Warm Equations is a monograph that's not a monograph: a study of an unstable, mercurial subject. Taking the paintings of New York-based Alan Reid as a cypher, the book pivots around the artist's deferral of authorial closure, shifting the emphasis from his work to a multiplicity of voices and contributors. Rushing in from offstage, these voices pronounce their own concerns, setting textual tempos and rhythms that run amok non-hierarchically, catching on to or installing their own ambient metaphors. Set among Reid's images, each text constitutes a voice within a splintered chorus. The dramaturgical chorus, traditionally united in its simultaneous interventions, here operates on discrete registers. The ideal audience, the self-same guide, the judge and jury of ever evolving ethical ploys, the personification of narrative, the analyst, a reminder of social imperative, a road to the gods. The chorus shares in the action, but only by marking its enunciation as interlude, as arbitrated pause. Warm Equations assembles such interludes, recasting the figure of the protagonist as always already necessarily multiple.
Alan Reid: Warm Equations