Tony Trehy blog

Asia Triennial Manchester

2011-10-05T16:06:00.001Z

The projects are coming thick and fast at the moment; immediately after the re-launch of the Irwell Sculpture Trail, we go into the Manchester Asia Triennial. To coincide, Bury Art Museum presents its second 5 Places manifestation, with guest curator Australian Irene Barberis programming UK based photographer Dinu Li (first picture) alongside Tam Wei Ping (picture 2 and 3).

There is an interesting dialogue between the two artists' presentations: Tam Wei Ping's Pilgrim's Journey series questions whether all the places are the same; and where the boundary, identity and praxis to ascertain location and cultural identity rests. Dinu Li has four works from his series documenting the possessions of Chinese illegal immigrants in Liverpool.

Ron Silliman on the Irwell Sculpture Trail

2011-09-29T20:02:00.000Z

Ron Silliman's Bury Text was installed yesterday in the Tram station.

Irwell Sculpture Trail

2011-09-28T06:52:00.000Z

Who would have thought that my idea for a 33 mile long public art project back in 1993 would be re-launched as a major UK attraction in 2011?

Back then although there was a computer on my desk it only dealt with finance and purchase ordering. I used some project budget to buy a stand-alone PC which could connect to the new fangled internet - the first person in the Authority to be online - and told everyone I met that the internet was going to be a big thing (this wasn't California). Tomorrow the Irwell Sculpture Trail (IST) launches its new website http://www.irwellsculpturetrail.co.uk/ - there's also a facebook page and a twitter feed through which you can follow more immediate developments. It's a big job gathering all the data to put up online but it should all be there in the next 6 or 8 weeks. In this sense, the re-launch is a little bit of a misnomer, as the commissioning of artists has been and is a continuous process. I've lost count of how many artworks I have commissioned over the years, and that's not counting the ones that have been installed in the Rossendale and Salford parts of the Trail - is it 30 or 40? Today, Ron Silliman's neon text art will be installed in the Bury Transport Exchange. On the evening of 14 October, a new lightwork by Daksha Patel will be projected in Bury town centre. Mark Jalland is working on a new work in Openshaw Park, Jack Wright is completing a piece in Brandlesholme. Really, this is a launch of new technology. The website will offer downloadable interpretation, satellite navigation, QR Code trickery and all sorts of other new fangled things. So like the Trail itself, its website will be a continously evolving resource.

No Time at the moment

2011-08-18T19:19:00.002Z

I've not blogged for weeks due to the volume of projects I am involved in. As well as preparing to relaunch the Irwell Sculpture Trail, I am pursuing projects in China, Korea and Japan. I'll be in China in September and hope that will throw up opportunities to report here.

2011-07-19T17:05:00.000Z

arthur+martha have launched their first twitter poem - in collaboration with homeless people in Manchester and Bury. During the course of their map of you project they spoke with many homeless people. These interviews were edited by various writers to produce a long collaborative poem, which appears in tweet form four times a day at
http://twitter.com/#!/tweetfromengels
These 'verses' are snapshots in text of homeless lives, in all their moods - joy, terror, humour, resilience, anger. Famously, Engels wrote about the harshness of 19th Century Manchester; people today who live a comparable existence are the homeless. The writing imagines a dialogue between Engels and the homeless people of Manchester. Interspersed through the poem is found material from Engel's correspondence with Marx, and his classic The Condition of the English Working Class.

The idea of the poem was developed with Candian Steve Giasson - who suggested a kind of anti-epic, inspired by Louis Zukovsky. Geof Huth met several Big Issue vendors, prompting several of the lines. The Mancunian poet copland smith helped to give the poem formal design, inspired by the traditional Welsh poetic form the englyn. Longtime arthur+martha colleague Rebecca Guest helped Philip edit the final piece.

This project is in partnership with the Text Festival, The Big Issue in the North, The Red Door (Bury Housing Concern), Brighter Futures, The Booth Centre, The Lowry, LOVE Creative, the BBC. Poets and writers who've been involved include Steve Giasson, Geof Huth, copland smith, Anna MacGowan. Editors Philip Davenport and Rebecca Guest.

The resulting long poem will be tweeted over the coming weeks and streamed as occasional online video through an LED by LOVE Creative.

Berlin

2011-06-23T11:11:00.000Z

My disrupted internet access and the forthcoming house move delayed me putting this up. The conference of Festivals covered much of the ground one would expect. There was the usual sharing of recent project ideas and much discussion of destructive cuts to literature funding across the globe, with representatives farthest stretched to Chile in the West and the Ukraine in the East. A lot of Balkan Festivals too. The Text Festival was the only overtly non-literature festival.

Pleased to see Eduard Escoffet (Barcelona) again.

Berlin again

2011-06-16T14:35:00.001Z

It’s been a while since I thought about blogging; a mixture of Text Festival exhaustion, illness, holidays, buying a new apartment and kicking off a major new international project (which I will be setting up with a visit to China in September) put it to the back of my mind.

Tomorrow I set off for the Berlin Poetry Festival http://literaturwerkstatt.org/index.php?id=1016 – I was invited to be part of the festival’s ambition to establish collaborative programming and joint projects between various international festivals. I was quite looking forward to this dialogue until today when I received the agenda for the sessions. The second presentation of Saturday is fucking Poetry Parnassus. http://tony-trehy.blogspot.com/2010/11/olympics-and-poetry.html So we are in a sharing environment with an organisation with which you have to keep your copyright close to your chest. I find this hugely annoying and now am not optimistic at all. I guess, as with most conferences, the best links will be established over lunch.

More positively, I am very much looking forward to meeting up again with Steve Miller – an artist for whom I have a lot of time.

Anyway, I hope to blog about the trip during or on my return.

Text Festival: the last event!

2011-05-30T19:28:00.000Z

Featuring Geraldine Monk (UK), Adeena Karasick (USA), bill bissett (CAN), Iris Garrelf (UK)

@ The Met Arts Centre

Friday 3rd June 2011 / 7.30pm

The last gig of the 2011 Festival, featuring:

Adeena Karasick is a poet, media-artist and the award-winning author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory. Marked with an urban, Jewish, feminist aesthetic that continually challenges normative modes of meaning production, and engaged with the art of combination and turbulence of thought, her work is a testament to the creative and regenerative power of language and its infinite possibilities for pushing meaning to the limits of its semantic boundaries. She is Professor of Global Literature at St. John'sUniversityin New York.

Geraldine Monk is one of the most exciting and provocative writer-performers on the British scene. Her readings a witty, warm and dynamic drawing on a prolific career which has spawned fourteen major works in the last twenty five years.

bill bissett is a famously anti-conventional Canadian poet with more than 60 books to his (uncapitalised) name immediately identifiable by the incorporation of his artwork and his consistently phonetic (funetik) spelling. As an energetic "man-child mystic," bill bissett is living proof of William Blake's adage "the spirit of sweet delight can never be defiled." His idealistic and ecstatic stances frequently obscure his critical-mindedness, humour and craftmanship.

Iris Garrelf is a composer/performer intrigued by change, fascinated with voices and definitely enamoured by technology. She often uses her voice as raw material, which she transmuted into machine noises, choral works or pulverised “into granules of electroacoustic babble and glitch, generating animated dialogues between innate human expressiveness and the overt artifice of digital processing” as the Wire Magzine put it. A vital part of her work, be it using voice or other sound material, is improvisation and the use of random elements, the ephemeral fragility and risk implied in giving up control to me moment, a sonic singularity.

Preparing for the next Text Festival weekend

2011-05-15T17:34:00.000Z

A week of preparations for another big Text Festival weekend. On 19th, 20th and 21st May, Station stories is a unique, site specific, live, literature performance event using digital technology and improvised electronic sound. Taking place at Piccadilly Station, moving from platform to platform, café to café and shop to shop, six writers read specially commissioned stories that guide the audience on a creative journey.The writers include: David Gaffney, Jenn Ashworth, Nicholas Royle, Peter Wild, Tom Jenks and Tom Fletcher. Sound Artist: Daniel Hopkins. For more information and tickets, go to www.stationstories.com

Guest curators Helen Kaplinsky & Maurice Carlin of Reading for Reading’s Sake bring New York based Rainer Ganahl to the Transport Museum. Ganahl, who represented Austria in the 1999 Venice Biennale, arrives on Wednesday though installation of his exhibition at the Bury Transport Museum starts on Monday. Ganahl has ambitious plans to create various works this week including two films. The show is called Engels…Engels…Engels and is an investigation through videos, assemblage, photos and prints of “The Condition of the Working Class in England” (1844).

As part of the project Ganahl will facilitate Engels seminars on the 18th (6:30-8:30pm), 19th (2-4pm) and 20th (6:30-8:30pm) May at Bury Transport Museum. No prior reading required but to book email kaplinskyhelen@yahoo.co.uk. The artist will also present a talk on Thurs 19th May 6pm at Islington Mill.

Books Launch

2011-05-08T18:38:00.000Z

Text Festival opening weekend

2011-05-03T09:59:00.001Z

An intensely packed and exciting opening weekend in Bury and Manchester for the Text Festival - various reviews, images, recordings, videos and reports will appear in the next few weeks but here is a selection of images to start it off here. Many of my photos look like there was no-one there, mainly because I was able to take shots before everyone arrived and once they did I was often too busy to think about the camera. (above: gallery view - foreground: I TELL YOU THE TRUTH by Kate Pickering)

Ron Silliman, Tony Lopez, Me, Barney and Christian Bök .

Sarah Sanders' beautiful performance from the ring balcony

Liz Collini's great wall drawing in the Bury Transport Museum.

As an encore following the Ursonate performances, an amazing world first - Christian Bök and Jaap Blonk improvise

The Bury Poems

2011-04-29T14:58:00.000Z

In 2008, when Robert Grenier was in Bury for his reading at the "Irony of Flatness" exhibition, an interview had been set up with him conducively located in a local cafe-bar. Unfortunately the interviewer was taken ill, which we didnt hear about for a few hours and with Bob not carrying a mobile phone it took a while to let him know. In those hours of waiting, he wrote 6 poems responding to the local rural landscape, north of Bury, where he had requested to be billeted because he can't sleep if there is any urban noise. They were called the "Ramsbottom Poems" from the village where he was staying. This got me to thinking about the poetic responses that could be accumulated from artists' involvement in working Bury - and thus was born the idea of the Bury Poems.

Initially, I commissioned Phil Davenport, Carol Watts and Tony Lopez to create new Bury Poems - which all 3 performed at the 2009 Text Festival. Also during that festival, while Ron Silliman was here, he spent time on his wanderings between events working on a new poem called "Northern Soul" to be part of his Universe project. Initally I suggested that we publish it in time to launch at this festival, but Ron felt it may not be appropriate or ready within his plans. But I remembered a comment that Ron had made to me backstage at his festival reading along the lines that he could see in the performances of the artists on stage before him direct resonances to his own work. This made me consider: what has no-one asked Ron to do? A piece of public art. So we commissioned him to make a public text, a neon work which will be shown in the Art Gallery and then located permanently as an artwork in the Bury Tram Station. The making of this work in itself then became an additional sequence in the Bury Poems. With the final addition of works written by Geof Huth also in response to the Text and new works written by Holly Pester, one of the performers at this years event, the collection was almost done. Done in my mind anyway. Having editorialised it to this stage, I invited Phil Davenport to co-edit and continue the project to publication. All that was missing was my commissioner's contextualising essay, but Phil felt that my own poetry was also a response to the context that I had created and so pressed me to select new works from "The Tragedy of Althusserianism" which I have been writing for ifpthenq but had to delay because of the festival workload.

The book arrived from the printers on Thursday, a very handsome production just in time for the opening on Saturday. My thanks to all the poets involved and to Phil for bringing it to fruition.

Curating the Text

2011-04-27T20:29:00.000Z

Although I have only written about my curatorial conception of the Text Festival exhibitions once before they actually open, it feels like it is a tradition that I should continue with the forthcoming displays. In this, I’m mainly thinking about the Bury Art Gallery shows, Wonder Rooms and Sentences. I’ll write about A Map of You, TradeStamps, and Requiem another time.

Preparing for this the third festival, it occurred to me that while previous TF displays included examples of visual poetry, no show so far has directly addressed the question of the location of visual poetry in a gallery. My conception for the show has developed from my responses to the dynamics and location of visual poetry itself. The first thing that seemed obvious is the disconnection of visual poetry from visual art. I am not aware of many (any?) exhibitions of visual poetry qua visual art curated by a curator in an art gallery. Since the 1960’s and conceptual art, text-based work in contemporary art galleries is been ubiquitous; for a while I used to play a little mental game when visiting galleries – how long does it take to come upon a text work? After a while I gave it up because it became repetitive: but tellingly, they were unremittingly not works located in or even tangentially connected to a poetry tradition. As Christian Bök observes in the Harriet Blog about the Text Festival: “While we might expect poets to upstage all other artists in the use of language as an artful medium, few poets of advanced, literary renown have ever enjoyed the level of either artistic prestige or monetary success, typically experienced by any famous, visual artist who uses language in a gallery exhibit.”

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/the-text-festival-part-1/

It’s actually worse than that. As I have blogged previously, contemporary poetry is so disconnected from contemporary art that it is practically invisible. I could digress (again) into the problem of galleries deploying poets as event decoration which actually proves the point in the vacuous names they choose – eg Simon Armitage at Yorkshire Sculpture Park or Carol Ann Duffy at Tate Liverpool. Even probably the most famous curator Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Poetry Marathon at the Serpentine in 2009 failed to unpick the inherent alienation. One of the poets who performed at the Marathon, Caroline Bergvall (who is perhaps the most successful poet in contemporary art nexus – and by the way one of the first commissions in the first Text Festival) observed of the Marathon experience:

“Although a number of the chosen artists are known for dealing with writing and language pertinently and intrinsically as part of their artwork (Susan Hiller, Tacita Dean, Sean Landers, Jimmie Durham, Jonas Mekas, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster), it was something of a disappointment to see so many of them react with undisguised anxiety at that same word, ‘poetry’. Otherwise lucid, articulate artists found themselves in the throes of open self loathing, ‘I don’t know poetry’, ‘I don’t know what to read’” and “it seems to me that the event confirmed that the debates between art and poetry remain superficial and usually kept on a back foot, or at arm’s length.”

http://www.carolinebergvall.com/content/text/POETRYMARATHON.pdf

It is at the conceptual end of the poetry spectrum where it feels that the dialogue can engage most easily with contemporary art practice – and I’ll return to this in discussing Sentences. But the curatorial question of visual poetry remains: what are the dynamics of display for a visual form that is peripheral in the infrastructure of visual exhibition?

In attempting to answer this question (and I am not claiming my answer is the only answer), I apprehended a number of considerations – some are generalisations which may not apply to a particular individuals but are I think observable across the piste. The first is the prolific productivity which seems to characterise most vispo practitioners. Unlike other artistic practice, visual poets tend to generate many interpretations, editions or versions of the same work; though not necessarily common, some vispo artists treat the multiple versions as a rhythmic or serial single work. A second observation was the global ubiquity of visual poetry: as soon as you start looking for visual poets or invite submissions you find them everywhere. So one subsidiary question that floated around for a while was: are there national or regional stylistic differences? Are there even dialects of vispo? As I have curated Wonder Rooms, this has become less relevant. Parsing such subtleties proves difficult given that a significant driver of vispo production and distribution is the internet. It is noticeable that so much of the work is designed with software and ‘shown’ online, which in itself introduces another aspect related to scale. Seeing their precedents in poetry and hence the page, and then working for the screen, many visual poets do not have a specific sense of how their work should exist off-line. A lot of work came to me with no stipulation as to how big it should be printed or on what type of surface. This is not a criticism, just an observation of a dynamic in the form, which impacts on how it can function in a visual arts context in which scale in space is part of the vocabulary of reception. Then finally when I could find representations of other visual poetry displays, which tend to be curated by visual poets: I looked at what these implied about vispo’s interpretation of how vispo functions in a space.

The challenge is summed up by Christian Bök’s comment: “The visual artist might produce a linguistical installation that gets presented at a glamorous, grandiose scale—but to poets, such an installation might often appear “unpoetic” in its use of language, missing obvious chances to demonstrate the kind of artful merits, seen in the most expert usages of both concise rhetoric and unusual metaphor. The poet might deploy language more artfully than the visual artist—but alas, poets seem to be incapable of filling the white cube of the gallery with their own words, since poets lack the stylistic expertise that might give them access to the “vocabularies” of novelty, glamour, and fashion, required to address the world of art with an impressive, innovative gesture.”

So these were the elements that Wonder Rooms set out to address – production and distribution factors, display assumptions (of individual works and works in spaces) and then finally the specific location of visual poetry in Bury Art Gallery in its dialogue with Sentences (and to a lesser extent with the other shows in the festival).

My initial solution is implied in the title – the urge to ‘over-production’, the geographical ubiquity, the alienation of scale – suggested a cabinet of curiosities style installation. Not only was this inherent in the vispo landscape, but it also challenges the expectation of display as restrained in the minimalism of the white cube. Again, generally, on the odd occasion when vispo is curated it seems routed in a static idea of curating, a response to space that is inherited from galleries seen, rather than an engagement between the work and spatial immanence. Although it was my intention to pack the show to the roof, but as Picasso once advised, you should avoid the seductions of pretty ideas. So as the mass of works came to be laid out in the room, a new dynamic imposed itself – rooted in the original Wunderkammer idea but taking the visitor/reader through the space as an interweaving of vispo styles, methods of production, technologies, ideas exchanged in juxtaposition, and curatorial judgements about how blocks of works, colours, eye-lines, desire paths enhance the experience of passing through the space.

For the Sentences show, I set out to investigate the problem from a different direction. In looking at how conceptual artists have approached language in art, the simple observation is their tendency towards the sentence as the unit of composition – which is a relatively straightforward place for poets since LANGUAGE. And in consideration of the lack of stylistic expertise that might give poets “access to the “vocabularies” of novelty, glamour, and fashion, required to address the world of art with an impressive, innovative gesture”, I commissioned and sourced poets noted for their work with sentences treated with equality to text-based artists. I’m particularly pleased to be the only context that has commissioned Ron Silliman to create a gallery work; more than that, his neon text has been conceived as a piece of public art which will be repositioned after the exhibition to become a permanent feature at Bury’s Tram Station. Curatorially, this show was conceived to be a significantly minimalist hang to counter balance the excess of the Wonder Rooms show; though to establish a dialogue between the two spaces, a little of the latter style bleeds over into Sentences.

Anyway, there are a number of other ideas which inform the inclusion of Pavel Buchler’s Studio Schwitters, Christian Bök’s Protein 13, Holly Pester’s Text Festival archival work, etc. but I will leave these for visitors to experience. Let’s just say, I endorse Art Monthly’s review comment of the 2009 Text Festival’s “intrepid resistance to interpretation”.

