Stalin

The other day I was calling out the latest American Empire colour revolution on social media. It doesn't matter which one it was because I've counted another 2 or 3 more since I posted it. Anyway, some big-gob/bot/whatever (unknown to me but apparently a follower of other people I know), barged onto my time-line to accuse me of being a 'Stalinoid'. Hard to think of a more adolescently feeble 'insult', but it reminded me that while back I wrote a two-part piece about Stalin for my 'Dyer & Mahfouz' Collection. So this is a good excuse to roll it out:

The Birth of Stalin

Gerard Trehy had been an active shop steward in the building trade in the 1960s. He’d stood against old style bosses alongside the legendary firebrand Union man, ‘Red’ Eric Heffer. So, when I began work, my very first job, and almost immediately got ‘volunteered’/put myself forward to be a shop steward, I asked for his advice. He said: “the thing to watch out for is at some future union meeting or stewards committee, the top table will report that the employers have proposed some terrible change to working conditions or pay or holidays, whatever. And the bloke beside you will lean over and say – here, that’s outrageous, we can’t let them get away with that. Etc. etc. and he’ll get you wound up and feed you ammunition, make you angry to such a point that you will stand up and make an impassioned speech about how the union needs to stand and fight. And you will pull everyone else up to that pitch and the top table will agree to confront the bosses and you’ll be volunteered to be at the forefront because you are so passionate. And later when things get difficult, the bloke who sat next to you won’t be anywhere to be seen.”

And true enough, in only my second or third stewards meeting, the branch secretary reported an outrageous stunt from the bosses, and I leant over to the steward sitting next to me and said: “Here, we can’t let them get away with that. That’s fucking outrageous.”

The Triumph of Stalin

In the spring of this dissymmetry, singular and true, I am Stalin qua Stalin, to

the big picture, shaping the new individual, indexed to the double scission, 

fifth of five but with renewed undeniable music; I am remembered, 

fond of binary meets, the very Idea secretary of all meets and all joins

the warmth, the warmth in that household to preserve

an infinitely expanding tautology of action, singular and true, A

determination unsympathetic and dismissive assertions,

appropriations under-specified and my model axiom:

 “Never ask, command.”

        and by all accounts

    I won, to be fair.

 

 

Broadside

Soon after arriving in Portugal, I was introduced to the American artist Marsha McDonald by the inestimable Marton Koppany. It's a small world since it appears there's a fair degree of overlap between our networks, but we didn't know of each other until we met in Porto. It turns out that we also have a mutual friend in Robert Grenier, and maybe in a nod to the form of his 'Sentences', Marsha and I have collaborated on a Limited Edition 'Broadside'. 

The set of 7 prints features Marsha's photography juxtaposed with four of my new poems (Indigo, The Last Time, The Tree of Moments, and Types of Failure. 

They are available from me (tonytrehy@ymail.com) or Marsha (marsham6@gmail.com) for 10 euros (plus postage/packaging).

Funeral Poetry

Like any other sane/unindoctrinated person, I found the funeral propaganda around Queen Elizabeth II’s death and the Establishment’s rush to overwhelm critical thought with the rapid accession of ‘King’ Charles III to be infuriating and risible in equal measure. I am reminded of Picasso’s comment that after a walk in the countryside, he had ‘green’ indigestion and it had to be relieved with a green painting on return to his studio. So the steady stream of mind-numbingly stupid worshipful coverage became so indigestible that I needed to write a funeral poem. Almost coincident with this decision, the former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy published her commemoration in the Guardian, (Former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy shares poem to mark Queen’s passing | Carol Ann Duffy | The Guardian) which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be laugh out loud appalling – spoiler alert – it’s a list poem. (At this point I was going to quote a small sample but on re-reading it, the cringe is too great to stomach). Then the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage also knocked one out, (Floral Tribute, a poem for the Queen by Simon Armitage | Queen Elizabeth II | The Guardian) which turned out to be a fucking Acrostic. The Establishment claim that the Funeral is the most important event in history (yes, the narrative is that bad!) and their Establishment poet comes up with a cowardly acrostic flower poem. As an ex-primary school teacher I know commented, if one of her eight-year-olds had offered that she would have asked them to try again.

