Posts

Showing posts from 2010

2010 - the end of days

Image
I did a review of the year for 2009 which felt like my tradition but I now realise that it was actually the first time I had done it. As I sit down to consider 2010, I am surprised to find that the pressures of the year make a simple review less easy. The combination of the depression across the UK at the dark forces that have assumed control of the state, the professional pressures from this (which put many of us in the position of being resistant while charged with tasks of implementing the destruction of public services), the sadness from bereavement, and the massive but more exhilarating challenge of putting together the next and last Text Festival (while also working on its replacement) – all this gives the year a somewhat distorted retrospection. For a start off when I look to review cultural highlights I find that I only managed to get to the cinema once all year – that was to see Inception. A shortlist of one would hardly have much credit, though I could just say Inception and

Merry Christmas!

Barney opens his presents

Marrakech

I am in Marrakech writing the Tragedy of Althusserianism.

Ghosts move about me patched with histories

Image
Philip Davenport and Nicola Smith Chinese Art Centre, Manchester 30 November - 17 December Artists' Talk: 9 December 5.30- 6.30pm Preview Evening: 9 December - 6.30pm - 8.30pm Tour dates: 9 - 11 December Ghosts move about me patched with histories is an immersive text/art experience, designed by poet Philip Davenport and performance artist Nicola Smith. Both have previously taken part in artist residencies in Chongqing and will use the exhibition to reflect on their experiences in China. The exhibition counterpoints the freedom of being in a strange environment with the limits imposed by social control. Davenport’s text installation is a poem written into wallpaper, covering one side of the gallery. Nicola will act as a deliberately misleading tour guide, taking visitors through the environment created by the pair, including a pause for snacks, some trashy TV and a computer that rewrites Davenport’s words with infinite variations, programmed by poet Tom Jenks. A live chicken will

The Other Room

KEN EDWARDS, NEIL ADDISON, LOUISE WOODCOCK 7pm 1st December 2010 The Old Abbey Inn, 61 Pencroft Way, Manchester, M15 6AY (Manchester Science Park) Admission is free and there is a well-stocked book shop. Ken Edwards is the publisher and editor of the small poetry press Reality Street. He has had numerous books and pamphlets published including: Good Science: Poems 1983-1991 (Roof Books, New York City, 1992), No Public Language: Selected Poems 1975-1995 (Shearsman Books, 2006), Songbook (Oystercatcher Press, 2009). Neil Addison’s latest book Apocapulco is in the new Salt Modern Voices series. His chapbook The Everyday of Irma Kite (2009) was published by Arthur Shilling Press. His blog is flyingpigfoldingchair.blogspot.com Louise Woodcock is an artist currently residing in Manchester. She works in a diverse range of media including Live Art, Installation, Sound and Fibre. Recent projects include a collaborative performance with Jennifer McDonald at Counting Backwards, a live crochet at

Every Day is a Good Day

Image
There's been a buzz about the major retrospective John Cage, currently on display at Huddersfield Art Gallery - originated by the Hayward Gallery and the BALTIC, an excitement I also shared today when I got to see it. I say 'shared' because despite all its marvels, I found a flaw which has nagged away at me since I left. You enter the exhibition to a film of Cage being interviewed and photos of him doing various things, and even if you don't hang around to watch the video the drift of the Zen contentment of his conversation seems to gently locate your consciousness as you pass into the exhibition proper. The individual works are mostly beautifully deep and subtle images, for obvious reasons, reminiscent of Japanese Zen painting, punctuated by the equally striking diagrammatic compositions. Seeing such a body of work is fascinating, wash-away calming and affirming. It's just great stuff. Then there is the hang: inspired by Cage's use of chance-determined scores

Worksetting - in every dream home a heartache

Image
Last night's launch of "in every dream home a heartache" at the worksetting gallery, huddersfield. It opened with a performance of a structured accordian ensemble improvisation by experimental music composer Alvin Curran. Although it was interesting in its intervention in the distinctive arcade space, it was over long and too tonally restricted. http://www.hcmf.co.uk/page/show/144 The most striking element of the show was the corian furniture by amanda levete. Also included (on ipods) was the first stage of the nono project: sound-poetry works by Ben Gwilliam (sound treatment of American poet P.Inman) - "Nono" Carol Watts & Will Montgomery - "Pitch" Simon Smith (with sound treatment by Jamie Telford ) - "The Angel"; "Angel Cut-Up"; "Six Bold Flavours" Sarah Boothroyd - Power and Freedom. I am still working on curating the nono project so anyone out there still interested in responding to Luigi Nono can still get so

