INHERENT MADNESS - Book Review

As reviewed by Mikkel Bruun Zangenberg, Literary Critic at Politiken Denmark
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Univ. of Copenhagen, currently Lecturer in Danish Language and Culture at the University of Kent, UK


On 500Milligrammes’ INHERENT MADNESS, May 2016

"Though this be madness, yet there’s method in’t."

Trite, overly famous words, and yet, at the first encounter with 500Milligrammes’ and Artisan Books’ magnificent, disturbing INHERENT MADNESS, the words of Polonius spring to mind.

INHERENT MADNESS is a solid, cloth-covered, black, sombre block of words and images. It veers wildly and yet coolly between a layering and constellation of registers: A cosmological note, in the beginning there was no word, but merely flux and confluence, an explosion “outwards into emptiness”, and it’s a note that terminates in (never-ending) “ontological autometamorphosis”, i.e. matter and being that changes itself by itself.

Within this grand, blinking scale, a jagged narrative of love and desire is inserted, we get cut-outs of pornographic images, carefully planted on a wood-stump, or on damp earth, and a nameless narrator who tells of a drama of jealousy at “61A Charrington Gardens”. A man, a tennis-player for whom things have gone downhill, has been kept by a woman, who deserts him for an old school-friend. This in itself banal drama immediately launches a very sophisticated set of fragmented strategies: there is a “Lesson 5” on knifework, that details the minutiae on the construction and use of the ideal dagger; there is consistent allusion to a Greek, mythological backdrop (“Avoid all the gods except Aphrodite/The Golden Aphrodite”), there is the glaring, black-and-white photograph of a gun, there is a “Lesson 19” on how to self-destruct, a highly detailed listing of lethal poisons, titled “Führe Mich”, and even a layer of spies and agents, accompanied by proper methods of assassination, is introduced as well.

In-between are freezing images of urban landscapes, stairwells, and semi-naked women, and quasi-abstract patterns from zooming-in or skewing natural motifs. And abrupt sentences like “You want me to accept your role of eschatological anaesthetist”, or “Reality is temporary/And yields to nonexistence”. Accompanied by various “appendixes” in random order. Numbers are in flux, are carefully disordered. The result is disorientation, vertigo, the reader is pushed, lured and tempted into staggering and stumbling through the interweavings of cosmos, jealousy, murder, betrayal, death and resurrection. The latter is important, for in the far background the Bible and religion plays into the equation. INHERENT MADNESS has an opening dedication: “For the real trinity”. What trinity, one might ask? Death, cosmos and madness, perhaps. The dedication opens unto the wild negotiation of images and words, lessons and instructions, scenarios and sentences, that comprise the beautiful, cloth-covered book that is INHERENT MADNESS.

The beginning, self-contradictory words correct the Biblical sentence: “In the beginning there was no word”; on the next page the sentence is finished: “Only IDMACHINE”. The societal machine that produces us as proper subjects (“ID yourself”), or the workings of the Freudian Id, that rushes through the betrayed, tennis- playing male? Impossible to tell. INHERENT MADNESS implies that madness is inevitable, internal and ubiquitous, thus rendering Prince’s invitation to “Let’s go crazy” entirely superfluous, for we’re all mad already, indeed matter itself is mad – and yet there’s method in’t, the methodology of INHERENT MADNESS before us. We all ought to enter that IDMACHINE from time to time.

INHERENT MADNESS - 500Milligrammes

At Offprint book fair at the Tate Modern 20-22May 2016

Limited edition book printed by Artisan Books/Hurtwood Press

Format
Hardcover, clothbound 
235mm x 300mm
168pp
Illustrated throughout