Although you know it subconsciously, it wasn’t until I saw these ‘poems’ that I fully realised how the moral, political and cultural bankruptcy and corruption of the UK was so clearly mirrored in its Official Verse Culture. As Charles Bernstein wrote in ‘My Way’:

“Poetry can interrogate how language constitutes, rather than simply reflects, social meaning and values. You can’t fully critique the dominant culture if you are confined to the forms through which it reproduces itself, not because hegemonic forms are compromised ‘in themselves’ but because their criticality has been commandeered.” (Yes, I know I am stretching it to connect Duffy and Armitage to the idea of cultural criticality).

All this randomly coincided with my current reading of Alain Badiou’s ‘The Immanence of Truths’ in which he articulates the ontological and evental structure of worlds. It’s a massive undertaking and too large a subject for here, but a key theme is the systemic finitude limiting societal change, and the operational covering-over of the possibility of thinking about change. Capitalism consumes everything with the idea that the dismal future is endless, unchangeable and theirs:

“Any system that maintains that the current laws of what exists will be confirmed indefinitely because they are deduced, insofar as their universe is constructible, from what has already been defined.”

In ‘Immanence’, Badiou identifies that change is very much possible and “a fundamental ethics can be derived, in three interrelated imperatives” to achieve it. The Queen’s funeral qua hegemon is an ethic challenge to humanity and to poetry as truth procedure - a challenge that Armitage and Duffy have clearly failed. Here is my poem: 

 

Endless

1        “You must always commit to an Idea” 

See that?

It’s passed that. A line of trees hopeful between two buildings, or maybe

as big as ‘let not another child be slain’, as strong as memory of stolen lands,

To create a pulsing ripple, that soliton which surfs even under their palimpsest,

This our secret opera in a key undefaced by crucifixion or commodity

or gangmasters for captive freedom.

Our delicate wont to violent negation is a vinculum to black and red posters

Untouched acts vs the fading replacement written in tepid ink

the discretion out of reach and living as if divined

Forever and passed there, 

you can see that?

 

2          “You must contribute to uncovering”

Clown Laureates offer the consolations of traffic management, uniform imbalances,

A planning conceit of property values, secretly waged, a chart of dominant percentages, 

with walking children, royally screwed, to exude the smell of spoilage and unpasteurised 

genitals, lined up

in good order, salutes, highborn as primitive and weakened to obtain a “good” 

remembering, our photos are the same as life in Queue Theory chicanery

or chicane being-for-death – let not another child be slain, remember?

Ordinal to name things, number things, and hierarchize them, mediated as to police

This recurring procession dream and rule as repetition.

  

3          “Open thought up to real infinity” 

With the Hierarchy of Mediations in transit by deletion, with each local gesture,

The joyous breeze of interruption of imaginary nations as the true value

As art preserves, with the promise of happiness, the memory of the goals that failed fade. 

We

to be earned can commit the happiness of thoughtcrime to increment, to replacement.

And that’s it. Bypass feudal linear procession. Use elevated biocular focus to see that:

Passed even that. A sombre toast: to the grand narratives of us 

in the absence of gods, kings, laureates, etc.

 

 

Writing: World-Building

 

As per the last blog, the first novel of my post-UK period, The Family Idiots, is near enough finished (just proofing, etc) so I have moved on to writing the next two books, in parallel and (sort of) intertwining: Urim and The Museum Quarter. Contrary to the implication of the title, The Museum Quarter is as much about museums as Sartre’s Roads to Freedom is about living in Paris or Lord of the Flies is about life on an island. Maybe its antecedence is closer to George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (without the OULIPO).

