Courteys of @brad___phillips.
Drug use is one way, among others, to address a lack. At a New York screening of the 1971 film The Panic in Needle Park, Joan Didion was asked what experience she and her writer–husband John Dunne had to write a film about addiction. Didion‘s response: “it’s a film about love.” Drugs have to do with desire, but destruction too—a way of both possessing and escaping the world. A temporary relief—it works until it doesn’t. SLEEK presents a reading list in conversation with our new winter edition, the Trance issue, out now.
Oval, Elvia Wilk, Soft Skull Press, 2019
Image via Soft Skull Press.
A consultant designs a pill that simulates generosity, leaking it into Berlin’s club drug supply for the common cause. A parade of unreal empathy begins. Elvia Wilk‘s brave new world—in which artists have become consultants for corporations, and environmental action is above all else an aesthetic— is not so far from our own. Meaningless gestures continue to dominate the art world that Wilk satirises—in Basel over the weekend, Facebook commissioned an artist to, amongst other spectacles, host four North Pole themed dinner parties, in which real arctic ice was served to participants. As Wilk writes, “You honestly think [the patrons] don’t get the joke?…Of course they do, but they pretend not to, which is an even bigger joke. And [the artist] is pretending he doesn’t know they’re pretending. And that just makes it an even bigger joke. And on and on forever in an endless loop.”
My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh, Penguin Books, 2018
Image via Penguin Books.
So disembodied she doesn’t even have a name—a spiral of addiction and possible psychosis follows this nihilist gallerist and her search for sleep. “I can’t point to any one event that resulted in my decision to go into hibernation,” Moshfegh writes, “Initially, I just wanted some downers to drown out my thoughts and judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything. I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.” Painlessness is an impossible condition, and no matter what the drug manufacturer/ prescriber/ dealer may say, nothing in this world is without consequence.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander, The New Press, 2010
In the past three decades, the US prison population exploded from 300,000 to over 2 million, with the vast majority drug convictions. Michelle Alexander examines the war on drugs, more aptly described as the prison industrial complex, and the power and prerogative of the state to incarcerate hundreds of thousands of black men. We are quick to denounce racism when it is individualised‚it is more difficult to interrogate its institutionalized form. As Alexander writes, “Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.”
Image via Pinterest.
Divine Horsemen: The Voodoo Gods of Haiti, Maia Deren, McPherson, 1985
Maia Deren continues her search for experiences that escape representation. Divine Horsemen describes the possession the artist, film-maker and writer experienced when she attended the ritual celebration of the Haitian goddess Erzulie.
The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Cornell University Press, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, 1986
In Peter Stallybrass and Allison White’s seminal text, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, the politics of pleasure are interrogated. Are minor transgressions, ostensibly criminalized, tolerated precisely because they prevent true rebellions?