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Showing posts from March, 2009

The Other Room

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they never run, only call

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I meant to write about Rachel Goodyear’s superb show “ they never run, only call ” at International 3 http://www.international3.com/exhibition.php?E=40 while it was still on but didn’t get round to it. But I have been carrying the experience around with me of her intense concentration of the drawings since I saw it. And this was magnified the other day when I happened to be in Manchester Art Gallery for the launch of Manchester International Festival – of which more in future posts. No, the specific trigger for reconsidering Goodyear was seeing the Gallery’s newest acquisition Antony Gormley’s Filter (pictured). “It’s a hanging figure made of flat mild steel rings welded together. The sculpture is hollow and holes in the rings allow you to glimpse inside the body, which contains a suspended heart.” During his siting visit, Gormley said “The work hangs in space as if in orbit, open to light and the elements, it is a meditation on the relationship between the core of the body and spa

The Other Room Anthology

The Other Room Anthology 08/09 is now available, featuring: David Annwn Richard Barrett Caroline Bergvall Stuart Calton Lucy Harvest Clarke Patricia Farrell Alan Halsey Tom Jenks Alex Middleton Geraldine Monk Maggie O’Sullivan Robert Sheppard Harriet Tarlo Scott Thurston Tony Trehy Carol Watts Joy As Tiresome Vandalism The official launch is at the next Other Room on 1st April but you can pre-order a copy for £5 + £0.75 P&P via PayPal by visiting us at www.otherroom.org .

Great Cinema

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While Glen Ford would be respected as one of the movie greats, it amazes me that no one mentions one stunning performance which I regard as the greatest death scene in cinema history. Ordinarily most people would quickly change the channel when the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie comes on the TV, but I am riveted to the screen (as I was last night) until Ford's scene. He plays Jonathan Kent and only has two scenes in the film - the first one the Kent's find the baby superman just arrived from Krypton and in the second he puts a fatherly arm around the Clark's teenage shoulders and speculates about whether there is some cosmic purpose to the boy being 'super'. The conversation ends and Clark runs ahead to the barn calling back "race you". The camera turns onto Ford as he walks up the slope. His heart attack happens in seconds, if you blink you could miss it, but it is, I think, unbearably moving. A realisation passes across his face, then a panic but

Small Eternities

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It's always a pleasure to visit Manchester's finest building - the Rylands Library. The recent refurbishment is thankfully sufficiently restrained so as not to interfer with the original architecture. The Library itself has got a fabulous collection including 500-year-old translations of the Bible into English, one of England’s oldest recipe books and even fragments of the Gospel of Mary. Its poetry collection stretches from one of the earliest existing manuscripts of the complete Canterbury Tales by Chaucer to the Dom Sylvester Houédard http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/news/0310hou.html plus, as the local publisher, the Carcanet archive. The Library has recently opened an exhibition called "A Small Eternity - the Shape of the Sonnet Through Time" which I was keen to see as the form has been recently illuminated by Jeff Hilson's brilliant survey of contemporary practice " The Reality Street Book of Sonnets ". Sad to report the best you can say about the sh

Altermodern

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In responding to the Tate Triennial exhibition, Altermodern , you are forced to approach it within the framing logic laid out by its French curator Nicolas Bourriaud. http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/ “Altermodern is an in-progress redefinition of modernity in the era of globalisation, stressing the experience of wandering in time, space and mediums”. A mighty claim – re-defining modernity – which adding “in-progress” doesn’t release the exhibition from the responsibility to deliver. Of course it can’t and doesn’t. So you have to wonder why Bourriaud made the claim for the show. To answer this you have to turn to the catalogue essay (or the video clips on the website if you like). It is reasonable given the context of curating in one of the international institutional galleries and of the implied portentous status of a Triennial for Bourriaud set out to consider the historic moment of globalisation, liberal uncertainty, fundamentalisms, etc, we are in and where c