Text Festival 2011

The new Text Festival website goes live today.

http://www.textfestival.com

Over the next month more events will be added.

Back to Finland

It's been an intense few weeks as the Text Festival moved towards having some sort of shape, so I haven't had time to blog. The first wave of the programme will be officially announced in the next few days - there'll be more to follow. Meanwhile I am returning to my favourite (so far) place in Finland - Tampere.

Primarily I am seeing purdah to write "The Tragedy of Althusserianism", which assuming I finish it, will come out on ifpthenq in November. But I am looking forward to seeing Karri Korro again and meeting Satu Kaikkonen for the first time. The first thing I'll do on arrival is attend an exhibition opening at TR1
http://www.tampere.fi/tr1/english.htm
Through the week I'll also be meeting various local curators to talk about future projects. I am not sure I will have internet access.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

I remember that there were only two artists at Sevilla Biennale 2008 whom I found interesting; I can't recall one without looking back to my journal but the other was the Mexican-Canadian electronic artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. He also caught my radar at Basel Art Fair in 2009. So I am pleased to see that he has a solo show called Recorders at Manchester Art Gallery. It features seven recent pieces of which I think I recognise a couple from the previous installations.
Lozano-Hemmer’s artworks depend on the participation of visitors to exist and develop, as the artist describes:

“In Recorders, artworks hear, see and feel the public, they exhibit awareness and record and replay memories entirely obtained during the show. The pieces either depend on participation to exist or predatorily gather information on the public through surveillance and biometric technologies.”

Highlights of the exhibition include Pulse Room, on show in the UK for the very first time. Premiered in Puebla, Mexico in 2006 and shown to critical acclaim in the Mexican pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2007, the work is made up of 100 light bulbs which are activated by a sensor to flash at the exact rhythm of particpants' heart rates.

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

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

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

A Single Man’s Inception

I rarely mention film here and I am going to do what Ron Silliman in his review of Inception said one shouldn’t and that is consider that film’s implications as a medium of serious thought. Like Ron, I thought Christopher Nolan’s movie of dreams within dreams was a ‘kick-ass summer film to trump all summer films.” And I probably would have left it at that until I caught up with last year’s Tom Ford film A Single Man while in Malta. There may not seem an immediately obvious connection between the two films.

Inception is a ‘colossal digital artefact, a virtual reality sci-fi thriller set inside the dreaming mind, with brilliant architectural effects and a weirdly inert narrative inspired by Philip K Dick and Lewis Carroll’ (Guardian). In the distant future, the technology of industrial espionage allows snoopers to invade the dreams of CEOs and steal commercially sensitive information. Leonardo DiCaprio is Cobb, a specialist who both carries out these hi-tech brain raids and trains executives to resist them.

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

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

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

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

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

And the Award for the Best Poetry Dog goes to…

I have a dilemma in writing about the Manchester Literature Festival which has launched its programme for this October: I have noticed that my blog readership doubles when I critically blast some aspect of UK literary banality – so if I comment on the MIF programme in the way that most of my readers would expect I will increase my hits; on the other hand I also notice that the Manchester Blogger Awards are situated within the Festival, so if I say something less critical maybe I’d increase my chances of a Blogger nomination. So prostitute myself for blog-reader popularity or sell out for an Award nomination?

I jest, of course. I couldn’t get a Manchester Blogger nomination because I am too negative about too many things Manchester. This is not because I have particular pleasure in denigrating the city; rather it is because I am fond of Manchester, because I like living here and therefore want it to be what it could be. I want Manchester to be an international city, and am saddened that it only has delusions of grandeur not real prospects (except in football which irritatingly, as an Everton supporter, is the one greatness I am against). A great city has certain characteristics. I want it to have great contemporary architecture and it doesn’t. I want it to have a great orchestra but it doesn’t. I want it to have a great Gallery and it doesn’t. I want it to have an International Festival that's not corporate or Literature Festival that actually contributes something to global artistic dialogue and its own cultural life but it doesn’t (well it does – the Text Festival but Manchester doesn’t acknowledge it). As Kurt Vonneghut would say: so it goes. So I can forget the Blogger nominations because I want Manchester to be more than it is - and so I turn to the Literature Festival programme.

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

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

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

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

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

Busy even on holiday

I've not really had time to blog this last week or more due to the Text Festival curating. Between now and early November is the busiest period of organisation. It is such a big labour that it has to be done in phases. The Text Festival website should be back live any day now with the first announcements of what and who's on but in the meantime there is now a Text Festival Facebook and Twitter.

This coming week I am off to Malta for a break - except while I am there I will be finishing my article for the Shortcut Europe Conference publication, the sleeve notes for Ben Gwilliam's disc of 'molto semplice e cantabile', my Nono sound-poem for the Luigi Nono Project, and my forthcoming collection for ifpthenq "The Tragedy of Althusserianism". I have a couple of long blog rants also on the go which may make it up here when I get back.

