'Animalinside' by Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann

Krasznahorkai was provoked into writing a piece of prose after receiving one of Neumann’s remarkable artworks, and Neumann responded by producing 13 further artworks for which Krasznahorkai then wrote texts. Both texts and artworks explore the interplay between impulse and constraint and the unbearable ‘tautening’ that results for an archetypal doglike creature that is both menacing and abject. As with this creature, Krasznahorkai’s amazing sentences flex and tauten, repeating and transforming themselves, moving from third to first person and back, worrying at the bounds of their meaning and straining both to express and to destroy their referents. Krasznahorkai is a master of the comma, and this short work, with its incantatory nihilism and centrifugal pain and savagery, rewards many readings.

(December 2013)