Mummies

William S. Burroughs & Carl Apfelschnitt
Düsseldorf / Poestenkill, NY: Kaldewey Press, 1982
Edition Kaldewey 5

Title page
Etchings by abstract artist Carl Apfelschnitt

Apfelschnitt’s beautifully textured etchings are at once at least slightly whimsical, in character with the text, and austerely serious, registering the ineluctable fact of death and the perennial grim determination to overcome it. Apfelschnitt, who would die of aids in 1990 at the age of 42, seems to be suggesting that we are mummies already, walking dead absurdly shoring up our immortality.

 

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