We're thrilled to announce that the second volume of Ken Hollings'
Trash Project, Purgatory: Towards the Decay of
Meaning, is available to pre-order now and will be shipping
mid-October!
Purgatory
The Trash Project Volume 2: Towards The Decay Of Meaning
By Ken Hollings
344 pp., 6 x 8
Paperback
ISBN: 9781913689230
Published: November 2022
The sequel to Inferno (which you
can also order
here), Purgatory is the second
volume in Ken Hollings’ three-part series of personal
reflections on Trash and Trash Aesthetics.
In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, British artist Basil
Hallward sets off for Paris, intending to take his greatest artwork with him. In
the 1961 film The Rebel, another British artist, Anthony Hancock, also sets off
for Paris, intending to take his greatest artwork with him. Seventy years may
separate the two stories, but very little else.
For this sequel to 2020’s Inferno, Ken Hollings turns his attention to
Europe at the height of decadence and decay, following the twin fates of
Hallward and Hancock as they are drawn, like so many nineteenth-century artists,
towards the French capital. It was here that August Strindberg struggled to turn
iron and carbon into gold, while esoteric aesthete Sâr Péladan
staged his sumptuous Salons de la Rose+Croix.
In thirty-three essays modelled on Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio,
personal reflection, historical incidents and unexpected mythological
correspondences combine to unearth a restless underground of alchemists, poets,
painters, and philosophers.
Their influence would shape the future events of May 1968 and presage the
emergence of a uniquely European form of Trash cinema devoted exclusively to
beauty, sex and despair. Hollings’ radical retelling reveals that, while
Hell may be a tough act to follow, Purgatory can be just as weird and far more
dangerous.
