Galley Beggar Advent 2023

DECEMBER 18

susan tomaselli’S CULTURAL HIGHLIGHTS

WAS IT DAVID BOWIE - or maybe it was Orson Welles - who said they didn't know anything about art but knew what they liked? I don’t know much about art but I like artists who write. Scanning one of my shelves, I see: Maria Fusco (Give Up Art), Dragana Jurišić (Her Own), Leonora Carrington (The Debutante and Other Stories), Derek Jarman (Modern Nature), Hito Steyerl (Duty Free Art), Chris Kraus (I Love Dick), Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You), (some) Andy Warhol, Katrina Palmer (The Dark Object), Ad Reinhardt (Art as Art), Peter Mendelsund (What We See When We Read), Peter Blegvad (Imagine, Observe, Remember), Leanne Shapton (Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris), Sara Baume (Seven Steeples), and one of my favourite writers of recent times, Kathryn Scanlan. For those who don’t know, Scanlan’s first novel was called Aug 9-Fog, and was five seasonal chapters (Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter) composed of bits of entries from a real woman’s diary that Scanlan’d picked up at an auction. It’s stunning. And matched only by Scanlan’s follow-up, Kick the Latch. This time, it’s transcribed conversations between the author and Iowa-born horse trainer Sonia. So it’s an oral history? No, it’s not an oral history. There is craft in this work, and most definitely authorship. So it’s a novel? Yes, it’s a novel. My novel of the year. One other pick, if I may, would be Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X. We’re staying in the art world with this, except the artist does not exist, never existed. I’m old enough to remember the hoo-ha around William Boyd’s ‘biography’ of abstract expressionist artist Nat Tate. Tate had destroyed most of his work before jumping to death from the Staten Island ferry. Some of the art world - including David Bowie, who published and launched Boyd’s monograph on the artist - had heard of him, but most had not. Biography of X isn’t like that, it’s not intended as a literary hoax. Yes, it’s a novel wrapped around a fictional biography, replete with photographs, artworks and so on, and a blend of real characters and imagined art practice (Bowie records X’s songs etc). And Lacey collapses political and cultural histories of America. It’s a portrait of deception, narcissism and artist truth. It is all artifice. And it feels novel.

SUSAN TOMASELLI is founder and editor of gorse journal. She is former co-editor of 3:AM Magazine and editor at 3:AM Press. She has written for The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Stinging Fly, Bookmunch, CultureNI, and contributed to Little Black Book of Books (Cassell, 2007), The Beat Anthology (Blackheath Books, 2010), and We’ll Never Have Paris (Repeater Books, 2019), amongst others. She edited Dogmatika from 2005 until 2009. She has participated in numerous literary festivals (West Cork Literary Festival, Cúirt, Doolin Writers’ Weekend, Listowel, Mountains to Sea), and provides consultation to arts organisations (Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Dublin, The Arts Foundation UK) and literary publishers. She is currently working on a novel-in-essays, Traces, on memory, trauma, technology, and failure.