Posts

Showing posts from 2012

Toward Modernity

Image
We've been working on " Toward Modernity: 300 Years of British Art " for more than a year; tomorrow I set off to Beijing for the opening at the World Art Museum. 

After

Image
Installed this month on the Irwell Sculpture Trail , Tony Lopez 's new text work After . This is one of three inscribed plaques installed in Radcliffe, Lancashire, along a footpath and a canal towpath near Radcliffe Metrolink Tram Station, part of the work After , also known as The Scattered Poem , a holocaust memorial piece that Tony has been planning for the last few years.  The title  After  comes from Theodor Adorno: 'Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch' (To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric) from  Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft  (1963).  The original poem is 28 verses, a particularly abstract piece that was composed using a text generator program that randomised vocabulary combinations from an original draft that he wrote on a visit to Providence, Rhode Island, in the late 90s. The program was run many times to produce a vast text and the results were then edited down to a tiny fraction of the output. This text was then

Bury Light Night

Image
Another long gap between blogs and this time's excuse has been working on Bury Light Night . You can see much more of it on its Facebook page (I was too busy to get many photos of my own) but Saturday night's event drew a crowd of around 25,000-30,000 people to the streets of the town centre.   In total, there were 22 artists involved in the night - including 11 local Bury artists; 11 live bands;  Circus performers and acrobats performing around the town centre (Custard Storm); And then Nationally and internationally renowned performers such as Walk The Plank , KMA and Flame OZ ; The laser bus also worked with the Noise Festival and 3 young practitioners to help develop their work, opportunities and practice. The event was a huge labour and couldn't have been done without the massive support of the  Hamilton Project . 

These Are My Twisted Words

Image
I last saw Radiohead live in 2003 and it was the best gig I've been to; so I looked forward to last week's show in Manchester with considerable excitement. Last time the one word summation of the concert was "astonishing" (which coincidentally was exactly the same word the Guardian reviewer also used about the gig). As the band started this time, I thought this wasn't the word. This time I thought "intelligent". This might sound faint praise compared to the first show, and when I realised, it cause me to adjust my expectations for the rest of the show. But this was a mistake: as the band progressed through the track list the power of its structure  was accumulatively awe-inspiring - until " These Are My Twisted Words " a track I had somehow never heard (it turns out it was a free download some years ago): this song was stunning - jaw hanging open with shivers running down your neck. At that moment the heights of the earlier gig were surpasse

Icy Resolution

Image
I received an interesting comment left by “anonymous” in response to my blog post about Ben Gwilliam's   molto semplice e cantabile   “A number of artists have made records out of ice. A more interesting and  resolved conceptual idea being Katie Paterson”. Until this I was unfamiliar with Katie Paterson   and I am grateful to the commenter for drawing my attention to her; she has some really interesting work including a piece called Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull which according to her website is made up of sound recordings from three glaciers in Iceland, pressed into three records, cast, and frozen with the meltwater from each of these glaciers, and played on three turntables until they completely melt. The records were played once and now exist as three digital films. The turntables begin playing together, and for the first ten minutes as the needles trace their way around, the sounds from each glacier merge in and out with the sounds the ice itself c

Beauty Outside the Object

Image
In a meeting earlier in the week, a curator suggested setting up a reciprocal peer review system where curators from nearby galleries could visit each others spaces and offer suggestions for improvement. The example offered was new eyes would be able to spot interpretation labels that might not work very well. Though I didn’t say anything at the time, as you might guess, I thought to myself that I would hope that such a visitor wouldn’t fine a label to review. Because I have been working on the international touring project for most of the year, I have not curated anything in Bury pretty much since the Text Festival; so imagine the near paternal pride I felt when I popped into the Gallery to see the latest show Beauty in Utility curated by our museum curator Susan Lord : not a single label in sight. In discussion with Susan, she used phrases like “what’s wrong with people experiencing the mystery of not-knowing?” I almost feel my mission is complete! The obsession with mu

I'm Back!