Sarah Sanders

During the Not at This Address exhibition I curated last July (blogged at the time) I noticed that most of the younger artists involved had very little sense of how to deal with a larger gallery space. This is not surprising really: young artists first show at degree shows which offer them a display space the size of a cupboard; if they are anyways successful in their early career they might show at an artfair, and these spaces are just slightly larger cupboards; after that it's a succession of small galleries or group shows, the latter offering little experience in spatial judgement either. Artists develop their practice and therefore the size of the spaces they show in over years. Young artists rarely get the opportunity to respond to the challenge of a big gallery. I got to wondering what would the young artists whom I rate do with a large gallery. What would they learn? And what would I learn too? So when Bury Art Gallery had a gap in the programme (due to a major chunk of its historic collection touring the far east), the chance to find out was available.

The first to get the opportunity was Sarah Sander, a young artist whom I have been championing for a while - I showed her in the last Text Festival and in Not at this Address. Phil Davenport also included her live writing act in William Blake & the Naked Tea Party.
As one would expect, Sarah admitted that the challenge of responding such a large space was quite daunting, but Sarah is a performative explorer. In consultation with assistant curator Kat McClung-Oakes (a talent that should also be acknowledged), Sarah interweaved two fields of experiment - a personal response to the more obscure more recent figurative acquisitions to the collection and her articulation of visceral drawing qua act.

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

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

Space reviewed

Robert Grenier's response to Space the Soldier who died for Perspective
http://sibila.com.br/index.php/sibila-english/1232-robert-grenier

The book is available from Veer Books
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc/publications/veer-books

uncontainable excitement

It looks like once a year I will receive an email from the Poetry Society inviting me to recommend ‘exciting new work’ that I might have come across, commissioned, etc., in the last 12 months to be considered for Carol Ann Duffy’s Ted Hughes Award for New Work, which she set up when she took over from Andrew Motion as Poet Laureate.

Somewhat bemused by the source of this request last year, I emailed them back to ask who the judges were going to be (as at the time of launch they hadn’t been announced). I received an email back telling me who they were – I forget now, look it up somewhere if you need to know – but it was obvious that the judges would be incapable of recognising new work if it held a gun to their heads, which is what I replied to the Poetry Society - to offer up real innovators would be to diminish them and validate a sham. The final communication from them took the form of the equivalent of a shrug.

And surprise, surprise, who should win the inaugural award than Duffy-lite Alice Oswald, “a nature poet who writes ‘very much in the tradition’ of Hughes”.

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

Etc

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

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

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

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

node:space #1

The first installation in node:space. Have I created a visual poem?

Or an architectural poem?

Viewing by appointment.

I'll be inviting other artists into node:space in future moments.

Duffy at the Tate

When I first heard that Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy had curated an exhibition called The Sculpture of Language at Tate Liverpool http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/CollectionDisplays?venueid=4&roomid=6299 my reaction was an equivalence of anger at the implications of this hegemonic banality and resignation that it was only to be expected.

For a while I intended to traipse over to Liverpool specially, so I could do write an informed critique. Noticeably there appear to have been no reviews of the show. Google just throws up the usual lazy journalism of reprinting the Gallery press release. A quick look at said-publicity, the list of works included, and the execrable sonnet Duffy wrote to accompany her selection made me begrudge the obvious waste of time and effort to actually go and see it but also realise that the information available is more than enough to know what’s wrong with it. Coincidentally I have been reading Tom Raworth’s latest “Windmills in Flames” which includes the appropriate response to Duffy ‘Coda to a Laureate’ – (first line: “If I could take my tongue out of your arse”).

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

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

Followed by 2 more stanzas of equal banality.

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

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

Busy

Blogging has take a back seat recently as I focus on putting the Text Festival together and preparing the Nono project. Despite the impending dark age initated by the new Government, I am hopeful that the Text Festival will still be a mighty gesture. I am losing count of how many artists are involved now. The main announcement of the programme will be in October but maybe I can whet your appetite by letting slip that Christian Bök will do his first UK readings at the Festival and Ron Silliman will be back - reading and with a surprising manifestation of Northern Soul, the poem he began during his last visit.

(These recently rediscovered illustrations are from my distance past (1980's) when I trained as a potter)

This Week

Two gigs this week:

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

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

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

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

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

www.otherroom.org

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

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

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

Dublin

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

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

Urban Moves in Bury

Guess The Winner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pollinators of Eden

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

Free CD with £3 entry fee...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Urban Moves

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

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

An Iraq Soap Opera

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

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

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

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

The Other Room