that the episode’s ‘Purple Death’ serves as a metaphor for the creeping collective anxieties of a devolving of senses and of values. Hollings’s permeating interest here is in what might have been overlooked or thrown away: true waste – Trash with a capital T. In his energetic and enthusiastic approach, Hollings’s conception of the origins and de initions of trash are poetic, exaggerated and o en conventionally nonsensical, true to the conceptual and ultimately confrontational nature of the underground. ‘Trash’, he writes, ‘is a bourgeois nightmare: it represents a grati ication not so much deferred as denied to the point of becoming a tangible presence’.

As Hollings passes through to the inal circles of Hell, presumably reaching further into the vortex towards its ‘Trash’ heart, we ind in its pit an amalgamation of the principles and characters reviewed through the course of the book. By the end of the 1960s, we ind, bikers have become fast friends with Warhol’s ‘superstar’ Edie Sedgwick, Anger’s Lucifer à la Lucifer Rising, 1972, encounters folk anti-hero, cult leader and conspiracy theorist Charles Manson, while Meyer and Anger ind they have a ‘close friend in common’. Inferno exists as a broad and painterly account of oppositional taste of the 1960s and suggests that these ilmmakers, artists and cultural visionaries were united not only philosophically in their rejection of Hollywood – as Warhol had it, Hollywood people were ‘idiots’ – but also physically.

Where the mainstream (Hollywood) passively reproduces dominant culture, alternative art, avantgarde, erotica, midnight movies, camp, B-movies and the underground exist to challenge dominant culture. Hollings is speci ically concerned with the culturally ‘low’ genres in this range – cult, obscure and ‘trash’ titles. Expanding literature within social and ilm studies suggests that the distinctions between ‘mainstream’ cinema and cult have become gendered – ‘cult’ academia serving as a masculine-leaning and naturalised subculture whereby cult is heroic, refusing structures o en coded as feminine, and offering little room for women to participate in cult movie fandom. In Hollings’s account of proli ic ilmmaker Doris Wishman, he mentions that Wishman hides her identity as a woman behind the name Anthony Brooks. There is, however, little attention paid to the circumstances surrounding why that might be. In exalting this kind of art without paying due attention to its historical and political contexts or its o en bigoted nature – the frequent representations of ultra-powerful women, for example, are quickly knocked down with sexualised violence – can contribute to a reproduction of existing cultural hierarchies, despite a posited opposition to dominant culture.

Hollings’s overall approach to these cultural works in Inferno is accessible and joyous. While it may leave some important historical and cultural context behind, it serves as an apt and explorative introductory journey through works which have o en been ignored or cast aside. With the author’s careful guidance, we arrive at an altar to trash – a domain between cultural Heaven and Hell. Ken Hollings, Inferno: A Genealogy of 1960s Trash Culture, MIT Press/Strange Attractor Press, 2020, 196pp, £15.99, 978 1 907222 79 5. Laura Jacobs is a ilm programmer and critic based in London.

On Care In the 2016 collection Vulnerability in Resistance, co-editor Judith Butler posits that one cannot be politically active without understanding one’s vulnerability in the world, pointing towards a collective material dependency on infrastructures of care. Late capitalism forces ‘its subjects to ignore their own needs’ while assimilating ‘any challenge to it’; a painful reality carefully mapped out in Juliet Jacques’s contribution to this collection. The co-option of self-care in political rhetoric is one of the many subjects and realities addressed within this eclectic and urgent publication.

On Care follows 2018’s On Violence from the Ma Bibliothèque imprint of artist Sharon Kivland, who returns to edit this new title alongside previous collaborator, artist Rebecca Jagoe. The collection features contributions from 43 diverse voices, including Oisín Byrne, Holly Graham, Helen Hester, Juliet Jacques, Sophie Jung, Roy Claire Potter, Victoria Sin and Erica Scourti.

Editorially, the publication reads like a direct follow-up to On Violence. The impetus of its predecessor stemmed from the violence of language with regards to hierarchies and the relentless arsenal of form and structure. In contrast, On Care inds itself situated directly in the fallout of such violence and abuse of power: a decade of Tory austerity; government incompetence; systemic racism; an unfolding pandemic and the endless unforgiving consequences of an oblique and cruel lack of care. It is within this context that On Care presents ictions, testaments and essays dealing with such issues as where care is received and given, privilege, the ethics of self-care and care as a commodity within the complex transactional economies of the healthcare industry.

The collection opens with a statement and correspondence that sheds light on the dif iculty of bringing together a publication with such wide scope within the hyper-temporality that has come to de ine daily life in the 21st century, especially in the vortex of 2020. As the ‘editors completed their work and entered into the design stage,’ we read, ‘the coronavirus Covid-19 hit with force’. This is followed by an acknowledgment of the brutal police killing of George Floyd, which led to global BLM protests. In the correspondence that follows between Kivland and Jagoe, the concept of care is illustrated not as an abstract or academic notion, but as a concrete act within the daily lives of the editors/writers at the moment of editing, from the act of editing such a publication to Kivland giving eggs to everyone in her village because, apparently, ‘these have run out in the shops’. This opening correspondence invites the reader to re-evaluate what constitutes ‘care’. Kivland, in turn, addresses her own indings and understandings in her ex/in/troduction that bookends the collection.

Correspondence and conversation continue throughout. ‘Fly Better – A Conversation’, in which Jagoe interviews artist Mati Jhurry, is captivating. Jhurry tells of a durational performance in which they are employed as cabin crew by Emirates for three years, a performance that stems from an interest in hospitality and the so-called paradise economy. ‘You don’t have time for yourself,’ reveals Jhurry, in a comment that resonates with many of the points outlined in Jacques’ astutely composed ‘Aphorisms on Self Care’.

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Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021