I'm Back!

The publication of my interview about the Text Festival with Derek Beaulieu in Jacket, which was actually concluded just after the Festival, turns out to be coincidental with my ability to return to blogging. It’s been an odd year or more social media-wise. Almost overnight, I went from active and frequent verbosity to near silence, which probably seemed a bit odd to people who follow these writings. Initially there was an element of exhaustion post-festival exacerbated by the urgently depressing/infuriating battle to save cultural services from the sado-monetarist onslaught of the evil which is the coalition government. Paradoxically, the solution to the threat that I came up with precluded even more public comment. To the many participants and followers of the Text Festival, an inclusive open maybe even rambling dialogical event, it may be counterintuitive that my next major cultural project has to be developed in large part through confidential negotiations but that has what has been engaging me for the last 12 months.

Finding the solution to the threat to cultural provision was an interesting challenge. The problem could be defined thus: the arts in the UK had spent the last 20 years justifying their legitimacy by association with other fields - mainly social, education and welfare policy. The arts had developed a body evidence tailored to impacts on government indicators for social cohesion, learning, health & well-being, etc. The problem came when the new fundamentally anti-social government re-defined public policy as simply related to its cost. By this criterion, the arts are buggered – all that social good stuff is meaningless to politicians whose rightful place is in the Museum of Dead Bastards Heads.  The knee-jerk response from the arts sector was to re-double its use of the arguments and evidencing of arts as social value, because this had mitigated the worst extremes of previous cost-cutting assaults – although tellingly not without notable cultural losses. By definition this was a doomed strategy this time round and there developed almost a feeding frenzy of cultural cutting. Going to museums meetings during that period involved seeing lots of haunted resignation. It occurred to me early on that the arts’ response was inadequate – primarily, I suppose, because I was never convinced in the first place that art needed to be justified through its contribution to non-cultural agendas. Readers of my blog will have observed this over the years as I have criticised, for example, art in regeneration where you get bad environmental development because it is driven by the artistically compromised; or my attacks on the nonsense of the Kids in Museums organisation which turns cultural facilities into vacuous crèches; or my smugness over my "intrepid resistance to interpretation", etc. All the solutions on offer in those early days were either administrative or financial – move around or share the deckchairs, shed staff or cut budgets. Once you head down that road, you have lost the argument and might as well shut up shop straightaway.

So I set up to find an artistic solution.

The answer turned out to be unexpectedly simple: We should curate our way out of trouble. The arts should do what Art does. Specifically: to curate exhibitions and projects aimed at international galleries and networks; to move the cultural horizon beyond the constricted UK context to where there were still opportunities for funding and partnerships committed to culture qua culture. It may seem simple now but I lost count of the number of meetings at which someone said: why has no-one thought of this before?

I had imagined that this would be the way forward for Bury, but unexpectedly galleries and museums across the north threw their hats into the ring realising that it offered opportunity to all. Pretty quickly I had lost count of how many had joined the project – it is somewhere around forty now, I think.

I planned to focus on Japan initially, as we had experience working there; but as the British Council got involved we were quickly steered to China as the UK’s top priority: hence my trips to China in October 2011 and April 2012 to negotiate and set up projects. As much of the detail was delicate, diplomatic and intensely demanding, confidentiality became essential to progress the plans: so behind the scenes me and my team (who have been remarkable) have been working on the hardest, most complicated project we’ve ever attempted; meanwhile outwardly, my social media presence was near silence.

However, as the first project of this new vision is close to opening, it’s now time to resurface. I’ll expand on the project in a future blog, but suffice it to say our team has put together an exhibition called “Toward Modernity: 300 years of British Art” - drawn from 19 UK museums and touring to 6 national museums in China. So I’ll be in Changsha (Hunan Provincial Museum pictured) again in September for the opening and then again in Beijing in November. In between I’ll be in Austria and Italy setting up a new partnership in the area of public art and creative industries and in the early new year I’ll be in Japan and maybe South Korea working on more touring exhibitions. (It’s not just me; by the way, members of my team are booked for the European Sculpture Network in Celle, Germany in September and the Glasgow Europe conference in November. As I write the incomparable Kat McClung-Oakes is in Tampere, Finland, setting up our Turner exhibition and Josef Minta has just come back from an EU digital museums conference in Barcelona).

