Astrid Lorange
Astrid Lorange is a writer, artist and teacher. She lectures at UNSW Art & Design. She has published essays, poems, and How Reading is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein (Wesleyan University Press, 2014). She is one-half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate
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.
