in the voice of the hoaxer who led yorkshire police on a wild goose chase m ark blacklock s first novel is an audacious exercise in mimicry yet it is an utterly appropriate one too through a series of letters witness statements and assorted official documents blacklock assumes the voice of one of britain s most notorious hoaxers john humble aka wearside jack the man who assumed the voice of the yorkshire ripper in 1979 humble sent a tape recording to chief constable george oldfield the man leading the hunt for the serial killer who over the previous 10 years had murdered 10 women and assaulted several others throughout the north of england played at a televised press conference the tape a two minute low fi recording of humble taunting oldfield had the makings of a breakthrough in the yorkshire ripper case i m jack i see you are still having no luck catching me i have the greatest respect for you george but lord you are no nearer catching me now than four years ago when i started dialect specialists pinned the accent down to the castletown area of sunderland in wearside northeast england a wild goose chase ensued with more than 40 000 sunderland born suspects interviewed this was a gift to the actual ripper peter sutcliffe a west yorkshireman who was questioned nine times before his eventual arrest in 1981 he said that after hearing the tape he felt safe safe enough to murder three more women as detectives looked elsewhere the hunt plagued oldfield burnt out he suffered a heart attack he never returned to the case and died in 1985 but what of humble before sending the tape the hoaxer had also sent three letters purporting to come from the ripper two addressed to oldfield and one to the daily mirror newspaper when west yorkshire police decided to review the case in 2005 dna advances linked humble to one of the envelopes he had licked detectives found him alcoholic and unemployed living with his brother on the ford estate in sunderland the living conditions were described as squalid in 2006 humble then 50 received an eight year prison sentence for perverting the course of justice he had apparently been inspired by a library book he had borrowed and never returned about the victorian serial killer jack the ripper blacklock who also hails from sunderland portrays humble as a classic unreliable narrator sly yet not entirely unsympathetic he pesters the ghost of oldfield from his prison cell in leeds with a batch of letters that are a compelling mess of bad grammar rambling reveals and local dialect blacklock has the voice down pat with the same insidiously familiar tone as humble s tape or his original letters thing is george there was a time that summer everyone was listening to my voice i was listening to my voice you couldn t not listen to my voice it was playing everywhere wasn t it a picture emerges not only of prison life but also of the lonely thwarted existence that led to it then there are other more obviously fictional pieces poems two stream of consciousness monologues from a younger humble and a lurid horror story titled yours sincerely jack the ripper purportedly written by robert blake this presumably is a variation on robert psycho bloch s 1943 story yours truly jack the ripper blacklock deftly captures the trashy popular mythologising of the original ripper murders his yarn tellingly ends with the words i m jack a pulp fiction endorsement for humble the fantasist fleshing the story out further are the numerous official documents interspersed among humble s one way dispatches police transcripts housing association letters graphology reports newspaper cuttings some are taken straight from real life sources although not necessarily relating to humble others have been written by blacklock all of them though are orderly businesslike and serious unlike humble s wayward outpourings the contrast a hierarchy of tone style and content magnifies humble s lonely position on the bottom rung of society s ladder i m jack doesn t have the intensity of gordon burn s immersive 1984 take on the life of peter sutcliffe somebody s husband somebody s son or of david peace s red riding quartet which have the yorkshire ripper investigation as their background its tone is more mischievous with a vein of dark crafty humour though the overall effect is sombre blacklock s humble is impossible to like yet by the end it is almost impossible not to feel sorry for him i m jack by mark blacklock granta rrp 12 99 240 pages austin collings is the author of the myth of brilliant summers pariah press apr 14 2015 5 comments promo i m jack noise dead media living voices secrets never told and tales well telt currys for grundigs dixons for sanyo smiths for c60s greasy grapples and broken glasses flies in ointment beetles under carpets custard powder on your tape tvs that go pop danger in water at any depth no heavy petting run to the hills i don t know if you re me or i m you when we talk like this i just want you to listen my friends i m jack drblacklock grantabooks i do recommend this excellent novel cover looks good too pic twitter com bativ6hegv james miller jmlostboys april 11 2015 jmlostboys drblacklock grantabooks this is such a good book lee rourke leerourke april 11 2015 devouring mark blacklock s remarkable debut novel i m jack publ grantabooks june strength of writing matches the ambitious form v good niven govinden niven_govinden march 16 2015 drblacklock look what we have fridayreads aidanoneilll is ace pic twitter com y9nnlzihaa stokeylitfest stokeylitfest march 6 2015 readers watch out for the forthcoming sunderland based experimental novel i m jack by drblacklock https t co 3ijdxy3cwf benjamin myers benmyers1 january 18 2015 go drblacklock whose novel i m jack makes him one of amazon s rising stars along with er david duchovny http t co h9koizbhuw dennis duncan djbduncan january 9 2015 just as i m wondering what to read next drblacklock s i am jack proof turns up from maxjohnporter excited scared pic twitter com vktj2q35yc andrew male andrewmalemojo october 30 2014 tagged fiction i m jack mar 30 2015 leave a comment uncategorized island hopping or an essay upon several projections some images and audio from last thursday evening s think tank part of tom mccarthy s installation at the ica as part of fig 2 with many thanks to tom and fatoş üstek for inviting me to participate my 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