Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through
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- USD 16.99
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- USD 16.99
Descripción editorial
W. G. Sebald meets Maggie Nelson in an autobiographical narrative of embodiment, visual art, history, and loss.
How do the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art? How does art affect our relationship to our bodies? T Fleischmann uses Felix Gonzáles-Torres’s artworks—piles of candy, stacks of paper, puzzles—as a path through questions of love and loss, violence and rejuvenation, gender and sexuality.
From the back porches of Buffalo, to the galleries of New York and L.A., to farmhouses of rural Tennessee, the artworks act as still points, sites for reflection situated in lived experience. Fleischmann combines serious engagement with warmth and clarity of prose, reveling in the experiences and pleasures of art and the body, identity and community.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fleischmann (Syzygy Beauty: An Essay) weaves together art criticism, poetry, and memoir in this introspective and poignant book-length essay. It circles around the interactive art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, providing both an homage to the late artist and an exploration of such issues as power, desire, and activism. Fleischmann writes that Gonzalez-Torres's "work does not simply endure, but rather replenishes itself, proliferating freedom, grace, and change." Freedom, grace, and change are themes Fleischmann (who prefers they/them pronouns) examines in their own life as they transition through genders and traverse a range of landscapes, from rural Tennessee to Berlin, along the way reconnecting with lovers, making art with friends, and searching for a dynamic understanding of bodies and identity that transcends traditional labels. Fleischmann also writes about taking hormones and moving from gay culture into a more gender queer scene. Throughout the book, Fleischmann articulates the power in finally becoming visible in a world hostile to gender fluidity, recalling that previously, "I never knew people like me existed, so I never imagined myself next to someone or not." Their remark that between "the epistolary or the journal, I try to have each at once" eloquently summarizes the form of a perceptive and compassionate narrative that beautifully breaks with the limits of genre and gender.
