Language Moment

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

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

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

Helen White installs

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

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

Dinner

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

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

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

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

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

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

The festival exhibitions are rapidly taking shape!

Copenhagen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Barney opens his presents

Marrakech

I am in Marrakech writing the Tragedy of Althusserianism.

Ghosts move about me patched with histories

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

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

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

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

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

(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

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.