Overview

A blush is a gulp, a glitch, a stammer, a flutter, a flinch. A blush is hot. A blush is an index of confusion. A blush, according to Darwin, is ‘the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions’. A blush says something and it speaks true … Texts by Jack Robinson (with citations from a range of fiction and non-fiction) and colour photographs by Natalia Zagórska-Thomas (including many of her own artwork) investigate the cultural and social history of the blush from the late 18th century to the present day.

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9781909585287

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Reviews

‘Unlike conventionally analytic studies that falter when they reach the 20th century, Blush’s visual and textual explorations quietly pledge to beguile, belie, play around with, and generally embody the contradictory shamefulness and shamelessness bound up in a modern-day hot red cheek. [...] This is as much formally experimental art and social commentary as it is cultural criticism; through their ‘misunderstandings’, the slippery meanings of Zagórska-Thomas’s images and Robinson’s text belie the slippery contradictions of the blush with its simultaneous modesty and desire, voluntariness and involuntariness, affect and effect, innocence and guilt.’ – Will Forrester, Review 31 ‘In Blush, Jack Robinson provides a subtle and insightful phenomenology and social history of blushing alongside witty and equally subtle and insightful images by Natalia Zagórska-Thomas, each and both displaying the virtue of lightness that lends their work a polyvalent concision that enables it to keep generating meaning for a considerable time after the reading/viewing has been ostensibly completed.’ – Thomas Koed, Volume ‘Robinson’s mild-mannered tone curdles in the presence of Zagórska-Thomas’s unsettling photographs, which seem intent on excavating the obscenities that roil under any dainty, lacquered surface. In this sense, the book constantly points to blushing’s abiding context, that of the tactile and libidinous body. One image shows long maroon hairs sprouting from a toothbrush; another features a white briefcase that has split open to reveal a lewdly magenta interior. These images suggest that fascination with the blush is perverse. Its “impure and imprecise” emotions vibrate, magnetized, between the poles of sex and willful denial.’ – Zoë Hu, The Believer

Author Information

Jack Robinson is a pen-name of Charles Boyle, founder-editor of CB editions. Natalia Zagorska-Thomas is a visual artist, art conservator and curator. She owns the studio and exhibition space Studio Expurgamento in Camden Town, London.

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