The London Delivery

2011-04-20T20:19:00.000Z

I've been looking forward to today for some time: the day when the art movers delivered the artworks collected from artists, galleries and collectors in London. It's a great moment when works that you pursued get unwrapped of their packing. Invariably they are bigger or smaller than you expected, which is also fun, because you have to re-think how things fit together.

It was a very intense day while the main focus was on working out the Sentences show, there was still installation work going on in the Fusilier Museum too.

The Team working hard on continuing installations

2011-04-18T19:56:00.000Z

Chris and Scott hanging a work by Márton Koppány.

Another Márton Koppány work being transferred to the Transport Museum.

Sarah Kerrison (Transport Museum Curator) checking out a work by Marco Giovenale and another

Márton Koppány.

Helena Ho sorting out Geof Huth's vispo cards

Kat and Richard installing vispo...

Language Moment

2011-04-16T07:54:00.000Z

The trailblazer event of the Text Festival took place last night at the Green Room. I was pleased with how the juxtapositions of artists worked - a great gig. These pictures were taken during the sound checks. More pictures, films and a soundtrack will be available in due course.

Maggie O'Sullivan

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl

Phil Minton

Text Festival

2011-04-14T22:22:00.000Z

The Language MomentFeaturing Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Maggie O’Sullivan, Phil Minton and Ben Gwilliam & Phil Davenport, Sarah Sander, and Sarah Boothroyd
@ The Green Room, Manchester

Friday 15 April 2011

In a pre-festival partnership event with the Green Room, Manchester, the Text Festival presents an evening of virtuoso vocal performance and groundbreaking sound art.

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl is an Icelandic poet and author of three novels. He works with performance and sound-poetry, and regularly appears at poetry and music festivals, as well as dabbling in the dark arts of the concrete. In the recent years he has explored the possibilities inherent in the European and North-American avant-garde traditions, and focused on disassembling language into its visual, social and linguistic units. Nothing can prepare you for the power and dexterity of his performance, the sonically richness of his sound poems, and his amazing control of his material. His huge contortions twist his mouth to stun the audience.

Phil Minton is a dramatic baritone with a free-form style of "extended techniques" that are extremely unsettling. His vocals often include the sounds of retching, burping, screaming, and gasping, as well as childlike muttering, whining, crying and deep-throated drones; he also has an ability to distort his vocal cords to produce two notes at once. Phil Minton's voice occupies a category apart, as joyously accessible as it is radical.

For over thirty years, Maggie O’Sullivan has been one of the leading figures of British innovative poetry. An international performer and visual artist, she is committed to excavating language in all its multiple voices and tongues, known and unknown, in visceral gestures that collage and pulverization at the service of a rhythmic vortex.
Phil Davenport & Ben Gwilliam are artists engaged in collaborative practice across different artforms: Davenport the poet and Gwilliam the sound artist merge experimental language through the infrathin processing of the silence between sounds.

The event will also feature interventions by Sarah Sanders and Matt Dalby.
http://www.greenroomarts.org/

Wonder Rooms hang

2011-04-13T04:52:00.001Z

The curation and installation start in earnest for the Wonder Rooms visual poetry show.

Helen White installs

2011-04-11T16:09:00.000Z

Belgium-based poet Helen White arrrived today to install her texts in the Museum.

http://www.krikri.be/helen/

Dinner

2011-04-10T09:14:00.001Z

Could art ever compare to one of Sue's fine dinner parties? Last night, guests Christian Bök, Phil Davenport and Julia Grimes.

On arrival prosecco and sharing platter consisting of bresola, hams, roasted red and yellow peppers, artichoke hearts, various dips and sausages in a spicy sticky sauce. Followed by:

A choice of parsnip soup or cauliflower veloute with chorizo and herb garnish accompanied with a Hungarian Furmint to drink.

Pan-roasted pork tenderloin, portobello mushroom sauce, cubetti potatoes, carrot puree and spinach accompanied with an Argentinian Bonarda.
Cointreau and blood orange jellies, home-made orange ice cream, and home-made orange-scented short breads; with Muscato d’asti to drink.
Cheese board followed by coffee and home-made chocolates (and for old times, no doubt some Finnish Cloudberry liqueur)

Text Update

2011-04-09T07:58:00.000Z

Another week packed with Text Festival organisation: Printing late submissions from Michael Basinski in Buffalo, Fatima Queiroz in Rio and new tradestamp designs for Wang Jun (CHI) and Satu Kaikkonen (FIN) for the Museum Tradestamps show,

which I also spent time talking through with Museum Curator Sue Lord who has done the massive job of researching and pulling together the history and objects for the show – the nearly final installation layout decisions were made on Friday morning; followed immediately afterwards by the installation walk-through at the Transport Museum – for which the Nozomi video piece from Peter Jaeger and Kaz was confirmed yesterday. Phil Davenport was having such good ideas for this show that I invited him to take over its curation. Then quickly across the road to the Fusilier Museum with incomparable Curator Kat McClung-Oakes and Technician Chris Holland to look at the siting and technical issues of Steve Giasson’s 246.
Finally found Brazilian sound artist Bruno Bresani and agreed the work I want for one of the gigs.

Meanwhile Christian Bök continues to build the model of Protein 13; lots of to-ing and fro-ing with 3 different BBC departments attempting to set up interviews with Christian Bök – toward the end of the day it looked like the Science correspondent for Radio 4’s Today programme had bagged the story, but then it got lost somewhere in the BBC.

Also generated by Catharine Braithwaite were various media pick ups of Phil Minton especially his Feral Choir project running from 26 April. All this generated requests for more publicity copy, especially the gig on 15 April which the press obvious need soonest. The bit I like least: sorting out the technical details for the gigs at the Green Room, the Met Arts Centre and the Parish Church. The first two not so bad as both have technical staff who know what they are doing.

Helmut Lemke arrived for a tour of possible sites for his durational performance with Hans Specht on 30 April. Soon after Ian Hunter of Littoral turned up a week early to discuss the arrangements for the Schwitters events on Sunday 1 May.

Then back to the Gallery ring balcony to layout the selection of Japanese visual poetry that I think will go there. The works maybe a little delicate for such a large space but they fit its connective curatorial logic between Sentences and Wonder Rooms.

And each day more work arrives…

This week (interrupted a couple of times for planning the re-launch of the Irwell Sculpture Trail in September): Helen White will install her work in museum on Monday; an interview with the Manchester Evening News; curating the Wonder Rooms show; curating the Fusilier Museum show; writing various interpretation texts; and ending the week with Phil Minton, Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Maggie O’Sullivan, Minton and Ben Gwilliam & Phil Davenport on Friday. Get your tickets!

molto semplice e cantabile

2011-04-08T06:28:00.000Z

In 2009 during the Bury Art Gallery exhibition "Not at this address", the UK sound artist Ben Gwilliam performed a new work using ice casts of Beethoven's molto semplice e cantabile. Today, we received the conceptual conclusion of that work with delivery of a limited edition of the disc cast in transparent vinyl. Ben will be performing at the Green Room on 15 April with Phil Davenport as the opening gig of the Text Festival. molto will be available for sale at the Festival shop (£15) - I would suggest that your art collection is incomplete without a copy of this work.

In molto semplice e cantabile Ben Gwilliam taps into the traditions of harmonic music of the classical period, the Cagean rejection of what Beethoven stands for, sound artist turntablism, the physics of the anomalous expansion of water, the metaphysics of time, the counter-continuous diagram of creation through entropy, the very ontology of the listener. The plenary space fills with more than the sound of ice melting. molto semplice e cantabile is a recursive and dynamic inflation of musical parameters.

A mould of a vinyl disc of Beethoven's Sonata No 32 was taken to create ice casts of the record. Taking the ice discs from a fridge located in the space, Gwilliam places them on turntables and mixes two or more records - technology integral to contemporary aural experience that stores and channels original vibrations without depletion or transformation due to interaction with surfaces, densities of medium, of other frozen vibrations. Gwilliam goes beyond the technical. The discs are played by him, hands-on as it were, he is improvising; he develops an intimate knowledge of how ice melts – the humidity in the playing space, the differences in the original water consistency, the room temperature, all effect the way the work materialises. He is not simply in the hands of the physics of water’s anomalies, he adds fine spray as the records play, subtly lubricating the disc, the grooves refreeze the new droplets creating microscopic intervention. Suddenly the ice grooves give up and the 'instrumentation' becomes harsher, more mechanical, urban and then it slowly fades to a recording akin to applause, like ice being swept away or paper torn; melting unevenly the discs undulated to become more like crashing massive waves. A new disc was added, a re-invigorated orchestration, this time sounding more like series of explosions offered as variations. Abstract and swirling, rotation and undulation, the rhythm created by spinning discs is hypnotic and relentless, the energy of vague drumming culture intensity, or Reichian appropriation. But while molto semplice e cantabile shares the interminable repetition of these sonic traditions, through the mechanics of rotation, melting creates an extraordinary counterpoint, constantly moving to a different place with different turntable pick-ups subtly altering the pace and nuances and meaning of sound.

Fundamentally the work operates at the margins of physics – the phase transitional point of ice to water states. Phase boundaries between phases of solid, liquid, gas are characterised by the free energy of non-analyticity. The phase boundary between solid and liquid does not continue indefinitely. Instead, it terminates at what is called the critical point. At temperatures and pressure above the critical point, the physical property differences that differentiate the solid phase from the liquid phase become less defineable. It is in these unstable liminal spaces that Gwilliam conducts his sounds.

It is a remarkable flow feature of molto semplice e cantabile own phase boundaries that it is both a continuous function, discontinuous and, in its inversion of decay and creation, bicontinuous at the same time. In the wave ripples of mechanical thirty three and a third rhythm, shifting from utterance to audition, Beethoven’s contributory material is a decaying monolith, superseded, from the start distant from us even as it recedes. In this way, although the equipment of turntables and sampling gesture, discs spinning, pick-ups tweaked, that the work only nods at the intertextuality of analog-digital cut and paste. The whole is such a plenary concept that its amplification saturates the acoustic space: the microscopic crashes of the stylus in crumbling ice grooves become explosive glaciers - we listen to the sounds in listening inside sounds.

We are forced to address ourselves to the question of time through the work. Intellectually there is a cultural time-line, with the work carrying the history of music from harmony to modernist musicalising sound; but as we experience the ice record, a physical time-space thickness, we face the ontology of listening to our time as also melting. Ben Gwilliam pulls the sounds into time. Is there a mathematics of this, an equation of melting which extrapolates a rule? Could we apply a science to measure how long we have left? No. Physics dissolves culture (paradoxically modelling it into a sonic (cultural) act). Reality has too many micro-macro variables: the anomalous expansion of water becomes an uncertainty principle for our continued experience.

What does it mean for the ice to be represented by the vinyl?

An original vinyl is transformed to ice and now the ice is transformed back to vinyl, transparent, and shot through with the phased transitions from start to finish. But it could be argued that the production of a clear vinyl is illustrative, almost a decorative outcome, a product rather than the original process. The melting performances were located in time and places (Bury and Wolfsburg), but the disc is no longer site specific. Moreover, with this disc, circles are closed vinyl-ice-vinyl, harmony-melting-silence; the monolithic presence of Beethoven recording is engaged with the physical repeatable presence of its fading away, the transparency counter-changeable to the blackness of a traditional vinyl, symbolic again of the death of distance measured as time. The Gwilliam disc is the instrument, the sound emitting body, the necessary part of an ensemble which creates artistic meaning.

Textual Excitement mounts

2011-04-02T18:42:00.000Z

I often comment in conversation that by the time Text Festival arrives it will already be over for me as I will have seen all the exhibitions before anyone else arrives. Obviously I won’t have seen buzz of so many artists hanging out or experienced the performances – but sadly I am able to enjoy these less than most because I have the stress of carrying the event and hopeful making sure it all comes together. The run up to the last festival wasn’t so good for me because I had an agonising broken tooth so preparations for the shows were a little distracted.

Without that pain, this time round is doubly exciting because the Text has achieved a presence in many artists’ thinking so lots more practitioners than previously have engaged with it.

Each time I walk into the receiving office at the gallery there are tables full of newly arrived works, packages wait to be unwrapped, fresh printed digital submissions: beautiful visual poetry from Japan via Vienna, the first 50 of 100 vispos by Geof Huth, a delicious limited edition by Eric Maximillan Zboya (pictured), Alexander Jorgensen’s prints from Prague, an unexpected video poem by Kazuo Takakatabe & Peter Jaeger which will be in the Transport Museum; two brand new, unseen, works by Aysegul Tozeren, a dozen poems from Zeynep Cansu Başeren arrive by email. A long Skype conversation with Steve Miller in Berlin about how the fonts should work on his powerpoint work; email exchanges with Marco Giovenale in Rome about his performance, with Derek Beaulieu in Calgary about his conceptual text response to the UK arts cuts, the complicated arrangements for Christian Bök’s construction schedule, Helen White’s early installation in the museum, the confirmations of On Kawara and Ian Hamilton Finlay for Requiem at the Fusilier Museum; testing sound works in location – Matt Dalby’s sound great in the Greenroom; contacts from Poetrifestival Berlin or the Journal of Contemporary Visual Culture in Dubai wanting to set collaborations; comings and goings of various media enquiries – BBC interview schedules, a possible World Service documentary (Catharine Braithwaite our media expert is doing a miraculous job as usual) – , advising on travel arrangements, suggesting hotels; checking the proofs of “The Bury Poems” publication which we hope will be ready just in time for the Festival. This was just the last few days. It’s been like this for weeks and it will just ratchet up day after day as the opening gets closer. On Monday, Christian arrives to start work; Helen White the week after; the big delivery of artworks from various London artists and galleries is awaited with great anticipation. On Friday we curate and install the museum Tradestamps show and curate the Transport Museum and maybe the Fusilier Museum too if we have time. The following week the Wonder Rooms (visual poetry) show is installed and on the Friday the first gig - Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Maggie O’Sullivan, Phil Minton and Ben Gwilliam & Phil Davenport. Blimey! It’s getting close!
http://www.textfestival.com/

The Other Room

2011-03-31T06:31:00.001Z

The Other Room 3rd birthday & launch of The Other Room Anthology 3; would love to see you there. 6th April 2011, The Old Abbey Inn, Manchester, M15 6AY, FREE entry Ken Edwards, Carrie Etter, Alec Finlay & Derek Henderson (live stream) Ken Edwards is the editor and publisher of Reality Street. He has had numerous books and pamphlets published including: Good Science: Poems 1983-1991 (Roof Books, NY, 1992), No Public Language: Selected Poems 1975-1995 (Shearsman Books, 2006), Songbook (Shearsman, 2009). Carrie Etter is an American poet based in the UK. Her first collection, The Tethers, was published by Seren Books in June 2009 and in 2011 Divining for Starters was published by Shearsman. She is the editor of the important Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets and is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing for Bath Spa University. Alec Finlay is an artist, poet & publisher. Born in Scotland in 1966, he now lives in the North-East of England. He is author of countless collections of poetry and has had exhibitions in a wide range of venues including The BALTIC, The Yorkshire Sculpture Park and most recently at Leeds Art Gallery as part of The Northern Art Prize. His publishing includes the pocketbooks series, platform projects, bookscapes, morning star and web-books. More at www.alecfinlay.com Derek Henderson is alive and well in Salt Lake City. He is co-author, with Derek Pollard, of Inconsequentia (BlazeVox). An erasure of Ted Berrigan’s sonnets, Thus &, is out now from if p then q. www.otherroom.org

50 Heads Revealed

2011-03-12T07:28:00.020Z

I thought that this would just be a blog that pointed to Phil Davenport's review of my book of 2006 50 Heads,
http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2011/03/never-to-have-compromised-with.html
which I would illustrate with an image from the installation of one of my texts at the Dubai Drawingspace (above). At the last minute, I thought of adding one of my favourite 50 Heads poems; then came the surprise. On opening the folder, I uncovered maybe another 8 'Heads' poems that I decided not to include because the structural mathematics of the whole only required 49. I had completely forgotten these existed - as my dad jokes the upside of Alzheimer's is you are always making new friends. So here is a new Head:

Distance
0. How long ago it was. Closeness is measured by how many
fluents change. The place and the placing matter little and for
clarity, for order, for certainty. When sweat can move you
through the air, stochastic on the way, the heresy lays inside
dedication to the vertical axis – instructions for measuring
some significant item symbolising pry loose separation.
Counterintuitive, a day alone through the eyes of people not
here. Their demand that maps serve as aids for accurate
travel is fairly recent, the geometry of in-between precision is
less important than connection. Like the space, is there one
thing? Renormalisation avoids these infinities, steel glass,
music of voices extended to their Hill sphere, sanitary in a
good way, sterile in a good way, implying in a good way
infinities that interchange this/that/them/there/not here.
You never lose the accent, whereas formulas that are 'true'
blanket intuition, authentic to its provenance. Rejecting nature,
the theory cannot prove its own consistency, upward,
concrete editing of the gaps in between the geometry
of scaffolding,ephemeral, celebrating construction and noise:
A plea to somewhere else plus: 1

Designing the Text Festival exhibitions

2011-03-06T10:04:00.004Z

The festival exhibitions are rapidly taking shape!

Copenhagen

2011-03-03T08:35:00.007Z

Although Copenhagen was a short holiday, I managed to take in some exhibitions. All three of the spaces I saw were worth the visit just for the spaces themselves. The most enjoyable was Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, a delightful architectural experience, really impressive Eypgtian and Roman collections and beautifully curated.
http://traveldk.com/copenhagen/dk/highlight/ny-carlsberg-glyptotek
The only irritant in the visit was a rather clumsy pink plastic interpretation/response to some of the Roman sculpture by Louise Bourgeois called “Nature Study”. Oddly when I look at a photo of it now http://www.flickr.com/photos/15434282@N00/4927611588/ I quite like it, but in the context of the brilliant set piece curating of the Roman gallery it inhabited it was annoying in its location. Bourgeois wasn’t so impressive either at Kunstforeningen GL Strand, Copenhagen. Given my previously expressed complete disinterest in anything to do with children and distaste at the desperate romanticism attached to pregnancy, a show of endless paintings of pink bellies, lactating breasts and baby shapes, it is difficult to imagine a show which I would find less interesting.
Also at Kunstforeningen GL Strand, Copenhagen was “Wax – Sensation in Sculpture”;

http://www.glstrand.dk/English/udstillinger_aktuel.htm it featured people you’d expect in a survey of contemporary wax sculpture, Maurizio Cattelan, Elmgreen and Dragset, Robert Gober, Gavin Turk, etc., but it was also a vaguely disappointing show. The work itself was nicely shown in good spaces – maybe it was the wax pretext itself which proved a little thin.

