Brian Dillon

Essayism

An elegant work of literary criticism from the author of ESSAYISM.

Suppose a Sentence

In Affinities, Brian Dillon explores images and artists he is drawn to or loves, and tries to analyze the attraction. What do we mean when we claim affinity with an object or picture, or say that affinities exist (not only formal) between such things? What do feelings of affinity imply about individual or collective experience of art, and of the world? The word 'affinity' used to mean an attraction of opposites, between chemical elements. In his Elective Affinities, Goethe used the idea to think about the orbits and collisions of love. In the poetry and essays of Baudelaire, the writings of Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg, the art of Tacita Dean and Moyra Davey, a partly buried history of affinity can be found. Affinities is a critical and personal study of a sensation that is not exactly taste, desire, or allyship, but has aspects of all. Approaching this subject via discrete examples, this book is first of all about images - mostly photographs - that have stayed with the author over many years, or grown in significance during months of pandemic isolation, when the visual field had shrunk. Some of these are historical works by artists such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Dora Maar, Claude Cahun, Samuel Beckett and Andy Warhol. Others are more or less obscure scientific or vernacular images: sea creatures, migraine auras, astronomical illustrations derived from dreams. Also family photographs, film stills, records of atomic ruin. And contemporary art by Rinko Kawauchi, Susan Hiller and John Stezaker. Written as a series of linked essays, interwoven with a reflection on affinity itself, Affinities completes a trilogy, with Essayism and Suppose a Sentence, about the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking.

Affinities

A lucid and delicate exploration of memory and grief from the author of Essayism.

In the Dark Room

Nina Katchadourian

Assembled and photographed in various private homes, libraries, and museums, the conceptual artist presents her stacks or "clusters" of books exhibiting creative and playful expressions formed with their titles.

Sorted Books

A Journey in Memory

Tormented Hopeis a book about mind and body, fear and hope, illness and imagination. It explores, in the stories of nine individuals, the relationship between mind and body as it is mediated by the experience, or simply the terror, of being ill. And in an intimate investigation of those nine lives, it shows how the mind can make a prison of the body, by distorting our sense of ourselves as physical beings. Healthy or unhealthy, robust or failing, ignored or obsessed over, our bodies respond daily to our shifting state of mind, whether we are aware of the process or not. This book is about an especially dramatic instance of that relationship- the mind's invention of physical disease. Through his witty, entertaining and often moving examinations of the lives of its nine subjects - James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Marcel Proust, Alice James, Glenn Gould andAndy Warhol - Brian Dillon brilliantly unravels the tortuous connections between real and imagined illness, irrational fear and rational concern, anxiety and imagination, the mind's aches and the body's ideas.

Nine Hypochondriac Lives

Tormented Hope

Ruins is one of a series documenting major themes and ideas in contemporary art.

Ruins

Marina Warner

Roger Malbert

Artists featured include Tacita Dean, Katie Paterson, Nina Canell, Pablo Bronstein, Charles Le Brun, Gerard Byrne, Phillip Henry Gosse, John Dee, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Corinne May Botz, Gunda Forster, Matt Mullican, Toril Johannessen, Anna Atkins, Nina Katchadourian, Laurent Grasso, Salvatore Arancio, Aurelien Froment, Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, and the taxidermy of Thomas Grunfeld.

Art and the Pleasures of Knowing

Curiosity

Este libro parte de una propuesta muy singular. El autor reúne frases –no necesariamente las más célebres ni las más trascendentales- de veintisiete escritores –desde Shakespeare a algunos actuales– y cada una de ellas da pie a un breve, sagaz e inteligente ensayo. El arranque shakespeariano es sorprendente: la frase elegida es «Oh, oh, oh, oh». Siguen otras de John Donne sobre la mentira, sir Thomas Browne sobre el tiempo, de Quincey sobre el daguerrotipo, Charlotte Brontë sobre las medicinas y el dolor, George Eliot sobre la mirada, uno de los juegos verbales de Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf sobre la enfermedad, una respuesta de James Baldwin a Norman Mailer, un pie de foto escrito por Joan Didion, un comentario de Roland Barthes sobre las anguilas en la gastronomía japonesa, una reflexión de Anne Carson a partir de Flaubert... El resultado es un derroche de talento e ingenio, una pirueta literaria, un ejercicio de erudición, un reto intelectual, un deslumbrante juego experimental, una reflexión sobre el poder de las palabras y un muy estimulante conjunto de jugosos ensayos.

Imaginemos una frase

The prolific art critic and writer Brian Dillon is back with his fifth book in as many

Essays

Objects in this Mirror

Ruin Lust offers a guide to the mournful, thrilling, comic, and perverse uses of ruins in art from the 17th century to the present day. This book, which accompanied a major Tate Britain exhibition, includes more than 100 works by artists such as J. M. W Turner, John Constable, John Martin, Eduardo Paolozzi, Paul Nash, and Rachel Whiteread. Beginning in the midst of the craze that sent artists, writers, architects, and tourists in search of ruins and picturesque landscapes in the 18th century, it shows how ruins have continued to be a source of visual and emo­tional fascination at particular historical moments. Thoroughly illustrated, Ruin Lust explores how ruin has become a way of thinking about art itself and its connection to both the past and the future.

