Laura Bartlett Gallery is pleased to present Thomas Bernard Malamud, a new bookwork by Becky Beasley. The book’s launch at Laura Bartlett Gallery coincides with German Soup, the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery on Thursday 15th October, 6-9pm.

As a sequel of sorts to her previous book, American Letter (2007), Thomas Bernard Malamud, is not so much a catalogue of her work of the last two years as a bookwork in which specifically conceived documentation of the works produced for the exhibitions Malamud(2008) and German Soup (2009) is combined with new writing, notation and design to produce a rich and expansive context for Beasley’s recent thematic and aesthetic concerns.

Thomas Bernard Malamud is a fictional name made by conjoining those of the novelists Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) and Bernard Malamud (1914-86). Understood by the artist as a hinge, or flexible joint, the act of combining these two authors’ names - one a subtle chronicler of Jewish-American life during the Great Depression, the other a provocative critic of his native Austria’s collusion with Nazism - produced a way of thinking historically about the politics of flexible joints, everyday objects and broken connections, between which unifying forces were neither assumed nor necessarily sought. What would it be to hinge two things together without then providing any defense or coherent argument for the marriage? Where would that gesture leave the subject? Unhinged? Happily adrift? Free?

The book falls into two loose halves, in the centre of which is an authorized reprint of 'The Problem in Summarizing Blanchot', a short essay against abridgment, by the American translator and writer, Lydia Davis. Elsewhere John Slyce, who previously collaborated with Beasley on American Letter, has produced a new essay in the form of thirty-two fragments that combine his own writing with citations from various sources. Chris Sharp develops his thoughts on the exhibition Malamud and, finally, Simone Menegoi sends a long and fraught letter to the artist. Interspersed between these are the artist’s own writings.

Ultimately, Thomas Bernard Malamud discloses, in its own clear yet unabridged way, the artist’s major concerns: the objects and activities of the Everyday as physical, material and intellectual decisions played out in space by a subject who is simultaneously approaching and diminishing. At once humorous, emotive and, to use Thomas Bernhard’s term, ‘corrective’, Thomas Bernard Malamud proposes new ways of thinking about the Everyday as a series of necessarily deathbound, yet potentially joyful, decisions and displacements, additions and reductions.

Thomas Bernard Malamud has been published by the artist, Laura Bartlett Gallery and Office Baroque. It has been printed in a trade edition of 500 copies and a Limited Edition of 21 signed, numbered copies each of which comes with a signed, numbered gelatin silver print titled, Gracias (2). Please contact the gallery for more information.