Katrina Palmer: The Dark Object

by Katrina Palmer, Stewart Home (Editor), Gavin Everall (Editor)

This volume of interrelated yet self contained short stories is set in an art school in which a paranoid, conceptual ideology has prohibited the making of objects. One student isolated and battling with institutional directives and solitary confinement, Addison Cole writes stories. These narrate a series of explicit encounters with texts, objects and artists, reducing characters to their pornographic effect. Imagine Slavojzizek as an impotent sexual metaphor or Hegel as a skeletal specter. London-based author Katrina Palmer explores the tension between the restraint of narrative form and the explosion of ontic instability. The aim is not to subsume fantasy into the everyday, but rather demonstrate that everything is real and the everyday is fantastical.

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Edmond · Rating 5 out of 5]

A protest against the "dematerialization" of the art object, a plea for embodied art. Set in an art school that has banned objects. Feminist and funny. And Slavoj Zizek makes an appearance. So, like, you have no excuse not to read it.

[Luīze Nežberte · Rating 1 out of 5]

So much fighting with myself about whether I should just not finish this book which is something I never do as sometimes its in the last pages that a book opens itself to the reader..THANK GOD I managed to loose this book somewhere in my room and now i can just never read it ever again! !! Really really wanted to love this but it fell so incredibly flat, self-involved and not interesting at all. Perhaps all of this has to do with the fact that I am facing art and theory on a daily basis and am just not a fan of such regurgitations and this is the opposite of the reason why I’m in arts. I see art as the last frontier-an honest and serious human battle marked by joy, kindness, and real pain, whereas this reading felt like an institutionalized knowledge nightmare.

[Jacquie · Rating 5 out of 5]

a remarkably fleshy book about theory

[Ana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Conceptual

[Nafeesa mushtaq · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book/or not depending on how it is encountered left me changed forever.