Lawrence Weiner

The sad news this week that Lawrence Weiner has passed away. I first met Lawrence in 2005 when he completed an installation of WATER MADE IT WET on a bridge over the Manchester-Bolton Canal in Radcliffe as part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail and the first Text Festival. (although I had already acquired a public work from him which is installed on the riverbank in Radcliffe town centre). I spent a lovely day with him on the day of the unveiling and then did an In Conversation with him in front of a live audience at the Met - I think I blogged about it at the time. I remember being really nervous because I'd just read the thick volume of Interviews with Lawrence Weiner in which he frequently humiliated interviewers. He reassured me that that was because early on Conceptual Art was targeted by the Establishment and so he was interviewed by many idiot academics and journalists who wanted to show how clever they were. Soon after I went off to write my first poetry collection 50 Heads published in 2006. I sent a copy to Lawrence with a note that the poem 'Sculpture' was a response to his work.

Sculpture 

0. The object of making your opponent weep descriptions 

between the upper and lower structures in vertebrates 

forming the framework of the mouth, containing the teeth, 

the parts of tool or machine. That body language material 

with the tongue intropunitive instead of angry, anger our 

faults are most obvious as nothing hides them breasts 

move as sacks of liquid dynamic contents. The knife 

fixation on things in evaluation, of sweat-scented straps 

forward and back in the infantile world of ready-made 

values, woman, the happy or resigned slave lives allowing 

both misogyny and visionary context. Scattering 

amplitude internationally is that difference in any given 

place. Choice language to present material realities, 

histories that I only deal with divergent objects and all 

translatable to stand outside a less human presence more 

profound for their human attachment to non-living things 

and construction of bridges to be crossed as opposed too 

catalogued: 1 

He sent back postcard in which he said he had read the book on the plane to the Venice Biennale and responded to it very warmly, and specifically included his response back ARRIVING AT THE SAME PLACE AT THE SAME TIME. I'm not sure how true that is, but from then on he was constantly supportive of my practice in Bury. We met up over the years usually at some Art Fair or exhibitions he'd invite me to. And I liked to think of him as a friend. In 2014, when I opened the Bury Sculpture Centre, it could only be Lawrence with whom it opened. I remember the humour around the coincidence of him opening two other shows on the same night - one in Rio and (I think) Berlin. And as a recognition of our artistic dialogue across the years, the centre piece for his installation was ARRIVING AT THE SAME PLACE AT THE SAME TIME.

Leaving Bury

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

I think I can leave Bury satisfied with my achievements. 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Architecture Now

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

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

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

Exhibition runs 9th March to 29th June.

Irwell Sculpture Trail – 25 Years of Public Art (1)

This year is officially the 25^th Anniversary of the Irwell Sculpture Trail  (IST). It’s a funny feeling realising that you have been working on something that long, provoking, inevitably, the urge to reminisce. As anyone who tried to study the Text Festival, before Susan Lord stepped in to establish the Text Archive, will know I am notoriously disinterested in past projects – as John Peel used to say: “The last song isn’t as interesting as the next song”.  Someone wanting to know about the IST can look at the website, visit the sculptures or, if studying public art, make an appointment to see the historical files. But there are very few people left who can tell the stories behind the IST and the artists, and actually only me left still able to recount the tales of the 40+ artworks plus supporting community projects, temporary works and exhibitions, and ultimately also the creation of the Bury Sculpture Centre in 2014. The first sculpture I curated was by an artist called Pauline Holmes who made a beautiful (no longer extant) work with logs in Rawtenstall and

the latest was Auke de Vries magnificent untitled sculpture at Burrs Country Park last year. The next (later this year) will be the memorial sculpture of Victoria Wood by Graham Ibbeson. So, this starts an occasional series of blogs recounting an anecdotal history of sculptures in the Irwell valley.

The first thing to say is that this 25^th Anniversary isn’t commemoration of IST’s inauguration - I have actually been working on IST since 1993. I had just arrived at Rossendale Council as the new Tourism & Arts Officer, when the Councillor responsible for Tourism came into my office and told me that he wanted me to organise Sunday markets at newly opened Rawtenstall station to encourage visitors arriving on the East Lancs Steam Railway to get off the trains and spend money in the town. The idea of me organising Sunday markets was abysmal. So I had to think of something quick that would achieve the same result without me wanting to kill myself in the first month of the new job. At the time there was one sculpture on the roundabout beside the station, celebrating the town-twinning with Bocholt in Germany. A few days later while washing some dishes, it occurred to me that a small sculpture trail around the station could be used to guide visitors to point of interest in Rawtenstall. I started identifying sites for sculptures with John Elliman in the Planning dept and realised that almost by accident the locations were on the Irwell Valley Trail. So that’s how it started in Rossendale. A few months later I was shopping in Manchester and saw a street sign pointing to the Irwell River; blinkedly working in Rossendale I had only recognised the river there. Suddenly I realised that, as rivers do, it ran all the way down to Manchester. I wrote from Rossendale to Bury and Manchester with the proposal that they commission art on the path too and together we could create the longest public sculpture trail in Europe. I had no idea if that was true, but we’ve been saying it ever since!