The last show I saw was Gil & Moti: Totally Devoted to You at Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen http://www.kunsthallennikolaj.dk/en/ Nikolaj Kunsthal is an old church converted to an arts centre. Gil &
Moti had installed a series of documentation style installations from recent projects. Such as the record of their wedding and honeymoon in Rotterdam complete with the honeymoon bed; a project opening pen-pal relationships with gay arabs documented with the letters and watercolour portraits of these friends; a project where they set out to help Muslim immigrants establish themselves in their new lives. The totality of the show was an intensely positive affirmation of humanity.

I only slotted in one meeting while in the city, that was with Malmo-based dancer/choreographer khamlane halsackda, discussing possible projects.
http://www.khamlanehalsackda.com/#/photos/4539419260

But never mind the art, Copenhagen is a great city – if you visit also go to Ruby http://www.worldsbestbars.com/city/copenhagen/ruby.htm

Rethinking the Museum

2011-02-14T20:50:00.010Z

I was speculating the other day about an epigrammatic comparison of the attitude of the current government and the previous one to its subjects (us); and came up with “the last government wanted to control your every thought and action; the new government doesn’t care what you think or do; it wants you to fuck off.” Maybe an over-simplification but it was only for my personal entertainment, one of those idle conceits you think to yourself but don’t say out loud. But it came back to mind when I read the ‘think-piece’ on the new North West Museums Federation website “Rethinking the Museum”.
http://www.nwfed.org.uk/thinkpieces/rethinking-the-museum

At first I was pleased to see that someone had attempted futurological thinking beyond the constrictive cultural damage of the previous government and the cultural catastrophe of the current lot forward to 2030; but as I read the ‘think-piece’ another question inviting epigrammatic speculation came to mind: what would the future look like to organisations conditioned by New Labour managerialism and then splayed under knives of sado-monetarism? It would look like the current essay “Rethinking the Museum”.

The science fiction conventions of looking forward are either utopian or post-apocalyptic. The addition of the concept of ‘Vision’ implicitly supposes the former, a dynamic positive projection from current conditions to a desirable future. The NWFED essay finds a bureaucratically dismal third possibility. “Rethinking” offers a future that assumes an absence of positive change, a future of degradation and decline, an extrapolated acceptance of the consequences of the ideological attack on the foundations of British social and cultural structures. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/02/margaret-thatcher-coalition-lib-dems The “think-piece” should embarrass the writer(s) because it accepts and carries forward a cultural outrage. This doesn’t surprise me: the paper is branded to MLA (Museums Libraries & Archives Council), Renaissance North West and National Museums Liverpool (NML). I’ve had no dealings with the latter but generally found MLA a mildly irrelevant organisation – its chairman is the turgid ex-poet laureate Andrew Motion; both it and Renaissance NW were creations of New Labour and are philosophically flawed in that conception. Recently I had a meeting with a Renaissance officer, during which she actually told me that “Greater Manchester has a super-supply of galleries and museums and could bear a controlled ‘thinning out’”. This doesn’t fit with David Fleming’s (NML) introductory comment: “new museum leaders emerge. They will be those who were prepared to stand up and be counted when times were really tough, who didn’t take budget cuts lying down.” The NW Fed site contextualises this debate with: “We need leadership now more than we ever have.” Yet “Rethinking” starts with the comment “some of the museums we know and love today will be distant memories”: these ‘visionaries’ are puppies waiting for the psycho to pull their legs off, some of them still have wagging tails.

Each aspect of this ‘vision’ is an extrapolation of Tory rhetoric, essentially saying back to anyone in government who might be listening (they’re not), ‘New Labour created us and conditioned us to think what we are told to think so don’t hurt us because we can deliver whatever you want.’ The upshot of this is a ‘vision’ that attempts to justify practices that no museum professional would say unless they had a gun to his head.

By 2030, apparently “successful museums will have learnt how to save money and make money… Monetisation of the museum will be the key”. No, this is the desperation of Now. Museums “…offering paid for services, a healthy [sic] network of volunteers and… exploiting the philanthropy of those with ‘significant net personal wealth’. These are governmental stipulations not vision: make money, run services with volunteers (ie the unemployed/unpaid), and the pretence/lie that by letting the Rich keep their money, they are disposed to redistribute because they are not really bastards. Significant net personal wealth? Another example: ‘Shared Services’, another of the current mantras: apparently a panacea to save running costs. Renaissance NW seems especially enamoured with this idea. In reality this is a very dangerous slippery slope which will lead to museum closures. The think-piece has already assumed that the culture crime has been committed. So in 2030 there will be collection sharing. This is non-idea – museums already share collections, regularly loaning works to each other. A related dismal thought is the “‘showbiz’ value for visitors and will be as much about the shared brand equity of big name museums”. As Riiko Sakkinen observed over the proposed Guggenheim in Helsinki “Guggenheim is the McDonald's of Art - reliable, easygoing and extremely unsurprising. Ronald McDonald serves us comfort food and Sololon R. Guggenheim shows us comfort art.” As he terms it – shoppingmallization. The paper is full of contradictions inherent in government policy: Museums will “centres of experience rather than consumerism…an alternative to ‘consume at all costs’. How does that square with “they will be past masters at leveraging the value of their brand” and the new ‘key value’ of ‘Monetisation’?

“Rethinking the Museum” is shot through with self interest. As Morpheus observed in the Matrix “Most of these people are not ready to be unplugged and many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it”. The North West Federation of Museums will still exist. Laudably museums will have helped people ‘through the worst of’ the onslaught’ (at least this recognises the scale of the disaster we face and it projects into the future). However, the Museum sector will be structured pretty much as the New Labour Renaissance model: National Museums (the showbiz brands), the Core Museums (which is currently equivalent to where the Renaissance staff sit), and local museums. But wait, it’s just been announced that Renaissance is going to be called New Renaissance and will focus on ‘Core Museums’. So against the evidence of history that Museum national and regional structures have a shelf life of about 3-5 years, ‘Rethinking the Museum’ reckons these structures will still be in place for 20 years. In the same spirit of adopting ‘future’ nonsense, local museums will all have been morphed in line with today’s ideology – museums will be charitable trusts, ‘independent’ from local authorities (under this government its possible that local government itself will essentially cease to exist), ‘benefiting from mutuality and enterprise’ – every few weeks I get an email inviting me to training courses so I can prepare for mutuality and enterprise. It’s bollocks now and it would be bollocks in 2030.

The only passage that can be said to actually speculate creatively about the future is the opening “some of the museums we know and love will be distant memories, their collections dispersed, their buildings transformed into…work/live units for micro-creatives [whatever they are], crash pads for funky seniors, urban food hubs or incubation facilities for nanotech start-ups”. Thus bizarrely the only unrestricted futurology makes predictions about the non-museum uses of museums after the wreckage of the sado-monetarist apocalypse.

But the think-piece does provoke thinking – Can we extrapolate from current conditions a future with equal validity but containing some hope, some fight?:

The museum wars finished in 2016 when the radical micro-creative movement destroyed the last remaining museum of capitalism, as much from anger at the mind-numbing obsession with stories as its association with the catastrophic Cameron Regime. The preserved ‘archaeology’ of this ‘museum’, which no longer fulfilled the by then accepted definition of a museum, were adorned with the severed heads on pikes of those who had previously held ‘significant net personal wealth’ (for those worried about the museological implications of preservation of biological material for future generations – the outdoor versions will actually be realistic cases of the originals which will have supplementary status in the Museum of Dead Bastards Heads). Meanwhile the Turbo-Realist Museum Movement will be globally networked Glass Bead Game-style hubs of new idea generation, overlaying holographic virtual realities projected contiguously onto surrounding streets or even whole towns. Rather than users or visitors, museums will have thinkers; the only ‘brand’ that will matter will be the depth of a particular museum’s experimentation. Unlike the expectations of “Rethinking the Museum”, the global problems that society faces and to which museums can contribute solutions will be entirely different and unpredictable from 2011. For instance, the solution to climate change was sorted out within 12 months of the bankruptcy and subsequent collapse of capitalism, coming remarkably and unexpectedly from the socialist New Renaissance of the Arab world (sees Zizek http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/01/egypt-tunisia-revolt), after that it was simply a matter of project implementation. [As I have recently experienced idea thief, I hereby copyright this vision].

Is this future more fanciful than “Rethinking the Museum? Of course. But it is just as valid in taking forward current trends with the difference that it suggests some prospect that progress is possible, or if you don’t accept this projection as progressive, then let’s just say it’s more imaginative.

Fundamentally the problem with “Rethinking the Museum” is the problem of museums in the UK. I am reminded that the new (toothless) People’s History Museum uses the strap line “Sometimes ideas are worth fighting for” – this is exactly what is missing in British museums (PHM included): for them if ideas are worth fighting for, they are fights that happened in the past. This isn’t a recent problem; it was there in the earnest procession to take idiotic performance indicators seriously. The objection that these were externally imposed doesn’t wash because in my experience it was possible to do the minimum bureaucratic nonsense and therefore not compromise artistic vision. Generally, however, public galleries accepted that the government targets told them something important about how they were doing, but each governmental regime is value-laden and thus slanted to distort radical museological practice. The museums sector is defenceless because it relies on arguments based in Liberalism, on protestations of social value. The current government is not interested in social value; it’s only interested in cost. And Liberalism itself is intestate now that the Liberal Democrats in government have been shown to be without principle. To rethink the Museum, we have to finally ditch its reliance on liberal ideas of the past and focus on facing the ideological challenges of the 21st Century.

Events this week

2011-01-30T14:18:00.002Z

The Other Room
Wednesday 2 February 7pm @ The Old Abbey Inn, 61 Pencroft Way, Manchester,
M15 6AY (Manchester Science Park)
www.otherroom.org

JOSEPH WALTON (aka JOW LINDSAY), POSIE RIDER & STEPHEN EMMERSON
Joseph Walton (aka Jow Lindsay) is a poet, fiction writer, and editor of Sad Press.
Posie Rider is author of the chapbook tristanundisolde from Arthur Shilling Press (2010) and, City Break Weekend Girl forthcoming from Critical Documents (2011).
Stephen Emmerson’s poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and journals including Jacket, Great Works, Cake, Poetry Salzburg Review, Freaklung, Sunfish and Department and Poems found at the scene of a murder (Zim Zalla, 2010).

Islington Mill James St, Salford, M3 5HW
– Thursday 3 February 6pm
Irene Barberis, Australian artist and curator will deliver a talk about her work as part of the “Say Something Series”.

Counting Backwards is a series of text-sound-performance events. It takes place on the first Thursday of alternate months at Fuel Cafe Bar in Withington. The fifth evening in the series takes place on Thursday 3 February 2011 at 7.30pm with performances from Philip Davenport, James Davies, Juxtavoices, and Helen Shanahan.

wave us goodbye

2011-01-27T07:59:00.004Z

Poetry films on the BBC Big Screen in Manchester will commemorate the Holocaust, bringing together the memories of older Jewish people.

The project, titled BRING LIGHT TOWARDS YOU, is one of many arts projects run by the arthur+martha arts organisation. In the build-up to Holocaust Memorial Day on 27th January, poetic texts created by the older people, many of whom are Holocaust survivors, will be displayed ‘in lights’ on the Screen at The Triangle in the city centre.

The Holocaust has often been linked to trains: millions of people, particularly Jews, were taken to concentration camps by train before being killed in the notorious Nazi ‘Final Solution’ during the Second World War. These 30-second films give fragments from accounts of their journeys: to destruction and journeys of escape.

Artist Lois Blackburn and poet Philip Davenport worked with older Jewish people living at The Morris Feinmann Home, Manchester, exploring issues related to the Holocaust. “To hear these stories has been a powerful, haunting experience,” said Davenport. “The poems are little pockets of emotion that bring alive one of the most notorious events in recent history. It's hard to imagine the reality of the Holocaust because it was so huge, so brutal. What these tiny moments of remembering do is connect to ordinary people's experience.”

Lois Blackburn added: “As in all our projects, we talked to people about the small details of their experience, because it is people’s everyday lives that collectively make history. It’s the sandwiches your mum made, or the look on your sister’s face as you said goodbye. The fact that we’ve been able to help people transform these memories into messages that will be seen my thousands is an extraordinary privilege.”

Some of the pieces were shown on the electronic billboard in Piccadilly Railway Station on Holocaust Memorial Day 2009, but this is the first time that the whole sequence has been seen. arthur+martha have continued to develop the project in partnership with Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, working with young people with special needs, Roma children and many others.

arthur+martha will be contributing A Map of You during the Text Festival. http://www.textfestival.com/education-and-projects/education-and-projects.php?eid=8

Irene Barberis and 5 Places

2011-01-23T21:19:00.012Z

Irene Barberis arrived in Manchester yesterday for a two week residency at Bury Art Gallery. Melbourne-based Irene and I have begun work on various projects, of which this project is the first part of an international curatorial collaboration called 5 Places. The concept of 5 Places proceeds from the notion of mobility, unpredictability and interchangeability brought about in networks challenged through curatorial and artist dialogue. As the name suggests there will be shows in 5 international venues around the world. The next show will also be in Bury in October as part of the Manchester Asia Triennial, but after that shows are planned in Hong Kong, Melbourne, New York, and one other to be confirmed.

http://www.irenebarberis.com/home.html

Showing alongside Irene's installation is Mike Parr's video project "Breathless", here he is talking about it.

Digital Immortality

2011-01-16T18:06:00.007Z

I was pleased to read about the Michael Wolf show in Paris http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2011/01/michael-wolf-we-are-watching-y.php which looks interesting in its own right but resonates with me

because I am also immortalised on Google in this street view (you can zoom closer!):

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=m3+4jn&sll=53.476835,-2.256918&sspn=0.011825,0.05476&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Manchester+M3+4JN,+United+Kingdom&ll=53.476809,-2.248807&spn=0,0.05476&z=15&layer=c&cbll=53.476669,-2.257167&panoid=WZiPiAC8XPRTg5C-F3tQdw&cbp=12,10.3,,0,10.67

Text progress report

2011-01-13T21:42:00.011Z

I've not had time or brain space to blog much for a while now. Mainly tied up with pulling the Text Festival together and preparing the plans to save the Bury Arts & Museums Service from the onslaught of government destruction of public services. The Text Festival has been a massive undertaking this time but there's enough organised now that if I am run over by a bus the event won't notice my absence. As I am getting interesting stuff offered constantly, I may eventually be guilty of either putting too much in or missing out good people. Anyway, the website is pretty up to date now so it's worth a look. www.textfestival.com There are a number of set pieces which I am particularly pleased with:

- Ron Silliman's first public art commission - this will be unveiled as part of the Sentences show and after the Festival will be re-sited in a permanent prominent outdoor location.
- Christian Bök's first UK performance but more than that I'm pleased with the concept of that whole show mixing sound art and Eduard Escoffet from Spain and London-based Holly Pester. Holly is also working on a new work utilising the sound art commissions and recorded concerts of earlier festivals to be shown in the gallery.
- Satu Kaikkonen and Karri Kokko not only performing for the first time in the UK but also for the first time as a 'duet'. This gig should be very striking in Bury Parish Church: in addition to the Finns, the bill includes Ron's reading and Phil Minton's Feral Choir http://www.philminton.co.uk/feralchoir.html
- Phil Davenport's A Map of You project with homeless people which will see the participants doing workshops with Derek Beaulieu and Geof Huth and probably others...

Although previous festivals featured visual poetry, this is the first one to celebrate vispo in a show specifically curated with that work at its core. In addition to showing the work itself I am interested in questioning how vispo is usually shown - a curatorial vocabulary which has been limited I believe by the location of vispo near to poetry rather than visual art. I'll talk more about this when I have actually installed the show. By the way, I am still open to late submissions of vispo for this show - I'd particularly like more artists' books. There's also still work to do on the "Requiem" show at the Fusilier Museum so I am open to ideas for that too.

By the time the shows are ready for opening, I'll be more stressed by it than excited - though hopefully the audience will be more excited and not stressed. So the thing I am most looking forward to is the buzz that will be around all the great people who are coming. It's fascinating to think that in these times global networks of friendship exist but a lot of people have not actually met - something that I am really looking forward to witnessing at the Text gathering.

2010 - the end of days

2010-12-30T16:21:00.007Z

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 imply that I had seen more. I had the energy to see a lot more video films so the film of the year would have to be Tom Ford’s A Single Man – which actually came out last year, but to quote Michel Serres, whom I was reading while in Marrakech before Christmas: “Few people and even fewer thoughts are completely congruent with the date of their times”.

I did see a lot of exhibitions this year – a lot of which were very strong making it invidious to pick out the exhibition of the year. An honourable mention should go to the Moomin exhibition in Bury - while I set it up, the curation of the spaces was a collective effort in the Bury team to whom congratulations are due. But the final decision comes down to Jannis Kounellis at Ambika P3, London, and Brass Art’s The Non-existence of the Unnamed at International 3.

Both great shows - the only way to settle it was to think if I could see only one of them again which one would I re-visit: and therefore Brass Art just shades it (pictures).

In terms of poetry, I haven’t read very much this year either – the three books that most stick in my mind are Derek Beaulieu’s How to Write, Helen Hajnoczky’s Brocade Light and When blue light falls 2 by Carol Watts. Of the three, I probably enjoyed Carol’s most, but I think the first part also ‘won’ it for me last year. Saying I haven’t read much poetry isn’t strictly true as I have read loads of visual poetry, in research for the vispo show in the Text Festival. Locating many of these books by date is pretty hit-and-miss so as with my criteria above, I ignore the date of publication. Particularly brilliant, but also probably the furthest from a contemporary publication date was Márton Koppány’s Investigations. I am very fond of Satu Kaikkonen’s Fif poems and The Hidden Point which she gave me when we met in Tampere in October, but the most beautiful vispo book I got this year was Derek Beaulieu’s Silence http://www.redfoxpress.com/dada-beaulieu.html . The best poetry performance I saw was also by Derek at Bury Art Gallery in July.

When I realised that due to the pressures already acknowledged my review of the year was going to be thin on positives and in the depressed mood of the time, I considered whether to supplement it conversely with ‘awards’ for the truly awful shows one sees in a year. But the despicable Conservative Government assault on British society is a low point against which even the worse exhibition of the year can’t compete. So I leave this year instead with a contender for the funniest moment of the year. Browsing in a bookshop I picked up a poetry book and read:
“I am a sperm-whale”... The opening line of Simon Armitage’s latest book.

Happy New Year

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-25T14:04:00.002Z

Barney opens his presents

Marrakech

2010-12-18T12:51:00.001Z

I am in Marrakech writing the Tragedy of Althusserianism.

