Alan Reid: Warm Equations

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