Newspeak

Image
In London in the week making a presentation about the Irwell Sculpture Trail http://www.irwellsculpturetrail.co.uk/ to the Chartered Institute of Water and Environment Management ( http://www.ciwem.org/ ) to develop future project partnerships. (A bit scary to realise that I started the IST in 1993). Anyway, the only show I had time to take in was Newspeak: British Art Now at the Saatchi Gallery http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/new_britannia/ It wasn’t clear why it called Newspeak. I guessed that it somehow implied that as this is Saatchi’s next generation they are supposed to be speaking new. That was me assuming that they were trying to say something positive about the new collection. But it did seem a bit risky because of the Orwellian interpretations – that Saatchi is attempting to control the discourse (again) about contemporary British Art. I discover via Google that "this exhibition turns that Orwellian vision on its head, showing that the range of visual languag

Death and the idea of museums

(My usual excuse for not blogging much = Text Festival organising, preparing for the government destruction of public services, writing the Tragedy of Althusserianism, etc.). Anyway, I joined the Museum-id network recently ( http://museum-id.ning.com/ ). A quick trawl through more recent discussions that drew my attention to a question from Steph Mastoris, Head of the National Waterfront Museum: Are Museums About Stories or Objects ? He answers: "The boring and safe answer is, of course, that museums are about both. Objects are central to the very existence of the museum, but without telling stories about them the museum is just a storehouse. For me, the key issue here is much more about whether the museum's displays begin with the object or the story. I feel that the concept-centred display is far more robust and logical than one driven by what is available in the stores. The imperative to inform that lies at the heart of the museum's purpose is best served when coherent

The Olympics and Poetry

Image
In 2009 I was shortlisted for one of the 2012 Olympic commissions called " Artists Taking The Lead " - which would develop an international language festival featuring many of the world's leading poets, sound and media artists. Held in Manchester in 2012, The Language Moment would be the largest ever celebration and dialogue of language in the arts. http://www.artiststakingthelead.org.uk/north-west/info Simon Armitage was shortlisted for "Any Distance Greater than a Single Span", which would see an epic poem carved into the rock on Ilkley Moor and a range of spectacular performances. Neither of us got the final commission - mine was beaten by the proposal for a crap fountain in Liverpool; I dont know who beat Armitage but I like to think that his proposal was beaten by the offensiveness of its own egomania. When the powers that be realised that the 2012 Cultural Olympiad was becoming shambolic, they brought in respected cultural leader Ruth MacKenzie to give i

A Sustainable Future for the Rollerball Museum

Image
Since May, the cultural workforce in the UK has been nervously anticipating the onslaught of the dark regime that now governs the country. The disaster that this will be for British culture is universally accepted – except maybe by intestate liberals in denial, who for the sake of realism can be ignored as hopefully they will be for a generation - Charlie Brooker commented in the Guardian this week that the liberals represent the acceptable face of abuse but we have to hope that they are treated as unacceptable for many years to come. The only question in most people’s minds is the degree of destruction we face. I think that the most telling comparison I have heard is with the Conservatives' last ideological attack: the destruction of the labour movement and the closure of the once mighty mining industry: culture’s future looks remarkably like the fate that befell the wasteland of pit villages and blighted a generation of workers. My epigrammatic assessment is that this governmen

Moomin Valley at Bury

Image
Magical Moominvalley 23 October - 15 January 2011 To celebrate the 65th anniversary of the Moomins Bury Art Gallery has recreated the feeling of visiting Moominvalley itself. The world of the Moomins, created by Finnish artist Tove Jansson has delighted and captivated children and adults alike for the last 65 years. Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson created the white hippopotamus-looking creatures whose adventures have been translated into 34 languages. Jansson wrote and illustrated eight books about these eccentric creatures, the first of which The Moomins and the Great Flood was published in 1945. Tove Jansson was a prolific illustrator and less well-known for her work produced in newspapers. Her beautiful drawings of the Moomins will be shown alongside a collection of rare examples of Jansson’s illustrations published in Finnish daily newspapers, as well as illustrations of JR Tolkein’s The Hobbit and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The exhibitions will appeal to children

