/lit/ - Literature

>>19033170

Why have you not read the art book of the year yet? (Emily Segal who?)

>Anti-ligature rooms are designed to protect the inhabitants from themselves. Cells that work to prevent us from any agency in the biggest, grandest sense. A room full of paintings that won't let you kill yourself. Anti-Ligature Rooms by Contemporary Art Writing Daily (an author project since 2014) is an attempt to retexturize a world – a world streamlining a smoother digestion of us, of our resources and our art. Fear for an art that is affective palliative to an experience that's just generally bad.

>The book consists of seven sections, six of which are numbered rooms, riffing on the title, focusing on themes like “cold” or “content.” What these texts offer is less a series of critical theses than the manifestation of a mood; a mood defined, paradoxically, by anxiety about the absence of a mood: of feeling, affect, and emotion. “In these rooms everything slants, rounds, droops. Everything is sloughing. You can’t suspend. Fear for lumps inside us, unchecked growth, a malignancy, ‘matter out of place’ ‘the unchecked diversities that proliferate in the dump.’ Heavy concentrations of microplastics in the great Pacific beverage. In parts per million, in tumours, in cysts. Stuff in the concerns.” These texts are interspersed with Google Ngram visualizations tracking the frequency of online searches for “depression treatment” or “cuckolding,” alongside searches for “anhedonia.” This is the book’s core complaint: the “loss of affect, of connection” against which CAWD offers a “bedroom fantasy of alleviating our critical stagnation, numbness, anhedonia.” There is something deeply and touchingly Romantic about this book. It assumes, like Coleridge and Baudelaire, that states of “mental illness” such as anhedonia offer insights into the limitations of culture and society. It rails against the destruction of the environment by plastic, the corruption of eroticism by pornography, and the marginalization of art by capitalism.