If you watch ‘how to write’ YouTube videos etc. (which I wouldn’t advise), one of the things often extolled is “world-building” your novel, a convincing world for the reader to navigate. The Museum Quarter is not about museums, but there are five museums in its world. Two or three of them are composites of museums I know well, but I wanted a New Art Museum, which needed to be authoritatively contemporary. So rather than conjure up something architecturally unconvincing, I turned to a real architect, Maurice Shapero, whom I curated in my last show in Bury Art Museum. After the show we completed a book of my poem ‘Architecture & Now’ and his drawings but Covid and related budget issues interfered with the final production. Although the new novel is set in an unspecified city, there is a steeply sloping site in Porto, slowly intersected by the curve of Rua Amaldo Leite and Rua da Mocidade da Arrábida, and dropping down from Campo Alegre to the Douro river, which I walk Barney through quite often and I began to see this as the location for the New Art Museum. 

I shared a Google maps screenshot to Maurice, hopeful that he’d be at least up for a quick sketch from his kitchen table which I could fill in the gaps novelistically. But it turns out novel ‘world-building’ has stepped up to a level, maybe even to a new genre. Architects rarely get a brief for such an ambitious site, where there is no budget limit and no planning bureaucracy, an opportunity for free architectural expression; this is the sort of non-brief I used to give artists I was curating. Who cares what the curator wants? It’s the artist that is doing the creating. And Maurice has embraced the brief: the Museum Quarter will have its New Art Museum (link). I look forward to the novel’s ‘characters’ wandering its halls incised into the slope (below):

I’m not going to say much more about the novel because the focus is on writing it rather than talking about writing it, but with five museums to wander around, in the same spirit, I have also invited one guest curator and various artists to exhibit in shows that won’t exist. Hopefully, the novel’s funders, ‘stakeholders’ and visitors to these museums are not going to be happy.

 

Writing 2022

For years while curating and directing Bury Art Museum and the Text Festival, I mostly put my own work on the backburner. My first publication 50 Heads (downloadable version here) was only written in 2006 because I was able to take a sabbatical, and was mostly written in Iceland, Netherlands, Japan and Italy. This became one of the features of subsequent publications with them written around the world at a creative distance from the day job. My second book was eponymously located in Reykjavik alongside my exhibition (alongside Dan Flavin & Alan Charlton) at Safn.

Reykjavik cover

Space The Soldier who died for Perspective (Veer Books) is even structured in sections identified for the location they were written or installed (Tampere, Berlin, Bertinoro, Melbourne, Budapest, Edinburgh). By the time my Bury projects had reach China my workload was so great that I sort of announced my retirement from writing with The End of Poetry .

So leaving Bury meant I could finally give my own work the concentration I had only been able to squeeze in for the last 20 years. Leaving the fetid corruption and racism of Brexit England gives me the context to quote Robert Graves that I have waited 40 years for: “Goodbye to all that”. 

So moving to Porto gives me one of the things that I find conducive for writing - detachment. The ill-health that triggered my retirement decision plus the pandemic made initial concentration difficult. And with my previous propensity to find a theoretical framework for my (curatorial) practice, one of the first things I distracted myself with was researching the answer to the problem I identified in Poetry as Thoughtcrime - in brief:

‘In this historic moment of crisis, where the omniscient capitalist lying data-god turns us into the raw material it consumes - Poetry is Thoughtcrime. But how do you commit that crime when every thought is predicted, manipulated and commodified?’  

I’m happy to say that I conceived a theory for the future of poetry and, by extended logic, other artforms. I shared an initial Manifesto with a handful of similarly-concerned artists and have it mostly written in what would have been my first post-Bury book - Poetry as Thoughtcrime. Then I had cause to pause. If I’d still been in Bury and curating, the theory would have formed the basis for a Text Festival, but I realised that this was just a habit of thought and that now I was not in Bury or curating, it was time for me to apply my analysis to my own work rather than providing a forum or a context for others - that can come later. In part as a deferment and part a compromise, I moved onto the second book, which would be the transition in literary practice. It struck me that frequently in history philosophers have ‘inserted’ a ‘prequel’ work to their major discovery that seeks to explain their methodology for their breakthrough later work. So I set off write my first poetry book since 2012 calling it In Search of Method. Let the book’s own introduction explain:

In Search of Method

In Search of Method is a lie.