Ghosts move about me patched with histories

2010-12-04T16:14:00.002Z

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 be ‘resident’ in the space.

The artist talk is free but booking is required: please follow the link below for tickets: http://whisper-residency-artists-talk.eventbrite.com/

The Other Room

2010-11-30T15:49:00.002Z

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 Mill 24, a video piece in Unsungfest at Contact Theatre and a talk and performance at University of Huddersfield’s Sonic Arts Forum.

http://www.otherroom.org

Every Day is a Good Day

2010-11-26T15:43:00.047Z

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, according to the catalogue "the exhibition differs markedly from a traditional touring exhibition. The procedure that Cage often employed, using an I Ching-like computer programme, is used to determine the layout of the exhibition at the gallery, with the programme determining the position of each work through chance operations. This results in works being displayed at many different heights, and in groups that no curator would ordinarily choose; such chance encounters between quite different works gives a sense of them being part of an ongoing creative process, rather than merely being the result of one creative moment." And on first experiencing the spatisalisation of works as no curator would not ordinarily choose, it is very striking. Knowing that the works are juxtaposed by chance adds a new layer. But as I walked through the galleries a second time (as I was waiting to meet Phil Minton who was performing at the Gallery), something about it began to bother me. It's no more than a deep feeling but how to explain that there is something fundamental and subliminal not right? I began to wonder about the "I Ching-like" computer programme. I realise that I am not convinced by the computer programme - not that it isnt random or that someone cheated, but that its randomness is not Cagean. I know that Cage did use a I Ching computer programme to generate chance operations which he created with Ed Korbin but he also used the I Ching itself - as I have frequently in the past. And it is this familiarity with I Ching that makes me uneasy. I didn't investigate the mathematics of the hang but I can only call its effect 'mechanical', and for me it seemed to clash with the ethereal Cagean gestures in drawing and paint. I am left thinking that an installation using an actual I Ching ritual would have delivered a more organic chance driven curation.

Just on the comment "in groupings that no curator would ordinarily choose", I am also reminded of the Schalauger (Basel 2009) hang which delivered a similar aesthetic (other areas not pictured here had the Cagean sparseness).

So I found Cage's works beautiful but I was less convinced by the artifice of the mock-Cage installation concept - not because it was over-egged or contrived but because I could feel that it was machine generated rather than spiritually random.

Worksetting - in every dream home a heartache

2010-11-22T21:41:00.011Z

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 something in.

Newspeak

2010-11-20T13:44:00.008Z

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 languages being exploited and invented by these new artists is, in fact, expanding and multiplying." This in itself is a mad newspeak distortion of the meaning of newspeak.

And the claim made for it is not supported by the work or oddly the curation. On my previous visits the latter aspect has not really struck me because the work carried the hang. But while there are some works worth seeing the absence of a sense that this is a cohesive vision makes the linear circulation pattern of the hang seem lumbering. The only locational surprise is Gareth Cadwallader’s Dead Horse installed alone in a thoroughfare between two galleries. In the loose context, I found myself more in the mood for abstraction and so liked (top picture) Marcus Foster’s Untitled form, which he describes as hot air balloon-like but for me was reminiscent of forms from 17th Century Chinese fluted ceramics.

Dean Hughes never puts a foot wrong but I didn’t think Saatchi displayed it very well.

And the other work that stood out for me was Systems House with his mix of minimalism and manufacturing.

Unusually nowadays, the only noticeable use of text was James Howard and his 46 digital prints appropriating the graphics and language of advertising and information posters. Apart from the soft spot for me of finding an artwork which features a dog called Barny in the Saatchi, I enjoyed Howard’s word play

EARLY WARNING
When its fact of life teaching schedule remember to
Include tell her most important one.
ASK YOURSELF
“Is any other dog?
Has it happened
To Barny?
At an alarming rate?”
“Has the children?”

Death and the idea of museums

2010-11-14T14:37:00.008Z

(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 narratives are on offer. Once these stories are established the museum's collections really come into their own by providing unrivalled sources of evidence. Indeed, such a clear narrative structure also enhances the more random inspirational powers that objects possess. It is so easy to say "let the objects speak for themselves", but their language and their messages are often difficult to understand without a good narrative context. So we need museums that are story-driven, but object rich. "

Although Mastoris uses the phrased ‘concept-centred display’, ‘story-driven’ privileges narration, linearity over concept; I read his conclusion as bypassing ideas as the driver of the concept of a museum (despite the word itself of course being rooted in ‘the place sacred to the Muses’).

Contrary to a response framed in museological theory, my reflex in these sorts of debates is more phenomenological, referenced back to my own first museum ‘epiphany’ in the Isle of Man. Back before the Manx Museum had its rationalising extension and modernisation, it was a magical place. When asked questions about what museums are for, or how museums work best I am always taken back to a memory from 1972 standing in the museum’s reconstruction of a dimly lit Victorian shopping street and looking up to see the giant skeleton of a whale hanging overhead. It made no sense (probably a mixture of historic display accident and/or lack of storage space) but it remains my most striking experience in any museum. When I last visited everything had changed for the less imaginative. This panorama link:
http://www.gov.im/tourism/attractions/virtualtours/ManxMuseum.xml
now shows the whale skeleton hovering above where it ‘should’ be in a natural history gallery. I have thought often on why this bizarre juxtaposition worked. It clearly wasn’t a curatorial strategy – generally deliberate curatorial surrealism is egotistic and irritating – it had hung like that since the early Sixties, I think; I’d guess in a time when a little isolated island museum didn’t even have what we now think of as a curator. It wasn’t an ostentatious surrealist act; it was just the way the architecture of the building worked. When you were upstairs you could see the skeleton contextualised with the natural history collection but in the ‘street’ the outline of whale flew overhead. In terms of the debate about what are museums about, this experience is about an object (the skeleton) but, unless you are a museum professional who can interpret the installation as an operational configuration, there was no story. I recall and still find that the installation was unfathomable: it was what it was and was magical because of that. That moment represented, and still does, the possibility of imaginative space; in negating any meaning at all except itself it offered the exhilaration of creative freedom in an act without precedence. My answer to “Are museums about objects or stories” is neither. For me, museums are about the possibility of freedom, the ground for creativity. The curatorial responsibility is the mobilisation of objects to create the opportunity for that space. This is why the political imperative over the last decade or more for UK museums to be educational, to spoon feed the visitor and the school pupil with the story, is fundamentally destructive to museums’ value and raison d’etre.

With the new Dark Age pending in the UK and the sad and sudden death of Sue’s father, this question and my intuitive response to it, were in my mind when I checked out the People’s History Museum exhibition “Death and the Working Class” this week.

http://www.phm.org.uk/changing-exhibitions-gallery/death-and-the-working-class/

This video link gives a pretty good visual of the layout.

http://player.vimeo.com/video/16393923

Although I have blogged previously about how disappointing the new PHM is, I approached the show with an open mind, maybe even optimism – reasoning that the banality of the permanent displays could be put down to funder sensitivity/expectation of political neutrality but that a temporary show working with such an emotive subject has the room, even the imperative, to address the seriousness of its intent.

Predictably given where PHM seems to have located itself, Death and the Working Class lacks the idea that would make it a serious show: anger. It is a bland social history show of objects supported only by fragments of context. It doesn’t evoke the idea of death or the experience of people dying. The display goes down the route of parsing the subject by themes:

preparing for death
causes of death
laying out
the ceremony
wakes and wills
mourning and remembrance

but the absence of the theme of struggle leaves you wondering why it bother to mention Class in its title. How can you curate such as show and not impart a sense of injustice in the viewer?

Whatever seriousness the exhibition could claim is badly undermined by the ubiquitous nonsense of ‘access’ play. In amongst the exhibits you are invited to read an epitaph and guess whose name it relates to under a flap you lift. There is a comments board where you are invited to write your own epitaph. On the floor there is a snakes and ladders game with coloured plastic skulls as pieces. But the stupidity prize has to go to the rack of mourning clothes with its sign “Put on these mourning clothes: how do they make you feel?” This is really unacceptable - especially having had Sue's father's funeral last week.

The Olympics and Poetry

2010-11-04T21:10:00.013Z

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 it new direction. Various people said to me: MacKenzie is a shrewd judge of a good project, re-submit the Language Moment, she might have more insight than the previous discredited judging panels. So I did. I got a reply that she would pass it on to her team to consider. I heard nothing more and readers here will know the Language Moment has continued to develop and will subsequently be the legacy project I take forward after the Text Festival (freed from any constraints that the Olympics would have imposed).

Suddenly the BBC announced yesterday "An ambitious project to assemble poets from all of the Olympic nations in 2012 has been launched in London."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11674308 apparently"Simon Armitage, the poet behind the idea, said: 'My hunch is this will be the biggest poetry event ever - a truly global coming together of poets.' The fucking poet behind the idea! Jude Kelly, the Southbank Centre's artistic director, (which is hosting the event) said: "Poetry has always been so associated with the Olympics - It seems appropriate to make poetry this central idea of something that is about a world gathering." Tony Trehy of the Language Moment said (in 2009 and again to the new Olympic Culture people in 2010): "Poetry was as much a feature of the ancient Olympics as sport. By the 21st Century the concept of global friendship has become central to the Olympiad without recognition of the role that the language arts could play in enhancing this world dialogue."

Apparently they are aiming for 200 poets from all continents. Hmmm... the Language Moment had 200 poets signed up from all continents. The only differences I can see is that the event will happen in London where the Language Moment happened in Manchester - to which people living in the north will no doubt look askance sky-ward, tutting "the usual story". And the other difference is that Hegemony of the Banal continue to limit the possibilities of language in poetry thus ignoring its relationship and dialogue with sound art, visual art, multimedia, etc.

A Sustainable Future for the Rollerball Museum

2010-10-27T20:50:00.015Z

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 government could destroy one hundred years of British culture in the space of three.

The ‘Arts’ and ‘Museums’ have been producing various briefing documents and lobbying campaigns that set out why the arts are so important and there are various online ‘save the arts’ websites and petitions. The problem with all of these is that they rely on the arguments that the arts have developed over 2 decades of New Labour target-driven non-culture imperatives which have fundamentally undermine chances of survival in the current situation. Basically, the arts argue for the economic/social/educational value they provide but the new government is only interested in costs (and that is charitably to give them an economic justification rather than the more likely ideological truth): in this simple equation, the value of the arts is irrelevant.

The dangers are compounded because of the clever nonsense of ‘Business Transformation’. For decades, cuts in public service have been referred to as ‘efficiency savings’. Everyone knows that this is newspeak bollocks; but the unprecedented speed and scale of this debacle implementation is dressed up with this new language which suggests that services can be saved by radical re-configuration: “Business Transformation” is more than a distortion of the language – it is a plain lie. The propagation of this lie is compounded by the naivety of a sector of museum/arts administrators who were trained in the ethos of neo-Puritan museums as useful – it’s a generational thing. They are quick to accept the cuts as inevitable – because they are conditioned by the methodology of the previous regime to hit the target, even if the target is perversely destructive. So you get nonsense out of them such as “it is better to have one good museum than four mediocre ones”. This is supposed to suggest that the recent times of plenty have resulted in too many museums, some good some mediocre, and therefore the new governmental cull is actually an opportunity! This is plainly bollocks. Maybe it would be better to have four good ones – good museums don’t cost any more to run than mediocre ones.

I am pretty frequently getting email bulletins now with titles like “Fuelling The Necessary Revolution”. Every single word of that title makes me want to slap the writer, who goes on to claim that “The funding cuts announced this week are bringing into sharp focus the need for us to consider different ways of thinking and different ways of doing. Whilst artists have a proud and promiscuous history of collaborating across every imaginable boundary, arts organisations have too often tended to work in isolation or in competition. It has been written especially for public and private funders in order to persuade them to encourage and support more collaborations. This guide includes an explanation of the competencies, qualities and attributes necessary, describes the early stage challenges and offers a framework for assessment. It explains what disciplined collaboration looks like...” The exasperation I feel reading this is nearly debilitating – maybe to reduce my use of expletives in this blog I could just observe that the cuts are so large that most of the thinking is already directed to not doing things rather than doing differently; that for those of us who have been ‘promiscuously’ collaborating with artists for years and crossing every imaginable boundary this is patronising shite; and explanation of competencies, qualities, attributes and frameworks for assessement (just what we need!) is the tiresome bureaucracy of HR-Fordist model imposed on arts management over the last decade which paradoxically has artistically de-skilled arts management while pretending to professionalise it.

The other delusional strategy being offered is that the way to survive is to focus on the young – “we need to illustrate to government and society that our organisations can teach young people about the past so they can construct their futures.” There are two misapprehensions in this: the first relates to my earlier observation – under New Labour, working with young people was a consistent governmental imperative (to the detriment, I would argue, to the quality of the arts themselves): the working with youth card is already in the game and clearly has no value to the rich bastards that now govern the country. The other problem with it relates to the sustainability of the Rollerball Museum, which I come to below. Sustainability is another bit of jargon that has a multiple life in the current situation. Until recently it was used as part of the green agenda, reducing the carbon footprint of museums and galleries, etc. Now it has an additional use, much as ‘transformation’ means ‘dismantle’, sustainability now means survival.

Along with the liberal “don’t hurt us because we are good with the poor and dispossessed” strategy of the arts (liberalism after all is dead in the final act of coalition), the other humiliation some are swallowing is “The Big Society”. This is the Government’s vision for replacing the ‘big state’. I can’t be bothered to parse this nonsense, but suffice it to say, that there are arts administrators arguing that there is an opportunity for the arts to survive by ‘delivering this new agenda’. I am just not convinced that enough of the cultural infrastructure will survive because the sentence includes its own demise “for the arts to survive by delivering this new agenda”. This assumes that the arts are supposed to survive; but this is an ideological dismantling of public life to be rebuilt in a different image much as it was with monetarism in the 80s-90s. It doesn’t need or want the past. One of the founding concepts of museums is that access to the past informs the future - “our organisations can teach young people about the past so they can construct their futures” – to dismantle the infrastructure of British museums and galleries is to overwrite history, to disconnect the past so that a different, forgetful future is forged. The new government’s schedule for destruction is 2014 (so that British society has been irrevocably changed before they can be kicked out in the 2015 election), but this story makes me think of a slightly later date: 2018.

By the year 2018, the Corporate Wars have ended and crime has been eliminated around the globe. To entertain and divert the bored masses, the sport of Rollerball -- a cross between hockey, roller derby, and motocross -- has been invented and become wildly popular. Veteran player Jonathan E. (played by James Caan) of the Houston team has become so big with the fans over his ten-year career that the corporate owners fear his stardom violates the team ideology of Rollerball and may inspire a revolution. Mr. Bartholomew (John Houseman), an executive with Energy Corp., the team owners, tells Jonathan E. “Corporate society was an inevitable destiny”. Increasingly suspicious, the previously dumb jock Jonathan tries to investigate the history of the game and the corporations by going to visiting the last library-archive in the world, which is Zero, the world's most powerful computer based in Geneva. Jonathan only finds more evidence that the world is all wrong. The head librarian is madder than a hatter and the computer is twisted. Somehow they have lost the entire 13th Century and who knows what else. To paraphrase George Orwell “Who controls the past, controls the future”. And how better to control the past than to lose chunks of it. You never know, maybe they’ll win a second term, in which case they will be in power in 2018 - with the unemployment in the arts that's coming, there'll be plenty of applications for the museum director.

Moomin Valley at Bury

2010-10-22T18:18:00.004Z

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 who are fascinated by tales of the Moomins but also to adults who can appreciate Jansson’s expressive drawings and the darker subtexts of the images and stories.

Events
23 October - Special Opening, The exhibition will be formally opened by the Mayor and the Finnish Ambassador.

The Other Room

2010-10-17T08:22:00.001Z

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

2010-10-14T19:13:00.004Z

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

2010-10-12T17:26:00.012Z

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 visited Tampere Art Museum, Tampere Contemporary Art Museum and the Sara Hilden Museum. Added to two shows I saw at TR1 and it felt like a cultured week. I had great meetings with Toimi Jaatinen and Taina Myllyharju, both social and establishing future projects. Taina was a great host throughout the week.

The next fruit of the Tampere partnership is the opening of the Moomin Valley exhibition at Bury Art Gallery on 23 October.

Text Festival 2011

2010-09-30T19:37:00.004Z

The new Text Festival website goes live today.

http://www.textfestival.com

Over the next month more events will be added.

Back to Finland

2010-09-30T15:43:00.002Z

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

2010-09-22T11:13:00.012Z

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, Mexico in 2006 and shown to critical acclaim in the Mexican pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2007, the work is made up of 100 light bulbs which are activated by a sensor to flash at the exact rhythm of particpants' heart rates.

"33 Questions per Minute" is a Queneau-like question-generating programme which as much uses rules of grammar to create endless (enigmatic and/or meaningless) questions. "Close Up" invites viewers to insert a finger into a scanner which then generate a digital image of the finger print into a collage of previously inserted fingers.

Seeing this accumulation of Lozano-Hemmer work, the striking thing is the visual pleasure in the digital super-realism of the images or the soothing beauty in mathematically balanced proportion in such works as Pulse Room. Oddly though, this ultimate over-rules the putative selling point of interactivity. This becomes of peripheral interest - and if focused on too long undermines the effect of the show as a whole because it gives the impression that in the end all the works are versions of the same piece.

http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/
http://www.manchestergalleries.org/whats-on/exhibitions/index.php?itemID=73

A Single Man’s Inception

2010-09-19T17:40:00.014Z

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 executives to resist them.

Cobb’s team of specialists plan their inceptions like heists, drugging their targets, installing vast, detailed imaginary worlds inside their minds where they go into a lucid dreaming state, letting their subconscious guard down so the team trick them into doing or believing the thing Cobb’s employers require. Saito, an energy magnate, wants Cobb to do the reverse: not take information, but plant an idea in a rival's mind. In return, he'll fix problems with the US government so Cobb can return to his children. Cobb takes the near-impossible job, planning three layers of dreams within dreams for the target. It requires a larger team taking a powerful sedative: if something goes awry, the dreamers may not awake. Cobb doesn't tell his team that his past nurtures feelings powerful enough to bring on this comatose state for all of them. The embedding of the multiple layers of dreams is a directorial tour de force. In such sure hands the viewer is never lost in the complications but has the pleasure of feeling that it frequently stretches you.

