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Showing posts from September, 2009

The Language Moment

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Yesterday was the big day - the Language Moment was presented to the North West Panel of the Olympic Artists Taking the Lead Commission. I was accompanied in the presentation by Phil Davenport and Diana Hamilton from the Hamilton Project http://www.thehamiltonproject.co.uk/projects/. I haven't said much about the proposal here or anywhere else really - basically because I was working too hard on it to the last minute. But now it's in and we await the decision - it will be announced on 22 October. The Language Moment is a festival of international language in art, recognising and creating a cross-artform dialogue from poetry to sound art, from sculpture to multimedia. The Commission would create new worldwide possibilities for art and communication. In so doing, it aspires to change the course and discourse of contemporary art and poetics establishing a new definition and a new field of international linguistic art practice and dialogue. It would locate Manchester at the centr

Paul Neagu at the Romanian Cultural Institute

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Discussing art collecting

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Yesterday at the Buy Art Fair at Urbis http://www.buyartfair.co.uk/ I took part in the panel discussion of "Public/Private: Institutions and Developing a Market for Contemporary Art." The others on the panel were Lewis Biggs (Liverpool Biennial), Mark Waugh (A Foundation), and Paul Moss (Workplace Gallery). I quite enjoyed the discussion but think it was only just getting started when we ran out of time. My main position was that most UK public authority galleries have been driven by governmental non-cullture priorities for so long that curators have been artistically de-skilled and don't have curatorial confidence to be validating players in the art market; in this context, the Arts Council's ambition for more adventurous collecting policies is mostly a fantasy.

Angels of Anarchy

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Last night, we attended the preview of Angels of Anarchy at Manchester Art Gallery. There was a big crowd, which made looking at the show not so easy - previews generally are not the best time to actually see an exhibition. Rarely for the Gallery, this show made me think I would probably go back to see it without the crowd. I admit that my interest in surrealism has always been limited so my knowledge of women surrealists, who, as Jeanette Winterton pointed out in her opening remarks, are as marginalised as most women in avant-gardes. Therefore it was pretty much all new for me (except vaguely Lee Miller.) I found that the works which I most frequently looked at the label to see who had done pieces that stood out were consistently by Eileen Agar ( http://www.redfern-gallery.co.uk/pages/artistinfo/121.html ), her self-portrait in pen & ink of 1928 was a beautiful drawing made somewhat poignant by the inscription "for peter". "Ladybird" is another worth seeking o

BBC interview

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A very conducive interview for BBC north west by Steve Rawling about the Language Moment. Apparently the BBC are filming all 5 of the shortlisted candidates and will show them just before the public announcement. He filmed me in front of Shaun Pickard's neon text "Darwin" and the video animation "Grin Variations" edited by Phil Davenport from his work with schools in Bury and the Hague.

I'm Back

Well except for the project in Finland, the last 6 weeks have been completely taken up with preparation of the final submission of the Language Moment. The process of drawing it together, as well as being exhausting, has been remarkable for the massive extension of my global contacts and the universal excitement it has generated from everyone I have been discussing it with. I don't want to say too much about the project yet, it seems a little like tempting fate when I still have the presentation to do to the Panel on 29 September. After that I'll describe it in more detail - suffice it to say that it will involve more than 100 artists and most of the main venues in Manchester. The team I have pulled together who will help deliver it could change the world given the chance - so let's hope we get it. Anyway, normal service is resumed here now.

Tampere

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Tuire arrives at Ikko where we were staying. http://www.ilkko.fi/eng/indexeng.html Tuire did a remarkable job looking after our party, translating and sorting everything out with endless energy. Older people from Bury and Tampere dancing together Lunch with Karri Korro, who drove up from Helsinki Project evaluation: and finally: Home and Barney with his Moomin brought from the Moomin Valley Museum http://inter9.tampere.fi/muumilaakso/index.php?lang=en

Back to Finland

From tomorrow, I am back in my favourite Finnish city, Tampere. Cultural mobility is the buzz phrase in most debates about globalisation, but usually this refers to artist mobility. My take on it is broader, including communities themselves. Bury had previously taken a group of older people to Stuttgart who were learning to write plays. I was presenting this experience to a European Museums seminar in Bertinoro, Italy after which the Finnish delegation approached me to do a similar project with them. So here we are. The group we are taking are older people who are participating in a dance project led by Ruth Tyson-Jones. The programme includes dance workshops, meeting Finnish older people to exchange experience, seeing museums, etc, etc. Personally, I'm looking forward to the Sara Hilden Art Museum opening on Friday http://www.tampere.fi/english/sarahilden/ Saunas will be ubiquitious; but I draw the line at jumping into lakes - that degree of closeness to nature verges on psychosis

If Not This and

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If Not This opened as the audience entered the building with Helmut Lemke 's "if not this...WHAT THEN & if not at this address...WHERE ELSE?" - a very witty durational configuration of Helmut sitting on a chair with a bucket on his head, a high up bottle of water slowly dripping down onto the bucket. Audience members were invited to drop written comments into another bucket beside him (my comment pictured above) He picked up each written comment and mumbled it from inside the bucket and attempted blindly to scrawl on the outside of the bucket. A very amusing piece. Up in the main gallery, I welcomed the audience and introduced the rest of the artists. First up Ben Gwilliam : he performed molto semplice e cantabile . Prior to the gig, he had made a mould of a vinyl disc of Beethoven's Sonata No 32 and from this created casts in ice. Taking these from a specially brought in fridge, he placed them on turntables: abstract and swirling, the rhythm created by spinning