In Search of Method is the conceit of sequential philosophers.

Jean-Paul Sartre called his 1957 precursor to the ‘Critique of Dialectical Reason’:

‘Search for a Method’.

The Rules of Rene Descartes’ ‘Discourse on Method’

contain the most detailed description of his method but magically

for the Search for Method, he never completed it, and never refers to it

in his published writings or correspondence. Alain Badiou, in ‘Logics of Worlds’

pauses before the launch, his stepping off - “Once we are in possession

of a Greater Logic, of a completed theory of worlds and objects, it is possible to examine on its own terms the question of change, 

especially the question of radical change, or of the event”.

They all do. Writing their method is to already know where it will end,

“we will adopt a method of maximal interiority”

“to show from the outset

that which is only fully intelligible at the end”

The Search for Method is the rigorous path of the poet.

 

So my poetic investigation tests four methods of (re)searching:

Lévy Flight - the evolutionary approach, favoured by sharks and people who are lost.

Descartes’ Rules based methodology.

Seeing To It That (STIT) Theory - The contemporary theoretical system parsing the nature of knowing and action.

Separation & Lapse method developing the Anthropology of the Name, Sylvain Lazarus’s seminal investigation of thought.

Except for the conclusion, this book is near enough finished now too.

I’ve been invited to curate an intervention for Synapse International and expect to structure it around the Search of Method, plus pointing the direction of my new theories. And I’ll be doing an online work called The Answer on Rachel Defay-Liautard’s maintenants-synapse 

Despite all this apparent precedence for poetic output, not a lot of people know that my decision to write poetry originally was only because it was quicker to write than fiction. So more importantly and exciting for me, I am just completing my first novel in years, The Family Idiots, and have made a start on my second, Urim.

A couple of other things are floating around. I’ve just written a foreword for a collaboration between Rachel Defay-Liautard between Marton Koppány, and I’ve been invited by MarshaMacDonald to work on a limited-edition broadsheet, which will be called Hurry/Depression.

 

Lawrence Weiner

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

Sculpture 

0. The object of making your opponent weep descriptions 

between the upper and lower structures in vertebrates 

forming the framework of the mouth, containing the teeth, 

the parts of tool or machine. That body language material 

with the tongue intropunitive instead of angry, anger our 

faults are most obvious as nothing hides them breasts 

move as sacks of liquid dynamic contents. The knife 

fixation on things in evaluation, of sweat-scented straps 

forward and back in the infantile world of ready-made 

values, woman, the happy or resigned slave lives allowing 

both misogyny and visionary context. Scattering 

amplitude internationally is that difference in any given 

place. Choice language to present material realities, 

histories that I only deal with divergent objects and all 

translatable to stand outside a less human presence more 

profound for their human attachment to non-living things 

and construction of bridges to be crossed as opposed too 

catalogued: 1 

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

Winter with Helmut Lemke

the WINTER on Vimeo 

Helmut Lemke posts 'Winter', the last in his seasonal art 'lectures' featuring his reading of my specially written poem: 

Zugzwang as the Fourth Part registering Transition to Rumours of Winter and End 

Transition from rumours of winter, positional to suns rising over there (points in that direction) rather than over there (points in that direction).

Record suns replace cold lyric frost

Counting as

Drift

As Autumn’s pension arrangements are now irrelevant to the quartet. To hang on . . .                                                                                                    to hang on

To the field of action mostly taking place at night or winter daylight, passed celebrating the cold last day,

The series addition delays to die in the gap, immortal but only by implication, by hope, by leaving the new clear to go on

precarious in Queue Theory

waking each morning darker

our moment of inertia and the failing capacity to self-heal telomere degradation

This rhythm of fourths, a promise we aim to break, weakened, diagnosed, conditioned to lose

winter as weary

our Lévy Flight bouncing between this point and that point

frantic without knowing

the unannealed countdown

…eighth, twenty-ninth, thirtieth, thirty-first.

