The Moment of Text

Sean Bonney commented during his reading at the Other Room that no-one writes manifestos these days (so one of the poems performed functioned as one); there is a sense that such change-the-world declarations are too grandiose for modern times – so of course, the first Text Festival launched with a manifesto. Modelled on John Cage’s Credo for the Future of Music, it is a complex of themes but I can pull out an overarching statement:

“Conventional language is about its subject and with the ubiquity of (commercial) typography, the omnipresence of a plenary uniformist language in the public domain has enmeshed the text into the ‘efficient’ and ‘transparent’ – principles of graphic design/language unified as the visual hegemony of packaging, identity and commodity. The aural debris of furniture music burying consciousness in organised marketing noise is the shared fate for text. Restricting the definition of literacy to consensualised standard public organisation, language is co-opted to approved central meanings and decanted through a hierarchy of mediations to allow only poetry expressions of exemplary personal narratives. The question of form is our only constant connection with the past. Although the great forms of the past were the sonnet or free verse, Text, the future will dialectically rise from a Glass Bead Game of
Parataxis
Intertextuality
Materiality
Spatialisation
Restricted Languages
Faced with the paradox of language’s militarisation and de-militarisation, invention of new language forms, new literacies, language as a material and field of enquiry must be the response to the challenge of changing experience. Innovation is the negation of the given – the continuity of discovery beyond the colonized sector and the future of text, will rest not with the gatekeepers, but as it always has, with the restless, the investigators of language who disclose and construct experience and meanings in the substantial ambiguity of language.”

It is the nature of manifestos that they are primarily a negation of the current as much as prediction the forthcoming breakthrough: The Text was written from my perception that there was change in the air, that at the beginning of the new century we faced one of those historic moments when something new would be made. After two Text Festival’s it is noticeable that language in art is an increasingly prominent element of what is going on globally. A look at the latest issue of the art magazine ArtWorld, for instance, shows text-based art on virtually every page, and even a feature in the Reviews section under the title “Basel: the joy of text” surveying the “preponderance of interesting text works: that genre, seen only in somewhat predictable neon at last year’s fairs, showed plenty of wit and provocation while playing off the way in which words can be both abstract and meaningful.” Having seen all these works at the fair myself, except for Elisabetta Benassi’s “Telegram from Buckminster Fuller to Isamu Noguchi Explaining Einstein’s Theory of Relativity” (how much does my soft spot for Fuller influence that?); I found most of the work still “somewhat predictable” and from a poet’s viewpoint, somewhat linguistically light. ArtWorld is interest as it is the only art magazine I know which has a poetry page. Sadly, while the magazine’s art coverage reports and critiques contemporary practice, its poetry is mainstream and therefore more than somewhat predictable. In this month’s issue, there is a poor poem by Sean O’Brien inspired by a painting by Jock McFadyen. Jeffrey Side has a good piece on O’Brien at http://jeffrey-side.blogspot.com/2009/08/sean-obrien-and-seamus-heaney.html

Already mentioned here, text work made it to the London ICA (Poor.Old.Tired.Horse.), and I hear on the grapevine that Leeds City Gallery scouted out the Text Festival in preparation of them doing a text show. Even the Serpentine Gallery is preparing a Poetry event in the October. I will be meeting Hans Ulrich Obrist next week to discuss the projected two-day Poetry Marathon. This event will be the fourth in the series of Marathons presented by the Serpentine Gallery, the first being the Interview Marathon, 2006 during which Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed 66 leading architects, artists, philosophers, writers, film-makers and theorists over a 24-hours. This was followed by the Experiment Marathon, 2007, 50 live experiments by leading artists, writers, musicians, architects and scientists and the Manifesto Marathon 2008 which presented 70 manifestos for the 21st century over a two day futurological conference – so it turns out that there actually is a lot of manifesto production going on after all.