Image
The publication of my interview about the Text Festival with Derek Beaulieu in Jacket , which was actually concluded just after the Festival, turns out to be coincidental with my ability to return to blogging. It’s been an odd year or more social media-wise. Almost overnight, I went from active and frequent verbosity to near silence, which probably seemed a bit odd to people who follow these writings. Initially there was an element of exhaustion post-festival exacerbated by the urgently depressing/infuriating battle to save cultural services from the sado-monetarist onslaught of the evil which is the coalition government. Paradoxically, the solution to the threat that I came up with precluded even more public comment. To the many participants and followers of the Text Festival, an inclusive open maybe even rambling dialogical event, it may be counterintuitive that my next major cultural project has to be developed in large part through confidential negotiations but that has what has

The End of Poetry

Image
I wrote The End of Poetry in October 2010 in Tampere, Finland. On my return to Manchester I was then buried in the planning and preparation of the 2011 Text Festival and after that went straight into setting up the international projects (most notably in China); so I didn't have time to think about poetry. Thanks to patience and persuasion of Irene Barberis at the Metasenta   in Melbourne, with some editing the poems have made it to print. The book will be available via Metasenta shortly, but I have a supply now.  It is a collection which opens with a return to the 'heads' form I used in 50 Heads , followed by my response to Luigi Nono's opera Intolleranz a (seen from the grim position we find ourselves in the collapse of capitalism) and then a sequence of 23 poems mirroring the tormented and treacherous last days of Louis Althusser counting down to his murder of  Hélène Rytman. In the imperative spirit of stepping outside his/its intense enclosure, the book fini

Visual Poetry Event

Image
Sunday 22 April 2012 at TR1, Tampere, Finland  http://tr1.tampere.fi/mariam-kretschmer-2-9-%E2%80%93-20-9-2011-galleria-nottbeck-tampere/  13.00 - 14.00 Curators' tour on the exhibition : Karri and I talking about the works in the exhibition and its links with the Text Festival.  14.00 - 15. 00 A panel discussion about visual art/text with me, Karri, and some of the artists in the show, questions and answers.  15.00 - 16.00 Artists performing  - Karri Kokko, Satu Kaikkonen, Marko Niemi, & Mia Toivio.

Text Art - Poetry for the Eye

Image
It is a source of satisfaction that the relationship with Tampere Art Museum in Finland, which last manifested itself in the Moomins exhibited at Bury Art Museum, has led to a partnership in Text Art now. " Text Art - Poetry for the Eye " opens on Saturday at TR1  and runs until 29 May. Finnish artists included are Tytti Heikkinen, Satu Kaikkonen, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Karri Kokko, Tiina Lehikoinen, Marko Niemi & Miia Toivio and JP Sipilä. From the Text Festival, we have added Tony Lopez, Liz Collini (pictured), Steve Miller, Shaun Pickard, Derek Beaulieu and Márton Koppány. Due to my Chinese trip, I won't get to see the show until mid April - there's a poetry event as part of the show on 22 April, which I will be doing something at. ...and now, to Beijing...

APPEAL IN AIR

Image
I've been so busy with new projects (about which I hope soon to be able to write) over the last few months that I've not had the brainspace to return to blogging. However, I couldn't let the release of Phil Davenport’s new book-length poem APPEAL IN AIR go by without celebration. Visitors to the Requiem exhibition at the Bury Transport Museum during the Text Festival will have seen his spreadsheet form work in progress.   By using an accounting tool for an anatomy of sadness, the poem questions the way that we place value in our own lives. Who gets overlooked, what is unheard, what’s too loud? The poem begins with a pile-up of noise, urban overload, into which is inserted the story of “A”, a true story of a suicide, verbatim from an overheard conversation. “… a thought lost in noise sold as music…” The poem drowns in random information, out of which come soaring flights of birds – first in tiny letters, then in flurries of word/birds that fill the page. The final sect