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Showing posts from November, 2009

Inspection to infinity

Has the UK Government found the resources to go beyond the Russell Paradox? "Suppose that every public library has to compile a catalog of all its books. The catalog is itself one of the library's books, but while some librarians include it in the catalog for completeness, others leave it out, as being self-evident. Now imagine that all these catalogs are sent to the national library. Some of them include themselves in their listings, others do not. The national librarian compiles two master catalogs - one of all the catalogs that list themselves, and one of all those that don't. The question is now, should these catalogs list themselves? The 'Catalog of all catalogs that list themselves' is no problem. If the librarian doesn't include it in its own listing, it is still a true catalog of those catalogs that do include themselves. If he does include it, it remains a true catalog of those that list themselves. However, just as the librarian cannot go wrong with t

Forthcoming

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Giles Goodland will be reading for Vital Signs at the Chapman Gallery, Salford University, at 1pm on Monday 30thNovember. Admission is free. Giles is the author of, among other books, the excellent Capital http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/184471263X.htm) The 13th Other Room takes place Wednesday, 2nd December. After at the usual venue, The Old Abbey Inn, 61 Pencroft Way, Manchester, M15 6AY (on Manchester Science Park). 7 PM start. Details of readers below. More details at www.otherroom.org SOPHIE ROBINSON is a London poet whose work has appeared in various online magazines including Pilot, How2 and Dusie as well as Jeff Hilson's Reality Street Book Of Sonnets and Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe) Her most recent collection is a on Les Figues Press. NICK THURSTON (b.1982) is a conceptual artist and writer whose primary concerns are the use of languages and the possibilities of languages. Thurston explores modes of reading, in both literary and ‘fin

Not Curating For The Future

I had expected today to blog about the future of curating because I attended the Renaissance North West Conference "Curating for the Future", http://www.mla.gov.uk/what/programmes/renaissance/contacts/renaissance_north_west which should have given me some interesting things to get my teeth into. However, it turned out that the conference had very little to do with what I think of when I use the word "curate". Indeed, on reflection, I don't think I heard the word used. Come to think of it, artists werent mentioned either. It turned out that curating in the context of the conference meant "our sector strives for organisational and environmental sustainability to ensure we continue to exist, develop and provide relevant and inspirational services to the public we were." The conference opened with a speech from the Culture Minister - delivered by the top civil servant from the Dept. of Culture because she had been required to do something more important i

fourmill plus quarterinch

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Performance and CD Launch of Lemke/Gwilliam’s fourmill plus quarterinch Castlefield gallery Thursday, November 26, 2009 (18:00 - 20:00) fourmill plus quarterinch is the duo of sound artists and improvising musicians Helmut Lemke and Ben Gwilliam. In this collaboration the two artists use different formats of audiotape; pre-recorded, prepared and unprepared. From individual banks of sound recordings on tape comes a subtle and often dense music that is both composed and improvised in concrete time. FREE EVENT, BOOKING REQUIRED To book please call the gallery on 0161 832 8034 or email events@castlefieldgallery.co.uk with your contact details and number of places. Castlefield gallery, 2 Hewitt Street Knott Mill, Manchester M15 4GB

From Space

Procumbent to be alone would be paradisiacal a walled garden, solipsistic pause when no-one sees you facing the wrong way and there is no other waiting no gaze, a state only achieved in the morning shower before the regular routine of work.

News From Phil Davenport

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Phil's in China at the moment - this just in: Speech is code Philip Davenport’s residency at 501 Artspace in Chongqing, China (2 Nov-31 Dec) features input from several Chinese artists, in a sequence of English/Chinese text art works, titled Speech is Code. Davenport has made a sequence of 8-word poems, which collage together ancient Chinese poems, lines from iconic conceptual and text art sources and modernist and postmodern poetry, finding parallels in form and intent – and knitting together new meanings completely unintended by the originators. Davenport moves between literary and visual modes, exhibiting works as in situ billposter/poems in cities throughout Europe, in galleries and as 3D objects. His 2006 Heartshape Pornography series was handwritten onto artificial apples; in 2008 he relabelled street debris; 1998-2008 his Imaginary Missing People, poems made from missing person notices, were billposted in Berlin, Edinburgh, Reykjavik, Paris, London, Bilbao. The Speech is Cod