Whereas ‘A Single Man’ is based on the 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood, which follows a desparate single day in the life of a deeply grieving single man – possibly the last day as the man, George Falconer, played by Colin Firth, prepares to commit suicide. Falconer is an expatriate Englishman in Los Angeles, a bespectacled college professor teaching English literature, a discreet gay man whose partner, Jim, has just died in a car accident. It is 1962, and there is fever and change in the air: the recently passed Cuban missile crisis has left America in a jittery mood, relieved but still profoundly anxious. The students increasingly affect the style of beatniks, bikers and bohemians, and youth culture is breaking through the suburban conformity. Falconer lectures against the state of fear for fear’s sake and compared to the authenticity of celebration implied by the meeting of Jim and George the students’ testing of youthful ideas are gropingly superficial. Colin Firth's performance is brilliant; as the Guardian reviewer commented, almost radioactive with grief, a grief which he may not express publicly, having been debarred from Jim's funeral by the deceased's family, and compounded (especially for us) by the loss of the couple’s two dogs in the same accident. So George lives this last day, punctuated with flashbacks to poignant memories of times with Jim as a kind of sensory farewell.

Both are great to watch (though the latter is head-and-shoulders better), though apparently no points of connection between the two films; but as they both revolve around the structure of consciousness, for the purposes of argument they were unified in my consciousness so that’s enough to consider the connection.

The reviews of A Single Man were strangely grudging. On the one hand, Colin Firth is universally appreciated for an outstanding portrayal, ably supported by Julianne Moore’s characterisation of his semi-alcoholic best-friend. But all the ones I have read are critical of Tom Ford’s directorial style; eg “sometimes looks like an indulgent exercise in 1960s period style, glazed with 21st-century good taste, a 100-minute commercial for men's cologne: Bereavement by Dior” and “visually potent but after a while it degenerates into a preening perfume commercial.” While once or twice, a beautiful composition is lingered on a moment too long, overall these criticisms are irritatingly misconceived. The only aspect that seemed overly a device of advertising is the absence of text. Advertising is a textual monoculture where only the words and logos of the single product features – it is actually this which makes advertland so unnatural. Despite the criticism being leveled at A Single Man, Inception is similarly textually restrainted but doesn’t get that charge.

In terms of representations of consciousness there is a big hole at the centre of the conception of Inception which makes it much closer to a film of multiple dimensions (like Matrix) rather than recursive dreams: each level has the same degree of reality as the next one and all levels are versions of reality. There’s no surrealism; even though in the dream worlds geometry can be distorted, it only transforms to hyperbolic geometry ie still geometry. The only ‘random intervention’ is a train blasting unexpectedly through one of the team’s set pieces, but in the context of the chase scene it arrives in, it almost doesn’t seem that out of place. There is no strangeness, the dream worlds dont have fuzzy edges, things that arent explicable to the dreamer; there are no puppies! Whereas Colin Firth experiences his day much more realistically as a dream, his consciousness drifts or focuses with intensity that changes the colour of the world, a sensation can overwhelm him, or the scent - when missing his lost dogs, he pets another character’s dog, smelling its head as someone who had lost a loved pet would. One of the reviewers criticised a flashback scene where George and Jim are sun-bathing in an unlikely rocky landscape, criticised it because it looked like an advertising location, but it is more dream-like than any scene in Inception. In comparing the models of consciousness in the two films - Inception's is as digital as its form; A Single Man is a phenomenological study, beautifully balanced and deeply insightful with a poignant conclusion looping back to the opening scenes.

And the Award for the Best Poetry Dog goes to…

2010-09-09T12:25:00.014Z

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 that it only has delusions of grandeur not real prospects (except in football which irritatingly, as an Everton supporter, is the one greatness I am against). A great city has certain characteristics. I want it to have great contemporary architecture and it doesn’t. I want it to have a great orchestra but it doesn’t. I want it to have a great Gallery and it doesn’t. I want it to have an International Festival that's not corporate or Literature Festival that actually contributes something to global artistic dialogue and its own cultural life but it doesn’t (well it does – the Text Festival but Manchester doesn’t acknowledge it). As Kurt Vonneghut would say: so it goes. So I can forget the Blogger nominations because I want Manchester to be more than it is - and so I turn to the Literature Festival programme.

My thoughts on it are mostly poetry related, as nowadays I get very little time to read fiction, but I guess we can extrapolate the quality of the poetry programme as consistent across to fiction.

Having built up to the big statement, it may not be world-shattering news for me to say the programme is dismally dull. Self-evidently the hegemony of the banal is installed in this and most other UK literature events, intertwined with the dumb marketing-led publishing, prize-winning poets giving each other prizes and facile literature newspaper coverage. So in this sense, Manchester is merely representative of the UK situation - the hegemony of the banal is a gauge symmetry – pretty much interchangeable with other such festivals in the UK - accommodation of mediocrity, indeed its celebration. Fundamentally, the purposeless Hegemonists have no artistic direction (just telling their own stories in their own voices) and so their festivals are artistically static. It is analogous to Richard Dawkins’ observation of the corrosive effect of day-to-day superstitions such as astrology on rationality; or the delusions of ‘be-nice’ liberalism – which have been cruelly exposed for their political vacuity in the current evil of the coalition government.

The only event that seems odd is the Tribute to Roy Fisher, which raises the question: Why has this particular poet been located in a relation to the mainstream? After all as Marjorie Perloff observed: “Fisher’s ‘cutting’ of the page, with its removal of words from their ‘planned situations’, anticipated a mode that became prominent in the U.S., not only in Silliman’s poetry but in that of many other Language poets, at least a decade after Fisher had written the (evidently unknown to them) Cut Pages”. But then in the brochure copy you find that his work has been championed by Carol Ann Duffy – the festival is shot-through (as Sartre would say) with Duffy. As Nate Dorward notes in Jacket 12 “a new mainstream postmodernism represented by authors like Craig Raine, Carol Ann Duffy, Paul Muldoon and Simon Armitage, and more generally by the popular dissemination of the clichés of poststructuralist theory…Fisher’s poetry has become less formally unpredictable since the mid-1970” and “The Cut Pages, Fisher’s most experimental text, is little known outside the ranks of Fisher enthusiasts because of its exclusion from the Oxford and Bloodaxe editions of his poems”. So that explains it.

Ordinarily MLF would not occupy my thoughts for more than the time it takes to flick through the brochure and be confirmed in the expectation that there is nothing worth attending. However, the mainstream is fond of its competitions – it is the way in which it validates itself, sells its books, rewards its mates. MLF is liberally sprinkled with awards, there’s even a gala prize dinner (in the company of Simon Armitage et al) for something called the Manchester Poetry Prize. But there is one prize which the mainstream can never have, despite their bid for it in the centre spread of the Festival Brochure.
And that is Best Poetry Dog. MLF’s whimsical design conceit is minimalist and newsprint style, punctuated by photos of flyposted epigrammatic sentences, with the addition on the centre spread of an intensely focused Border Terrier pulling toward something out of shot (amusingly it seems to have more directional intent than the mainstream poetry it has been co-opted to represent). The mainstream has a tendency to raid beyond its boundaries to pick up less threatening elements of more experimental work, the flyposting is a neat absorption of street poem installations stretching back to Cobbing and beyond, and more recently Phil Davenport’s interventions in Manchester and other cities; but the inclusion of the Border Terrier, can only be seen as a doomed attempt to take on the world’s most famous Poetry Dog – Barney. (I obviously highly rate Márton Koppány’s Gertrude S. in Budapest but I think Márton would accept that Barney holds the crown). This is a field of poetic contention which the Hegemony can not win. So the terrier – nameless therefore simply a model rather than a real poetry dog – fails miserably to challenge the Barnster. As evidence of Barney’s poetry credentials I offer the illustrations in this blog:
Barney and Derek Beaulieu
Barney (as a puppy) sitting in Robert Grenier’s shoes
Barney and Ron Silliman reading Geof Huth (photoed by Geof himself)

And therefore I am sure you will join me in celebration as the Award for the Best Poetry Dog goes to … Barney.

Busy even on holiday

2010-09-05T19:57:00.003Z

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

2010-08-27T16:38:00.051Z

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 its historic collection touring the far east), the chance to find out was available.

The first to get the opportunity was Sarah Sander, a young artist whom I have been championing for a while - I showed her in the last Text Festival and in Not at this Address. Phil Davenport also included her live writing act in William Blake & the Naked Tea Party.

As one would expect, Sarah admitted that the challenge of responding such a large space was quite daunting, but Sarah is a performative explorer. In consultation with assistant curator Kat McClung-Oakes (a talent that should also be acknowledged), Sarah interweaved two fields of experiment - a personal response to the more obscure more recent figurative acquisitions to the collection and her articulation of visceral drawing qua act.

This combination merged into a fascination with paper itself as a form of drawing, and a dialogue with an artist she found in the collection (of whom I had never heard!) called Paul Hempton with a compositional obsession with triangles. Her installation has taken the form of a discovery of a balanced hang of the focal Hempton's plus some figurative but vaguely and unintentionally cubist landscapes also from the collection in conversation with her exploration of the geometry of the triangle within the format of modern paper proportions. The paper experiments, some drawn some folded, some cut, form a spatial rhythm around the space. Part joke, part first breakthrough, part seminal moment, privileged on a focal plinth with case she located her first terrible lump of paper folded - as far from origami as a lump of carpet. Interestingly this celebrated clumsy failure magnifies the subsequent finese of her artistry. As she installed floating pages hanging in mid-air this act too became performative which led to a final action in the installation on Friday in which she silently took a sheet of paper and like a video stuck in a loop walked to a specific place, threw the paper into the air, collected it from the floor, sliced it in half, returned to the spot, threw the 2 halves into the air, collected them from the floor, sliced again, on and on in a minimalist rhythm of beautiful simplicity.

The result of Sarah Sanders project is an abstract handling of space that is restrained, romantic, multi-centred and lyrically reminiscent of the cubist townscapes of Lionel Feininger.

Space reviewed

2010-08-24T07:09:00.006Z

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

2010-08-20T17:47:00.006Z

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-lite Alice Oswald, “a nature poet who writes ‘very much in the tradition’ of Hughes”.

First of April - new born gentle
Fleeting wakeful on a greenleaf cradle.
Second of April - eyes half open,
faint light moving under lids. Face hidden.
Third of April - bonny and blossoming
in a yellow dress that needs no fastening.

Etc

Despite the claim that the award is for "the most exciting contribution to poetry" in the past year, Oswald, whose work is as indistinguishably mainstream as Duffy’s own, beat the ‘fabulous’ shortlist of Andrew Motion and Jackie Kay – on what planet would any of these names be considered exciting? The only adjective that comes to mind for Motion’s writing is turgid. Sue Trehy is an insanely fast reader and so when we travel she takes piles of books. I noticed that a Jackie Kay book had made it into her luggage recently. She doesn’t like me telling her what she should and shouldn’t read so I kept my mouth shut, interested to see what she thought of it. I’ve never seen her not finish a book, she seems to take it as a point of pride to finish if she’s started whatever it's like; but the Kay was thrown down unfinished. "Ordinary beyond belief, she can't write" she declared, "I’ve read better writing by 6th Form teenagers."

Saying “I would have told you so” isn’t as much fun as saying “I told you so”.

The artistic bankruptcy of the hegemony continues to manifest in an implied but fundamentally aimless desire for renewal. With no recourse or capacity to language itself as the source of renewal, much as they dally in writing for children or try their hand at plays, or as reviewed recently, even curating exhibitions (Duffy at the Tate), supposedly this “very exciting award highlights the many forms in which poets work, from poetry collections to verse novels; radio poems and film poems to libretti and verse dramas; individual poems or poem sequences; work for adults or children; through to poetry written for public sculptures, inscriptions, or other contexts”. Except the evidence so far contradicts this empty rhetoric because Oswald won with a rural book like her other rural books except with illustrations by an artist I can’t be bothered to look up. Amusingly Oswald said: “it’s an award that dips beyond the mainstream into some of the more unusual poetic channels”. ‘dips beyond the mainstream’ ! As well as being talentless, the arrogant writers of the hegemony of the banal are cheeky buggers.

Anyway, this year I emailed the Poetry Society back that having seen their understanding of new work in the first year I thought that they had a brilliant sense of humour and I was looking forward to an excitingly risible second year award. I did momentarily wonder what damage it would do to a poet who actually did write something new if they won it accidentally, an award despite itself, but even after only one year it is clear this is inconceivable.

node:space #1

2010-08-13T15:32:00.024Z

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

2010-08-10T19:23:00.002Z

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 the appropriate response to Duffy ‘Coda to a Laureate’ – (first line: “If I could take my tongue out of your arse”).

According to the PR the show “Presenting artworks created in a range of media from 1699 to the present day, Duffy's personal selection creates a multi-layered and poetic display. It invites us on a journey towards a universal notion of language, from ‘before words’ to ‘when words come into being’. She explores the numerous ways in which artists have deployed, dissected and engaged with language; by making reference to literature, by exploring the processes and devices of inscription and the formal qualities of typography, by using words to convey meaning or by creating works that are synonyms and metaphors for communication itself.” I always wonder what marketing people and visual arts people (for that matter) mean when they refer to a ‘poetic display’. You frequently read artists and curators refer to images as poetic but I am never sure what that actually means; one can usually infer that it references some form of vague lyricism, which is about all you could expect from Duffy. In her case maybe vaguely lyricist visualism is preferable to

POETRY
I couldn’t see Guinness
and not envisage a nun;
a gun, a finger and thumb;
midges, blether, scribble, scrum.

Followed by 2 more stanzas of equal banality.

The claim that this has been realized as an installation, which allows visitors to re-write it to create ‘their own sonnet’ is I guess laughable. My bet is that this is nothing more than the usual UK gallery practice of ‘hands-on’ write on cards and pin on a board to ‘have your say’.

The irritation about this show is in the oft-repeated fiasco of the visual arts co-opting poetry and in their choice demonstrating that they have absolutely no idea of what is going on in contemporary poetry. In curating the Text Festival I have reviewed the Tate Collection myself to borrow from so I know what Duffy had to work with. Seeing what she chose I am drawn to a comment from Marjorie Perloff’s ‘Differentials; Poetry, Poetics, pedagogy’ which I am also reading at the moment: “the what might happen subordinated to the what has happened”- this actually describes the problem in the hegemony of the banal, Duffy and her oppos write as if modernism didn’t happen; their past is not modern (her selection at the Tate is at best artistically static); their present is not contemporary and their future can only be the past.

Busy

2010-08-06T14:33:00.005Z

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)

This Week

2010-08-01T07:13:00.004Z

Two gigs this week:

The Other Room
Linus Slug, Chris McCabe, Ben Gwilliam
4th August 2010, 7pm

The Old Abbey Inn, Pencroft Way, Manchester, M15 6AY

Ben Gwilliam is a sound artist and improvising musician based in Manchester, England. He works in the cross fields of experimental music, sound art, film and performance. Since the early 2000's he has been working with open reel tape, magnetics and amplified processes in solo and collaborative arrangements.
His work is a curiosity about sound-making/recording and listening, the 'sounds between' things as Installations, performances and appropriations. He has worked, performed and exhibited in Europe and the USA. He will be performing with Philip Davenport.

Chris McCabe’s poetry has featured in a number of magazines including Magma and Poetry Review. His first collection The Hutton Inquiry was published in 2005. He has discussed and read his poetry on BBC World Service, featured a poem on the Oxfam CD Lifelines and performs his work regularly. He currently works as Joint Librarian of The Poetry Library

Linus Slug is an obsessive compulsive disorder + pretend poet of the Putney Heath. In 2009 Slug graduated from the Hilson School of Poetry + is currently employed by the Insect Library in London. Slug runs the small press 'ninerrors' [http://ninerrors.blogspot.com/] and is editor of FREAKLUNG. In June 2010 Slug organised a reading in memory of Barry MacSweeney at Morden Tower to accompany FREAKLUNG Odes [the current issue of the zine]. Work can be seen in Cannibal Spices, Klatch and issue 1 of Cleaves + Freaklung. Chapbooks include ffrass gazette [Arthur Shilling Press], sporangiaphores [yt communication] and a series of pamphlets via ninerrors. Obsessions include Art Garfunkel, anagrams + pseudonyms and the no. 9.

www.otherroom.org

Counting Backwards is a new series of text-sound-performance events. It takes place on the first Thursday of alternate months at Fuel cafe bar in Withington. After a successful launch in June the series returns on Thursday 5 August 2010 with performances from Blood Stereo, Becky Creminand Jennifer McDonald & Louise Woodcock.
Start time is 7:30pm, and entry is free.
Blood Stereo is husband and wife duo Karen Constance and Dylan Nyoukis, each legendary in their own right, with Smack Music 7 and Prick Decay/Decaer Pinga respectively. Mangling sonic forms (musique concrete, sound poetry etc.) and tapes alike, the opportunity to see and hear them in action should not be missed.

Becky Cremin works in process and draws on traditions of live art, fluxus, performance writing and site specific work to construct a hybridity of practice which uses language as an object to expose, to investigate, to locate. She is a founding member of the poetic collective PRESS FREE PRESS, she regularly performs in London and beyond and her first chapbook Cutting Movement is now available from The Knives Forks and Spoons Press.

Jennifer McDonald & Louise Woodcock are Manchester-based artists, and part of a collective artists project called Rare Experiments. Jennifer is better known as a visual artist, and draws inspiration from significant cultural spaces. Louise curated the Lost Language exhibition earlier this year at Kraak gallery, and is one half of improvising noise band Blood Moon.

Dublin

2010-07-29T07:24:00.007Z

Coincident but not causal on our arrival in the city, Dublin was announced as a UNESCO City of Literature; not sure what that will actually mean but I have observed in this and previous visits that it does seem to have a lot of readers – it is noticeable that many more people seem to read books in public places, parks and cafes. Anyway, as it was a shortbreak, my only literary tourism was a visit to the Chester Beattie Library; European Museum of the year in 2002, this is a must certainly for visual poets with its magnificent collection of rare and ancient manuscripts.
http://www.cbl.ie/Collections/Introduction.aspx

My only gallery experience was my habitual return to the Douglas Hyde Gallery.
http://www.douglashydegallery.com/home.php
The gallery has unusual but interesting levels and is always very thoughtfully hung. On this visit I saw Dana Schutz’s Tourette’s Paintings and a tiny display of photography (+ 1 painting) by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein. The latter was mildly interesting with its hinted at Secessionist outsider aesthetic in the exotic photos of his wife, but was also slightly disappointing as the brochure talked about his massive range of activity so the show was inhabited by its absence. I didn’t think I was going to like the Schutz paintings and certainly some of them didn’t quite work, mainly because there was on occasion a sense that she didn’t know when to stop painting so that especially some of the backgrounds were over-decorated. But the interweaving of art historical references with the visceral dysfunction, irrational jerks, the human humiliations, and the contradictorily sweet colours made it a show I was pleased to see.