VOLTA5

and tomorrow

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

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

TEXT FESTIVAL

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

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

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

Holbein to Tillmans

As mentioned the Schaulager is a great space and experience to visit. From Wikipedia: “Designed by the renowned architectural office of Herzog & de Meuron under commission from the Laurenz Foundation, the Schaulager was opened in 2003 in Münchenstein outside Basel and was conceived as an open warehouse that provides the optimal spatial and climatic conditions for the preservation of works of art. The collection of the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation forms the main core of the Schaulager. The institution functions as a mix between public museum, art storage facility and art research institute. It is primarily directed at a specialist audience but is also open to the general public for special events and the annual exhibitions.”

Coincident with last year’s Basel was a brilliant double show of Andrea Zittel and Monica Sosnowka, both beautifully displayed in the pure white spaces. To allow the Kunstmuseum to receive the Van Gogh landscapes show, the former’s collection moved to the Schaulager this year. Last year’s experience had been so good, I wondered whether what appeared to be a convenience driven survey could be particularly interesting. Curatorially it is a tour de force. The concept of the show consciously views the works, both contemporary and historical, with today’s eyes. The brochure talks of the astonishing connections between the works – this hyperbole is slightly misplaced though I think. Many of the connections are very striking such as a great accumulating presence of On Kawara date paintings (http://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/13/work_1309.htm) circulating Fischli and Weiss Table installation – the latter probably would have left me cold but in this juxtaposition Fischli & Weiss became as potent an existential presence as Kawara. Another great one is Joseph Beuys’ 1965 “Snowfall” made of 32 felt blankets weighing down fir tree trunks on the floor, beside a Mountain landscape with smashed trees from the 1620s. It read as a criticism to say the brochure is hyperbolic; I’d also say it is falsely modest: The monumental outer wall on the lower storey is hung “like a mine of still unformed raw material. Countless paintings are spread out, only roughly sorted, above, beside, and beneath one another across the entire length of the wall. Each painting can stand for itself, but at the same time it invites to look within the spacious presentation for its partner or groups to which it could belong.” This could even be called disingenuous: as, far from it having a sense of categorising still to come, it actually stands as one of the most subtly balanced and controlled installation I have ever seen. The curator who organised that wall has one of the finest eyes I have ever come across.

As a footnote, it is interesting to compare this show with the Giacometti show and the Visual Encounters – Africa, Oceania and Modern Art which are both on at the Fondation Beyeler which I saw earlier in the week http://www.beyeler.com/. Another great architect's building (Renzo Piano). The Schaulager also features a couple of Giacometti’s which are much better served by being given lots of space to breathe and therefore carry the existential potent that you expect from his work; the Beyeler installation packs in too much work and in the crowding (added to by the huge visitor numbers) the sculptures are distracted and lessened. The paintings come across as much stronger because standing front of them framed alone on white walls they remain powerfully intense. The Visual Encounters installation has some very fine set piece juxtapositions: the connecting space between the two shows features 9 Giacometti figures connected by a long Monet water lilly painting to some wood carved figures from Cameroon in front of a Cezanne; A gallery of Rothko paintings with vitrines of African masks, Leger paintings with Oceanic sculptures, more Cezanne Bathers with work from Mali, etc. (Mondrian doesn’t work in this context I think); but there is something strangely unsurprising about the Encounters, in a sense it is too balanced spatially. The Schaulager manages to be perfectly tuned while offering the tingle of risk, and the pleasure of seeing the risk pulled off.

Brunch at the Schaulager

What a great place is the Schaulager
http://www.schaulager.org/en/index.php

Art Basel 09

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

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

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

Art Unlimited & Liste 09

Actually except for the free Champagne, it was pretty limited, and Liste 09 - supposedly the feast of new and emerging artists & galleries, was decidedly lacking in anything worthy of emergence. Hopefully, the Art Fair proper tomorrow will be more interesting.