Book launch and the publishers fair

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London Small Publishers Fair Reading from Space The Soldier Who Died For Perspective As I said in my preamble, maybe a reading should be more about what the writer learns for the next work rather than how the audience are entertained, so it occurred to me there was something interesting to test in the rhythm of the way Space was written. When I am writing a piece, each time I sit down with it I work from the start each time; this means when the first complete draft is done, the beginning section is much more worked. Over time, I hopefully work the whole piece to the same level of finish, but it occurred to me that in a book of 6 works written over 4 years, there may well be a relationship, a dialogue between all those beginnings. So for this reading, which had to be short, I read the beginnings of each of the sections. From Vertigo, I just read the first line: "everything that is the case is a non-recursive set." Which is, of course, my reworking of Wittgenstein's first l

About Space

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(From a second conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, which will be posted here shortly,) HANS ULRICH OBRIST: How much control does the artist have in the interpretation of his work? Which got me thinking about the forthcoming reception of Space The Soldier Who Died For Perspective . When 50 Heads came out, I didn’t write anything about it or even read at the launch, so essentially there was no interpretation from me. As Ron Silliman noted: “This explains everything. That there won’t be any explanations in the usual sense of that word”. I wondered therefore: What would be different if I offered explanations of Space? The book is structured to mirror the composition of Paolo Uccello’s “ Rout of San Romano ” painted in 1432 – a painting which has fascinated me for more than 30 years, and specifically the procumbent soldier in the bottom left corner, whom art history calls ‘the soldier who died for perspective’ – because Uccello, who was obsessed with the complications of perspective, app

Reading Room - Barnsley

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Finished the installation of my text "Reading Room" in the "Reading by Light" show at the Barnsley Civic Gallery - things were still being hung and the lighting still needs to be sorted but I couldn't resist putting up these immediate pictures - official ones next week. The show opens tomorrow.

Fully Booked

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Output-wise, it’s a busy week for me: two exhibitions and a book launch. First up is Fully Booked in Bonn ; then (also on Friday) Reading by Light in Barnsley; and then on Saturday the launch of “ Space The Soldier Who Died For Perspective ” at the London Small Publishers Fair. More of the latter two later. The Beethoven hotel in Bonn will be demolished in 2010 to make way for a large complex with apartments and a restaurant. The old, and now empty, hotel occupies a very central location – directly opposite Bonn 's opera house, and overlooking the west bank of the Rhine. But before it is pulled down, it is being brought to life with a varied program of artistic interventions. The website gives you some idea of the sort of things that are going on - including some exuberant installations. http://www.moving-locations.de/eng_index.html There are also a number of minimalists at work too, of which I am one. My text, called Broadcast Room , is an edit of "The Radio Broadcast &

Lightboxes

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Manchester's Piccadilly Metro station features a set of nine lightboxes facing the platforms which are devoted to display of artworks. Originally part of the Text Festival but delayed due to engineering works, the station has just reopened with text works selected by me supported by the Hamilton Project. Various artists featured including Madrid-based Finn, Riiko Sakkinen (Future Cola) (below) http://www.riikosakkinen.com/ "Some Infinities are larger than others" part of a text work by me in collaboration with Kerry Morrison, plus a couple of works by Márton Koppány from Budapest (introduced to me by Geof Huth). 40,000 people a day stand on these platforms looking at the work while they wait for their trams - an exposure reaching nearly 2 million by the end of the display in February. It would have been nice if the Station had not located those awful yellow "Piccadilly" signs next to the lightboxes, though.

On Jazz or Comedy

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As regulars here will know it is only in recent times that I have begun to do readings. Previously I had taken the view that the work was specifically written for the page, with effects for the readers’ eye and silent voice. When I wrote “Mirror Canon Snips” for Melbourne the idea that it would be performed by moving readers through the installation caused me to become intrigued with the question whether it was possible to make them stumble by making the language of the poem too complex to read while walking. But then when I was persuaded to read at the Other Room, I discovered that there were things that I could learn from performing the poems which weren’t evident in silence. There were also dramatic effects that I discovered that were more for the entertainment of the audience – particularly the way Reykjavik opens when you read it. I remember recording the first part of the performance for me to review any insights in that reading, having not anticipated that it was also videoed b