Andrea Mason - Explicitly weird and wild, implicitly political, it is a work both formed and informed by an excessive cultural surplus and then re-collaged together by an undeniably British, art school educated brain. Exquisite re-giftings of DeLillo, Antonioni, and Cage

Andrea Mason, Waste Extractions, Broken Sleep Books, 2022

https://www.andreamason.co.uk/writing/

In Waste Extractions, the brilliant fiction pamphlet from Andrea Mason, we are asked to consider waste, nature, and what determines value, in a variety of interesting and diverse forms. Mason's work is experimental and vivid, evoking what happens when 'in becoming like everyone else' we become banished from society, from ourselves.

Bataille believed that the true function of wealth was to “squander without reciprocation.” Reading Waste Extractions I suspect that Andrea Mason agrees. Explicitly weird and wild, implicitly political, it is a work both formed and informed by an excessive cultural surplus and then re-collaged together by an undeniably British, art school educated brain. Exquisite re-giftings of DeLillo, Antonioni, and Cage, sit side by side with descriptions such as “Dirty. Pubes.” The word ‘cough’ appears 37 times. A rotting seal carcass is vividly depicted… In short, I loved this book and hope you will too.— Susan Finlay

Andrea Mason puts the flippin’ ’eck into ekphrasis in these diverse, extraordinary responses to key works of film, music and literature. — Nicholas Royle

A waste book in the tradition of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s Waste Books—fragmentary, various, hybrid—taking additional power from waste as an urgent question: what is a waste of resources? of money? of time? A question that Mason answers in a glorious series of offcuts, scourings and scraps.— Joanna Walsh

Andrea Mason’s Waste Extractions is a brilliant and virtuoso performance drawn from her extraordinary repertoire of innovative approaches to fiction-making. Her pamphlet aptly concludes ‘at the end: rapturous applause’. This refers perhaps to the John Cage piece rendered here through Mason’s visually and sonically lively ‘transcription’, but ‘rapturous applause’ also seems a fitting response to the heightened, multisensory reading experience this pamphlet offers. ‘Waste Extraction’ is not only a vibrant and engaging standalone piece, it also gives us an exciting glimpse into some of Mason’s working practices, ‘extracted’ from her eagerly-awaited forthcoming hybrid-text /novel. She offers the reader a rich variety of methodologies as we are invited to consider if waste is simply the inevitable by-product of the ‘decaying self’: a necessary redundancy created by Gertrude Stein-like patterns of ‘repetition with variation’ characteristic of personal, linguistic and cultural processes. Or, whether it is the toxic consequence of the excess and damage caused by our environmental exploitation. Mason’s pamphlet is by turn reflective and lyrical, playful and violent, making full use of the spatial potential of the page to challenge the ‘wasteful’ neglect of visual possibility in more conventional fiction. Like the best movie trailers, this pamphlet is both an adrenalin-packed world complete in itself, and a compelling hook for the bigger piece to come.— Susie Campbell

Andrea Mason, The Cremation Project, Bearded Badger, 2022