Berlioz in the Desert

Review by Nick Garrett

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Berlioz in the Desert or One Man's Meat (Karen Jones, 2003)
The delightful, pellucid squish of flesh can also be a place of desolation; of course this rather depends on outlook, sensibility and state of health: an impotent man will find nothing in the flesh desert except his own misery and look at how, say, Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon delight in, and are appalled by, flesh. This image, then, is prime Karen Jones: the many levels of a visual: here be Berlioz in a desert, a desert of sound or introspection; equally here is a dual portrait of the rolling morbid foothills of a trickling vagina and the rain-soaked, keeling red heel of a drunken tart staggering to an encounter with too many bottles of alcopops inside her.