Having ‘worked through’ the transition from the Text Festival to world tours, I thought that my observations in the interview with Derek would now seem out of date but I think it still covers what I thought of the Festival. As I predicted despite my protestations I am now working on a 2014 Text Festival, and as I projected then, the questions that seemed to me unacknowledged challenges for poets will probably surface; although maybe not, as poetry has seemed less and less relevant as the year has passed: my latest poetry book will be lucky if it is read by 50 people; the exhibition I have organised in China will be seen by 4 million. Maybe this was one of the reasons why my book was called “The End of Poetry”. 

 

I have missed blogging: I originally started blogging because I liked moaning about crap books, films and exhibitions. And over the last year there have been many things I could and should have moaned about, but now I’m back! 

Irene Barberis and 5 Places

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.

Does the Cambridge School exist when you are in Dortmund?

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

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?

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?

Dinner for the Finns

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.

Fully Booked

Output-wise, it’s a busy week for me: two exhibitions and a book launch. First up is Fully Booked in Bonn; then (also on Friday) Reading by Light in Barnsley; and then on Saturday the launch of “Space The Soldier Who Died For Perspective” at the London Small Publishers Fair. More of the latter two later.



The Beethoven hotel in Bonn will be demolished in 2010 to make way for a large complex with apartments and a restaurant. The old, and now empty, hotel occupies a very central location – directly opposite Bonn 's opera house, and overlooking the west bank of the Rhine. But before it is pulled down, it is being brought to life with a varied program of artistic interventions. The website gives you some idea of the sort of things that are going on - including some exuberant installations.

http://www.moving-locations.de/eng_index.html

There are also a number of minimalists at work too, of which I am one. My text, called Broadcast Room, is an edit of "The Radio Broadcast & The Bus Queue" which was originally written for a space in Berlin and appears in "Space The Soldier Who Died For Perspective." In terms of the room, I wanted to keep the sense of the stripped out hotel, adding a simple thickness of language, (hand-written on the ceiling) as an act of passing, a work that is nearly not there.

The preview is on Friday from 6pm and the show runs till February.

My thanks to Christoph Dahlhausen for his help with the show and the installation.
Other artists in the show:

Nir Alon (ISR)
Nathan Baker (USA)
Carola Bark
Nicholas Bodde
Ingo Bracke
Lars Breuer
Silke Brösskamp
Götz Bury
Laura Bruce (USA)
Christoph Dahlhausen
Bruno Dorn
Reinhard Doubrawa
Martin Durham (GB)
Karsten Födinger
Manuel Franke
Marcel Frey
Sebastian Freytag
Tom Früchtl
Daniel Göttin (CH)
Wiebke Grösch und
Frank Metzger
Yvo Hartmann
Geka Heinke
Graham Hudson (GB)
Gary Jolley (AUS)
Laresa Kosloff (AUS)
Andreas Lorenschat
Antonia Low (GB)
Tumi Magnússon (IS)
Guido Münch
Aki Nakazawa (JAP)
Esther Neumann
Frank Piasta
Jan van der Ploeg (NL)
Trevor Richards (AUS)
Kai Richter
Rita Rohlfing
Christine Rühmann (CH)
/Sjaak Beemsterboer (NL)
Karen Scheper
Christiane Schlosser
Arne Schreiber
Nicola Schudy
Daniel Schürer
Paul Schwer
Cony Theis
David Thomas (AUS)
Tony Trehy (GB)
Jan Verbeek
Cornel Wachter
Achim Zeman

vispo workshop as seen by josefin

Proud father, Karri Korro, who organised the Saari poetry workshop in Finland, sent the link to his 14 year old daughter Josefin Strandell's photo record of the event:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/38224264@N05/sets/72157621922664234/

Saari

Back in Helsinki from Saari. Unfortunately I forgot the camera lead so I can’t up load any photos, but Geof Huth has been blogging extensively what it is like. I arrived on Thursday and went virtually straight into my talk. I mainly surveyed the last two Text Festivals and compared text works that I had seen at the Basel Art Fair shows and the disappointing ICA show. I also responded to the question that has been bouncing around the workshop (according to the blogs) which is “What is the difference between a vispo and a graphic designer?” it seems to me that this is the wrong question, instead I asked “What is the difference between a vispo and a visual artist?” Generally it was felt that the answer to both questions is the same – poets don’t get paid. Christian Bök’s line was most interesting - that the reason why poetry can’t compete in artistic status is economic – the price of failure in poetry is so low as opposed to the 'capital investment' of say visual arts. In addition, unlike most other artforms, it isn’t possible for poetry to support the infrastructure of auxiliary business, ie there isn’t enough money in it to allow agents, gallerists, publishers, etc, to make profit from its re-sale. However, the distinction between the two questions is actually one of self-esteem. There are obvious stylistic and technical similarities between some vispo and some graphic design practice but implicit in the relation to graphics is the lack of connection between vispo and visual art. This is the vispo problem.

