Ben Eastham on Reba Maybury and Lucy McKenzie’s Pervert or Detective?, edited by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen with an afterword by Susan Finlay, was published by no place press in 2025. It accompanied an exhibition on view at Ca’Buccari, Venice. (e-flux)
When used to camouflage a deeper conservatism, which is so often the function of cliché, the phrasing reassures readers that their engagement with the work of art in question affirms their opposition to the injustice they might recently have observed in the world, might even be feeling guilty about. Aesthetic experience is reconciled with ethical principle, pleasure equated with virtue, the beautiful made consistent with the good.
In the conversation at the heart of this book, [the] artists … dismantle this comforting delusion.
That “perversion” … carries the implication of a desire that cannot be subordinated to any ethical framework.
Art might in turn alert us to the “violence in which we live,” as McKenzie puts it, and lead us to establish creative spaces—subcultures—outside of those strictures.
By decoupling art from received morality, they reclaim it as an arena in which hierarchies and social norms can be brought into question without repercussion.
Only by expressing our unconscious desires and then measuring them against abstract ideals of the good can we approach self-knowledge and establish a workable politics.
The right to make my dreams come true,
I ask, nay, I demand of life,
Nor shall fate’s deadly contraband
Impede my steps, nor countermand;
Too long my heart against the ground
Has beat the dusty years around,
And now at length I rise! I wake!
And stride into the morning break!
Calling Dreams, Georgia Douglas Johnson