In that period, I commissioned 3 or 4 artworks (some of which no longer exist) and Bury commission a couple. I moved to a job in Bury which coincided with the launch of the National Lottery. With that pot of money available, I coordinated the 3 local authorities plus then Lancashire County Council and a handful of Environmental agencies (most of which have been abolished now) to bid for my vision of an environmental art trail running 30 miles from Bacup at the source of the river to Salford Quays. This is why this year is the 25^th anniversary – it commemorates the year we started commissioning in earnest with an operating budget of £4million (£2.1million from the Lottery). We didn’t bid for that much money originally – it was much less; but when the lottery assessor came, he said that I wasn’t asking for enough money to achieve the scale of vision I was describing. He didn’t have to submit his judgment straight away so he gave me 2 weeks to rewrite the bid. In that 2 weeks I wrote 26 new documents and the money flowed. I doubt you can do that in today’s bureaucracy –  Lottery funding was more wild west then!

The other interesting anecdote about the bid itself came, when one morning the Councillor mentioned above came to my office to congratulate me on the success of the bid. I pointed to the documents still laying on my desk, and told him I had not yet submitted it. But he told me that the Secretary of State for Heritage/Culture had announce on Radio 4 that the Irwell Sculpture Trail had been awarded the grant. It took a little time to work out what this was about. It came down to politics. I discovered that the Secretary of State, Virginia Bottomley MP was scheduled for an interview on Radio 4 during which it was obvious that she was going to have a hard time justifying the Lottery’s first major grant being £50million to ‘elitist’ Covent Garden Opera. Her bureaucrats were charged with finding something she could point to that was ‘up north’ and ‘for the people’. To the system’s shame, they had not funded anything of the kind, so her briefing had to talk about something that fitted the bill and gloss over that it hadn’t actually been approved yet.

Anyway, on Saturday 17 February, the Sculpture Centre hosts an IST retrospective celebration of the work of Brass Art (Chara Lewis, Kristin Mojsiewicz and Anneke Pettican). Brass Art have a long history of working with Bury Art Museum and did their IST From the Tower Falls the Shadow in 2002.

(More IST artist stories in the next blog)

The Mathis der Maler Question

One of the great pleasures and stimulations of working with artists who connect to the cultural moment that is Bury has been the development of the personal creative dialogues that have blossomed over the years. Lots of collaborations have grown out of the confluence of artists meeting through Bury. Some of them have even involved me, as an artist rather than curator. The most recent is the new 'Place' project with Jayne Dyer which has dragged me back into writing poems. One of my last before my 'poetry retirement' in 2010 was my poetic response to a question that Riiko Sakkinen posted back in 2009(ish) - the eternal question for artists - how does the artist engage with the revolutionary struggle (or words to that effect)? This resonated with me because (not a lot of people know [or care probably] that) my favourite composer is Paul Hindemith and my favourite piece of music (since 1982 when I first heard it) is his Mathis der Maler Symphony.  The Symphony is the orchestral version of the opera of the same name in which Mathis the painter struggles for artistic freedom in the Protestant Reformation. My answer to the question is the poem below, which was published in the Bury Poems:

Suddenly Violins

The Mathis der Maler question: demands Riiko Sakkinen must paint.

All length scales in analogous deferment; what does this say about me?
(POV)
That people are watching/judging or they are not watching/judging.
Looking nostalgic illusion or less ultraparallel
the one breach of principle tested twice.
Later iterations forgetting serves a good functional purpose.
Failed (isotropic and homogeneous) within 
the meniscus didn't ought to have do that and longing
for when defeat used to be romantic.
Homophonic. Sweeping. But as with all things eurotrashed, 
recursion how far?

To digress: the death of distance is also the annihilation of memory. 
Save us from the annoyance of the past described in the present tense:
sessile objects made flat. 

Reading the poem back I was struck by how the Mathis de Maler question now resonates very directly with the global/local danger of fascism/war/environmental catastrophe/Brexit/Trump/etc we face. A tweet I read a few weeks ago came to mind; (words to the effect of) "If you ever wondered what it felt like to be a decent German in 1934, now you know" - which is exactly the situation that Hindemith faced. The Opera was not performed because the Nazi Party banned it, and Hindemith had to flee in 1938.