The Other Room

Tuesday 19 October 6pm FREE The International Anthony Burgess Foundation, The Engine House, Chorlton Mill, 3 Cambridge Street, Manchester M1 5BY. JEROME ROTHENBERG, ALLEN FISHER, MAGGIE O'SULLIVAN

Ron Silliman's Text

Image
Ron's neon text extracted from his poem Northern Soul which, I think, is part of Universe, begins production. www.textfestival.com

Back from Finland

Image
A great week in Tampere. The Tragedy of Althusserianism started badly - so badly in fact that within a couple of days of arriving and struggling hopelessly, I seriously considered giving up the writing break and flying home early. I found an internet connection and started costing up flights. Then returned to my computer, and as if the threat of stopping turned on a tap, 19 sections of the poem poured forth. "ichnologic years after inserting one mental state into another, the space between but the excuses as color-naming systems deviate from the predict of universal forces would predict" I was very pleased to see Karri Kokko again and to meet Satu Kaikkonen . I gave Satu a copy of Reykjavik and she gave me 3 fabulous hand-made books (one of which featured the namepoem pictured here) and a couple of visual poems (which are now both on the wall in the apartment). (Picture:Karri and Satu) We had lunch together, and agreed their participation in the Text Festival, and then vis

Text Festival 2011

Image
The new Text Festival website goes live today. http://www.textfestival.com Over the next month more events will be added.

Back to Finland

It's been an intense few weeks as the Text Festival moved towards having some sort of shape, so I haven't had time to blog. The first wave of the programme will be officially announced in the next few days - there'll be more to follow. Meanwhile I am returning to my favourite (so far) place in Finland - Tampere. Primarily I am seeing purdah to write "The Tragedy of Althusserianism", which assuming I finish it, will come out on ifpthenq in November. But I am looking forward to seeing Karri Korro again and meeting Satu Kaikkonen for the first time. The first thing I'll do on arrival is attend an exhibition opening at TR1 http://www.tampere.fi/tr1/english.htm Through the week I'll also be meeting various local curators to talk about future projects. I am not sure I will have internet access.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Image
I remember that there were only two artists at Sevilla Biennale 2008 whom I found interesting; I can't recall one without looking back to my journal but the other was the Mexican-Canadian electronic artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer . He also caught my radar at Basel Art Fair in 2009. So I am pleased to see that he has a solo show called Recorders at Manchester Art Gallery. It features seven recent pieces of which I think I recognise a couple from the previous installations. Lozano-Hemmer’s artworks depend on the participation of visitors to exist and develop, as the artist describes: “In Recorders, artworks hear, see and feel the public, they exhibit awareness and record and replay memories entirely obtained during the show. The pieces either depend on participation to exist or predatorily gather information on the public through surveillance and biometric technologies.” Highlights of the exhibition include Pulse Room, on show in the UK for the very first time. Premiered in Puebla, Mex

A Single Man’s Inception

Image
I rarely mention film here and I am going to do what Ron Silliman in his review of Inception said one shouldn’t and that is consider that film’s implications as a medium of serious thought. Like Ron, I thought Christopher Nolan’s movie of dreams within dreams was a ‘kick-ass summer film to trump all summer films.” And I probably would have left it at that until I caught up with last year’s Tom Ford film A Single Man while in Malta. There may not seem an immediately obvious connection between the two films. Inception is a ‘colossal digital artefact, a virtual reality sci-fi thriller set inside the dreaming mind, with brilliant architectural effects and a weirdly inert narrative inspired by Philip K Dick and Lewis Carroll’ (Guardian). In the distant future, the technology of industrial espionage allows snoopers to invade the dreams of CEOs and steal commercially sensitive information. Leonardo DiCaprio is Cobb, a specialist who both carries out these hi-tech brain raids and trains exec

And the Award for the Best Poetry Dog goes to…

Image
I have a dilemma in writing about the Manchester Literature Festival which has launched its programme for this October: I have noticed that my blog readership doubles when I critically blast some aspect of UK literary banality – so if I comment on the MIF programme in the way that most of my readers would expect I will increase my hits; on the other hand I also notice that the Manchester Blogger Awards are situated within the Festival, so if I say something less critical maybe I’d increase my chances of a Blogger nomination. So prostitute myself for blog-reader popularity or sell out for an Award nomination? I jest, of course. I couldn’t get a Manchester Blogger nomination because I am too negative about too many things Manchester. This is not because I have particular pleasure in denigrating the city; rather it is because I am fond of Manchester, because I like living here and therefore want it to be what it could be. I want Manchester to be an international city, and am saddened th

