“Transmigration of the soul does not happen after
but during a life.” Nootebaum wrote his 33 texts in response to a series of
striking, raw, unsettling images drawn by Neumann in charcoal and orange paint
on brown paper bags. I ordered this book after being impressed by Neumann’s
artwork in Animalinside, his collaboration with writer Lazlo
Krasnahorkai. Nootebaum’s texts are like dreams or memories, evanescent, full of
significance without consequence and transgressing the borders of
identity.
(December 2014)
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.
