Mary Walling Blackburn - Cream Psychosis (e-flux journal)

For several years, artist Mary Walling Blackburn has given name, shape, and complication to the lumpy lineage from whence she comes. This book of essays, written between the 2010s and the present, moves with near psychedelic precision across American time and its surrounding spaces. It begins near the annals of the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum, March 1883. Archeological digs, nuclear plants, and horrors of predation collide. California crumbles through the decades into the smog and sea. In 2020, all over, protestors meet BORTAC-trained soldiers under skies choked with propellors and noxious propellants. Facing a dying nation, Blackburn insists on showing volumes of teeming, vibrant, miscreant life. The essays and works collected here are movies of America in parallax view. A deep bucket list for surviving the lumbering empires and their long-range off-gasses. Reading the texts inside can be a wide-awake, meditative, sometimes gruesome trip. Existing alongside them is also outrageously enjoyable. No reader will be left unscathed!