No Document

No Document

$15.95

Anwen Crawford

Shortlisted for the Stella Prize

Disappeared artworks, effaced histories, abandoned futures. No Document is an exploration of loss in its many forms, embracing histories of protest and revolution, art-making and cinema, and border policing. It is also an elegy for a friendship and artistic partnership cut short by death, an attempt to make a dear friend emerge from a field of memory, a document continuously emerging. In a bold work by one of Australia’s leading writers, No Document shows how love, kinship, and resistance echo through time.

Anwen Crawford is best known for her writing as a critic, and here she draws also on her background in poetry and visual art in a formally daring work of composition and collage. At once intimate and expansive, No Document reimagines the boundaries that divide us—as people, nations, and species—and asks how we can create forms of solidarity that endure.

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Praise for No Document

“Anwen Crawford’s remarkable new work of non-fiction, No Document, is many kinds of document, but one of the ways it can be read is as an attempt to discover a form of writing fit for ephemeral art practices – especially as those practices relate to, or become bound up with, experiences of vulnerability, pain, and mortality. … No Document is forged in a void it cannot fill: a void it does and does not want to fill. How can you write a history of arts of disappearance, a history that lets the past run through its fingers, when those arts become encircled in grief, overlaid by more dreadful forms of loss? … Direct and eloquent, its frankness leavened with keen irony, Crawford’s writing nevertheless produces meaning largely through association and accrual. Its losses add up.’ —Alix Beeston, Sydney Review of Books

“Each aspect of Crawford’s book is carefully considered: the typesetting, the design, the sense of space and arrangement. It evinces the strategic eye of both the activist and the visual artist. … No Document is a tremendous vision of life, all the detail love and loss demand … A masterpiece.”—Declan Fry, The Saturday Paper

“Interweaving poetry, extracts from letters, news reports, fragments of history, activism and commentary, Anwen Crawford conjures up the love she felt for her dead friend through memories of their collaborations on radical art projects, exploring how this love is inseparable from their dream of a better world.”—Fiona Capp, Sydney Morning Herald

“Anwen Crawford’s No Document, a memorial to the casualties of late capitalism, occupies the space between elegy and witness, language and art … When someone dies young, elegy can easily descend into hagiography. But in No Document, the gift of loss is a kind of X-ray vision. It can see beyond the strictures of place, time and history – and understands how these are bound together.”—Neha Kale, Mascara Literary Review

“Crawford’s conjunctions – visual, linguistic, technical – between the processes of photography, filmmaking, and art production are pathways to understanding the enormity of loss, destruction, and sorrow; the calamitous scars wrought on body and mind by resisting injustice… a stunningly crafted testament to the enduring power of art and literature.”—Francesca Sasnaitis, Australian Book Review

“No Document finds Anwen Crawford, one of Australia’s sharpest and most engaged cultural critics, deploying [Walter] Benjamin’s method in a largely contemporary, local context. The outcome is by turns furious, tender and startlingly acute.”—Geordie Williamson, The Australian

“Reflecting on the loss of a close friend, comrade, and creative collaborator, Crawford moves through time in search of a remembered momentum towards revolution. Deconstruction and creation exist side-by-side as the processes of artistic techniques are described in detail, as well as the successes and failures of collective action. This work is a complex, deeply thought, and deeply felt ode to friendship and collaboration. There is the persistent feeling that through grief – remarkable and devastating – one is able to temporarily glimpse everything they need to know.”—2022 Stella Prize judges’ report

“Crawford’s book is a striking collage-like essay written in a spirit of lucid grief and righteous anger. Switching artfully between fragments of history, poetry, and memoir, its deliberately disjointed style belies the precision with which it has been assembled. No Document develops, slowly and purposefully, into a deeply considered and intensely personal reflection on the imperatives and disappointments of political resistance.”—James Ley, Australian Book Review, Books of the Year 2021

“No Document, about art, activism, grief and loss, is a book that demands your heart.” —THE SATURDAY PAPER

“No Document is lit throughout by a patient, controlled rage against injustice and suffering. Anwen Crawford deploys fragments to powerful effect in this essay collage, drawing out unexpected connections that startle and illuminate like the flash of a camera. The result is a far-ranging work of mourning and a profoundly moving act of remembrance.”—MICHELLE DE KRETSER