The White Review

[Featured Article]

Techno-primitivism

Vanessa Hodgkinson and David Trotter

What follows could have been an essay or an interview. In the event, it resembles the one as little as it resembles the other. The images are nearly all by Vanessa Hodgkinson. David Trotter supplied most of the words. This is the story of a critic’s encounter with work by an artist who had encountered some of his ideas. Although the artist the story describes is an artist and the critic a critic, it’s not always easy to tell exactly where in the art the artist ends and the critic begins, and exactly where in the criticism                                                                                     

the critic ends and the artist begins. What follows is the log of a conversation which has been going on in various ways for about six months, and will be continued. It is the record of images that would not have been made and thoughts that would not have been thought had two individuals not chanced to become conversant.   Techno-primitivism made its first public appearance in an essay I published in the London Review of Books in August 2012 on D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is full-on primitivist.... [Click to read more]

Interview with Darian Leader
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Interview with Darian Leader
Kishani Widyaratna

A practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst, Darian Leader is one of a dying breed. It is no overstatement to say that psychoanalysis is not only out of fashion and widely scorned but largely dismissed as an outdated discipline borne of a personality cult; Leader himself has described analysts today as ‘mutants scavenging after a nuclear holocaust’. What makes his position rarer still is that he is also a celebrated aut... [Click to read more]

Cabbage Butterflies by Ryu Murakami
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Cabbage Butterflies
Ryu Murakami, trans. Ralph McCarthy

The guy looked disappointed when he saw me. My one sales point is that I’m young, but my eyelids are so puffy they look like caterpillars, and my lips are pale and kind of caterpillary too, and so are my fingers and toes, so I’m pretty much caterpillars all over, and the problem was that the guy was fairly young himself. Not as young as me – I’m only 20 – but late twenties at most, which is about the same o... [Click to read more]

Still from The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke
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Haneke's Lessons
R. D'Ambrose

‘Art is there to have a stimulating effect, if it earns its name. You have to be honest, that's the only thing.’—Michael Haneke, in an interview   The voice, now over 70, is usually candid, bumptious; the statements – zealous, with the pang and the patina of a reproach – typically fixed at the high pitch of imperiousness. A choice remark: ‘Why do I rape the viewer? I try to rape him into being refl... [Click to read more]

Ad Tertiam by Saskia Hamilton
[Online Only]

Ad Tertiam
Saskia Hamilton

Rows of pines, planted years ago – so many,were you to count them on your fingers, youwould give up past a hundred span; and paindoesn’t yet know about it, while lording over all other feeling. Must explain these thingssome day. In the meantime, rowsof pines, the quincunx pattern lostin spirals and thickets of lesser branches increasing their reach inexorably. The manspoke of the bees: move the hive five milesa... [Click to read more]

A Rose Among Many Waters 1952 by Jack Butler Yeats 1871-1957
[Online Only]

Flatlands
Saskia Hamilton

Horses and geese in a sodden field.Solitaries with luggage on a wet platform.Postage-stamp house on a bit of land,a copse, a fold, a quadrant of wood,lines of beech, lines of poplar,miniature commentary magnifiedin the glass, winter streaking the window,the train bearing, not bearing the weightwithin. Let this not be thought(one thought to oneself), non-thoughts of passengers on the way forwardbackward through the ho... [Click to read more]

'Crystal Palace', graphite on paper, Lawrence Lek (2013)
[Extract]

Pyramid Schemes: Reading the Shard
Lawrence Lek

If the Shard is a descendant of anything, it is not Manhattan’s skyscrapers, but rather the most British of all architectures: the greenhouse. Appropriately, London’s most forward-thinking contribution to the art of building comes not from architecture butfrom gardening. Joseph Paxton, architect of the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibitionof 1851, was earlier responsible for developing greenhouses at the lands... [Click to read more]

Ron Mueck 'Woman with Sticks' (2008), © Ron Mueck, Courtesy Anthony d'Offay / Hauser & Wirth
[Online Only]

Strangely Ordinary: Ron Mueck's art of...
Anouchka Grose

Since the Stone Age, people have been concerned with the problem of how to represent life. Cave paintings at Lascaux show charging bison with multiple legs that appear to gallop in flickering firelight. Protruding lumps of rock add three-dimensionality to animal forms. The overlapping ‘Crossed Bison’ demonstrate an understanding of perspective. Perhaps even more amazingly, archaeologists now believe they have d... [Click to read more]

Beirut, 1997
[Online Only]

On the Margins
Sean Smith

Sean Smith is an award-winning photographer and filmmaker. His show 'On the Margins' opens 23 May with New Artists at the Dissenter's Chapel in Kensal Green Cemetery.  ... [Click to read more]

Contributors to the Current Issue

Mai-Thu Perret, Edouard Levé, Jan Steyn, Luc Tuymans, Mr Guardianista, Jesse Loncraine, Yves Bonnefoy, Berverley Bie Brahic, Jennifer Hodgson, Patricia Waugh, Talia Chetrit, Peter Stamm, Michael Hofmann, Keston Sutherland, Natalie Ferris, Oli Hazzard, Joe Luna, Lawrence Lek, John Stezaker, Alice Hattrick, James Wilkes

The Editors

Benjamin Eastham is a freelance editor, writer and curator. He also works at Hannah Barry Gallery, London.
Jacques Testard is a freelance editor, writer and translator. In the past he has worked at The Sunday Times, the Paris Review, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

News & Events

  1. PYRAMID SCHEMES BOOK NOW AVAILABLE TO BUY
  2. Pyramid Schemes: A Collaborative Exhibition on 2 May
  3. The White Review Short Story Prize Party: Thursday 25 April
  4. The White Review No. 7 Launch with John Stezaker at Claire de Rouen Books (28 March 2013)
  5. The White Review at Foyles on 24 January

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