And here we are in our rerun of 1934; only yesterday, the fascist mainstream British newspapers branded judges 'enemies of the people', whipping up the mob to rise up against the rule of law. 

There is some discussion in Museum circles about how to respond. I plan to savage the inadequacy of the Museum conference mewling in a future blog, but a first curatorial response had to be Riiko Sakkinen. His ABC of Capitalism opens on at Bury Sculpture Centre on Saturday 12 November.



(A footnote, while looking up links to write this blog, I stumbled on a forthcoming rare performance of the opera in Mainz. Having never actually seen it, I'm very excited to see if I can get there in 2017)

Last Things

Except for the poem "Israel" (published on this blog) I haven't written any poetry since 2010 - poetic silence from a combination of Bury workload, more exciting creative possibilities, and the sense that I had reached a point where to write was to repeat myself. When Jayne Dyer and Wayne Warren started work on their exhibition in the Bury Sculpture Centre, they asked initially for an essay for the catalogue, but then changed their 'demands' to a poem. I said OK but didn't actually think it was likely to materialise. 
It was only when I walked into the gallery and saw the installation forming that I realised that I had to respond poetically, as the extraordinary balanced moment of beauty is beyond description or explanation being relevant. So I wrote: 

Last Things

forward

past last things,

minus one, it is all happening too fast as iff propagation delay echoes shicho

Like now: and I cannot keep up capacitance

I am bicontinuous counting interarrival time

I am picked off trying to count backward minus one

a false antecedent and a false consequent, a nowhere and an everywhere

the lamps are going out

The catalogue (designed with John Rooney) - also beautifully produced - is available now from the Bury Art Museum shop.

The Australians Are Coming (to Bury)

Over the next week/month Bury celebrates Australian contemporary art. On Saturday afternoon (yes, I know it's an odd time), two shows - one an installation  Illuminating configurations : re forming the line; edges, splats and cuts by Irene Barberis and (curated by Irene) a survey of contemporary Australian drawing featuring 100 works. I'm very excited to see Irene again, we first met in Tokyo back in 2006 and it's always a pleasure to see her and her work. (some of you might have seen her installation in Bury alongside Mike Parr in 2011). 
Both shows run to 13 August. The Contemporary Australian Drawing has organically evolved from six previous exhibitions around the world, from Chicago and Rome to Dubai. The participating artists were asked for a visual response to two texts on writing/drawing, taken from essays by Serge Tisseron and Michel Butor, “All Writing is Drawing’, and ‘the Space of Writing, what is that?’.  

All artists were supplied with a standard size and weight paper. The thoughtful and enthusiastic response of all artists concerned has resulted in this extensive exploration and examination of the themes, ‘All writing is Drawing’ and ‘the Space of Writing'. 

The Australian intervention in the Sculpture Centre is Jayne Dyer working in collaboration with Wayne Warren. Funnily enough I met Jayne in Beijing through an introduction from Irene Barberis, and we immediately got on very well. She has shown in Bury before - you might remember her piece in the Text Festival.

Last Thing previews on 17 June, inspired by Paul Auster's 'In the Country of Last Things'; the book presents a world where architecture and space constantly vanish, preventing individuals from building their own identity relative to the space they inhabit. An arena where matter is scarce and what is available is regurgitated until it becomes unrecognizable or depleted. 'Last things' documents fictional spaces about to disappear. 

Three great shows not to be missed. 

Women in Art - Bury Art Museum

Funny how when you're busy you don't notice you're own patterns. I only realised this morning that all the contemporary art installed currently at Bury Art Museum is by women artists: Liz West "Colour Collection" in the Museum;

Alison Erika Forde "There's Nothing for you here" in the gallery;

Jo Clements "Retrospective" in the video gallery

Hilary Jack "The Late Great Planet Earth" in the Sculpture Centre

And Penny Anderson's 'Speech Bubble' Christmas Tree on the Ring Balcony

 

I quite like that there wasn't a plan for an all-women display - and it was just the brilliance of the work that brought it together. 

Bury Sculpture Centre Opens

Opening speeches from me, Cllr Sharon Briggs (Mayor of Bury) and Ian Tabbron (Arts Council of England) - and Greville Worthingon [out of shot](Yorkshire Sculpture Park).

