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Showing posts from June, 2009

Poets with the Barnster

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P.Inman & Tina Darragh

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Peter Inman and Tina Darragh arrived from the USA today for his reading in the Text Festival tomorrow, and their readings at the Other Room on Wednesday. (Pictured being initiated into the local beers)

Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.

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It was interesting hearing people mention “Poor.Old.Tired. Horse.” at the ICA, London, before I actually went. http://www.ica.org.uk/Poor%20Old%20Tired%20Horse+19863.twl There was a frisson suggesting something important might be happening. For the capital, maybe, the Text Festival is peripheral, something, somewhere up north but this is an exhibition in a London institution. An altogether different status again and a status that could contribute to artistic/poetic progress: Poor.Old.Tired. Horse. is not that show. There are three major problems with it (“No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition,” so maybe more than three problems will emerge as I think about it): a form of curatorial attention deficit disorder; a fragmentary curatorial logic; and curatorial dilettantism in relating the included work to the stated aim challenging that “stupidity [which] reduces language to words” (quote from Ian Hamilton Finlay). I didn’t realise until after I had visited and started reading the cata

Nine Catalytic Stations - Paul Neagu

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I wasn't familiar with Paul Neagu 's work until this week, when I accompanied Marianne Eigenheer to the Flowers Gallery where part of the Neagu archive resides. A teacher of Anish Kapoor, Neagu died about 5 years ago and is regarded as Romania's most important 20th Century Sculptor. Marianne is curating a small show of his work on behalf of the Neagu Estate (Yolanda pictured with Marianne and friend & curator, David Thorp) in September at the Romanian Cultural Institute in London. Yolanda gave me a disc of images, here's one to whet your appetite before the show:

London - Others Seen

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Holly Pester

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The USS Enterprise -D has met the USS Fearless in order to take on a Starfleet propulsion specialist who will perform an upgrade on the warp drive. When specialist is ready, Capt. Picard orders the Enterprise to warp 1.5. As the ship accelerates, The Enterprise puts in a massive burst of speed. The specialist grabs his console and starts to "phase" in and out of view, noticed only by Wesley. On the bridge, La Forge tells the captain they are passing warp 10, and Data later says that their velocity is off the scale. Picard orders a full stop, and the Enterprise drops out of warp. When he asks for the ship's position, La Forge replies incredulously that they have traveled 1 billion light years. Outside the ship, clouds of cosmic dust and energy beings swim in a never-ending blue abyss. Data concludes that they must be at the edge of the known universe and it will take them 300 years to get home. Down in engineering, Wesley is talking to the specialist. He tells him he me

How relevant is the Text Festival to Bury?

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The other day, someone higher up the bureaucratic food-chain asked: “How relevant is the Text Festival to Bury? Is it something that the ‘ordinary people’ of Bury can appreciate? Or is it something just for specialists?” The word ‘specialists’ was said with that wary intonation suggesting something dirty. The conversation was short (with the question of how will we answer the charge of elitism formed with the single word – “elitism?”). This is of course a dangerously phrased question: not in whether it can be answered but that it can be asked. The root of this is the cancer of State-control and audit validation of art. Public money is spent so art must be accountable (primarily in the financial meaning of the word); as the bureaucracy can’t actually compute ‘art’, it has to count the audience. As often mentioned here, the Government Performance Indicators for the arts are all audience counters. In this context, poetry is a form that is doomed. Poetry has either a solitary audience (the

Ming Wong Special Mention

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Coincident with two works featured in the Text Festival, Ming Wong has achieved special mention at the Venice Biennale : Life of Imitation 7 June - 22 November 2009 "The Jury of the 53rd International Art Exhibition has assigned one of the four Special Mentions to Ming Wong for his works in the Pavilion of Singapore. The Singapore Pavilion, entitled Life of Imitation, stages the co-existence of multiple worlds where language, gender, appearance and traditions constantly negotiate with one another. In playful and imperfect acts of mimesis and melodrama, this exhibition attempts to hold the mirror up to the Singaporean condition related to roots, hybridity and change. Wong explores the performative veneers of language and identity through his own "world cinema" - a series of video installations based on well-known works and artistes in Asian cinema. The mood is further enhanced by billboards painted by Wong and Singapore's last surviving billboard painter Neo Chon Tec

From Basel to Bury

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Blimey! that was a day of art: straight from VOLTA5 to the Text readings. Opened with Judy Kendall, great performances by Nick Thurston and Jesse Glass (travelling further than I to do the gig) and a film from Sarah Tremlett. Recordings of these and all the other readings will be available soon. Thanks to Phil for looking after Jesse and his family while I was on the plane.

VOLTA5

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and tomorrow

The last Basel thing I can fit in is Volta 5 http://www.voltashow.com/ then it's onto a plane for the next installment of the TEXT FESTIVAL Friday 12 June - 07:30 Bury Art Gallery, Moss St., Bury Free admission An evening of experimental poetry and sound in the company of Japan-based Jesse Glass, Nick Thurston, Sarah Tremlett and Judy Kendall. ( For anyone following the progress of " Space the Soldier who died for Perspective ", the next book, I finished it yesterday. The publishers, Veer, will get it next week).