Ruin Lust

Tormented Hope is a book about mind and body, fear and hope, illness and imagination. It explores, in the stories of nine individuals, the relationship between mind and body as it is mediated by the experience, or simply the terror, of being ill. And in an intimate investigation of those nine lives, it shows how the mind can make a prison of the body, by distorting our sense of ourselves as physical beings. Brian Dillon, whose brilliant debut In the Dark Room established him as an uncommonly intelligent and fluent explorer of the realm where ideas and emotions overlap, looks at nine prominent hypochondriacs - James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol - and what their lives tell us about the way the mind works with, and against, the body. His findings are stimulating and surprising, and the stories he tells are often moving, sometimes hilarious, and always gripping.

La paura di essere malati, l’irrazionale aspirazione di avere un corpo perfettamente sano e funzionante: insomma, l’ipocondria, malattia antica e strisciante di cui in qualche modo soffriamo tutti. Come Olivia Laing in Città sola, Brian Dillon racconta un tratto fondamentale del nostro essere umani attraverso gli artisti e le loro creazioni, descrivendo l’emarginazione provocata dall’ipocondria con i ritratti di nove scrittori, musicisti,scienziati che ne hanno sofferto.I dettagliatissimi registri dei sintomi tenuti da Charles Darwin, la maniacale cosmesi con cui Andy Warhol nascondeva le imperfezioni del suo corpo: e se l’ipocondria fosse effetto di una sensibilità fuori dal comune? Un libro brillante e profondo, alla scoperta di una delle paure più radicate nella mente umana.

Vite di nove ipocondriaci eccellenti

Philip Ó Ceallaigh

Short stories from Irishman who has lived far afield, described as "screamingly funny and beautifully crafted"

Sanctuary is a fiction set in the ruins of a Modernist building on the outskirts of a city in Northern Europe. The structure, a Catholic seminary built in the 1960s and abandoned twenty years later, embodies the failure of certain ambitions: architectural, civic, and spiritual. But it is the site too of a more recent disappearance. A young artist, intent on exploring the complex and its history, has gone missing among the wreckage. Months later his lover visits the place, unsure what she is looking for, and finds herself drawn into the strange nexus of energies and memories that persist there. Sanctuary is a story about what survives--of bodies, ideas, objects and the artistic or literary forms that might describe them--in the wake of catastrophe. Invoking key works of the last century--the fiction of Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet, the art of Robert Smithson, the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Marker and Andrei Tarkovsky--it maps a small but resonant portion of the ruins of the recent past. Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. He is the UK editor of Cabinet magazine and AHRC Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Kent. He is the author of Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin, 2009) and a memoir, In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005). His writing appears regularly in such publications as frieze, Artforum, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the Wire. He lives in Canterbury.

Sanctuary

Hayward Gallery

Isobel Harbison

Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art

Bluecoat Gallery

An illustrated catalogue that features work by international artists who have a diverse and interesting approach to drawing. It accompanies the Hayward Touring exhibition to MIMA, Middlesbrough (opening February 2009), The Bluecoat, Liverpool (May), Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery (September) and Fruitmarket, Edinburgh (November).Features work by artists including Jan Albers, Michael Borremans, Marc Brandenburg, Fernando Bryce, Kate Davis, Monika Grzymala, David Haines, Kim Hiorthoy, Garrett Phelan, Naoyuki Tsuji and Sandra Vasquez de la Horra.

Attitudes in Drawing

The End of the Line

Blackstone's Emergency Planning, Crisis, and Disaster Management is a practical guide for those involved in all aspects of emergency preparedness, resilience, and response. Primarily focused on the requirements of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, it has been developed from the highly regarded Emergency Planning Officers' Handbook. The complete toolkit for anyone involved in emergency planning, business continuity, and resilience management, this must-have guide offers a comprehensive, chronological guide to each stage of emergency planning, from creating a plan or exercise through to setting up a control room and debriefing for future improvement and development. There is also full coverage of how the emergency response is managed by each of the main agencies involved, helping you to gain a greater understanding of what to expect from each agency and the individuals participating, so they can be better integrated into an exercise or plan. Overviews at the start of each chapter, key point and top tip boxes, as well as tasks and flowcharts provide you with the complete reference, whether you are beginning your emergency planning or simply need to refresh your memory as you initiate an exercise.

Blackstone's Emergency Planning, Crisis, and Disaster Management

A Dark and Quiet Place accompanies a new moving image work of the same name by Australian artist David Noonan (born 1969). Both the film and the book present a meditation on performance, its associated apparatus and the physical and imaginary domains they inhabit. That this is Noonan's first film work in over a decade is significant, as his practice since has frequently referenced both the material qualities of film and projection, and an ongoing interest in the slippages between figuration and pure abstraction. For the book, the artist has worked closely with award-winning design studio A Practice for Everyday Life to disassemble the film work back into a rhythmic sequence of still images, employing both the language of design and Noonan's characteristic strategies of layering and manipulation. In his response to the work, celebrated author Brian Dillon presents a piece of fiction at once speculative and rigorously rational, in which geometric shapes become performers, diagrammatic grids become complex stage sets, and the supremacy of the body is thrown into doubt.

Brian Dillon

About

Books

Join the club