Diana Hamilton Reviews Two New Books by Kate Zambreno

Diana Hamilton reviews Kate Zambreno's two new books, Screen Tests: Stories and Other Writing (HarperCollins, 2019), and Appendix Project: Talks and Essays (Semiotext(e), 2019), for Frieze. "In both of her new books, Zambreno reflects on the dual urges to make beloved objects and to be loved oneself – to be beautiful and well-reviewed – even when the aesthetic and political canons to which you respond reject both of these desires," writes Hamilton. More:

In a ‘screen test’ on (and at times addressed to) Acker, she searches for a word for ‘the parasitism of middlebrow art and literature that steals from interesting and radical art but in the process strips it of its ferality, its political urgency, its queerness, its threat.’ When she writes, in an essay loosely on David Markson’s experimental novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), that ‘this sort of heavily referential writing is difficult for readers, I’ve been told,’ she dryly refuses to participate in said parasitism by allowing her references to take control over her writing rather than letting the latter feed off the former. In Antoine Compagnon’s book on citationality, La seconde main (Second Hand, 1979; reissued 2016), he describes a quote as functioning like a transplanted organ: there’s a risk of it being rejected by the body of the citing text. For Zambreno, the risk is inverted. She doesn’t want her body to successfully assimilate a quote. Instead, constant and recurring references – to Warhol’s screen tests, Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970), ‘layers and layers of appropriation’, Acker, et al. – are protective against the gross finality of cohesion.

Given its title, it’s not surprising that Screen Tests is also interested in fame. But I think the interest also betrays an affinity for shortcuts to meaning...

Find the full review at Frieze.