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J. S. Tennant
J.S. Tennant is a contributing editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


Luis Goytisolo’s ‘Recounting’

Book Review

March 2018

J. S. Tennant

Book Review

March 2018

In June last year the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo (interviewed in The White Review in 2014) died in Marrakesh, his home for decades. While his reputation never waned...

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Issue No. 20

From a Cuban Notebook

J. S. Tennant

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Issue No. 20

Beneath the rain, beneath the smell, beneath all that is a reality a people makes and unmakes itself leaving...

‘I produce awkward objects,’ the sculptor Alina Szapocznikow wrote in 1972 ‘Of all the manifestations of the ephemeral, the human body is the most vulnerable, the only source of all joy, all suffering and all truth’ Awkward, precarious, vulnerable bodies are as crucial to an understanding of Szapocznikow’s oeuvre as they are to her biography As a result, her life and work are often viewed as inseparable, a conflation that poses an interesting predicament regarding the extent to which one should read an artist’s work through the lens of their personal experience   Born into a Jewish intellectual family in Kalisz, Poland in 1926, Szapocznikow was ghettoised by the Nazis during her teenage years, and sent to concentration camps including Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz After the war, she trained as a sculptor in both Prague and Paris, and returned to Poland in 1951, where she produced a number of large-scale public commissions and exhibitions, including The Climbing (1959), a monument to those who died in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising In 1963, she moved back to Paris, where she remained until her death from breast cancer in 1973, aged 46   Despite having been an influential and well-known artist in Poland since the 1950s, until relatively recently Szapocznikow has remained internationally obscure The trajectory of her marginalisation and rehabilitation is familiar: the double bind of being both Polish and a woman meant she was overlooked by the Western and male-centric gatekeepers of art history, only to be celebrated post mortem Like many women artists who have died young or suffered unfortunate circumstances, such as Ana Mendieta or Francesca Woodman, there is a tendency to view Szapocznikow’s work through her life story, so that her sculptures and drawings become illustrations of this history Her experiences of war and proximity to death undoubtedly influenced her work – and are hard, if not impossible, to untangle from it But to focus solely on biography runs the risk of disregarding her involvement with avant-garde developments: the expansion of sculpture as a non-figurative form, the unconventional use of construction materials (cement, latex, polyester resin, and polyurethane foam), and an

Contributor

August 2014

J. S. Tennant

Contributor

August 2014

J.S. Tennant is a contributing editor at The White Review.

Interview with Juan Goytisolo

Interview

November 2014

J. S. Tennant

Interview

November 2014

Juan Goytisolo is one of Spain’s leading writers, but one with a fraught relationship with his home country, to put it mildly. The Mexican novelist Carlos...

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Issue No. 1

(Un)timely considerations on old and current issues

Donatien Grau

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Issue No. 1

Criticism has not been doing well lately. The London Review of Books, Europe’s biggest-selling literary publication, would no longer...

poetry

September 2016

Two Poems

Sun Yung Shin

poetry

September 2016

  Autoclonography   for performance   In 1998, scientists in South Korea claimed to have successfully cloned a human...

fiction

May 2015

A History of Money

Alan Pauls

TR. Ellie Robins

fiction

May 2015

He hasn’t yet turned fifteen when he sees his first dead person in the flesh. He’s somewhat astonished that...

 

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