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Kevin Brazil
Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Art Review, art-agenda, Studio International, and elsewhere. He is writing a book about queer happiness.

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Interview with Sianne Ngai

Interview

October 2020

Kevin Brazil

Interview

October 2020

Over the past fifteen years, Sianne Ngai has created a taxonomy of the aesthetic features of contemporary capitalism: the emotions it provokes, the judgements...

Essay

Issue No. 28

Fear of a Gay Planet

Kevin Brazil

Essay

Issue No. 28

In Robert Ferro’s 1988 novel Second Son, Mark Valerian suffers from an unnamed illness afflicting gay men, spread by...

The German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger has on three different occasions put the camera aside and directed for the theatre, each time another a play by Nobel Prize laureate Elfriede Jelinek In 2010 they embarked on another kind of collaboration as Jelinek began contributing to the dialogues in the screenplay of Ottinger’s film project Die Blutgräfin (The Blood Countess) While the reasons for each artist to address undeath are as varied or polymorphous as the range and style of their oeuvres, a direct connection in Jelinek’s case to her 1995 ‘Gothic novel’ The Children of the Dead (Die Kinder der Toten) is doubled by her own conviction, ever since its publication, that this work was her masterpiece, her posthumously-addressed legacy And yet it was received by its first readership as a timely diagnostic encounter with the rise of right-wing politics in Austria   In allegorical work, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, the first layer of figuration and exegesis is wrapped around topical significance The Children of the Dead allegorises prefab Austria, in its own media reflection and echo, as a new youth culture that doesn’t need mass media now that it gets around as zombieism Against the reign of prosperous postmodernity in Austria since the mid-1980s, Jelinek’s novel is set on an uncanny continuity, symptomatised as zombie epidemic, with the postwar Austrian ego idyll of decontextualised fascism and denial of the Holocaust dead   ‘I Was There’ when the post-war era lingered, malingered on An excellent document of Vienna at the time I spent a year there is Valie Export’s movie Unsichtbare Gegner (Invisible Adversaries) It was the season right before the antifreeze content of Austrian wine was disclosed [Editor’s Note: a 1985 scandal in which it was revealed that some Austrian vineyards had been adulterating their product with diethylene glycol] In the late afternoon on a daily basis you encountered at every turn individuals throwing up and passing out in the streets Behind the counter at the local post office (where older women, so-called war widows, would ask for stamps for ‘Groß Deutschland’) sat a dwarf whose object of contemplation, the latest calculator gadget, was handcuffed to his wrist To register at

Contributor

March 2018

Kevin Brazil

Contributor

March 2018

Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London...

Interview with Terre Thaemlitz

Interview

March 2018

Kevin Brazil

Interview

March 2018

In the first room of Terre Thaemlitz’s 2017 exhibition ‘INTERSTICES’, at Auto Italia in London, columns of white text ran across one wall. Thaemlitz...

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Interview

May 2015

Interview with Maggie Nelson

Jess Cotton

Interview

May 2015

Nothing, it seems, falls outside Maggie Nelson’s field of inquiry. The author of four books of poetry and five...

Prize Entry

April 2017

Birch

Thomas Chadwick

Prize Entry

April 2017

1997   Business boomed. Optimism was shooting up everywhere and bursting into flower. Music was jocular. Sport was effusive....

Art

March 2015

Tropenkoller

Lothar Hempel

Art

March 2015

Taking the title Tropenkoller (Tropical Madness), German artist Lothar Hempel’s latest exhibition at Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London (Feb 27-Mar...

 

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