Poetry as Thoughtcrime

The Poetic Imperative in the Age of Surveillance

In returning to writing from curating, I find the absence of a unified theory of poetry distracting, especially in these dark times. I have “Architecture & Now” (my poem with Maurice Shapero’s architectural drawings) coming out shortly and my hybrid-poetry collection “Dyer & Mahfouz” is rapidly taking shape, but a theoretical framework is missing. Thus, I am preparing just that: “Poetry as Thoughtcrime”. This aims to examine the huge existential problem facing contemporary writing and includes my manifesto for what to do about it. The analysis flows from the curatorial practice developed in the Text Festivals from 2005 to 2014. After that, I was creatively focused on the projects in China, which took my attention away from theoretical and practical next steps that should follow from the Text. In retrospect, this post-Text hiatus gave me a parallax view and distance from which my vision for the future could mature.

The full analysis will be available soon as a publication, but with the request from Synapse for an extract, and the near apocalyptic turn of world events in 2020, it feels imperative to offer some form of the new thinking. The starting point for any analysis of future direction has to acknowledge the backdrop of the crises of Late Capitalism, Brexit, Trump, and of course the big one, climate catastrophe; in this truncated disaster timescape, the hope that the post-virus world will be a brighter future already looks delusional; indeed, though I have referenced capitalism as the evil, there are credible arguments that it has already been replaced by an economic system that is even worse .

When Mark Fisher bleakly observed “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” you sort of optimistically imagine that he meant capitalism being ended with something better. Anyway, increasingly the massive crisis of the pandemic and capitalism’s responsibility and response continues to fit my initial analysis of the dangers we face as humans, and specifically, the challenge for writers isn’t materially changed.

My analysis does have an implicit fatalism – the longer version of this essay investigates the implication of writing in the countdown to extinction.

My project then will be as follows: as with all manifestos, the opening essay (a taster for which this is) is an analysis for the scale of the dangers we face – ‘Poetry as Thoughtcrime’. This is followed by a Manifesto, which posits an imperative direction for writing, and, more specifically, a unified theory for poetry in this age of multiple global crisis. In support of this statement and proposal, there are a series of related essays examining the implications for literary production which include a new vision for internationalism, a recognition of the inadequacy of Conceptual Poetry to meet the challenges, the poetic space within Post-Truth and the distractions/implications of dominant tropes in popular culture.

There are two ‘problems’ writers no longer have. From Albert Camus “A writer writes to a great extent to be read (as for those who say they don’t, let us admire them but not believe them).” And from Derek Beaulieu - “Don’t protect your artwork. Give it away. Trust your audience. Be your own pirate.” We have entered the age when everything is read and you don’t have to give your artwork away, because it is taken at the moment of conception. In fact, more than that, writing will soon be heteronomically manipulated in advance of its creation. In this regard, as the conceptualist writers argue, writers will not be the special category which they have claimed for themselves, as we progress into the end of Personhood.

In the full essay, I expand on the threats to Personhood (“You”) through three dynamic appropriations: commodification of consciousness, addictive attention sequestration and behaviour manipulation. For the sake of brevity here, I will just touch on some of the main sources of analysis. Shoshana Zuboff’s ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ articulates the final stage of capitalism where humans themselves are the commodity, humans are ‘farmed’:

“Surveillance capitalism migrated to Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon – and became the default option in most of the tech sector. It now advances across the economy from insurance, to retail, finance, health, education and more, including every “smart” product and “personalised” service.” … “Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data … fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later”. So “Computer-based personality judgements are more accurate than those made by humans” - Facebook knows you better than members of your own family do. “The team found that their software was able to predict a study participant’s personality more accurately than a work colleague by analysing just 10 ‘likes’’; and “Belgian police now say that the Facebook is using ‘likes’ as a way of collecting information about people and deciding how best to advertise to them. As such, it has warned people that they should avoid using the buttons if they want to preserve their privacy” (Andrew Griffin, the Independent). With personal data becoming the world’s most valuable commodity, the best analogy I’ve seen comes from Digital Ethicist Tristan Harris where he likens the digital model of you to a voodoo doll. Every action you take, real or digital, updates a more perfect copy of you which can then be used to predict what you will think, do or consume next, but more than that it can be tested, digital ‘pins’ can be poked into it to see how the real you will react to stimulus, and building on that, can be used to alter you. Algorithms are developing in ways that allow companies to profit from our past, present, and future behaviour – or what Shoshana Zuboff describes as our “behavioural surplus.”

