Doing Time: Essays on Using People

To write about someone else means both to expose and transform them. This is the dilemma of writing that Janet Malcolm describes as “morally indefensible.” In Doing Time: Essays on Using People, Kristian Vistrup Madsen deliberates on his correspondence with an inmate in a California prison named Michael. Over several years, this spawns a series of reflections about the politics of solidarity and appropriation, but also about writing itself and what happens when life is turned into art. This book is a portrait of a friendship interpolated by great difference, and of a fearful time in which experience and identity are everything, and thinking not enough.

Kristian Vistrup Madsen is a Berlin-based writer. He holds degrees from Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Royal College of Art, and is a frequent contributor to magazines such as Artforum, Frieze, Mousse, and Kunstkritikk.