The White Review

Interviews

[Featured Article]

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no overstatement to say that psychoanalysis is not only out of fashion and widely scorned but largely dismissed as an outdated discipline borne of a personality cult; Leader himself has described analysts today as ‘mutants scavenging after a nuclear holocaust’.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 author; in the course of eight books Leader has established himself as an elegant and erudite voice of Lacanian theory in academic yet popular books commenting on love, the sexes, the history of psychoanalysis, the mind and the body.                                                                                     

Much fêted by the artworld he has also written numerous essays on the work of leading British artists such as Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn – many of whom he counts as friends – and is often presented ‘in conversation’ with artists.   A remarkable feature of Leader’s writing is the seeming ease with which he can make complex and strange psychoanalytic concepts accessible to a general audience. This arises in part from the clarity of his prose but also from his ability to illus ... [Click to read more]

dismantledcabaret
[Full Article]

Interview with Keston Sutherland
Natalie Ferris

Said by the New Statesman to be ‘at the forefront of the experimental movement in contemporary British poetry’, Keston Sutherland’s poetic and critical work is a headrush. High on its own sensitivity, his writings explode the familiar modes of poetry, fusing the lyric tradition with the high-octane languages of protest, stock market exchange and information technology, with the individuated vocabularies of bioc... [Click to read more]

childishhats1
[Online Only]

Interview with Billy Childish
José da Silva

Billy Childish is a polymath with a prodigious output in painting, music and writing amongst other activities. Articles and interviews often reference biographical details of a tumultuous upbringing gleaned from his novels, fashionable bands that have cited him as an influence, and a famous artist ex-girlfriend. His prominent facial hair, being expelled from art school, former alcoholism, dyslexia, a tendency to rub ... [Click to read more]

calcutta
[Online Only]

Interview with Amit Chaudhuri
Anita Sethi

Think of the long trip home.  Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?  Where should we be today?  ‘Questions of Travel’ by Elizabeth Bishop.   The paradoxical pull between home and elsewhere forms the poignant tension at the heart of Amit Chaudhuri’s new book Calcutta: Two Years in the City. Indeed, it is a conflict with which Chaudhuri has grappled throughout all of his work. The writ... [Click to read more]

Nico and Andy Warhol as Batman and Robin
[Online Only]

Interview with Wayne Koestenbaum
Charlie Fox

Ekphrasis. (Love the ‘k’ in ekphrasis, like the ‘k’ in Elektra.) I dig Joseph Cornell’s blue anything: his blues, like Warhol’s (Blue Liz as Cleopatra, Blow [blew?] Job), declare melancholy as the new optimism: i.e., Cornell asks, as does Warhol, that we plunge deeply into our fantasies, at risk of psychosis, to find the kingdom of the inner fold, Artaud’s land, the principality of the ‘inner Satan’... [Click to read more]

Kalle Lasn
[Online Only]

Interview with Kalle Lasn
Huw Lemmey

Reinventing a political culture is a difficult task to set oneself; political aesthetics develop alongside political movements, and tracing the direct influence of any one group is a bold claim. If one group can be said to have had any serious influence on the culture of activism in the last twenty years, however, it is Adbusters – a glossy Canadian magazine which has played an influential role in the altergloba... [Click to read more]

Viktor Timofeev, 'me2' (detail)
[Extract]

Interview with China Miéville
Benjamin Eastham

It is a cliché to say that a writer’s work resists classification. It is ironic then that China Miéville, among the most ambitious, imaginative and unconventional novelists at work in the world today, should so actively endorse his own writing’s categorisation by genre. A three-time winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, Miéville has since the publication of his début nov... [Click to read more]

detail - edmund de waal - a thousand hours
[Extract]

Interview with Edmund de Waal
Emmeline Francis

As we speak, Edmund de Waal, ceramicist and writer, moves his palms continually over the surface of the trestle table in his studio. he makes wide, flat waves in circular motions, as though he were smoothing it or wiping it clean. At times his hands curl into knots that knead the top of the wood. he is certainly emphatic – and there are tensions behind much of what he says; he is both strained by and earnest in hi... [Click to read more]

Tahrir Square, March 2011
[Extract]

Interview with Ahdaf Soueif
Jacques Testard

In 1999, Ahdaf Soueif’s second novel, The Map of Love, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, eventually losing out to JM Coetzee’s Disgrace. The next year, the Guardian commissioned her to travel to Palestine – her first visit – and write about her experiences of a people increasingly marginalised and oppressed by the Israeli state. Thus began a decade-long crusade in cultural activism, in the shadow of her f... [Click to read more]

Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds
[Online Only]

Interview with Alison Klayman on...
Shepherd Laughlin

  Until his arrest in Beijing on 3 April as he boarded a plane to Hong Kong, Ai Weiwei was merely an internationally acclaimed artist and public figure, best known in Britain for his work ‘Sunflower Seeds’, a rare critical success for an installation in the Tate Modern’s challenging Turbine Hall. Today, he is a household name. Even as his career reaches new heights, the prolific tweeter (60,129 entries at t... [Click to read more]

Photographed by Shannon Tofts, 2011
[Online Only]

Interview with Cornelia Parker
Lowenna Waters

Cornelia Parker has over the past twenty years carved out a reputation as one of Britain's most respected sculptors and installation artists. Her work deals with themes of destruction, metamorphosis and the space between objects in the world. Thirty Pieces of Silver, currently showing at York St Mary's Church, consists of trophies, teapots, candlesticks, cigarette cases, musical instruments, spoons and forks steamr... [Click to read more]

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