You’ve already heard this. You know that your data is farmed. You know governments sell citizens’ records to the private sector. You know that facial recognition and location technologies have started following you – you’ve seen it on TV from China, cameras that identify citizens crossing the road wrong, etc. Every time you upload a photo, every time you download an app that makes an comic avatar of you or turns your selfie into a Renaissance style painting, or shows what you’d look like if you were a different gender, etc, you give more of yourself away, and make the software better at recognising everybody else.

Even more extreme Microsoft were, until recently exposed, working with the Israelis on implant technology for children; and under cover of the pandemic the transnational digital passport system ID2020 is actively being promoted, which will be able to restrict movement on the basis of your health status. It’s no coincidence that American police departments are using Covid Tracking Apps to identify Black Lives Matter protestors. “The internet is, in its essence, a machine of surveillance. It divides the flow of data into small, traceable, and reversible operations, thus exposing every user to surveillance”, writes Boris Groys.

Predictive data will tune and herd our behaviour towards the most profitable outcomes. It is not enough to automate information about us; we need to be consumable consumers. As one data scientist observed: “We can engineer the context around a particular behaviour, and force change that way … We are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance.”  Herbert Marcuse wrote in One Dimensional Man “The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centres the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to it.”

The final step will be AI. One might imagine that AI research is driven by the spirit of philosophic or scientific enquiry, but fundamentally it is business driven: AI, when successful, will be able to work faster, cheaper and beyond the limits of labour laws. With human factory labour already replaced, companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook have the automation of white-collar jobs directly within their sights. “It is no surprise that the idea of creative machines is coterminous with the ascent of platform capitalism. Art is among the last problems for which a human is still the best solution. No ruling class can exist without an appeal to the aesthetic, as almost any page from art history will show. To administer the aesthetic – to control the terms of what counts as an image, or what constitutes art – is to rule both the mind and the body, to influence the whole sensate world of human emotion and expression.” Mike Pepi (Frieze).

The world has become more digital in response to the Covid19 lockdowns, so the dynamics of control and subsummation are magnified. You may think that this is over-egging the threat of Surveillance and even that this is a First World anxiety, but the combination of corporate capitalism, rapidly expanding dictatorships and controlling propensity of neoliberal-fascist government, there are numerous examples of not only the dangerous direction of travel but significant inhuman initiatives. Orwell’s prediction - “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull” will be surpassed very soon when that few centimetres has gone too. 

This is not a luddite rejection of the digital, we can only live in now, the 21^st Century. But facing a more voracious form of capitalism: how can artists respond? Artists responses to surveillance hegemony fall into 3 categories (ignoring the blind innocents farmed as human cattle):

Lamentation - “the Internet, completely and unreflectively subject to market processes and dedicated to monopolists, controls gigantic quantities of data used not at all pansophically, for the broader access to information, but on the contrary, serving above all to program the behaviour of users, as we learned after the Cambridge Analytica affair. Instead of hearing the harmony of the world, we have heard a cacophony of sounds, an unbearable static in which we try, in despair, to pick up on some quieter melody, even the weakest beat.” Olga Tokarczuk (Nobel Lecture)

Compromised Embrace - There are writers, certainly within the Uncreative/Conceptual movement who piratically celebrate the ‘creative’ utility of technology, the prospect of AI creativity, the literate viruses etc, etc., but in the context of this consciousness Final Solution, their commitment is reminiscent of  Buddhist Monks willing to self-immolate: they prove their absolute belief; you can be impressed with their rigour and their faith but you have considerable doubt that they will be reborn in their next life. Notwithstanding this zeal and accepting that conceptual literary techniques will have a place in the way forward I will propose, we can also accept that there will be writers and readers who will choose subsummation.