Urban Moves in Bury

2010-07-23T14:25:00.017Z

Guess The Winner

2010-07-23T06:55:00.006Z

This year I couldn’t fit in attendance at the European Museums Forum in Tampere (Finland) – though I will pay my third visit to that city in October. This week I received the two booklets that accompany the conference each year. The first contains all the candidates for the Museum of the Year Award (plus a couple of other special commendations) and the second features the winners and some analysis thereof.

Although I think I did know which won, I couldn’t remember when I got the booklets, so played a little guessing game I do each year. Study each museum candidate in the book (and using no other evidence) rate the submissions and guess which one I would nominate (with no ‘official’ criteria other than my own instincts and predilections). My list is as much places I should one day visit and even if I don’t they are places that make me feel positive just by knowing they exist. Guessing which one will actually win is of less interest because I think that the judging panel in the past at least have had a tendency to be swayed by fashion or politics: an eco-museum in Lapland or validation of museums in EU border states that fit into an agenda of de-coupling those nations from Russia or Islam. In this regard the continued westernisation of Turkey, with its ever-increasing annual tally of new museums, is a noticeable feature.

So from this year’s batch, which ones stand out for me ?:

Austria: Vienna – The Museum of Contraception and Abortion
http://www.muvs.org/
Independent of pharmaceutical companies and government, while the museum looks worth a visit anyway, in the context of it functioning in a strongly Catholic environment and the rise of the fascist right in Austria (and many other places), it represents an almost heroic intellectual gesture.

Croatia: Zagreb: Typhlological Museum
http://www.tifloloskimuzej.hr/
(Greek Typhlos = blind). Museum of the Croatian Association of the Blind – among other things that stood out was the extension of the museum outside its walls – white tracks guide blind visitors to the entrance from all directions from the nearest tram stations in its neighbourhood.

Ireland: Carrick on Shannon: St.George’s Heritage and Visitor’s Centre
(no website given)
This one attracts me as much for the story it tells of the oppression and suffering of the local community under British rule, and especially the devastation of the Great Famine of 1847-9.

Netherlands: Amsterdam: Jewish Historical Museum
http://www.jhm.nl/
Although this one looks interesting in its own right, I have a politico-emotional response to this related to celebrating the first direct action against the Nazis' treatment of Jews:
'The Strike of February 1941' was a general strike organized during World War II in The Netherlands against the anti-Jewish activities of the Nazis. Its direct causes were the pogroms held by the Germans in the Jewish neighbourhood of Amsterdam. So visiting it would be an act of respect.

Portugal: Lisbon: Orient Museum
http://www.museudooriente.pt/
In the photos, this just looks like a great collection of Oriental Art.

Russia: St. Petersburg: Dostoevsky Literary-Memorial Museum
http://www.md.spb.ru/
This is the renovation of Dostoevsky’s house into a museum, study centre and theatre for performances, music and poetry events.

Turning to the winners booklet, it turns out the European Museum of the Year is
Ozeaneum, in Stralsund, Germany (picture)
http://www.ozeaneum.de/

Special commendations went to the Museum of Natural Sciences, Brussels; The Science Gallery, Dublin, and the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. The Council of Europe Prize went Portimao Museum, Portimao, Portugal and the Prix Micheletti went to Agbar Water Museum in Cornella de Llobregat, Spain.

European Museum Forum Website: http://www.europeanmuseumforum.org/

Meanwhile, many museums in the UK await the new government axe - we are entering a darker age.

The Pollinators of Eden

2010-07-21T13:54:00.003Z

The Pollinators of Eden (Ben Gwilliam & Matt Wand)
Rodrigo Constanzo & Richard Knight
Aht-n (Clutter, Tandog & Noise Research)
Plus Tandog visuals

Free CD with £3 entry fee...

At The Briton's Protection, M1 5LE
on 23rd July at 8.30pm

Matt Wand became known to a wider public especially with Stock, Hausen & Walkman and frequent collaboration with Tony Oxley.
Wand has recently been commissioned by WDR radio Köln for sound collages extracted from WDR recordings of contemporary classical works (Schnitt-Haubenstock, composition & live performance).

Besides live performances, radio work and installations he has written film scripts for short films and animations (one winning the Goldcrest award for best short in 1988) and shown many small gauge movies in the UK and abroad. He also runs the independent artistic recording label Hot Air and designs the visuals and packaging for the many vinyl and CD items released so far.
http://www.myspace.com/stockhausenandwalkman

Ben Gwilliam is a sound artist active in the fields of sound installation, curation, improvising new music and performance. He describes his practice as drawing attention to those sounds between things, be it objects, spaces or recordings. It is these sounds and their contexts that reveal visual and musical processes of listening and looking. It is from this curiosity about sound-making/recording/finding and how abstract/descriptive that sounds can be, that he makes parallels and similarities unpicking the relationship between those uncovered sounds and moments of primary experience. In 2004 he was awarded an AHRB Postgraduate Award. In 2007 he was nominated for the Jerwood Artist platform Prize. He has worked and shown internationally in Exhibitions, Residencies and Festivals including ‘art@radio’, 2002 USA, Artoll Labor, 2002 DE, ‘Hothouse’ 2003 Liverpool, Hull Time Based Arts, 2003 UK, ‘ineditos 2004’, Madrid & Barcelona, ‘stance’, 2005 market gallery, Glasgow, and ‘Unsilently’, 2005 CAC, North Adams, USA, ‘Sonic Arts Expo 2006’, Manchester, UK, ‘Klang-Labor 06’, DE. His work has been featured on Resonance FM, and has work in several CD and Publication Releases.
http://www.myspace.com/thosesounds

Rodrigo Constanzo was born in Madrid, Spain in 1976. He then spent the next three decades living in Miami, Florida, before moving to Manchester, England where he resides today. He has performed as a solo musician or as part of various groups for the majority of his life, including at the FUTURESONIC Festival in Manchester, the SOUND Festival in Aberdeen, and the GEM DAYS Festival in Huddersfield. He is currently involved in several projects, the main ones being performing with Takahashi's Shellfish Concern, an improv based performance-art group, Deaf To Van Gogh's Ear, a minimalist, math/pop band, and If Version Linger, a pseudo-chamber, composer’s band. He also co-runs Manchester’s long standing free improv night The Noise Upstairs.
http://www.myspace.com/rodrigoconstanzo

Richard Knight is a sonic/computational artist, usually performing with digital equipment. Recently he has established himself as a practitioner of the no-input mixer, a subverted device which allows analogue feedback to be harnessed in an often precise and diverse manner. The performance for EOVI will see Richard utilise two no-input mixers, in an ongoing collaboration with Rodrigo Constanzo. Other relevant projects include the electroacoustic/jazz duo, 'Pesticide Organica'; no-input techno project 'Closed Circuit' and experimental/electronica 'Underbaud'.
http://www.myspace.com/pesticideorganica

Aht-n formed in 2010 from members of Clutter (Shaun Blezzard), Tandog (Harry Gallimore) & Noise Research (Ian Simpson). A desire to create avant improvised Electronica (with a basic structure) and multi screen visuals led to rehearsals and recording to create what you'll see tonight. The trio have a mutual love of early krautrock and leftfield electronica (FSOL, Mouse on Mars, Cluster, Faust, Klaus Shultz et al).
http://www.myspace.com/aht-n

Urban Moves

2010-07-19T15:29:00.004Z

Conveniently programmed near to my office and to my home, part funded by Bury, Urban Moves is a three-day festival featuring live professional dance performance outdoors. Surprising the crowds with a unique blend of dance and spectacle, Urban Moves celebrates the cityscape and architecture of Greater Manchester - out in the parks and in the fountains, in the squares and in the gardens. The festival is renowned for some awesome aerial dance performance and for the use of some unusual stages!
There's some great contemporary dance in Bury and Castlefield from 23-25 July - details from the website below.

http://www.urbanmovesfestival.co.uk/UMpage.aspx

An Iraq Soap Opera

2010-07-17T08:40:00.001Z

I got to see Rachel Khedoori’s ‘The Iraq Book Project’ at Hauser & Wirth London this week. http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/667/rachel-khedoori/view/

(an excerpt from the publicity)
‘The Iraq Book Project’, Khedoori's ongoing documentary piece, consists of a chronological compilation of news articles found online using the search terms 'Iraq’, ‘Iraqi’ or ‘Baghdad’. The articles begin on 18 March 2003, the start date of the Iraq war, and in theory, can continue indefinitely. Presented as a series of large books on tall tables, the articles are sourced from a wide range of news services based all over the world, translated into English and formatted to flow together seamlessly; the only separation between the articles is the emboldened lettering of the titles, date and source. For this project, the gallery will be turned into a research centre with articles being compiled, printed and added to the books throughout the duration of the exhibition. ‘The Iraq Book Project’ is an attempt to find words for an indescribable event, highlighting the way in which perceptions of an event change depending upon time and place.

Seeing this show was an unexpected coincidence with my conversations with Derek Beaulieu re: conceptual poetry (since the show I intended to see was shut). I have had a couple of very similar submissions for the Text Festival from different artists and it has made me wonder given that there are so many versions of this choose-a-subject-google/findtext-amass-result process how is the quality of the artistic act understood. The case in point as experienced is quite disappointing in the Hauser & Wirth space. The visual rhythm of the books on the tables has a minimalist pleasure but this is undermined because there is no intention that this should be rigorous – the books are there because that is how the work is expanding rather than because of a proportional aesthetic – so one book which was not quite in line with the others became the transgressive focus of attention. (Carolyn Thompson, who was with me, had to straighten it in the end). In addition, because the concept generating the work is immediately stated, I found that I was much more fascinated with the mystery of what the only other book in the room was – namely the paperback being read by the young invigilator in the corner of the room (sadly it turned out to be Ian McEwan).

My response to this work was probably the opposite of what the artist intends; while it attempts “to find words for an indescribable event”, the books include endless words that are describing the event and what the viewer actually does is bring their own perception of Iraq to the work. That is something that all artworks do but I found myself irritated by this dialogue between my response to Iraq and an artistic gesture that fundamentally abrogates the artist’s responsibility and turns the ‘indescribable event’ into a structure more akin to a soap opera.

The Other Room

2010-07-08T06:07:00.005Z

Derek Beaulieu at Bury Art Gallery

2010-07-07T15:50:00.003Z

Interview with Derek: http://bit.ly/auKkRI

Dinner

2010-07-05T15:12:00.005Z

Welcoming Derek Beaulieu and Kristen Ingram arriving from Canada, David Osbaldeston and Katie Craven joined us for one of Sue's celebrated dinner parties:

The Menu

Spicy roasted red pepper and lime soup (accompanied with an Alsace Reisling)
Sue’s Crispy Prawn Toast with a dipping sauce
Pan-fried Sea Trout fillet with ribbons of courgette with chilli and ginger with a lemon and herb dressing (accompanied with a Spanish Albarino)
Home made clotted cream strawberry ice-cream, meringue, strawberries and strawberry sauce

(On Wednesday, Derek will be reading at Bury Art Gallery at 1pm and at the Other Room at 7pm)

The call of Nono

2010-07-03T08:24:00.006Z

I have been asked to curate a CD of language/text-based responses to the great contemporary composer Luigi Nono. The works will also be featured in a sound art exhibition in October-November as part of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

If you would like to be part of this project get in touch with me.

http://www.luiginono.it/en/

worksetting

2010-07-01T19:13:00.017Z

Apart from the Contemporary Music Festival, like Bury, Huddersfield doesnt immediately jump to mind as a place where there might be something interesting going on. So I'm pleased to report that the worksetting gallery is an important new development, built around the vision of curator/designer Paul Bradley to create a space that shows established modern masters alongside emerging artists presenting a context of work that hovers between art, fashion, furniture and design, contextualised within an ornate 19th Century shopping arcade.

The opening show is a great opening statement of intent and the future plans suggest this will be a must-see gallery.

"a place for everything and everything in its place" has a great rosta of artists from Lawrence Weiner, Michelangelo Pistoletto, James Turrell and Jaume Plensa to names I didnt (but probably should) know like Laurence Kavanagh, Stefano Bonacci and Vittorio Messina.

http://worksetting.co.uk/information.html

DIY7 - The Eavesdroppers’ Choir

2010-06-28T18:27:00.003Z

The Text Festival partnership with the Live Art Development Agency call for participants:

http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/prof_dev/diy/diy7_2010_participants.html

A found-live-language speaking choir, based on a 3 1/2-day intensive collaborative workshop to explore techniques of gathering, creating forms with and improvising live with found language.

Who can apply?
DIY is a scheme for artists working in Live Art. However, many of the DIY projects are relevant to artists who are interested in Live Art/performance but may not have an extensive track-record of Live Art practice.

Deadline and notification
The DIY projects have an application deadline of Friday 16 July, 2010. If you would like to take part in this DIY project (or one of the others featured on the LADA website) you need to contact the DIY project leader and submit your application to them.

Each project has slightly different selection methods - most often you will be asked to submit a cv or biography and a short statement. You should check each project description carefully to work out what is required for your submission. If in doubt, email the lead artist as early as possible with a question to clarify what is required.

The lead artist will respond to your submission and let you know if you have been accepted to participate. They will usually do this within a week of the deadline. Sometimes they will request further information to help them work out if the project is right for you.

The deadline for submission is 16 July. We encourage you however to make your submission at any time leading up to the deadline.

How much does DIY cost?
Generally DIY projects are free to take part in; however, for some projects you will be asked to contribute to the cost of food and other direct expenses. Mostly you will also be asked to cover your own travel costs to and from the place where the project is taking place. Some projects provide participants for specified costs such as travel.

The artist:
Fiona Templeton is a poet, director, performance/installation artist and teacher. She is director of the performance group, The Relationship, based in New York and London, which specialises in site-specific work, innovative language and exploring relations to the audience. Books and performances include The Medead (a performance epic), L’Ile (a citywide performance commissioned for Lille 2004), You-The City (an intimate Manhattanwide play for an audience of one), Cells of Release (an installation in an abandoned penitentiary), Delirium of Interpretations (on Camille Claudel), and Mum in Airdrie (poetry). Her current work involves Bluebeard and ventriloquism.
www.fionatempleton.org / www.therelationship.org

Workload

2010-06-27T07:41:00.010Z

By way of excuse for my recent slim blogging, an update about things in progress:

I am now heavily occupied planning the Text Festival - pictured "The Silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated" by Joseph Beuys which will be in one of the shows - most of the key elements will be in place in the next couple of months; though the first manifestation of the Festival, the Live Arts DIY development workshop in September will be announced tomorrow. The planning is not being made any easier because the new Con-Dem Government's impeding cuts regime is making budgeting almost impossible. It has to be said that from the information coming though local government it looks more like the complete dismantling of public services. UK cultural life itself is under threat.

I'm also simultaneously working on 2 books - The Tragedy of Althusserianism and Tesseract - plus an essay on the future of poetry and academia, and a long blog 'maximalism vs minimalism'.

Lost Properties

2010-06-24T16:35:00.003Z

arthur+martha artist Lois Blackburn and writer Philip Davenport will launch our new participatory event LOST PROPERTIES. You will find them at: Manchester Art Market, at St Ann's Square, Manchester City Centre, http://www.manchestermarkets.com Friday 25th and Saturday 26th June, 10am to 5.30pm. They will be exhibiting existing LOST PROPERTIES artworks and making new ones with the visiting public. Everyone is welcome. They will document works made during the event and photographs will be posted onto their portfolio site http://www.flickr.com/photos/arthur-and-martha/

LOST PROPERTIES is a project about caring. You might be a carer, need care yourself, know someone else who does, or help pay for care through your taxes. Care and support affects everybody. We are looking for ways to describe the people you care for most and the people who care for you. Lost Properties is an experiment in making art without using drawing or pictures, only words and secondhand objects. Who do you care about, and what reminds you of them?

This event has been kindly sponsored by Oxfam and Manchester Markets.

Manchester Day Parade

2010-06-20T15:00:00.008Z

if p then q readings & book launches

2010-06-19T07:20:00.001Z

@ Odder Bar
14 Oxford Road (opposite The BBC), Manchester, UK
23rd June 2010
6.30 pm [1:30 pm Eastern Time in the US]
Free admission

Performers:
Joy as Tiresome Vandalism
Geof Huth
Tom Jenks
Lucy Harvest Clarke

Programme:

6.30: Joy as Tiresome Vandalism present Nøjagtig Pamplemousse
7.00: Geof Huth (live stream – watch at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/geof-huth)
7.45: Lucy Harvest Clarke (watch live at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tom-jenks-lucy-harvest-clarke)
8.15: Tom Jenks: (watch live at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tom-jenks-lucy-harvest-clarke)

If you can’t be there in person use the above URLs to watch on the internet. Please be aware that all times are approximate.

Does the Cambridge School exist when you are in Dortmund?

2010-06-12T14:02:00.005Z

Before going to Dortmund I was too busy to read much of the discussion of Robert Archambeau’s essay in the Cambridge Literary Review positing the existence of a Cambridge School (of poetry) by Andrea Brady and others in various posts, forum discussions and blogs. At least some of the debate revolved around whether or not the CS exists, but I remember the phrase that came absent-mindedly as it was going on in my background was: “What would it mean if the Cambridge School existed?” Before setting off to Germany I printed off as much of the debate as I could find to read on the planes/trains. Of course, coming to a debate after everyone has had their say and moved on is a bit of a cheat, as you can pick your way through all the previous ideas, the clever analysis and look to be bringing something fresh, even if you’re not. So acknowledging my connivance, I found that reading the Cambridge School debate conflated with the discussions of European cultural policy and social inclusion strategies. Indeed, although not formulated in the CS context, the insight I came to, that the imposition of social inclusion bureaucracy on cultural practice leads to the exclusion of artists themselves, was as much a feeling about the claims of a Cambridge School; that the effects of institutionalisation of the arts in the UK are, in my mind, replicated by the constrictions of academia. And so that question kept recurring: What would it mean if the Cambridge School existed?

The discussion frequently veered into questions about whether poetry could be politically effective, which I won’t pursue here. Part of the question relates to the word ‘School’. Unpicking this ambiguity raises doubts about the whole claim: a school is not a movement – the comparisons made between L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Cambridge don’t stack up. The best you can claim for a school is that it is a source of influence, a generator of ideas. Clearly individuals who are being mentioned in this discussion are poets who command attention but I wouldn’t say that that constitutes an ‘incorporative’ effect across the UK poetry scene. Certainly, though I have read some but not all of the poets mentioned in connection with the CS epithet, I would have to say I don’t recognise any influence on my writing and I’m not sure I can see any particular influence on many other writers in the north. That might sound like a parochial observation from ‘up north’ but Chris Hamilton-Emery’s comment that “The British experimental crowd for whom Cambridge serves as a centre of gravity …” needs to be challenged. If anything, the thing that is most exciting about the UK is the ‘decentralisation’ of practice, the multiple and mobility of ‘centres of gravity’. I think it was Keston Sutherland who replied about the developments going on in Brighton for instance; I would identify what is happening in Manchester – practice, which I think influenced by the Text Festival, interweaves possibilities with the city’s sound art/performance art scenes.

