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Izabella Scott

IZABELLA SCOTT is an editor at The White Review.



Articles Available Online


Shola von Reinhold’s ‘LOTE’

Book Review

September 2020

Izabella Scott

Book Review

September 2020

To read Shola von Reinhold’s ornate, multi-layered novel LOTE (2020) is to encounter a baroque mind. It tells the story of a queer Black...

Art Review

November 2019

Actually, the Dead are Not Dead

Izabella Scott

Art Review

November 2019

During Bergen Assembly’s opening days, I am asked to attend a number of mock funerals, including one for a...

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 alterglobalisation movements right up to the instigation of Occupy Wall St At the forefront of the magazine’s development has been the filmmaker and author Kalle Lasn   Emerging out of the despondency of post-socialism in the early nineties Adbusters, a ‘journal of the mental environment’, aimed to expose and interrupt the stranglehold advertisers and the media have over our brains, relationships and lives From the start Adbusters rejected the established organisations and aesthetic regimes of the left, instead mixing post-situationist and punk aesthetics with the more everyday visual techniques of advertising and marketing   This rejection, alongside its professional production and distribution methods, established Adbusters as a clear and important voice amongst the nascent social movements rising against the huge global conferences and free-trade agreements that shaped the political landscape for activists in the late 1990s It would be fair to say that the Adbusters magazine itself (as opposed to the Adbusters Media Foundation, which organises ‘social marketing campaigns’) is characterised by a tendency to collage, both in its visuals and its ideological slant There is something for everyone in the magazine: images compete on the page for the attention of the time-strapped consumer-activist, just as punchy slogans and articles appeal for the ideological fealty of the reader ‘We’re trying to sell ideas, rather than products,’ Lasn said in 1996   Its strength – a low bar for ideological investment in the magazine – is also its weakness, with Adbusters often producing contradictory, lightweight and occasionally dangerous and disgusting ‘critiques’ of capitalist and geo-political systems, with frequent recourse to consumer choice and moral indignation Whilst Adbusters has played a significant role in the development of post-socialist aesthetics on the left, its economic critique has frequently lacked depth or clarity   Lasn’s

Contributor

September 2015

Izabella Scott

Contributor

September 2015

IZABELLA SCOTT is an editor at The White Review.

Book Review

August 2019

Jordy Rosenberg’s ‘Confessions of the Fox’

Izabella Scott

Book Review

August 2019

It’s hot as fuck, said the friend who handed me Confessions of the Fox, a faux-memoir set in eighteenth-century...

Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Echo Chamber

Art Review

November 2017

Izabella Scott

Art Review

November 2017

A lattice of diamonds and crosses, painted onto a 21-metre long wall at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, scatters my gaze. Artist Navine G....
Hot Rocks

feature

November 2016

Izabella Scott

feature

November 2016

‘We have received around 150 of them,’ Massimo Osanna tells me, as we peer into four small crates stuffed full of dusty freezer bags....
False shadows

Art

August 2016

Izabella Scott

Art

August 2016

The ‘beautiful disorder’ of the Forbidden City and the Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfection and Light) was first noted by the Jesuit painter Jean Denis...

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Interview

January 2016

Interview with Tor Ulven

Cecilie Schram Hoel

Alf van der Hagen

TR. Benjamin Mier-Cruz

Interview

January 2016

Tor Ulven gave this interview, his last, a year and a half before he died, leaving behind a language...

feature

Issue No. 7

Comment is Fraught: A Polemic

Mr Guardianista

feature

Issue No. 7

When not listening to the phone messages of recently deceased children or smearing those killed in stadium disasters, journalists...

feature

Issue No. 11

Literature in a Distracted Era

Adam Thirlwell

feature

Issue No. 11

There are two categories in the literary system I’d like to celebrate at high speed: the lonely writer, and...

 

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