Busy even on holiday

I've not really had time to blog this last week or more due to the Text Festival curating. Between now and early November is the busiest period of organisation. It is such a big labour that it has to be done in phases. The Text Festival website should be back live any day now with the first announcements of what and who's on but in the meantime there is now a Text Festival Facebook and Twitter. This coming week I am off to Malta for a break - except while I am there I will be finishing my article for the Shortcut Europe Conference publication, the sleeve notes for Ben Gwilliam's disc of 'molto semplice e cantabile' , my Nono sound-poem for the Luigi Nono Project, and my forthcoming collection for ifpthenq " The Tragedy of Althusserianism ". I have a couple of long blog rants also on the go which may make it up here when I get back.

Sarah Sanders

Image
During the Not at This Address exhibition I curated last July (blogged at the time) I noticed that most of the younger artists involved had very little sense of how to deal with a larger gallery space. This is not surprising really: young artists first show at degree shows which offer them a display space the size of a cupboard; if they are anyways successful in their early career they might show at an artfair, and these spaces are just slightly larger cupboards; after that it's a succession of small galleries or group shows, the latter offering little experience in spatial judgement either. Artists develop their practice and therefore the size of the spaces they show in over years. Young artists rarely get the opportunity to respond to the challenge of a big gallery. I got to wondering what would the young artists whom I rate do with a large gallery. What would they learn? And what would I learn too? So when Bury Art Gallery had a gap in the programme (due to a major chunk of i

Space reviewed

Image
Robert Grenier's response to Space the Soldier who died for Perspective http://sibila.com.br/index.php/sibila-english/1232-robert-grenier The book is available from Veer Books http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc/publications/veer-books

uncontainable excitement

It looks like once a year I will receive an email from the Poetry Society inviting me to recommend ‘exciting new work’ that I might have come across, commissioned, etc., in the last 12 months to be considered for Carol Ann Duffy’s Ted Hughes Award for New Work , which she set up when she took over from Andrew Motion as Poet Laureate. Somewhat bemused by the source of this request last year, I emailed them back to ask who the judges were going to be (as at the time of launch they hadn’t been announced). I received an email back telling me who they were – I forget now, look it up somewhere if you need to know – but it was obvious that the judges would be incapable of recognising new work if it held a gun to their heads, which is what I replied to the Poetry Society - to offer up real innovators would be to diminish them and validate a sham. The final communication from them took the form of the equivalent of a shrug. And surprise, surprise, who should win the inaugural award than Duffy-l

node:space #1

Image
The first installation in node:space . Have I created a visual poem? Or an architectural poem? Viewing by appointment. I'll be inviting other artists into node:space in future moments.

Duffy at the Tate

When I first heard that Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy had curated an exhibition called The Sculpture of Language at Tate Liverpool http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/CollectionDisplays?venueid=4&roomid=6299 my reaction was an equivalence of anger at the implications of this hegemonic banality and resignation that it was only to be expected. For a while I intended to traipse over to Liverpool specially, so I could do write an informed critique. Noticeably there appear to have been no reviews of the show. Google just throws up the usual lazy journalism of reprinting the Gallery press release. A quick look at said-publicity, the list of works included, and the execrable sonnet Duffy wrote to accompany her selection made me begrudge the obvious waste of time and effort to actually go and see it but also realise that the information available is more than enough to know what’s wrong with it. Coincidentally I have been reading Tom Raworth’s latest “ Windmills in Flames ” which includes th

Busy

Image
Blogging has take a back seat recently as I focus on putting the Text Festival together and preparing the Nono project. Despite the impending dark age initated by the new Government, I am hopeful that the Text Festival will still be a mighty gesture. I am losing count of how many artists are involved now. The main announcement of the programme will be in October but maybe I can whet your appetite by letting slip that Christian Bök will do his first UK readings at the Festival and Ron Silliman will be back - reading and with a surprising manifestation of Northern Soul, the poem he began during his last visit. (These recently rediscovered illustrations are from my distance past (1980's) when I trained as a potter)