Tracklist
| A | Mark Fisher On The Poor And The Proletariat |
| B | Sally O’Reilly On Wine And Milk |
Notes
Sally O’Reilly is a writer, contributing regularly to many art andculture publications. Her book The Body in Contemporary Art was published by Thames & Hudson in 2009. She has also curated and produced numerous performative events and was writer in residence at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (2010–11).
Mark Fisher is the author of Capitalist Realism (Zer0, 2009).
His writing regularly appears in frieze, The Wire, Film Quarterly
and Sight and Sound. He teaches at the University of East
London, the City Literary Institute and Goldsmiths, University
of London.
Co-published by CT Editions and Entr’acte.
First edition of 100 copies.
The first offering in a new series, Monologues features
two people presenting 15-minutes soliloquies on a topic
chosen from a pre-selected list, the results distributed
by way of vacuum-sealed cassette tapes. While the
speakers must deliver a perhaps awkward performance
before a microphone, the listener must go to the trouble
of finding a means to access this obsolete format.
Theorist Mark Fisher fidgets around his topic, The Poor
and the Proletariat, delivering a back-and-forth rhetoric,
and seeking, through the lens of his Capitalist Realism
project and book, a differentiation between the two
labels.
While Fisher appears to be ad-libbing a lecture, O’Reilly
invests in the performative possibilities of the audio
essay, challenging herself to alternate sips of milk and
white wine (her topics), the first of which apparently
curdles on the palate. In between, O’Reilly delivers
a humourous potted art-history lesson on the symbol-
ism of milk, noting its continual appearance in photo-
graphy, which she delivers to the soundtrack of a
William Wegman film, Drinking Milk , playing in
the background. But despite all that, and the obvious
talent of the contributors, the conceit of the medium
is never quite explained by the content.
