Read This: Social Acupuncture: A Guide to Suicide, Performance and Utopia
Non-fiction by Darren O’Donnell (Coach House Books)
REVIEW BY Peter McCamus
Part aesthetic manifesto, part play script, and all provocation, Social Acupuncture demands and rewards your critical attention. In his latest book, Darren O’Donnell takes aim at the timidity and irrelevance of theatre (endless restagings of Shakespeare are dealt a particularly harsh blow) and the naïveté of “fun” and “feel good” artistic gestures toward utopia. And he knows what he’s talking about: O’Donnell is one of the foremost practitioners—and, with this book, one of its most erudite and entertaining critics—of a particularly Canadian brand of participatory, socially engaged art. As a result, Social Acupuncture reads alternately like a stand-up comedy routine and an academic essay on aesthetic theory that, like much of the work he criticizes, is unlikely to reach beyond established audiences. Which is unfortunate, because whether or not you agree with his ideas about art as politics, you still have to contend with them.
