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Showing posts from 2008

Happy Christmas!!!

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The Other Room video

http://theotherroom.wordpress.com/december-2008-videos/

Islington Mill Art Academy

Back in 1982, I was nearly thrown out of Loughborough College of Art for too persistently challenging the competence of my lecturers. And in 2003 after a brief waste of time at Manchester Metropolitan University's MA, I resigned in disgust at the disorganisation and mediocrity of the poetry lecturers. So I am comfortably in the camp critical of the state of arts education. Higher education has become a business that is less to do with transfer of knowledge or nurturing artists and more to do with administrations that generate fees and 'hit' targets disingenuously pretending that progress is constant. So it was a great pleasure last week to spend some time in conversation with the artists of the Islington Mill Art Academy. http://www.islingtonmill.com/d.php?r=artacademy http://www.islingtonmillartacademy.blogspot.com/ The Academy is a fascinating attempt by a group of young artists to education themselves, to develop their practice autonomously. Choosing their own influences

Read

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Well who would have thought it? It turned out that I could work out how to read the poems after all. It felt like the audience got what I was doing too. Most of it turned on speed and breath I think. I found that I edited really visually or semantically dense passages on the hoof hoping to at least get the flavour of the original. One of the audience said in response to this, that this was surely an argument for editing them out of the originals as extraneous. But I can't accept that; that way lays writing for performance rather than writing to write. The performance was just a snapshot of what the poems might be/were on that particular night. I suppose the contrary revelation for me was that I actually really enjoyed the experience and want to do it again. The only thing I didnt do was read Calculus - because I forgot - minus the proper layout - because working that out on this page is as difficult as reading it. So here it is: 0. monotonic the fall. In the cot, of equilibria and

The Other Room

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The Other Room on 3rd December I'll be reading with Carol Watts and Scott Thurston. See http://theotherroom.wordpress.com/ This may be a surprise if anyone notices, because I virtually never read - as a matter of artistic 'policy'. Putting aside issues of reading as marketing, my writing contains its own investigative imperative that is driven by the need to solve problems of language and space; generally if a problem is solved by the writing itself, I don't see any need to read it to anyone - if someone wants to know whether my solution was viable or useable they read it themselves. In addition, formally my texts tend to use visual resonances, rhythms of layout or word shape, counterpoints of line beginnings and endings which I can't see how you could punctuate vocally without introduction sound accents that are not equivalent. On top of that personally I am dyslexic reading aloud. I'm buggered if I can think of a good reason why I am reading but I am. So

Text Festival

I've not been up to writing here for quite a few weeks due to illness mostly. Anyway, to prove it has not finished me off, I point you to the Text Festival website www.textfestival.com which is beginning to accumulate the shape of the forthcoming events.

Seville Biennial

Just back from Spain where I managed to see the Seville Biennial http://www.fundacionbiacs.com/biacs3/index.php in the Monasterio de la Cartuja de Santa María de las Cuevas. I thought as I entered that it is a brave curator who has “Miraculous Moments” written over the entrance. I have a number of responses to the show: the actual experience of individual works; the fairly clear but fragmented curatorial concept and then the catalogue. Luckily I didn’t read the latter until after I had seen the show. Particular highlights for me were Tamás Waliczky ’s ‘Landscape’ - http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/stories/storyReader$5790 Rafael lozano-hemmer ’s ‘Tercera persona’ http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/eproyecto.html Austrian Ruth Schnell ’s ‘Retinal Scripts’ were a striking effect installed at various locations around the site. At first glance these appeared to be simple lines of small lights but as the website says “hologram-like words that are generated by transmitting high frequency light impulses to l

Berlin

I went to Berlin ostensibly to attend the Zebra Poetry-Film Festival http://www.literaturwerkstatt.org/index.php?id=494&L=1 but who needs an excuse to visit your favourite city. The Poetry-Film Festival was execrable. The audience (at least starting out) was impressively large, so it is a double crime to have such poor work showing. Pretty much all I saw was either weak narrative poetry voiced over or subtitled to mediocre illustrative film images; or generally coming out of Eastern Europe/the Balkans laugh-out-loudly-bad Kafkaesque nightmare animations. The fare could be summed up as a festival of banal verse illustrated by plodding film-workshop shorts. “Again and Again” was an 11 minute documentary filmed in a glass factory in the Myanmar countryside with a subtitled and spoken Buddhist poem accompanying. The German producer stood up at the end and talked about her documentaries and how this film by The Maw Naing had come out of a film workshop she had set up in that country.