After my talk, Leevi Lehto talked (see Geof’s blog) and we had a dinner of fabulous Finnish smoked salmon with potatos, vegetables and a salad expertly dressed by Mr. Bök. The rest of the evening was great conversation and beer. All being well, Christian will be doing a project in the next Text Festival.

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bok/

Helsinki and beyond

Off to Helsinki, then on to the Saari residency http://www.koneensaatio.fi/en/manor/

Geof Huth is already there, and has been blogging the goings on all week. See http://dbqp.blogspot.com/ Presumably, I will be able to blog it too.

and tomorrow

The last Basel thing I can fit in is Volta 5 http://www.voltashow.com/

then it's onto a plane for the next installment of the

TEXT FESTIVAL

Friday 12 June - 07:30
Bury Art Gallery, Moss St., Bury
Free admission

An evening of experimental poetry and sound in the company of Japan-based Jesse Glass, Nick Thurston, Sarah Tremlett and Judy Kendall.

(For anyone following the progress of "Space the Soldier who died for Perspective", the next book, I finished it yesterday. The publishers, Veer, will get it next week).

Art Basel 09

“nearly 300 leading galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. More than 2,500 artists, ranging from the great masters of Modern art to the latest generation of emerging stars, are represented in the show's multiple sections.”

Too much to take in obviously. Prepared by the visual overload of last year, kept more of my attention in reserve so as not to burn out too quick (though resistance can’t last for long), and tried to give myself a specific focus – looking for interesting text works/artists for the next Text Festival. There were some but not many – I will return to my findings on Texts in a summation blog bringing together thoughts on this from all the shows.

Gallerists, dealers selling – prices lower now (offered a very nice Edmund de Waal for reasonable 5 figure sum.) “They won’t sell for less than 1.1 million”. “You must give me a call when you are next in New York”; So many spaces you get lost. The people as interesting as the art - much more surgical enhancement than I am used to seeing. Made arrangements to meet an artist in Madrid. Scribbling down names I want. Can I remember now? A great small space with drawings of Klimt, Schiele, Beckman, Dix; LAWRENCE BEING LAWRENCE Cathy Pilkington “Elsie” (4obvious reasons: a super-real cute dog asleep) sore feet KosuthADJECTIVEADJECTIVEADJECTIVElalla Essaydi Jaume Plensa Song of Songs Tatsuo Miyajima Counter line Marijike van Warmerdam various trees (for the nature show in Bury next year) AYSE ERKMEN, Gabrielle Basilico photographs, nearly knocking 27.AG.1995 (Kawara) off a wall, Glen Ligon tedium; everything else...

A Boat as a Vessel

In the same building as the Architekturmuseum, Kunsthalle Basel has a solo show by UK artist, Lucy Skaer called: A Boat Used as a Vessel. This was an interesting installation too, playing with the mathematics of pattern, planar shifting and method transparency. Greatest pleasure came from her use of old furniture, antique tables, used as printing blocks, the tops carved into, inked and printed off. In the first room, a multi-leaf table centred in the space was mirrored on the walls by these prints, each different – depending how many leaves had been pulled out – and augmented with a simple graphic symbol or a colour, gave a sense of monumentality.

In another space, she had suspended a whale skeleton behind panels so that it could be glimpsed through the gaps and mirrored this with large drawings on paper on two facing walls. These drawings are schematic and decoratively buried in layers of pattern echoing the stuttering presence of the whale skeleton.

Actually my only problem with the show comes (as is often the case) with the verbiage accompanying it: “The play on words in the title rests on the formal and fucntional correspondence of the two nouns. The title reveals the multilayered process of naming and attributing meaning: while a boat can both literally be a vessel, it also becomes the vessel to hold the meaning of the title…” Save us from artists using language. If the title is so important why are “as” and “a” uncapitalised? If the two nouns are commutative and equivalent why isn’t it “A Vessel”? If it would have been “a Boat” but for the first “a” being at the beginning of the sentence, we have the issue of an artist interrogating language but not really. There’s a lot of it about.

