Leaving Bury

Is there a certain symmetry in the coincidence that my first module of study at Loughborough Art College (back in 1980) was the History of Architecture and the last exhibition I curated in Bury was ‘Architecture Now’? Probably not. Although not widely shared, my health, especially last year, was not so good and so I have decided that now is the time to move on from Bury after 26 years. I will finish at Christmas, but I have no more shows or commissions in the curatorial pipeline, so there you have it, Architecture was my last Bury show. Thanks to Sarah Hardacre and Maurice Shapero for making the last show a pleasure to curate.

I think I can leave Bury satisfied with my achievements. 

Although I came up with the proposal for the Irwell Sculpture Trail in 1993, 

I conceived it in its full form when I arrived in Bury and proceeded to bid for £2.4 million from the National Lottery - at the time the biggest lottery award in the UK. In 25+ years I have worked on more public art commissions than I can remember. The first commission Logarythms (now long gone), by Pauline Holmes and the last was Graham Ibbeson's memorial statue to Victoria Wood unveiled in May this year. In between there have been commissions by Ulrich Rückriem, Lawrence Weiner and Maurizio Nannucci. 

Ed Allington’s titled vase was threatened with an oppositional 500 signature petition before it was even installed in 1997 and this year, as I leave, the local campaign has been for it to be restored as a much-loved Ramsbottom landmark.

I commissioned Ron Silliman's first (and as far as I know only) public artwork in 2011.

 

The 2016 installation of Auke de Vries' magnificent space-capturing sculpture at Burrs Country Park is last commission about which I am personally very proud to have facilitated into the world.

 

I’ve lost count of how many exhibitions I’ve curated. Before ‘Architecture Now’ I curated ‘Foreigners’ of which I was mighty proud. I was also responsible for the first ever exhibition of the Moomins in Britain. I led the refurbishment of Bury Museum, the creation of the Bury creative studios and the creation of the Sculpture Centre in 2014.  

 In 2012, I conceived a different way to organise international exhibition touring and subsequently led a 6-venue ground-breaking tour of the History of British Art across China. Until my health started playing up this visionary stuff and expertise developed in China led to regular presentations on the global conference circuit, getting me speaking gigs around the world from Taipei to Tokyo, Dusseldorf to Beijing, Siena to Chengdu, Seoul to Banya Luka.

I never tired of the commentary from Art Monthly about my other great achievement, the Text Festival: “According to Foucault, the singularities that serve to rupture and renew normative discourse always emerge from the interstices – in other words, where nobody is looking. Almost certainly nobody was looking in the direction of Bury for the emergence of this significant project…”. I originated, programmed and curated Text Festivals in 2005, 2009, 2011, and 2014.

 Through these ground-breaking moments, I have curated more than 30 exhibitions, commissioned numerous new works, gallery based and public art, publications and performances. It was important too for me that I facilitated creative collaborations and friendships connecting vispo, conceptual, sound, digital, sculptural, literary practitioners across the world and I think those relationships may be the long-term legacy of all the work. Funnily enough as the curator, I have rarely been in a position to participate as an artist in the dialogues beyond the Text, so I look forward to the opportunity of being free from my institutional position. The Text Festival also leaves a legacy of the Text Archive, including text works from all over the world, with the subset of one of the biggest collections of works by Bob Grenier. 

Although I've curated loads of festivals across artforms, my main regrets are that I didn't get to create the contemporary music/sound art festival I really wanted to; and I was just about to launch a new concept called 'The Radical Museum', but that coincided with my health packing in. I guess someone could still invite me to develop this somewhere, but the museum world is notoriously timorous so that won't happen. It feels like I've done a lot and I can leave proud of what I achieved; I thought I’d feel more let down about all the other projects I proposed but that were blocked, such as the John Pawson designed Ulrich Rückriem marketmuseum proposal in Radcliffe or a visionary globe-shifting approach to culture opening up of the UK-China Silk Road, but now I’m leaving, it doesn’t matter so much now.
Parallel to all this art malarkey, I wrote 5 books of poetry, Vertigo, 50 Heads (pdf available here), Reykjavik, The Soldier Who Died for Perspective and The End of Poetry. I’ve also exhibited my text works in various galleries from Reykjavik to Melbourne. So, retirement from Bury means an excited return to my personal projects. In the first instance, I will be writing a new theory of Poetics, finish my first poetry collection (Dyer) since 2010; and publish a collaboration with Maurice Shapero investigating poetic and architectural space/form/ideas. There’s also a couple of novels knocking around which won’t write themselves.

Architecture Now

Due to illness, it's two years since I curated a show. So it's quite exciting to work on the forthcoming 'Architecture Now' show, opening at 2pm on Saturday 9th March at Bury Sculpture Centre. Originally, I started working on this as a response to the appallingly poor quality of new 'architecture' in Manchester (about which I will write in another blog after the show opens). But I quickly rejected the idea of a polemic show in favour of something more about architectural thinking as art. So the show blurb reads: 

'Throughout history, architecture has been the creative form most closely entwined with symbols of power. In a society where building is mostly profit driven, architects create our living environment and work to accommodate this imperative. Faced with challenges of climate change to failing public housing, the tension between good architecture and bad building has never been starker. Globally there is new energy emerging in community place making and creative green solutions, can architecture respond to the challenge?'

‘Architecture Now’ features installations by Manchester architect Maurice Shapero and feminist printmaker Sarah Hardacre noted for her work investigating class and women’s experience of the built environment.

Exhibition runs 9th March to 29th June.