I Am Not Insane: a visual essay by Mary Leunig

Our Members be Unlimited is a book of about workers and their unions. It starts out with the formation of the first workers union in a dark field in Europe, and takes us all the way to the first rumblings of new unions in gig-economy workplaces like the Amazon fulfilment centre. It’s an innovative new onramp for a modern politics of collectivism and its possibilities.

What happens, in that moment of encounter, when a book states its intention, pre-empting the act of reading it?

The opportunity to write music for an exhibition of paintings by Turner was irresistible. Turner had been a favourite artist…

‘Buried Not Dead is a study in the forces that can both create the conditions for art and cultural flourishing, as well as the conditions for its inhibition and decline.’

How alienating, how jarring, to be made aware that you’re one step away from a cascading world of ones and zeros instead of live, decaying art objects. Get free of queues and tickets and blood-sugar crashes, but can’t shake the feeling that a high-quality colour book reproduction would offer a superior form of viewing. Wonder if Walter Benjamin could have dreamed of such a flaccid form of artistic replication as a virtual gallery tour.