Zebra Poetry Film Festival next

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Just back from the European Museums Forum in Bertinoro Castle, Italy http://www.ceub.it/index_en.cfm There's lots to report but I am now off to Berlin for the Zebra Poetry Film Festival http://www.literaturwerkstatt.org/index.php?id=494&L=1 - so I will have post a double report when I get back next week.

two 'gigs' to see

Next week I am in Bertinoro, Italy for the European Museums Forum Workshop “Museums And Local Resources: A European Perspective” http://assembly.coe.int/Museum/ForumEuroMusee/Workshop/workshop_Index.asp so I will miss two gigs that I would like to have seen: Marianne Eigenheer is doing a talk about her work and the current Bury Art Gallery Exhibition "the Irony of Flatness" at 12.30 lunchtime on Tuesday 30th September. and the other is The Other Room Wednesday 1st October 2008 at 7.00pm The Old Abbey Inn, 61 Pencroft Way, Manchester David Annwn, Caroline Bergvall, Joy as Tiresome Vandalism I've not seen Caroline since the last Text Festival so I am disappointed by the clash. I can highly recommend both events.

Carolyn Thompson in Porto

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the nature of bury

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As a curator no matter how much you trust your judgement that an artist will do something interesting, it is still a scary moment when the artist proposes an installation that starts with an ‘empty’ gallery. Whether you take a hard-line on the degree of rigour which an audience faces or not, curating an empty gallery at the start can be daunting. Conceptual environmental artist Kerry Morrison http://www.morrison-prowse.com/kerry/ ostensibly started from just that point in her current show ‘the nature of bury’ at Bury Art Gallery. Actually the gallery turned out not to be empty, it is filled with a question: “ where can I discover the nature of bury?” Kerry has for a number of years working in collaboration and dialogue with the scientific method – the gallery opened with the pregnant ‘scientific’ equipment which would be used to gather the samples, statistics and observations of the nature of bury – the display of a methodology of enquiry. I am pleased to write that Morrison’s quer

Peace Demo

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WE have the annual irritation of New Labour's party conference this week - Manchester streets are sealed off, police patrol in vast numbers, helicoptors hover overhead night and day. On the first day on which the sun seems to have shone all year, it was great to see the End the Wars Demonstration roll into town.

"The decision to withdraw the poem was not taken lightly"

The banning of the Carol Ann Duffy poem "Education for Leisure" in a GCSE poetry anthology has ripped around the world understandably with the outrage against censorship and also simple-minded stupidity. http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/09/banned_books.html http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/sep/04/gcses.english As I read this story the thing that struck me was not the fact that the Educational bureaucrats could be so easily bounced into Reaction - it is the defining characteristic of such people - be it in health services, local government or education. The thing that stands out, which sadly isnt being said by anyone, is that the poem is a stinker. Apparently they only had 3 complains and it was withdrawn; wouldnt the world be a better place if 3 complains that it is bad poetry could have got it withdrawn - that wouldnt have been censorship, that would be saving poetry itself from the banality which is its fate.

Cairo : Sound Constructions

Group exhibition from 7 till 30 September 2008 Location: Factory, 1st Floor 7 September, 8:00 pm: Opening 8 September, 8:00 pm : Viennoise – a performance by Mahmoud Refat Voices, melodies, and sounds fill the space of every city. Noises waft through the air, their origins often unknown. In the ebb and flow of sound, we find our way through the world, or get lost in it—dissolving into a sea of cell-phone ring tones, and re-emerging with the call of a name. Voice and identity are inextricably linked, connecting us to each other while defining us individually. The sounds of a city can feel like an embrace, but at other times they threaten and disturb. In the privacy of the home, city noise is shut out—but complete silence is rarely achieved. Thus, the artists featured in this exhibition do not attempt to quiet Cairo but instead add their own sounds to it: Their works layer and echo, interpret and describe, both acoustically and visually. Sounds will not only be heard, they will also bec

The Reality Street Book of Sonnets

Having recently received The Reality Street Book of Sonnets http://www.realitystreet.co.uk/ edited by Jeff Hilson, I was struck by the exhilarated curiosity one feels when in the presence of a great anthology. I counterpose this feeling with the contrary feeling you get from the salad-mixing of popular anthologies. Bookshop poetry sections offer two shades of negativity in this regard: pick up an anthology at random and you either have that sinking feeling that these people can get away with such sloppy publishing and concomitant sense of superiority you get from seeing these feeble efforts. As Ron Silliman wrote in “In The American Tree” – “[this] anthology is a record of the debate”, but there is an endless stream of imbeciles chattering at the moment. Anyway, these thoughts cause me to return to something I’ve not read for years – ‘A Pamphlet Against Anthologies’ by Laura Riding & Robert Graves. The essay argues that there are only 3 types of anthology that are acceptable: A no