And then there is the problem of ‘Cambridge’; from Dortmund (and the context of 300 delegates of 15 nationalities), the CS discussion seemed an increasingly localised irrelevance. Comments from Andrea Brady and Ken Edwards seemed to encapsulate the crux of the counter argument, a position I’d assume everyone who is not part of Cambridge or academics who want the association of reference would take. (“The problem of shipping everything under this CS bill…is that a great deal of really important poetry gets lost” and “Cambridge Poetry itself is NOT an adequate metonym for British innovative poetry”) To me the claims for it as a brand or a rallying point or even an actual School of poetry are irrelevant “springes to catch woodcocks”. Robert Archambeau commented that “what’s happening is that geography has become incidental, just as publication in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E became incidental to what was meant by Language Poetry. I use the term because that’s the term that seems to be coming into use.” Not round our way! My immediate response to the question what would it mean if the Cambridge School existed was: nothing. I have no contact with anything happening in Cambridge – I imagine that there are great people there, but, as far as I can tell, if it exists it has no influence on me or anyone I know, and don’t have any feeling that I am missing anything. If this term is coming into use, it is less than useless.

In Dortmund I reflected that there is more to the issue, especially viewed from outside the UK. It is surely self-evident that 21st Century cultural practice is globalised – geography is indeed becoming incidental. But the act of naming posits a future and a definition, a definition that has major implications if it is loaded with a geographic location and a particular history. Unchallenged, pinning the ‘British experimental crowd’ to Cambridge as ‘a centre of gravity’ limits UK innovative practice to a global (and local) perception of tradition – I don’t think anyone can see the word 'Cambridge' and it not trigger historic images. On top of this, Cambridge is globally synonymous with the University – what else is Cambridge known for? So putting aside the fact that the epithet does not represent the actual ecology of British experimental poetry, if the CS existed it could significantly distort UK poetics viewed from outside. Of course if CS existed it would carry an additional pejorative connotation within the UK which associates ‘Cambridge’ with elitism (in the English tradition of suspicion of the intelligentsia), allowing the mainstream hegemony of the banal (Armitage, Duffy, Motion, et al) easy unchallenged rejection of experimental practice.

So if the Cambridge School existed, if only for marketing reasons, it would need to drop the Cambridge. The ‘School’ is also a problem as above. In a way, the academic labelling of whatever is or has recently gone on in Cambridge is a decelerating act itself. I recall Ron Silliman telling us last year at the Text Festival that the meaningful label that ultimately sticks to a movement more often than not comes from your enemies. The leading players of something new are not usually that interested in labelling themselves. That is a little worrying for UK innovative poetry as the hegemony of the banal doesn’t have the imagination to come up with something good. The fact that the British mainstream hasn’t bothered to engage in naming its opposition indicates how little threat innovative practice is to its hegemony. However, I regard the institutionalising effects of the academy itself as one of the problems with British poetic development, much as the institutionalisation of other artforms through the State centralisation of culture have damaged UK artistic practice in general – and led to the exclusion of artists, I perceived in Dortmund.

In the Text Festival, I have been very conscious to locate it away from debates in poetry; as Ron Silliman observed of the last one: “Situating poetry in the arts, rather than in the academy, is of course exactly the right idea.” And to avoid the risk of institutionalisation, the 2011 Text Festival will be the last. As Geof Huth wrote in his excellent blogs about 2009: “Whenever you think you’re doing something right, you need to do something different. Otherwise, you’ll keep doing the same thing but think you’re moving forward. The good thing, though, is that Tony knows how to kill himself.” The process of the last Text Festival will inform the concept of what comes next – although it will probably go in the direction of the Language Moment concept which was developed last year.

(By the way Festival submissions have been coming in and more are welcome. There are some pretty exciting things which will be announced soon).

Dortmund - The Exclusion of the Artist

2010-06-06T18:29:00.012Z

Dortmund. 15 nations represented at the Shortcut Europe convention on Culture and Social Inclusion. I must admit that I was a little uncertain as to why I was invited to speak during this event, and a little nervous, therefore, that my contribution might not be pitched at the level at which with no evidence I valorised current German theory-practice function. The event opened as I have previously experienced with welcoming speeches from the hosting organisations followed by an interminably dense academic lecture by a professor from the University of Tübingen. Long theoretical speeches at the beginning seem to be a German tradition. This put me at ease because while turgid it located where things are here for me. This was followed by a panel discussion – the themes of most of the panels tended to be ignored once the conversations started. The standout contribution came from Franco Bianchini (Leeds University) who was notable because his global research gave him a much greater range of practice to reference. He was the only one for instance who could throw latest developments from South America into the debate – especially how culture is being used in failing or semi-criminal States to rebuild civic engagement and community cohesion.

On the second day I was pleased to hear Christopher Gordon, a UK consultant who did the research for the European Commission on culture and inclusion policy across the member states. Gratifyingly, in passing he confirmed my view that the target culture of the UK regime was disastrous for culture. In the break I was told that the Germans are fascinated with the British system but only ever hear that it is good, because official spokesman UK usually present the official story. If that wasn’t an invitation for me to fire with both barrels I don’t know what could be.

Then we broke up into different theme panels in which I chose the one on the possibilities of public art. Oddly the case studies were a conceptual approach to a community park in Berlin – which had some good ideas such as a community dance group choreographed to clean litter as a performance at the start and finish of every event and turning the park into everyone’s living room at night by inviting all the residents to bring out their lamps to light it – and two mural projects, one high profile architectural approach in Lyon and a free-culture radical graffiti in Düsseldorf. I think I am not alone in reaching for my gun when someone proposes a mural commission but there is more of a tradition of the form on the continent and higher quality. I think the problem with the UK experience is that murals are usually commissioned to do something worthy and so tend to be limited to subjects of local heritage or happy-clappy communities. Graffiti is also much more prevalent in Germany; virtually the whole railway system is decorated with it. Generally I have an artistic problem with graffiti: mostly its praxis seems to be a progression from naming (usually the ‘artist’) through to either figuration or cartoon(figuration) – not actually that interesting at any point. There are rare exceptions of course and it turned out that I had seen some of the case study examples as I came into Dortmund on the train – a huge monkey head pondering “What to do?” and a small building painted like a bank containing a banker robbing passers-by. This latter was presented during the artist Klaus Klinger’s talk. He showed one slide of it after it had been finished in which the figure of the banker had been painted out with a grey square and joked that this was obviously the banker’s trying to censor dissent. I would have joked back that it seemed more likely to me that it was radical minimalists striking back at the excess of graffiti – but when discussion is carried out through simultaneous translation you are always slightly behind the conversation so the joke would have been lost (twice in translation). The Lyon projects were striking paint jobs that turned rundown areas of cities in the region into trompe l'oeil palaces or classical idylls – from the evidence presented these seemed to have been successful interventions both in terms of the effect on the living environment and the sense of community in those involved. http://www.cite-creation.com/eng/wall-paintings/frescos-lyon-painted-wall.html

Afternoon tours were the next thing but the prospect of being bused here and there on such a scorchingly hot day wasn’t inviting so I went to Dortmund Art Gallery & Museum instead – a nice collection though nothing special except, I was surprised to find some remarkably beautiful 17th Century German furniture, something I have never really appreciated before.

Saturday and on to my session. My points on the danger of social inclusion policy for culture and cultural inclusion couldn’t have been exemplified better if I had planned the morning myself. Just before me, a senior manager from another UK city proudly presented the strategic policy structure of her authority (which is exactly the same as every other authority in the centralised system): having clearly become inured in the mind-numbing fallacies of it and having not understood the dynamics of European theory her presentation became increasingly ridiculous. I actually do an ironic version of this sometimes to audiences of artists to show how bad things are. But it is even worse when it is not done with irony. The audience were visibly losing their will to live and in the end in their restiveness she asked whether she should continue and they said no. So when I came on and said the UK system is bollocks, I was just confirming what they had seen for themselves. I opened with the half-serious point that because I was actually presenting rather than just attending I had scored an extra 2 points in our next government inspection. This got a laugh but is true so just shows how stupid the UK system is. Apart from warning the delegates of the dangers of the top down monitoring approach to cultural provision, my main thread was an idea that had come to me during the convention: in all the discussion of culture and social inclusion, because it is a policy concept being imposed on a fundamental practice, a new group in society now experienced exclusion – artists themselves. It was noticeable I pointed out that artists had been hardly mentioned in the conference and in the programme I was the only participant listed as an artist (and curator). I gave a load of examples how in the institutionalisation of culture (including academia) in UK over the last ten years at least has created an environment of compromise and artistic constriction which, especially in its indoctrination of children and young artists, has damaged the creative possibilities of a generation. There was a very positive response from a Danish delegate Soren Ohlsen, the ENCC co-ordinator in Copenhagen, who shared my anger because that country also has this system, and also from a number of different German participants – as parts of the country are also moving in this direction. This was an important message I think because surprising to an English ear, the continentals still talk about the importance of artistic freedom and autonomy. When was the last time you heard someone talk about that in England? As I left a woman from Berlin caught me and thanked me for exposing the fallacy in the frequent use of the word ‘empowerment’; politicians especially appropriate it – empowering the community is dangerous to their control so empowerment is never what is meant. I made some interesting contacts including Kristina Volk, curator of the Reichstag Art Collection, which I will arrange to go and see, and Peter Kampf, chair of ENCC, who will hopefully visit Manchester in the summer.

What am I going to say?

2010-06-02T19:17:00.002Z

The rest of this week I am in Dortmund at Shortcut Europe 2010, a convention predicated on:

“The EU is reacting to social tendencies of disruption in society from which culture is not excluded, as social and cultural exclusion often go hand in hand. Can cultural policy, cultural work and cultural education develop strategy against social exclusion?”

“Is the theoretically formulated demand of “culture for all” still present in the minds of the stakeholders and what does the actual praxis look like? Are there new approaches and methods of engaging cultural work in the European socio-cultural field? Where are exemplary projects being accomplished, that are worth being repeated elsewhere? Should cultural work include more local activities and approaches? How can socially disadvantaged youth be addressed more directly?”

Specifically, I will be initially talking about the conditions of cultural funding in the U.K. and my experiences with it – apparently there is a lot of interest in this. While there is a general acceptance of the social impact of the arts on the continent, there is a healthy concern about a loss of autonomy and freedom for artists in a system that demands concrete results which are not artistic ie all the social, educational, environmental and economic agendas that are loaded onto art projects in the UK. My criticism of the damage this centralised cultural policy has caused is perhaps why I have been invited to participate.

The convention will obviously feature loads of examples of good practice from around Europe and we will be visiting various projects in the Ruhr. There are a number of sessions that concentrate on issues related to disability, children and other disadvantaged groups but there are a number of theoretical questions underpinning that raise interesting questions, as much because some of them at least assume an analysis that is generally accepted but which I think is subtly distorted.

For instance: (3 June) ‘Cultural policies and social exclusion – what can cultural work accomplish?’ And on 5 June ‘Society and cultural participation – what can art accomplish?’ As above, the question of the status of the demand ‘culture for all’ is interesting. In the UK, the Arts Council’s new policy is called ‘Great Art for All’. The problems come from this idea being driven from public institutions which by attaching the funding to this agenda focus on the all rather than the art (great often not being a consideration). Because they are paying for it, the accomplishment of cultural work is rarely acceptable if the accomplishment is just culture. This is because in the UK at least culture is not fundamentally valued; so culture has to be justified through its accomplishment of other things – reduced youth crime, increased educational achievement, etc,. I forget the number of times I have sat in an arts officers meeting and someone has declared that all we need is a piece of research that demonstrates how the arts deliver the agendas of other socio-political priorities and politicians/stakeholders will take the arts seriously, and therefore fund them properly or at least not savagely cut them. Not only is this a mistake from the outset defining its importance as secondary to itself, I argue that these pieces of research already exist, that there are endless case-studies of how good practice has changed people’s lives, the convention will no doubt have lots; but fundamentally the politicians/stakeholders are not interested even when the evidence is there. There are two reasons for this in the UK: both intelligence and culture are suspicious values, politicians and strategic policy planners have a fundamental unease in these areas – which means the arts as icing on the cake, as societal luxury trinket are a much more comfortable notion (and so dispensable when more important economic forces apply); and second, and this answers the session on 4 June ‘Cultural work as empowerment: How can art and cultural work strengthen the actionability of individuals?’ artistic participation by definition makes things new, it creates new ideas, it creates the potential for liberation and resistance even. The constricted central agendas of government policy are not about encouraging actionability; they are about control. What is now called community arts started as part of the radicalized action of the 60s and 70s; it was about politically empowering communities. Over the years its language and practice has been appropriated while its political potential has been erased; fundamentally in Britain socio-culture (as the convention calls it) has become a decorative artform.

The main session at which I will speak is entitled: Where does that leave the arts?

Next Week...

2010-05-28T14:34:00.008Z

Next week is busy up north:
Mill24 is a two-part series of 24-hour exhibitions ready to set up stage for the second time this May 2010 at Islington Mill, Salford. Moving forward from the intense energy of April’s show, Part 2 this weekend will present a multitude of artists, ideas and practices; but offering a difference in pace with the new start time of 12 midday. The overarching focus of this month’s show is to highlight the normally unseen processes of idea generating and work making that normally occur prior to an exhibition. For those who dare to endure our 24-hour challenge, there will be live broadcasting, endurance open-studio projects and performance reenactments in abundance.
Mill24 will once again utilise all 5 floors of the mill’s space in its diverse 24-hour showcase of innovatively presented art: from a one-hour lecture series featuring talks and performances, to interactive sound art, to live painting, animation and more. http://mill24.blogspot.com/

The Other Room
Wednesday 2nd June, 7.00 pm.
The Old Abbey Inn, 61 Pencroft Way, Manchester, M15 6AY.
Admission is free.
Readers: Susana Gardner, Peter Manson and Nicole Mauro.

Counting Backwards is a new series of text-sound-performance events. It takes place on the first Thursday of alternate months at Fuel cafe bar in Withington. The first event is on Thursday 3 June 2010. Entrance is free. Performing at the first event are Mike Cannell, THF Drenching and Holly Pester.

worksetting
a place for everything and everything in its place
04.06 - 31.07.2010
A new gallery in Huddersfield curated by my friend Paul Bradley opens with a cracking first exhibition to integrate the new gallery into it’s environment with art and design works that involve materials and concepts not normally associated with either medium, but relate to some of the other retail and creative activities that already exist in the Arcade. I think that this is going to become an important space to keep an eye on.
http://worksetting.co.uk/index2.shtml

And sadly, probably the last event of the Salford Concert Series/University arts programme for some time, …menu for murmur, at The Chapman Gallery, The University of Salford, Peel Park Campus, Salford, M5 4WT
Tuesday 1 June – Friday 25 June
Performance: Saturday 5 June, 5.00 – 7.00pm

The show features many of the programme’s previous exhibitors, (including me), Claus van Bebber, Berserker, Chop Shop, Seth Cluett, Matt Dalby, G. Fisher, Rob Gawthrop, Chris Gladwin, Adolfo Guevara, Ryu Hankil, Paul Haywood, Espen Jensen, Petri Kuljuntausta, Bob Levene, Urban Mäder, Jonathan Maj, Lee Patterson, Stan Pete, Kirsten Reese, Henning Schweichel, Hans Specht, Frans de Waard, Matt Wand, Hainer Wörmann, and Jason Zeh.
Curators Ben Gwilliam and Helmut Lemke have invited international sound artists to contribute individual pieces that will stand on their own but will also create a new collaborative piece …menu for murmur. The sound objects, which include electronic devices, rulers and even a desk fan, will consciously be arranged in one space far and near.

A performance event will be held on Saturday 5 June featuring sounding interventions and interaction with the exhibition by sound artists Mick Beck and Matt Wand.
Opening Times: Monday – Friday, 10.00am – 4.00pm
Admission: Free

Sadly I will miss most of these events because I am in Dortmund speaking at the City of Culture conference on culture and social inclusion
http://www.fonds-soziokultur.de/shortcut/en/

Geof Huth's Birthday

2010-05-25T20:32:00.003Z

Happy Birthday to Geof. Nancy asked various people including me to send artworks to celebrate - you can see them at
http://geofhuthbday.blogspot.com/

Verona

2010-05-20T06:27:00.003Z

Sue likes Michael Buble, so for her birthday (next week), I am taking her to Verona to see him perform in the Roman Amphitheatre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verona_Arena this weekend.

We'll be staying at http://www.escalusverona.com/

The Absence of War

2010-05-19T11:52:00.006Z

Seeing the exhibition of Goya's Disasters of War at Manchester Art Gallery is a dismal experience, strangely encapsulated by one label accompanying one of the etchings - "A group of people gather sadly around a corpse which is hidden from view". The display itself is as professionally shown, in dim light, nicely laid out, as you'd expect. It is strongly supplemented with Jake & Dinos Chapman's model version of the disasters, reinterpreted with nazi torturers. But to get into the gallery you have to go through an anteroom which features children's prints of war themes - as usual, children's art is only of interest to their parents. Interestingly, quotations from the children have also been mounted in vinyl on the wall; the first one seemed to recognise this problematic intervention: 'Katy' comments: "...it makes me uncomfortable as it is so far removed from my experience and I dont know whether it is right to make a comment on it." It is a mercy that the child-centred stuff hasnt bled into the Goya/Chapman space though children are endlessly present in the show because the noise of them shouting and screaming in a nearby 'education' space fills the air. So the small group of adults looking at the prints looked very much like a group of people gathered sadly around a corpse which is hidden from view.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

2010-05-15T10:34:00.003Z

HUO: What are the conditions for dialogue in 2009? Is there a way out of this system of isolation?

TT: despite the taphonomic questioning the switchboard encourages apoptosis or an equivalent repetition not all directions are the same. Appropriate or. Recursive may be responsible for the concept of self. Remembering recursion qua: because it involves inserting a past mental state into the present one. As an intransitive relation a loop of preferences, perseveration infinite tuples.

HUO: What do you think of the current moment, in 2009? Jean-Pierre Page has just published Penser l'après crise [Thinking the After-Crisis]. For him, everything must be reinvented. He says that a new world is emerging now in which the attempt to establish a US-led globalization has been aborted.

TT: with the only revolution that mattered overturned in 200 years. Operant conditioning. So you if not simply mandarin the sort of eater who eats everything and nothing of our lowly divisions: [laughs] on food and football central dogma still holds. The conversations are important distractions from a vacuum. We smile we at something bigger we would like to be eaten by. The malign business model that procreate like a tube. Appropriate or. The progress of the subcontract works…

HUO: Can you tell us about it?

