M HKA Ensembles

Book, 19.5 x 13.1 cm, 119 p, language: English, publisher: Bookworks, London, ISBN: 9781906012120.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2024/772).

Literary synopsis The novel *Bubble Entendre* was reported as seized by US customs in 2010 on the pretext that it might be a manual for terrorism. The subjects the novel might smuggle across national borders include many unstable and volatile ideas retired from the pages of late post modernity to wage a war of dementia on the logos of the state. It is quite miraculous that the US border officials are so sensitive in their tastes for subversion and counter government activities. The book is perhaps a trilogy of novellas that winds its way back from an Olympic siege that never happened to a series of stories steeped in the pharmakon and the embers of a corpus of literature that is both untimely and singular in its affinity to the lightness of words in the darkness of the day. It is a book of lacunae and eclipses which spans three decades and at least three authors all of whom perished in the production of its fictions. 1. A terrorist siege at Claridge’s in 2012 replaces the Olympics as end of the world TV spectacle. An en suite novel is curated around a series of subjects forced to strip naked and perform like pornstars for a watching world. 2. Hard-boiled noir meets classic French theory as a zombie author transgresses the outer limits of postmodern fiction. The warped narrative plunges from art house to grindhouse and back again. 3. An insanely unofficial fictional updating of Derrida's *Of Grammatology*. Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice *Bubble Entendre* as a novel operates as a satellite capturing data from the cultural landscapes in which as a curator and artist Mark Waugh has located a range of artworks, from performance to film and installation. It is the most complete archive of these activities and yet immerses this history in the fragmentation of a corpus. Whilst many of the artworks he has made are ephemeral, the book remains and is therefore a particular trope of place in which the body works and continues to produce a catalogue of involuntary spasms like a hanged man or sashimi octopus. [Novel website](http://www.deathgumbubbleyum.com)