Better little Gestures - “The Madness of Madelon Vriesendorp”

Having viewed the disappointing Little Theatre of Gestures at the Kunstmuseum yesterday, it was a revelation to see significantly better little gestures in “The World of Madelon Vriesendorp” at Basel Architekturmuseum. www.sam-basel.org I don’t think I know any of her architectural works, but this show of paintings, postcards, objects and games from 1967 to now is brilliantly exciting. It features watercolours, prints and films of New York iconic buildings in surreal landscapes engaged in sex, climbing through holes, crumbling, with the Statue of Liberty sometimes naked, sometimes sleeping, sometimes also crumbled and over topped. Setting out to collect bad paintings, endless collections of postcards of New York, kitsch objects of mind-numbing oddness the Vriesendorp wunderkammer is a Sir John Soanes museum http://www.soane.org/ for the 21st Century – apparently her house is full of this stuff; it’s as if an artist with talent made Gormley’s "Field for the British Isles", but more than that, this doll-world doesn’t care that you are there looking at it, it lives without the observer. The exhibition has that excitement you feel as a child in a model village or how museums used to be before the edicts of 'education' and worthiness.

Against this you have totally bizarre objects, a city of tiny failed objects – a smiling sketelon dog wearing a hat and smoking a pipe, a laughing nun on drugs, a shark eating a baby, King Kong atop the Empire State Building holding a naked mermaid – which nevertheless have the hysterical delight of jaw-drop wonderment that says “who the hell thought of manufacturing that?”.

Little Theatre of Gestures

The current show at Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel,
http://www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch/en/exhibitions/current/little-theatre-of-gestures/ was an unexpectedly depressing affair in an otherwise very pleasant day (Basel continues to be delightful - pictured waiting for the river-powered boat). As the exhibition copy ducks out of claiming anything too portentous for the show "not aiming to give an overview on the formal and informal codes that constitute our communiciation in daily life, but instead to gather artistic positions for a mutual play on smaller or larger deeds." The dismay lay not so much in the artworks themselves, though some warranted little attention, but rather in the curation of that 'mutual play'. The spaces of the Gegenwartskunst Museum are quite dynamic and possibly challenging to work with as not many rooms seem to have much in the way of a right-angle, but the juxtaposition of the works often seemed arbitrary or too obviously clumsy. The only set piece that worked was Sol le Witt's pencil wall drawing of circles and grids opposite Bruce Nauman's "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths"; but what was a white painted geometrical frame by le Witt doing in dialogue with a Roualt painting of clowns. There were a number of occasions where artists reappeared on different floors of the gallery, implying a spatial dialogue that transcended a reading of the mixing as incoherent, but this was then countermanded by the top floor being given over exclusively to Joseph Beuys. They may have been positing him as the apotheosis of artist qua gesture but this cut across any non-linear, non-hierarchical, ahistorical reading that may have been proffered in the rest of the layout.

The Olympics of the Art World

Off today to Basel. A few days writing and sight-seeing then it is the Art Fair. All being well I will be blogging from there. www.artbasel.com

Back on 12 June just in time for the next Text Festival event featuring Jesse Glass, Nick Thurston, Sarah Tremlett and Judy Kendall. www.textfestival.com/when/view-12

we make money not art

A new experience of the Text Festival launch was the way events bounced-referred around different blogs. In that spirit of pointing to interesting things, the other blog that I frequently look at is we-make-money-not-art. Regine Debatty's report on the Knowbotic Research is worth a read.

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2009/05/positions-in-flux-panel-1-art.php

European Museums Forum

If I hadn't been busying myself with the Text Festival, at this time of the year, I would hope to be at the EMF, which this year took place in Bursa, Turkey. My friend museum consultant Benedetta Tiana set up her blog coincident with the event and here is her story of how it has been: http://bt-museumconsultancy.blogspot.com/

Wiesbaden

What an attractive city! I highly recommend Wiesbaden, and Gottfried Hafemann's gallery. Marianne Eigenheer's show opened last - the picture in my previous entry is a good image of the upper room with the lower room featured 3 tiny screens featuring beautiful little mobile photo footage from Berlin Zoo and this completely unexpected early painting. Today I managed to see another 8 canvases (not in the show) from the 80's, that really much be shown soon.

Tomorrow - back to Manchester and the growing anticipation of the Text Festival - opening night Thursday, but lots to do before then. I would advise anyone thinking of going to the ticket events to book in advance, because they are going fast.

Galerie Hafemann, Wiesbaden

With the Text Festival website notching up more than 60,000 hits (since Christmas), I am off to Galerie Hafemann, Wiesbaden (Germany) http://www.galerie-hafemann.de/templates/main.php?SID=20 for the opening of the new show from Marianne Eigenheer. I'll also be to check out what's going on in Frankfurt.