A Boat as a Vessel

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

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

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

Better little Gestures - “The Madness of Madelon Vriesendorp”

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

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

Little Theatre of Gestures

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

City Trees

Basel is delightful in June, and quiet this week, with all the art crowd at the Venice Bienniale until next week. What you can't get from a blog/twitter is the miraculous smell in the streets. We are pretty sure that it is the trees which are in flower. Being a city boy, I don't know or particularly care what type they are, just remember that Andy Warhol once complimented City Trees over their country cousins because "they work harder" - this week in Basel they are putting extra effort in.

The Olympics of the Art World

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

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

Art Basel

The rail trip from Stuttgart to Basel takes about 2 hours and is straight forward except for the dashing change at Karlsruhe. In Basel I stayed with the excellent Swiss artist and Director of the Institute of Curatorship and Education, Marianne Eigenheer http://cms.ifa.de/en/exhibitions/exhibitions-abroad/bk/kunstraum-deutschland/marianne-eigenheer/type/98/ . Shortly after I arrived Frank Hettig and Ed Beardsley (from Bonhams in Los Angeles) arrived. Upon which we set off for the first big opening Art Unlimited http://www.artbasel.com/go/id/elj/ at which invited international galleries show one artist only. We met up with Patrick Panetta one of the curatorial partnership of KP in Berlin (www.kimura-panetta.de) – we had been set up to meet to discuss a possible show for me at their space. Standing in the sunshine, drinking champagne is part of the scene of meeting old and new friends, new contacts, new projects, and of course being seen. I had a most interesting conversation with Eva & Adele, http://www.evaadele.com/INTRO.HTM who are an artist collaboration gender persona who have recently shown at KP.

Inside Art Unlimited itself there was little of interest. The only work that stood out was a beautifully lyrical video piece called Morakot (Emerald) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul from Thailand http://artforum.com/print.php?id=20205&pn=picks&action=print . While the most striking thing was a whole railway carriage shipped all the way from China containing an installation (which I didn’t queue for). It was striking more for the exaggeration of its presence in the hall, which counterpointed the problem with the majority of the exhibits: the hall itself; in this very difficult spatial context, galleries had individual display areas but these areas were predominantly the temporary trade fair display set up, which meant that even works that could have been interesting seemed out of place, not really there. As with much of Art Basel, this doesn’t seem to matter because the most important thing is the gallery/artist having achieved the status/value to have made the selection.

Then we walked a few blocks to Liste. http://www.liste.ch/ .This was 4 floors of gallerists, showing young artists from all over the world – it was like a giant degree show, really, with not much standing out. I was pleased to meet David Thorpe at long last – he is currently working on the new contemporary programme for the Royal Academy in London.
The only artist who stood out at Liste was Dean Hughes http://www.artfacts.net/index.php/pageType/artistInfo/artist/45960 - which is ironic since he was born in Bury, had a work in the Text Festival and has just shown at the Cube in Manchester. The Liste crowd was generally younger than Art Unlimited, overall production values were lower and less curatorially experienced, but it had the energy that you’d expect when you fill a 4 storey building with many hundreds of young artists trying to attract attention and at the same time have a good time.

At the end of the evening I finally hooked up with Patrick Panetta. We had an interesting conversation about my recent installations (Reykjavik: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGBo4jjzWxj4PUmViIzAIavVcBF44LbIJrH26FUvt1biLBNMTo87UDAJU4H-m7vmCaoycxIY9giBs6-QH-C-5GW3N93yiB9B3z3aYy9xqZE5jFht7QrCBKSJU_cexC5RRWW2HJxA/s1600-h/Reykjavik+3.JPG ) and he talked about the KP space in Berlin. Their concern is the notion of relevant questions for the current moment in the situation of Berlin and its art scene of maybe 500 spaces; what and how does a gallery/artist address a world which has so many other voices speaking at the same time? So far the ‘shows’ have been shows about the nature and experience of shows, their parties, their conventions, non-happenings. Patrick is rigorously committed to working with artists at the edge of the essence of their practice as artists. We are beginning a developmental conversation leading somewhere.

