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Showing posts from February, 2010

Havard Volden & Toshimaru Nakamura

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SCS 10 :: Havard Volden & Toshimaru Nakamura. Wednesday 24th February 8.00pm Islington Mill, James Street, Salford, M3 5HW Entry: £5 on the door Håvard Volden : a player of the 'Table Top Guitar', an instrument with a long history, this guy is one of the new generation along with the likes of Thomas Korber that has been handed the Baton by Jim O'Rourke ( in his youth ) who in turn was handed it by Mr Keith Rowe ( who's history is as long & radical as his personal music taste is as bewilderingly Reactionary! ). Strangely he doesn't sound anything like his family tree, with him this ...cough.. 'Traditional' set up of Guitar layed flat with springs, contact mics etc attached comes out sounding more like Hans Reichels Daxophone recordings! He's Norwegian. Toshimaru Nakamura : a player of 'No-Input Mixing Desk' , again this 'instrument' has a history, going back thru David Tudor, David Berman, David Myers, lotta Davids there strangel

The badge machine is broken

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I have been looking forward to the reopening of the remodelled and extended National People’s History Museum http://www.phm.org.uk/ as I held the old version in very high esteem. So high in fact that I used to have to steel myself for a visit because some of the histories, displays, documents, the moments of social revelation were so powerful that I would be moved to tears. This was the only museum that had such a profound effect on me – although appalling, even the Hiroshima Atomic Museum didn’t touch me so deeply. Living in Manchester you have to have low architectural expectations – an ‘international’ city with no (contemporary) international architecture. Walking passed the museum every day, I have parenthesised my view of Austin-Smith: Lord design ( http://www.austinsmithlord.com/ ) as competent mediocrity (although having seen the interior the ‘competent’ may be generous – picture: the foyer, notice the big column right in front of the information desk). But this isn’t an arc

Wallflower poetics and ‘the orthodoxy of subversion’

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Back in December, I wrote a letter contributing to the online correspondence between choreographer Jonathan Burrows and Live Art theorist Adrian Heathfield ( http://tony-trehy.blogspot.com/2009/12/gauging-freedom-and-constraint.html ). It’s been a while since the two put anything online to continue their conversation. In his new letter, http://www.thisisperformancematters.co.uk/news.1.12.html Jonathan tells us that they have been continuing development of their thinking by phone, which seems like a breach of the convention of starting a public conversation in the first place, and implicitly it does now feel like a dialogue that we have missed part of. Anyway, though I understand my contribution was pointed out to Adrian at least, I wasn’t expecting a response or acknowledge; I did hope that proof of an audience would up the quality of argument. Maybe a nod to this in Burrows letter is his references. So, to the content of the argument: I find it bizarre that their thinking continues

The Non-existence of the Unnamed

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A solo exhibition by Brass Art Preview: Friday 12 th February 2010 6pm -8pm Exhibition Dates: 13th February- 20th March 2010 Exhibition opening times: Wednesday - Saturday 12pm - 5pm The Myth of Origins, The Unnamed no.1, (2009), watercolour on paper, 50.8cmx40.6cm Brass Art is the collective name for artists, Chara Lewis, Kristin Mojsiewicz and Anneké Pettican. For their second solo show at The International 3, Brass Art continue to develop the expansive series of watercolour drawings collectively titled, The Myth of Origins, in which the shadow forms of the artists encounter the manifestation of their collective psyche. In the new series of drawings for The Non-existence of the Unnamed, the artists unlock the Entomology collection at The Manchester Museum. The suggested encounters portrayed between the re-animated specimens and living flesh are at once terrifying and intimate. Transformed into a series of theatrical masquerades, the drawings reveal the tension between the idea of th

Reykjavik

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Marton's response to Reykjavik makes me think that unless you were in Iceland in 2007 you probably haven't seen the poem's own visual manifestation in the Safn Museum. So here is what it looked like: (Dan Flavin and Roni Horn in the background)

Márton Koppány responses to Reykjavik

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Marton writes: "Since my English hasn't improved a bit since we met, here I send you an asemic comment on your Reykjavík (on its distances and boundaries)"

Budapest

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Arrived in Budapest to what the UK would call a blizzard. The snow was thicker than it was a few weeks back in England and it seemed to have no effect on daily life. Everywhere I went, even outer areas of the city, had cleared pavements and roads. Unlike Manchester city centre's incapable response to snow, no-one was slipping over; it was business as usual. (View from my hotel) Being here had the desired effect on writing Tesseract – what could be more conducive than being cut off from the world supplied at regular intervals with caffe lattes and overlooking ice flowing down the Danube? On Monday evening I had the great pleasure of dinner at Márton Koppány 's apartment. About 25 mins from the hotel, though the taxi ripped me off charging double what it cost for the trip back. Márton's 'poetry dog' (every poet should have one!) Gertrude S. was a big black soft haired sweety who barked whenever she wanted something, which most often was to be played with or stroked