Subversion – There are many technology critical artists mostly reliant on guerrilla or subversive utilisation of digital tools – a good example is Pip Thornton’s ground-breaking critiquing of linguistic capitalism using the system algorithms themselves to question the appropriation of value.

I contend that these strategies ultimately fail to free human creativity. None of them address the scale of the threat and will be subsumed by it. So where does poetry come in? Without Romanticism or wishful thinking, how is poetry answer to be all-consuming capitalist behemoth? After all, if you look at the canonical moments when poetry is addressed seriously, it doesn’t generally measure up. Everyone’s first thought, of course: Plato bans it from the Republic; and the go-to in times of totalitarian threat, George Orwell is even less enthusiastic: “There can be no doubt that in our civilization poetry is by far the most discredited of the arts, the only art, indeed, in which the average man refuses to discern any value. Arnold Bennett was hardly exaggerating when he said that in the English-speaking countries the word ‘poetry’ would disperse a crowd quicker than a fire-hose.”  Interestingly though, Orwell soften his dismissal of poetry in the context of the totalitarian: “Poetry might survive, in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts, such as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial,” and “It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer, though a poet … might possible find it breathable.” Maybe his observation of discredit becomes a utility: “It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effect on prose … To begin with, bureaucrats and other ‘practical’ men usually despise the poet too deeply to be much interested in what he is saying…It is therefore fairly easy for a poet to keep away from dangerous subjects and avoid uttering heresies: and even when he does utter them, they may escape notice”.  It would be a pretty lame revolutionary claim to posit irrelevance and inefficacy as the resistance space against Surveillance Capitalist. However, these ‘weaknesses’ have the strength in the context of the commodification of Personhood of being an agency with intrinsically no value. As Guy Debord observed: “Poetry is becoming more and more clearly the empty space, the antimatter, of consumer society, since it is not consumable”. So, in this historic moment of crisis, where the omniscient god they have created turns to consumption of us, its flock - Poetry is thoughtcrime. But how do you commit that crime? There are already programmes that create artificial poetry. So, poetry as thoughtcrime must take a specific resistance form: I will lay out what that is in the second (Manifesto) essay.

Conjugating The Verb ‘To Say Something About Extinction’

This week the Arctic Circle reached the highest temperature ever recorded. We are rapidly approaching, if we haven't already passed, the point where the evidence for climate change is the evidence for extinction. This is my contribution from my forthcoming collection Dyer & Mahfouz.

Conjugating The Verb ‘To Say Something About Extinction’

Clapping for Capitalists with Children. Quasicrystalline mannered 

Between the amorphous poset of the dead and completely dead.

Young birds fly from the nest or fall like discarded beer cans, late 

night pizza boxes, young detritus. Tiny delicate birds decathect

With or without us, profitcunts bijective to deathcunts reboot

exciting joy at new products - a false antecedent and a false 

consequent atmosphere overloaded with the vertical electric 

charge in the planetary boundary layer of aerosol particles. A

picture – foot-stamping won’t help, you can’t swim in your boots.

The extreme separation anxiety of our anomalous atmosphere,

Decaying as ignoble gas; maybe, we weren’t supposed to make it.

Wealth can provide independence of mind. Wealth 

affords one a position of natural leadership and trust. 

Wealth enables one to live more healthfully, with fewer of 

the

Brexit Poem

As Brexit is upon us, I think now is a good time for the Brexit poem, extracted from my collection in progress 'Dyer':


Terms & Conditions


Is there no question about my relationship to an auxetic good 
rejected? Lossless compression, intropunitive to distract 
from a lifetime’s facial recognition, as a practical matter
To both appellant cases of a rules-based system,
To storms in the guise of good, contrary to the season’s darkness,
our fugal rebirths past the revenge of deathcunts, the fading light
not far from this maladroit crowd's ignoble strife rehearses
echo bone crepitus.

Leaving Bury

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

I think I can leave Bury satisfied with my achievements. 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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