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Showing posts from June, 2005

The Empire Strikes Back (weakly)

It turns out that the website ‘interview’ with me, reproduced here 13 April 05, was a little disingenuous. By chance I stumbled on the site and found that it was something of a set up; although the questionnaire was published as written, it was contextualised with mocking criticism with a link to a Bloodaxe poet who irritably attacks my position. In the spirit of Silliman’s analysis of the fate of so-called ‘School of Quietude’ poets doomed to be forgotten, it doesn’t really matter which poet it is. But to paraphrase Socrates – a wise man can learn from a fool so it’s worth considering his arguments - some which is interesting. First the criticism: how can the Text Festival claim to be anti-establishment and have some funding from the Arts Council. The tongue-in-cheek response is that this was acknowledged prominently in the opening exhibition with the display of four poems from Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Death to the Arts Council series. But the actual answer rests in the misunderstan

Lawrence Weiner countdown

The opening exhibition of the Text Festival 'Text' finishes today. Get hold of David Briers brilliant review in Art Monthly (June) to see what you missed. The Artists Books show curated by Greville Worthington is still on and on 25 June the remarkable Lawrence Weiner poster archive (from Vancouver Art Gallery) opens for nine weeks. 1 July is the important date for your diary though, when Lawrence flights in from New York via Amsterdam for a conversation at the Met Arts Centre (tickets hotline: 0161 761 2216). Preparing for the 'interview' I have been reading HAVING BEEN SAID, the recent collection of his writings and interviews. While the Festival can fairly easily dismiss Official Verse Culure (despite its literary hegemony it pays the price in its cultural marginalisation) the greater theoretical problem lays in the art of Lawrence Weiner and his frequent rejection of any relationship between poetry and his use of language (in its art context). “…one must feel that

YSP

A great session was had by all last weekend at Partly Writing 4 ( www.partlywriting.com ) – hosted by the Text Festival at Bury Museum. The website will be expanded over the next few weeks with contributions arising out of the weekend’s deliberations. So I’ll not say much more about it here. Also this week I visited the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It’s been a while since I visited the Park; though I had seen the new visitor centre I had not seen the recently completed Underground Gallery. Cutting to the conclusions of my visit, I think it is obvious that the focus on the development of buildings and the poison chalice of the Arts Council’s Sculpture Collection have badly distracted the Curators. The Arts Council’s lower priority for art as against Government sponsored Access seems to have had the (probably unplanned or even noticed) effect of dumbing down the placement and any artistic rigour of the works in the park. I didn’t bother noting the artist’s name because the work was so