Carol Watts

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Carol Watts ( http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/staff/WattsCarol ) visited yesterday see the Irony of Flatness (picture 1) and discuss various project possibilities. Also shown introducing Phil Davenport to her "China" series - some of which will feature in the Text Festival anthology. Here is a sonnet from her 'Brass, Running' : IX difficult and persistent is the light and its qualities a haunting of precepts her gunmetal sanctuary where breath mists famished in its reckoning her absence is a volume to be accounted for do you know the desolation of measurement motes descending second per second without intimation think of the sound of light as a guttering of limbs its rush a hunger to sustain the evidence of breathing snatched from other open mouths the denial of burning is not harmless she is not here is something inflammatory baptism: light and water implicated in the frenzy of cities

Dancing Chairs and a Walking Woman

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On a more positive note, the works in the Irony of Flatness (Bury Art Gallery until November) are definitely deserving of more attention. The first is Marianne Eigenheer’s video-drawing “ Dancing Chairs and a Walking Woman ”. This is a particularly resonant and exciting piece. It recalls Marianne’s experience of walking around the streets of Cairo, having a look round while she was there preparing for a forthcoming show. This meandering came to be represented in the artist’s distinctive arabesque coloured drawing, the depth of her line mirroring her unique sense of space. This drawing in itself became a thirty metre long work which has been exhibited in Germany/Austria (I forget where). During her walk she became fascinated by the way Egyptian men place their chairs in the street, a male gesture of dominance of public space; Marianne began photographing them. “ Dancing Chairs and a Walking Woman ” is the brilliant counterpoint of these two aspects of the walk – the meandering fluidit

Green Drops and Moonsquirters

Months ago in this blog (more than once) I lamented the state of the English public gallery curating, specifically, as an example I mentioned how it was literally impossible to get into Manchester Art Gallery Asia Triennial video installation because there were so many playing toddlers and crying babies. The Gallery has now gone one step further with its latest offering: Green Drops and Moonsquirters http://www.manchestergalleries.org/whats-on/exhibitions/index.php?itemID=44 Of course, because success in the UK galleries is measured by numbers of visitors rather than the artistic quality of exhibitions, this is already a huge hit. But for anyone with any interest in the arts it is truly desperate - the galleries of the City Art Gallery must be hellish. In Manchester, the powers that be are constantly exercised with the notion that the city aspires to being 'world-class'. Every international visitor I have had, visiting the City Gallery can't understand it. Manchester is a g

The Other Room

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The Pros and Cons of Screens

The 'Live Sites' giant screens project aims to leave between 45 and 60 screens in towns and city centres. The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games is supplying the screens and the BBC will provide the content, including live coverage of the Beijing Olympics and through to London 2021 and beyond. The project is funded from the National Lottery and commercial sponsorship. Local authorities will be responsible for maintenance costs. CABE http://www.cabe.org.uk/ "fully supports the idea of creative access to the Olympics for the widest possible community through temporary large-scale screens around the country, it has serious concerns about leaving them as permanent installations." ..."Just when we're starting to create well-designed, civilised public space in many English towns, along comes a rash of intrusive neon screens," Sarah Gaventa, director of CABE Space, comments. There is only really one intrusive screen in Manchester

Introducing Robert Grenier to the Cotswolds

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After the Irony of Flatness , Sue and I introduced Bob and Suzy to the English countryside (since he's so embedded in the Californian countryside). While we were there, I did an recorded interview which will be available soon. But just after the tape stopped, Bob said "I'd like to add an addendum": which was - "My imagination of coming over to Bury to do this work was that once we had set it forth on the wall, I would have opportunity to finally know what it was. I could read it. I could stand back from it. I could think about it. I could question whether or not these separate images went together with each other, how these images might have gone together. After the fact, the real work was setting it forth on in space on the wall and it’s not my business to know what it says, any more than it is for any poet who writes a poem. I might get different readings on things in passing, but especially with a work of this kind of complexity, organisation, over time. The

More from the Flatness Opening

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Irony of Flatness Opens

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A great opening. Pictures mainly of Robert Grenier's reading. Others to follow plus recordings of the performance itself.

