No Document

March 21, 2022
Critic Crawford (Hole’s Live Through This) blends artistic analysis and pensive prose in this dreamy meditation on creation, memory, and loss. Simultaneously an elegy addressed to her late artistic collaborator Ned Sevil and a call to radical action to “keep moving, mourning, making, joining,” Crawford’s work is organized without chapter breaks or titles as she shares memories of Sevil, recounting their time at art school together and his experience with cystic fibrosis, while also reflecting on such works of art as the paintings of Franz Marc, a German painter drafted in WWI, and the films of Georges Franju, who served in the military in Algeria. Crawford describes her own political actions—going to Melbourne for a protest against a meeting of the World Economic Forum and protesting “in solidarity with asylum seekers being held on Manus Island”—and ponders art and creation. Her musings are poignant; she reflects that “art is not precious, neither is politics, we wrote, and we meant (I think we meant) that neither thing should be remote from the texture of our lives or out of reach of our making.” Politically engaged artists will delight in these powerful considerations.

February 17, 2021
In this arresting book, Anwen Crawford reckons with the death of a close friend and comrade. Seeking a language suitable for grief, Crawford stitches together material from a wide range of sources in a poetic and allusive manner reminiscent of Susan Howe or perhaps a miniature Arcades Project. But this is no insular work of autobiography. Crawford’s meditations on the lost works of the German expressionist painter Franz Marc are exemplary of the book’s political and historical dimensions: though some of Marc’s key paintings were never recovered after their Nazi confiscation, the power they continue to exercise over Crawford’s imagination resonates with the haunting memories of her lost friend. Such ghostly presences are political and historical: No Document is structured around a sequence of motifs of leftist despair, from the slaughter of the Paris Communards to CIA-backed coups and abductions. But the restorative work of remembering—be it protests Crawford attended with her lost friend, or the life of a girl who drowned while seeking refuge in Australia—is a source of hope. Crawford’s imaginative use of the white space around the text, which is often broken up with stark lines and squares, buttresses this effort to think beyond borders—most of all those separating life and death. A deeply moving anatomy of personal and political melancholy, No Document speaks as directly to the dead as it does to its reader. Crawford even includes a PO box address at the end, perhaps inviting that reader to speak back. Joshua Barnes is a writer and bookseller in Melbourne.