Astrid Lorange
Astrid Lorange is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at UNSW Sydney. Her research focuses on cultural studies of contemporary poetry, art, and media. Lorange is the author of How Reading is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein (Wesleyan University Press) and Homework, a book of essays co-authored with Andrew Brooks (Discipline). Her most recent poetry collection is Labour and Other Poems (Cordite Books). She is a member of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate, an editor at Rosa Press, and a founding member of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network.
All essays by Astrid Lorange
Calling Bullshit
The gimmick, is, therefore, perhaps the aesthetic category that captures the affective experience of life as mediated by the capital relation. The gimmick names the ambivalent judgement by which we come to apprehend the very process through which capitalism reproduces itself, and the abstractions that naturalise that process. When we judge something to be a gimmick, we are experiencing ‘dissatisfaction—mixed, for all this, with fascination—linked to our perception of an object making untrustworthy claims about the saving of time, the reduction of labor, and the expansion of value’.
Silverfish, Weevil, Ibis
This object might best be thought of as an ecology, a network of living, changing relations. We woke up early the other morning to read a little before the day became dominated by the rhythms of work. Our cat hurried into the front room, punctuating the silence with a series of yells that seemed to announce his surprise at finding us awake at this hour, and then stretched out on the firm yet inviting pages of the object in question. These pages invite use, suggest inhabitation, become part of the fabric of the house.