Announcing The Irony of Flatness

Three Exhibitions open on Friday at Bury Art Gallery An exhibition of drawings by international artists 19 July – 8 November 2008 As a mark-making act, drawing can simply be represented as (and be representational of) transferring the three or more dimensions of reality down to two – flatness. The Irony of Flatness is a challenging exhibition of contemporary drawing, which examines the possibilities and power of drawing. Through it, working with shadow, line and gesture, the artists taking part investigate the experience of the act, the space of the act, the moment of the act, and the concept of the act. Continuing Bury Art Gallery’s commitment to innovative international programmes in the north of England, the show features renowned artists featured include Marianne Eigenheer (Switzerland), Stefan Gec (UK), Rachel Goodyear (UK), Robert Grenier (USA), Kristian Gudmundson (Iceland), Alan Johnston (UK), Karin Sander (Germany) and Ulrich Rückriem (Germany). The drawings featured investiga

Dinner

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Celebrating Phil Davenport's birthday, Sue did one of her legendary dinner parties: (pictures: Barney with Robert Grenier's shoes; + Phil Davenport & Robert) Tonight Sue created: Roast spiced butternut squash soup + Prosecco Wild Mushroom Risotto + a Rosé (that Phil brought) Roast rosemary and garlic leg of Lamb with fondant potatos and parmiagiana + Greek Nemea (red Agiorgitiko grape) + a Merlot A trio of Lemon Desserts with Kir Royale

Countdown to Irony of Flatness

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I'm happy now that the countdown to Irony of Flatness has begun - the exhibition opens at Bury Art Gallery on Friday. Yesterday, Robert Grenier (right) arrived from California and Steve Miller (left) arrived from Berlin.

Barney joins the Trehy household!

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Budapest

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Back from a great visit to Budapest. A good meeting at the 2b Gallery discussing possible future projects http://www.pipacs.hu/2b/2b.html and a fleeting introduction at the Young Artists Association http://studio.c3.hu/ which needs following up in the next visit. The food was great because Sue came with me and we had an apartment. Though there was plenty of champagne drunk on the banks of the Danube! I also saw an interesting survey show of contemporary Hungarian art called WHAT'S UP at Műcsarnok http://www.mucsarnok.hu/ - I was particularly struck by El-Hassan Roza, Kis Varsó: Little Warsaw is Dead and Szász György, who I will no doubt keep an eye on for future possibilities.

Mirror Canon Snips in Melbourne

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Mirror Canon Snips has been installed in The DrawingSpace - Melbourne. Here is an extract of the text (which forms part of the "Space" series of projects, following from Edinburgh, Reykjavik and next Berlin) More images from the installation when I get back from Budapest. Palatine. descending begins with both registers. of the sequence are important. the undiagnosed wait. a. shimmering caused by the highest perceivable frequency and the inability to focus on the multitude of rising tones. Rise and going. Proposed that the piece be revised and realized the lower threshold won’t be treated as if it is between the upper and the lower threshold, rather all entrances are timed in such a way that the ratio between successive pitches is the subsequent voice imitates the initial voice only weakening. the peristaltic itinerary of thought stooping to the prone who must shade. the ability to breathe necessary to stay alive; iff not sufficient to stay alive, there is categorically no u

Green Drops and Moonsquirters

Months ago in this blog (more than once) I lamented the state of the English public gallery curating, specifically, as an example I mentioned how it was literally impossible to get into Manchester Art Gallery Asia Triennial video installation because there were so many playing toddlers and crying babies. The Gallery has now gone one step further with its latest offering: Green Drops and Moonsquirters http://www.manchestergalleries.org/whats-on/exhibitions/index.php?itemID=44 Of course, because success in the UK galleries is measured by numbers of visitors rather than the artistic quality of exhibitions, this is already a huge hit. But for anyone with any interest in the arts it is truly desperate - the galleries of the City Art Gallery must be hellish. In Manchester, the powers that be are constantly exercised with the notion that the city aspires to being 'world-class'. Every international visitor I have had, visiting the City Gallery can't understand it. Manchester is a

Twilight Readings

Just before my recent travels, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park sent me a copy of Simon Armitage’s YSP published book – The Twilight Readings http://www.ysp.co.uk/view.aspx?id=460 . According to the introduction, to celebrate the park’s 30th anniversary, Armitage was offered a residency. Armitage asked to be described as visiting artist rather than visiting poet. “I imagined working with the physicality of language – seeing poetry as a fashioned and fabricated substance, sculpted from words…” Not actually capable of that, Armitage ended up writing two types of poems: “The first anecdotal, prose-looking things, like stories… The second were translations from the Wakefield Mystery Plays, the cycle of mediaeval religious pageants which are closely associated with the region… I chose five dramatic monologues, each one having some relationship with the intended setting, and translated them form the original Middle English into contemporary [sic] (but still colloquial) verse.” This passage is ne

Dreamer? Are we the only ones?