Holbein to Tillmans

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As mentioned the Schaulager is a great space and experience to visit. From Wikipedia: “Designed by the renowned architectural office of Herzog & de Meuron under commission from the Laurenz Foundation, the Schaulager was opened in 2003 in Münchenstein outside Basel and was conceived as an open warehouse that provides the optimal spatial and climatic conditions for the preservation of works of art. The collection of the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation forms the main core of the Schaulager. The institution functions as a mix between public museum, art storage facility and art research institute. It is primarily directed at a specialist audience but is also open to the general public for special events and the annual exhibitions.” Coincident with last year’s Basel was a brilliant double show of Andrea Zittel and Monica Sosnowka , both beautifully displayed in the pure white spaces. To allow the Kunstmuseum to receive the Van Gogh landscapes show, the former’s collection moved to the Sch

Brunch at the Schaulager

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What a great place is the Schaulager http://www.schaulager.org/en/index.php

Art Basel 09

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“nearly 300 leading galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. More than 2,500 artists, ranging from the great masters of Modern art to the latest generation of emerging stars, are represented in the show's multiple sections.” Too much to take in obviously. Prepared by the visual overload of last year, kept more of my attention in reserve so as not to burn out too quick (though resistance can’t last for long), and tried to give myself a specific focus – looking for interesting text works/artists for the next Text Festival. There were some but not many – I will return to my findings on Texts in a summation blog bringing together thoughts on this from all the shows. Gallerists, dealers selling – prices lower now (offered a very nice Edmund de Waal for reasonable 5 figure sum.) “They won’t sell for less than 1.1 million”. “You must give me a call when you are next in New York”; So many spaces you get lost. The people as interesting as the art - much more su

Meanwhile, back in Salford

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Art Unlimited & Liste 09

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Actually except for the free Champagne, it was pretty limited, and Liste 09 - supposedly the feast of new and emerging artists & galleries, was decidedly lacking in anything worthy of emergence. Hopefully, the Art Fair proper tomorrow will be more interesting.

A Boat as a Vessel

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In the same building as the Architekturmuseum, Kunsthalle Basel has a solo show by UK artist, Lucy Skaer called: A Boat Used as a Vessel. This was an interesting installation too, playing with the mathematics of pattern, planar shifting and method transparency. Greatest pleasure came from her use of old furniture, antique tables, used as printing blocks, the tops carved into, inked and printed off. In the first room, a multi-leaf table centred in the space was mirrored on the walls by these prints, each different – depending how many leaves had been pulled out – and augmented with a simple graphic symbol or a colour, gave a sense of monumentality. In another space, she had suspended a whale skeleton behind panels so that it could be glimpsed through the gaps and mirrored this with large drawings on paper on two facing walls. These drawings are schematic and decoratively buried in layers of pattern echoing the stuttering presence of the whale skeleton. Actually my only problem with t

Better little Gestures - “The Madness of Madelon Vriesendorp”

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Having viewed the disappointing Little Theatre of Gestures at the Kunstmuseum yesterday, it was a revelation to see significantly better little gestures in “The World of Madelon Vriesendorp” at Basel Architekturmuseum . www.sam-basel.org I don’t think I know any of her architectural works, but this show of paintings, postcards, objects and games from 1967 to now is brilliantly exciting. It features watercolours, prints and films of New York iconic buildings in surreal landscapes engaged in sex, climbing through holes, crumbling, with the Statue of Liberty sometimes naked, sometimes sleeping, sometimes also crumbled and over topped. Setting out to collect bad paintings, endless collections of postcards of New York, kitsch objects of mind-numbing oddness the Vriesendorp wunderkammer is a Sir John Soanes museum http://www.soane.org/ for the 21st Century – apparently her house is full of this stuff; it’s as if an artist with talent made Gormley’s "Field for the British Isles"

Little Theatre of Gestures

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The current show at Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel , http://www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch/en/exhibitions/current/little-theatre-of-gestures/ was an unexpectedly depressing affair in an otherwise very pleasant day (Basel continues to be delightful - pictured waiting for the river-powered boat). As the exhibition copy ducks out of claiming anything too portentous for the show "not aiming to give an overview on the formal and informal codes that constitute our communiciation in daily life, but instead to gather artistic positions for a mutual play on smaller or larger deeds." The dismay lay not so much in the artworks themselves, though some warranted little attention, but rather in the curation of that 'mutual play'. The spaces of the Gegenwartskunst Museum are quite dynamic and possibly challenging to work with as not many rooms seem to have much in the way of a right-angle, but the juxtaposition of the works often seemed arbitrary or too obviously clumsy. The only set pi

City Trees

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Basel is delightful in June, and quiet this week, with all the art crowd at the Venice Bienniale until next week. What you can't get from a blog/twitter is the miraculous smell in the streets. We are pretty sure that it is the trees which are in flower. Being a city boy, I don't know or particularly care what type they are, just remember that Andy Warhol once complimented City Trees over their country cousins because "they work harder" - this week in Basel they are putting extra effort in.

The Olympics of the Art World

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Off today to Basel. A few days writing and sight-seeing then it is the Art Fair. All being well I will be blogging from there. www.artbasel.com Back on 12 June just in time for the next Text Festival event featuring Jesse Glass, Nick Thurston, Sarah Tremlett and Judy Kendall. www.textfestival.com/when/view-12

The Other Room

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