No Document

Critic Crawford (Hole’s Live Through This) blends artistic analysis and pensive prose in this dreamy meditation on creation, memory, and loss. Simultaneously an elegy addressed to her late artistic collaborator Ned Sevil and a call to radical action to “keep moving, mourning, making, joining,” Crawford’s work is organized without chapter breaks or titles as she shares memories of Sevil, recounting their time at art school together and his experience with cystic fibrosis, while also reflecting on such works of art as the paintings of Franz Marc, a German painter drafted in WWI, and the films of Georges Franju, who served in the military in Algeria. Crawford describes her own political actions—going to Melbourne for a protest against a meeting of the World Economic Forum and protesting “in solidarity with asylum seekers being held on Manus Island”—and ponders art and creation. Her musings are poignant; she reflects that “art is not precious, neither is politics, we wrote, and we meant (I think we meant) that neither thing should be remote from the texture of our lives or out of reach of our making.” Politically engaged artists will delight in these powerful considerations. (June)