Visiting an infant/primary school to discuss possibly curating a community-based commission, I waited in the corridor outside the Headteacher's office before the meeting. On the wall, presumably contributing to the development of young minds that use the corridor, there was a poster with a close-up of a young teenager (wearing make-up) slightly smiling, looking directly out of the picture at the viewer. The caption read: "dreamer? but you're not the only one. achieve economic wellbeing"

Art Basel

The rail trip from Stuttgart to Basel takes about 2 hours and is straight forward except for the dashing change at Karlsruhe. In Basel I stayed with the excellent Swiss artist and Director of the Institute of Curatorship and Education, Marianne Eigenheer http://cms.ifa.de/en/exhibitions/exhibitions-abroad/bk/kunstraum-deutschland/marianne-eigenheer/type/98/ . Shortly after I arrived Frank Hettig and Ed Beardsley (from Bonhams in Los Angeles) arrived. Upon which we set off for the first big opening Art Unlimited http://www.artbasel.com/go/id/elj/ at which invited international galleries show one artist only. We met up with Patrick Panetta one of the curatorial partnership of KP in Berlin ( www.kimura-panetta.de ) – we had been set up to meet to discuss a possible show for me at their space. Standing in the sunshine, drinking champagne is part of the scene of meeting old and new friends, new contacts, new projects, and of course being seen. I had a most interesting conversation with Ev

Waiblingen, Germany

I'm in Waiblingen on the outskirts of Stuttgart at the moment, http://www.stuttgart-tourist.de/ENG/city/waiblingen.htm - guest of the local authority; as Bury is loaning about 70 Turner prints for the opening exhibition of their new gallery. http://waiblingen.de/sixcms/detail.php?id=14920 . Conceived and guided to completion by my friend and long-time curatorial collaborator, Dr Helmut Herbst. I've taken loads of photos but not got the connection to load them from here - maybe when I get back to Manchester. As is often the case with this sort of opening, you can't really appreciate the gallery just now because most of the views of the architecture are cluttered with marques for the celebratory activities, concerts, etc. The German politicians and the accompanying academics that come out of the wood work on these occasions have a particular penchant for very long speeches - which seem interminable especially when you can't understand German. Sadly, as is the way of the

After Thoughts

The most affirming part of attending the European Museums Forum was seeing that there are plenty of museums out there not corrupted by English anti-intellectualism or New Labour. You see curators who quote Proust (“the truly imperfect earth is not one which is devoid of masterpieces of art but one which is full of them and does not know how to love them or preserve them”) rather than their performance indicator regime. The comparison was most striking comparison for me was the presentation by Weston Park Museum in Sheffield ( http://www.sheffieldgalleries.org.uk/coresite/html/WPM.asp ) and Museo degli Sguardi. Rimini's Ethnographic Collections ( http://www.riminiturismo.it/CMS2/main.php?elemId=322&classId=33&lang_index=1&seq_index=7 ). The former proudly told us how their public had been completely involved in every stage of the design and selection of displays; how they had won the Guardian’s Family Friendly Museum of the Year Award; how the community was at the heart

Dublin

Here I am in sunny Dublin. Initially I am here to work on Mirror Canon Snips in time for the Melbourne installation in June; later in the week I am here for the European Museums Forum. In a break in the work yesterday morning, I took a pleasant walk in the sun through St.Stephen’s Green and round to the Douglas Hyde Gallery. http://www.douglashydegallery.com/ . There was a video installation by Willie Doherty made up of a quite nicely shot footage of a winter wood (apparently near Belfast) intercut with shots of a concrete urban housing estate, overlaid with an enigmatic soft-accented deep-voiced narrative of visiting either or both. It had the feel of Robbe-Grillet’s great snapshot set on a forest walk and filmic Last Year in Marianbad – both of which I find more satisfying: I strongly recommend RG’s book Snapshots – but the Doherty piece is harmless enough. There was also a small selection of key objects which informed a booklet published by Paul Mosse by the Gallery. This was a d