No Medium

by Craig Dworkin

Close readings of ostensibly blank worksfrom unprinted pages to silent musicthat point to a new understanding of media.

Genres: Art

228 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Leif · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am in love with Craig Dworkin's body (of critical writing). The "Further Listening" section alone is worth the price of admission here, as is the half-sardonic, half-in love tone of criticism. See, for example, this entry:

Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse: Dark Night of the Soul (self-released, 2009). Brian Burton and Mark Linkous collaborated with over a dozen singers for a concept album of trippy, moody self-regard. Fortunately, a dispute with EMI kept the music from being included in this release, which instead offered a booklet bloated to over one-hundred hard-backed pages of David Lynch photographs and a recordable disc with the explanation: "For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will." Sadly, the dispute was quickly resolved and the songs were officially released the following year. Not to be confused with a Jarrod Fowler project.

Oh, and there's plenty of able, cutting-edge criticism that precedes this stuff too. Just great.

[Chris Cook · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has an interesting, if somewhat vapid, premise. Dworkin takes a couple hundred pages to do close readings on blank books. This seems to me to be much ado about nothing. The best part is the last chapter, where he steals from the archives of WPRB (a radio station where I used to work) to discuss silent recordings. In all, however, I would say I'll continue to write books with actual words in them, thanks anyway.

[Mills College Library]

701.8 D9934 2013