Bury Art Museum and Bury Sculpture centre

Just two weeks off the opening of the Bury Sculpture Centre and the launch of the fourth international Text Festival. Pulling the forthcoming programmes together has been one of the toughest workloads I can remember for various reasons beyond my control; but I think it is a programme to celebrate: I'll  expand on the individual aspects as it gets closer to the day, but I'm pleased to list some really great people involved in the Text: Lawrence Weiner, Ron Silliman, Phil Davenport, Simon Patterson, Riiko Sakkinen, Jayne Dyer, Caroline Bergvall, Penny Anderson, Jaap Blonk, Derek Beaulieu, Sally Labern & Bobby Lloyd, Tim Etchells, Sarah Sanders, Carolyn Thompson, Marton Koppany, Vanessa Place, Jez Dolan & Joseph Richardson, Peter Jaeger, Liz Collini, Mike Chavez-Dawson, Maria Damon, Juxtavoices, Rhys Trimble, Debbie Walsh, Richard Barrett, Tom Jenks, Bobby Parker, Lucy Harvest Parker, Tim Allen, Steve Giasson, Andrea Cotton, Carol Watts & Will Montgomery, Eran Hadas, Jorg Piringer, Rachel Smith, Erica Baum, Flo Fflach, Holly Pester, Rachel Defay-Liautard (that was the order I could remember them in I've probably forgotten someone). 

Arriving at the same place at the same time

The Text Festival has had a relationship with Lawrence Weiner since the very first one in 2005. Back then we commissioned WATER MADE IT WET and acquired his Horizon work from its original location in Hull, which he reconfigured to become Radcliffe Horizon.In the Festival exhibitions programme, we supported the public art works with a survey show of Lawrence’s poster art works.

Burned out after the insanity of creating a Festival that was 9 months long( never make that mistake again!), in 2006, I took a sabbatical to write 50 Heads. Within which the poem ‘Sculpture’ was my personal creative response to Lawrence.


Sculpture

0. The object of making your opponent weep descriptions
between the upper and lower structures in vertebrates
forming the framework of the mouth, containing the teeth,
the parts of tool or machine. That body language material
with the tongue intropunitive instead of angry, anger our
faults are most obvious as nothing hides them breasts
move as sacks of liquid dynamic contents. The knife
fixation on things in evaluation, of sweat-scented straps
forward and back in the infantile world of ready-made
values, woman, the happy or resigned slave lives allowing
both misogyny and visionary context. Scattering
amplitude internationally is that difference in any given
place. Choice language to present material realities,
histories that I only deal with divergent objects and all
translatable to stand outside a less human presence more
profound for their human attachment to non-living things
and construction of bridges to be crossed as opposed too
catalogued: 1

Lawrence read 50 Heads on the plane to the Venice Biennale and sent me one of his famous postcards with the aphorism ARRIVING AT THE SAME PLACE AT THE SAME TIME. At some levels true, others not. 

So in 2009 in Basel, I wrote the poem “Arriving At The Same Place At the Time” which was published on Veer in “Space The Soldier Who Died For Perspective” 

In programming the 2014 Text Festival who else but Lawrence Weiner could open the new Bury Sculpture Centre? And ARRIVING AT THE SAME PLACE AT THE SAME TIME is part of the installation. I think one of the things that the Festival does is create a space where artists from many different fields come together, opening dialogues and possibilities for new ideas, new exchanges, new works. So I suppose I could end this blog by asking: what new possibilities will open up for you, if you arrive in Bury at the same time as the Text Festival? 

The Public Typing Pool

Bury Sculpture Centre work in progress

Probably been the most intense period of my career, preparing on the Text Festival, planning the programme for the rest of 2014 and on into 2015, more projects in the Far East, and of course getting the Sculpture Centre ready.

As we pared back the old uses and abuse of the space, the thick layers of carpet and paint, something really beautiful has emerged. The space is exhilarating and some of the uncovered and restored Victorian detail is fascinating. The floor is magnificent. We open on 2 May with the preview for the Text Festival. 

Bury Sculpture Centre

News of developments will be thick and fast over the next few weeks; lots of things are coming to fruition – finally. 

The first is the announcement that Bury’s exhibition spaces are being expanded, with the creation of the Bury Sculpture Centre. Following the Borough Library Review, large new spaces have become available and given our long term leadership of the Irwell Sculpture Trail project, the logical or maybe visionary conclusion is to create an international focus for sculpture in Bury. We've got some Arts Council funding and the first year’s programme well developed. Barring accidents we should open the new venue with the Text Festival – and who better to inaugurate in the context of Sculpture and Language than Lawrence Weiner. (How many more reasons do you need to be at the festival opening weekend?) 

After Lawrence's show there'll be an exhibition investigating the artistic dialogue between East and West (building on our experience and networks in China/Japan and Europe.) And big moment in this will be the venue’s first international conference: the  European Sculpture International Forum. I’ll be heading off to this year’s event in the Hague to start preparing for that. Along with an exhibition of Contemporary Japanese Art in the Bury Art Museum, the two shows will be part of the Manchester Asia Triennial.

So there’s my excuse for not blogging recently: I’ve been busy.