TT: reactance tunnelling between the probe and the surface. Autumn the practice of control groups that has changed now. Space the soldier who died for perspective laboured and lost time over the details.

HUO: And has that been published?

TT: in sunk cost fallacy.

HUO: So was the aim to make it generic?

TT: quorum sensing. There guard(,) to act as a witness forms analogues of all the known phases spontaneously appearing observers suffer from the ambiguity of taking ratios of infinite numbers, and [a vocalization akin to laughter] motion inside a given observer’s horizon to continue assuming we are typical a single point without volume.

HUO: In your recent books you discuss your existence and temporality. The homogenizing forces of globalization homogenize time, and vice versa. How does one break with this? Could you discuss the temporality of happiness, as a notion?

TT: transcription factors. Taken from our restricted vantage point without reward of priority, time is the effect of ignorance; maximizing and satisficing strategies on the tip at the tip add credence to the hotspot theory. New questions future asked without compromise to artists or their agency much richer is to than.

HUO: Did you appear on the artists list?

TT: a taxon can't remember poised to revolutionise classification. In a disordered state, looking at a particle gives no information about what others are doing. Autumn has changed now without distracted prospect of extraction.

HUO: So it involved a high degree of self-reflexivity?

TT: as poets say within the limits of experimental accuracy mirror neurons vocal learning when a bird listens.

HUO: Can I ask you one last question? There is one question that I ask in all the interviews and it's a question about un-built roads, about unrealized projects. Could you tell us about your favorite unrealized projects, and by that I mean projects which are utopic, projects which are maybe too big or too small to have been realized, forgotten, self-censored, censored by others?

TT: bridge. The sum, difference and product of narratives could produce such equal brightness higher, greater than about the total image complex. The prototype is the benchmark. At least we died trying the favoured design for the future a success-loaded schedule between breathers and catalysis an accretion of interacting snips between disordered and crystalline states perception and the amygdale, a plethora of shapes beyond simple symmetries to reduce it to something far simpler the beginning of a new infinite family of indivisible structures or crisp uniformed assistance.

(latest poem published in The Other Room Anthology no.2)

Happy Birthday Barney

2010-05-13T08:24:00.002Z

2 today

Walls Are Talking

2010-05-11T06:49:00.021Z

If it hadn't been for showing our visiting Finnish curators around I probably wouldn't have seen the Whitworth Art Gallery wallpaper exhibition "Walls Are Talking"; when I walked in, I realised that I have been waiting for more than 40 years for this show. I imagine that kids still have wallpaper collaging images from cartoons or movies (I don't know any to verify that), but I remember the endless childhood fascination of laying in my bedroom surrounded by repeating images of the 60's colourful Adam West Batman. Before modern domestic interior design, UK houses of the 60's and 70's were pretty much fields of patterned wallpaper - my mother had (and still has) an obsession with wallpaper with huge expressionistically painted roses. Both the Batman paper and the roses are here: Walls Are Talking is dramatically more interesting than either of these but manages to make them (and other, what should be banalities) fascinating and in so being locates those historical domestic manifestations anew.

It is very interesting how the artists work with the form of wallpaper focuses nostalgia and animates memories of domestic life, fondly and humorously. There is great wit in many of the works - and this is the lasting impression from the show, its great fun. There are many things to enjoy; I particularly liked Virgil Marti's brilliantly bold repeat pattern of oversized sleeping pills in florescent ink and rayon on flock paper.

London Reviews

2010-05-06T19:41:00.005Z

While in London last week I saw four exhibitions:

Eberhard Havekost: Guest
White Cube
http://www.whitecube.com/exhibitions/havekost/
The most interesting Havekost paintings were the Gast series (Guest) – quite convincingly 3 dimensional forest forms maybe seen at night, which are at the same time strangely out of focus as you approach them. The thing that is odd about the show is the unexplained interruptions in the flow of the display with canvases which are vaguely floating colour fields. Then there is one strong graphic piece, “Distanz” possibly representing the bottom of a door in a corridor and another painting called “H2O”, the torso of a swimmer – neither seeming to make sense in relation to the night forest paintings. The upper floor mainly features more of the colour field paintings – which in the majority work quite pleasantly. Apparently Havekost starts from a photo and “enacts a process of de-materialisation and re-materialisation, from thought to object.” I think the interchange of figuration to abstraction is an interesting effect but the absence of a connecting logic undermines the whole.

Jia Aili & Lu Chunsheng
iniva at Rivington Place
http://www.iniva.org/exhibitions_projects
Jia Aili’s paintings are technically brilliant, though I would locate his iconography and forms with Bacon rather than (as curator David Thorpe suggests) Beckett. Unfortunately, I would say that when he takes the paint beyond the canvas onto the walls and floor they become inauthentic. The painting “Jia Aili, Good Morning” is a case in point: as the paint leaves the canvas at the bottom there is some dynamic spontaneous paint splashing but then other parts are overworked and remarkably clumsily done compared to the rest of the work. This exposed artifice is magnified by elements of broken glass or mirror on the floor which do not make the convincing transition from the image to the gallery spatial reality.
(Sadly I didn’t have time to see Lu Chunsheng’s video).

The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today
Saatchi Gallery
The impressive Saatchi Gallery has a very strong Indian Art exhibition.
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/current/indian_art_installation_views.htm

Artists who stood out: Shezad Dawood and especially Chitra Ganesh.
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/chitra_ganesh.htm?section_name=new_india

Jannis Kounellis
ambika P3
http://p3exhibitions.com/

P3 is quite a weird space to visit. I think part of the effect of the final installation is the process of getting to it, though the backside of the urban façade. The Kounellis installation is remarkable. Reading the exhibition notes doesn’t do the effects of this many favours, since it is one of those artistic acts that touches your being beyond language.

The Kounellis and Saatchi exhibitions are strongly recommended.

Dinner for the Finns

2010-05-03T13:42:00.007Z

Arrived from Tampere (Finland) today, Laura Köönikkä, Chief Curator in the Tampere Art museum, Elina Bonelius, Moominvalley museum curator, and Taina Myllyharju, Tampere museum director (pictured with Barney). Sue created one of her legendary dinner parties for the guests:

Menu
Du Barry soup
Warm duck and orange salad
Pan-fried cod loin with a bean, potato and choizo broth
Assiette of chocolate coffee desserts

They'll spend tomorrow in Bury, looking at the Gallery-Museum and preparing future projects.

Bloom

2010-05-01T19:00:00.025Z

Bloom opened on Friday. I'm pleased with how it has come out - especially as there was a point where the fact that I am not interested in the environment made me wonder whether anything curatorially meaningful would coalesce. As I wrote in the last two books "ignore the gaps between cities"; but actually what has happened is that my indifference has let the subject breathe, allowed different ideas to reflect between the works, without the tiresomely worthy monotone that characterises most artistic dialogue related to climate change, etc. The process then has been much more of an investigation, a search of what this could be; and in that I am satisfied with the result. One of the themes that weaves through the show is the manifestation of human control as action in relation to the environment; with another key idea being the role of representation of the environment in-itself and qua representation. Lawrence Weiner's piece (pictured) acts as the nexus for both these ideas. The question of the relation of representation to reality is reflected in a number of works: from 17th Century oil on canvas "flowerpiece" by Ignace Henri Jean Theodore Fantin-Latour which simply looks like a sumptuous flower arrangement, until you know that at the time of painting the image is completely artificial because the different flowers could not be in bloom at the same time. Then there are the photographs of Andy Latham which might be described as the most‘realistic’ representations of nature (http://www.andylatham.co.uk/gallery.html ),but then Tony Tickle’s 1-metre high, new wave Bonsai tree is a real tree, but as the ultimate aesthetic distortion of nature, is it a real tree? Shaun Pickard's famous 'unnatural' neon reflects on this while his 'Common Buzzard Bueto (below) and unidentified raptor, Northwest England, May 1998' text cut into a park bench records Pickard's preoccupation with the doomed artifice of trying to describe nature at all. Sitting on the bench you can watch Tamás Waliczky's super real animation of rainfalling on a deserted village, wherein suddenly the rain drops are frozen and held up to intense scrutiny. I see this as a counterpoint to Magnus Quaife's large watercolour of a supercomputer floating in and sustaining a landscape called 'Time and Memory'. There are more works but this will just become a list.

The title of the show came from discussions around Bury's annual participation in the Britain in Bloom competition. Each spring and summer municipal Parks Departments bedeck public spaces with neat floral displays with a design history trapped in neo-classicism and Romantic notions of the garden as ordered paradise. These habitual displays offer a public aesthetic that is increasingly open to question in the context of climate change. So there is a selection of artists who deal with the idea of the garden - from Ian Hamiton Finlay to Paul Scott & Anne Linnemann - their contemporary blue and white Porcelain tree cup on a (Vegetable) Garden tray, which circles us back to Fantin-Latour.

About to Bloom

2010-04-28T05:24:00.005Z

What would an exhibition about the environment look like if it was curated by someone isn’t interested in nature or climate change? Bloom opens on Friday evening at Bury Art Gallery.

(image: Carbonised flowers by Greville Worthington)
Full blog later in the week - now off to London for the "Deschooling Conference"
http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/hayward-gallery-and-visual-arts/visual-arts-talks-and-events/tickets/deschooling-society-52395

this work im doin I don’t kno what it is

2010-04-27T20:45:00.002Z

Philip Davenport's most recent project debuts at Henry Moore Institute library 27 April-7 June. These are poems written into spreadsheets, presenting moral dilemmas as accountancy - war crimes, celebrity, or the simple act of shopping become a tangle of questions. The spreadsheets are accompanied by 3D objects. So, dozens of broken eggshells become symbols for smashed skulls; a poem inscribed within the fragments. From these broken pieces of information, Davenport rebuilds delicate, intuited meanings…

Images and downloads at http://www.henry-moore.org/hmi/library/on-display

On 5 May Philip Davenport will be a 'reader in residence' in the library - looking at work from the Institute's Special Collections and pleased to answer any enquiries regarding his work.

Henry Moore Institute
The Headrow
Leeds LS1 3AH, UK

Open Monday to Sunday from 10am to 5.30pm, and Wednesday from 10am to 9pm

Another Text Festival Opportunity

2010-04-21T18:20:00.002Z

In addition to the call for submissions/proposals for the 2011 Text Festival in my last blog, here is another Text opportunity arising from a new partnership with the Live Arts Development Agency. The Agency run a programme called DIY, which is an opportunity for artists working in Live Art to conceive and run unusual training and professional development projects for other artists.

With the Text Festival, DIY proposals are being invited which address language in Live Art practice. The proposed project needs to take place in in August and September 2010 and hopefully some of the work will be developed to appear in the Festival next April. For more detail go to:

http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/prof_dev/diy/diy7_2010_Call.html

Text Festival Call for Submissions

2010-04-17T19:52:00.011Z

The third international Text Festival in Bury, Manchester, UK, will open on 29 April 2011.

Project proposals and submissions are invited - in any artform (sound, media, poetry, visual art, etc) using language in innovative ways. As I have mentioned over the last few months the shape of the next festival has been forming, with some great things in place already. There are more venues and new approaches. In addition to the open call, you can submit ideas in response to 4 projected exhibition themes:

1. Duchamp
2. Sentences
3. Wonder Rooms - a large scale survey of international Visual Poetry
4. Artists’ Books

Electronic submission (preferred) to

t.trehy@bury.gov.uk

or by mail to

Text Festival
Bury Art Gallery
Moss St
Bury
BL9 ODR

Chinese Arts Centre preview

2010-04-16T07:09:00.010Z

Stanley Wong photos

Wang Jun - rock, paper, scissors

and a collaborative poem with Phil Davenport

Scott Thurston

2010-04-13T16:46:00.008Z

I met with Scott Thurston today to discuss the possibility of setting up a Phd related to aspects of the Text Festival and Language Moment. As poets do, we exchanged our most recent books.

Scott has a nice habit when signing a book of quoting from it or pointing to an interesting section within. On returning home, I found that I have three of his books: Internal Rhyme, Momentum and Hold with these hints/pointers - I will share here:

After turning on our moment of error we'll collect it. I'm

not going to argue with you over how much is conventional

how much. Absolute fear of the scale that establishes real

measures. If you want to speak to me effectively never speak

to me directly. The overthought at night urge to retire, pride

swallowed, parade through the ventilation, the secrets turn

out to be nothing. The crowd tests offering what he invites but

withholds, enabling tension? Leave it out.

that something has

a form and is a form

beckons me one

over a bell tolling in

the distance

gives form to air to time

reassuring that

my trials are really nothing

substantial nor

serious not even missiles

shot over

borders can change that

really

can they?

a grey dusk benevolent

A Big Night in Manchester

2010-04-10T17:03:00.008Z

Thursday night (15 April) in Manchester feels like a real art festival (unlike the Manchester International Festival) but one that appears to be a happy accident. Castlefield Art Gallery, the Chinese Arts Centre, Cornerhouse and Rogue Project Space are all previewing their latest exhibitions, all within walking distance of each other.

Castlefield Gallery
David Osbaldeston:
Out of Time (The Light of Day / The Action of the Play)

I’m looking forward to seeing this show by my newly discovered neighbour, David Osbaldeston. Through manipulated images of news photography and a print series of interpretive book cover designs from Luigi Pirandello’s celebrated play Six Characters in Search of an Author, the exhibition will explore relationships between the gallery and theatre staging, displacement, reality, illusion and social discord.

The journalistic images are taken from photographic records made between the 1970’s and 1990’s of protests or accidents that report a breakdown of social and economic order such as the LA Riots, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Waco Siege, the Piper Alpha disaster and the Iraqi Highway of Death. Re-photographed, appropriated and re-presented by Osbaldeston with textual snippets, amplified in scale and printed on 1980s Ilford photographic paper; the works draw playful attention to the constructed nature of the photographic image.

Exhibition Continues: Friday 16 April – Sunday 6 June 2010

http://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk/Default.asp?eKey=333&eP=1
Address: 2 Hewitt Street, Manchester, M15 4GB

Cornerhouse
Contemporary Art Iraq

The first comprehensive UK exhibition of new and recent contemporary art from Iraq since the first Gulf War, examining practices that are emerging with fresh perspectives from a culture marked by conflict and turmoil. This has a bad taste because of the evil racism of UK immigration policy with 5 artists refused entry to the country because they don’t have bank accounts in Iraq. See
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/iraqi-artists-denied-entry-to-britain-for-their-own-exhibition-1934726.html I wonder whether the shameful Foreign Secretary and the Iraqi Ambassador will turn up to the preview, and if they are booked to make opening remarks.

Exhibition continues: Fri 16 April to Sun 20 June

http://www.cornerhouse.org/contemporaryartiraq
70 Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5NH, UK

Chinese Arts Centre
Lan Wei / Decaying End
anothermountainman (Stanley Wong)

Exhibition continues: 16th April – 12th June 2010

Lan Wei / Decaying End is anothermountainman’s first solo photography exhibition in the UK. It features a number of haunting large-scale photographic prints of abandoned, incomplete building projects from across Asia. Following the opening of its doors to foreign investment in China in the 1980s there was frenzied investment in real estate, which was exposed to corruption and contributed to the eventual collapse of the property market in the late 1990s. When the bubble burst huge numbers of building projects were abandoned and left unfinished. This wave of abortive building construction spread across other Asian cities that also experienced the same pattern of meteoric economic growth and collapse. The photographs in the exhibition were taken in China, Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia, Turkey and Singapore.

I’m also looking forward to meeting Wang Jun (picture), the current artist in residence and who is opening his studio also on this full evening. Since his recent residency in China, Phil Davenport has told me a lot of good things about Wang, whom he worked with out there.

http://www.chinese-arts-centre.org/
Market Buildings, Thomas Street, Manchester, M4 1EU

Rogue Artists' Studios & Project Space
Tom Hobson, In the blessed abyss of the eternal ether

Exhibition continues: 15th – 24th of April 2010 (By appointment only)

With a monumental effort comparable to the great men of history and the inventiveness of a mad professor, Hobson has created a device for talking to the sky and turned mountains upside down for this (his first solo) exhibition.

http://www.rogueartistsstudios.co.uk/
Address: 66-72 Chapeltown Street, Piccadilly, Manchester, M1 2WH

Big Blue Skies Big Bad Art

2010-04-07T16:31:00.004Z

When I was being shown round the 2012 Olympic site last year, the conversation about art projects to coincide referenced mysteriously “the Mayor’s commission”, which was separate from all the other cultural projects. This week the mystery was revealed. Anish Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower. This is yet another dismal example of the big is good school of art. This practice has its roots in public art in regeneration. It is an established reality that art can animate environmental and economic regeneration. But as everyone knows, anyone can do art, so pretty quickly the regeneration industry thought it could achieve the same effect without using artists – and so two things happen, you get terrible art or you get big art – which is also usually pretty bad. Once Newcastle-Gateshead installed Antony Gormley’s leaden “Angel of the North” achieved its iconic marketing function, the flood-gates opened and all round the country high profile regeneration demands big art. Channel 4 even had a reality TV show called Big Art which followed the commissioning of big public art.

Living in Manchester, I have a particular fondness for the idiocy of big art because the “B of the Bang” commission in the city: this “sculpture” was designed by an engineer not an artist, and not a very good one at that because it fell apart and hilariously had to be dismantled. But we still get this monsters trotted out – there are ‘landmark’ gateway works proposed for Wales and Mark Wallinger’s £2million 50 metre high “White Horse” sculpture which will dominate the Kent landscape if it is built (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/7880889.stm ).
And of course there is the northern’s own dismal ‘celebration’ of 2012, the Projected Column (A ‘monumental’ spinning column of cloud and light will rise “as far as the eye can see”) for monumental read of course ‘big’. The bigness thing has also been driven by the Turbine Hall commissions at Tate Modern.

The question with bigness is whether the scale actually carries any meaning other than being able to see the thing from a distance. The White Horse works as a white horse in maquette form. No doubt it would look striking dominating the Kent landscape but so would any other randomly blown up animal or object. The banality of this interchangeability locates the gesture as no more than college-level ersatz surrealism.

However, the Orbit Tower is different because it wants to be treated as ‘architecture’ designed by an artist. In architectural terms, under the arabesque the tower looks to be simply a disguised main vertical with a spiral (staircase). It has two clumsy articulations – the junction with the ground and the form of the viewing platform, this latter element looks like it was designed by someone else and for a different place. I am reminded of Buckminster Fuller’s observation of the superificiality of the Bauhaus – the design looked good but underneath it was still the same old plumbing.

No doubt it will become “London’s Eiffel Tower”, the tourists will queue to go up it, the gormless will, as ever, be impressed with bigness.