The Art Fair proper: http://www.artbasel.com/go/id/ss/lang/eng/ The crowd at the VIP opening, as the name suggests, was quite different from the other two openings – very wealthy collectors, movie stars, international curators and artists, and conspicuously beautiful well-dressed women. Unexpectedly I didn’t get to dive straight into the ‘art’. I had arranged to meet a German artist, Christoph Dalhausen who took me up to the coolly designed VIP lounge, where young assistants in fashioned uniforms served double expressos on demand. We talked for some time after which I rejoined Marianne Eigenheer to begin the marathon of walking around the endless avenues of contemporary art displays, most of which sell to collectors and dealers for 6 figure sums, contacts are made and met, business cards are exchanged. The credit crunch and economic downturn has apparently slowed the sales activity since last year, but a lot of business is done after the Fair so you can’t really tell on the ground how it is going. I recall Alan Charlton telling me that some gallerists put red dots beside works to give the impression of rampant demand and therefore the urgency to buy, buy, buy.

Of course the problem with so much art is that very quickly you can’t see it. The only memorable piece for me was a large Sol leWitt. I also found photo texts by Lalla Essaydi (Morroco) interesting, and Marianne introduced me to the work of Lothar Baumgarten, which I liked. After a pleasant lunch across the street with Frank and Ed, we had the pleasure of meeting my friend Maurizio Nannucci, http://www.maurizionannucci.it/ a real excitement after a gap of 3 years. We had a short conversation and agreed his involvement in the Text Festival next year.

After that, another weary session of touring round and then back for a nap before the late European premier of Lawrence Weiner’s ‘porn-film’ MILK IN WATER EXISTS. It was amusing queuing with the art crowd to get into a porn cinema, no doubt a joke LW intended. The wipe-able seats were wide with movable arms and plenty of leg room resonating the cinema’s more regular salivating clientele. This crowd was mainly young.

The film was an edited sex orgy in a gallery involving soapy-smooth young art students, with occasional overlaid Weiner phrases, fragments of his/their conversation about architecture and structure, and passing epigrams from him. I found the piece problematic. I have seen earlier Weiner films with similar use of naked bodies and it seemed locked into a previous time, and certainly a time before AIDS. This aspect was made more questionable by the only black male participant being the only one wearing a condom. IS THIS REALITY GENERAL OR SPECIFIC was frequently asked in the film; the ‘actors’ answered ‘general’; I felt that the condom (and the gum they were chewing, strangely) made it specific. You could see that Weiner was relating ideas of structure and materiality to the biological human reality, but it needed serious editing.

Next day, we were too exhausted to return for Weiner’s public conversation so I don’t know whether these issues were discussed. Having seen the manifestations of Art Basel I had come to see, I set off to the Kunsthalle Basel, which had a very dull show not worth discussing and the Basel Architekturmuseum which was not dull. I nearly didn’t go in as it had a show titled “re-sampling ornament”, but it was really excellent http://www.sam-basel.org/index.php?page=ornament_e Then I went across to the Basel Kunstmuseum – a massive collection to walk round. Legs got tired. High points for me were the Giacomettis and a surprising Albers piece called Fugue. Both fired me up for the Canon poems. By this time I was tiring fast so I found somewhere that looked nice for lunch but was ordinary Then I returned to base. Done.
After a good nap, I got back into the Canon meaning to start Albers or Giacometti but instead finished Tal’s Best Games. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Tal

On my last day, Marianne and I went to the Schaulager http://www.schaulager.org/ - “Schaulager is the home for the works in the collection of the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation that are not currently on exhibition. It is a new kind of space for art. It is neither museum nor a traditional warehouse. Schaulager is first and foremost a response to the old and new needs for the storage of works of the visual arts. It dispenses with box storage and transforms the foyers of the exhibition halls into autonomous facilities, independent of any museum, with specific qualities and functions.” A great concept, a great space, great architecture (Herzog & de Meuron) and great art. The exhibitions by Monika Sosnowska and Andrea Zittel excellent and reason enough on their own for the trip to Basel.