Foreigners

There's been a spate of museum ‘what-to-do-about-Brexit’ conferences/briefings since the EU referendum - a symptom of the uncertainty which museums (and everyone else) faces at this time. A fundamental problem for museums is that one of the founding values of their purpose, liberal progress, faces its darkest threat since WW2. As custodians of history, Museums (should) recognise more than most that we have been here before - rising hate crime, xenophobia, populist nationalism/fascism, and now Trump in the White House adding gangster capitalism and climate change denial. Chinese military officials openly operate on the assumption of the 'practical reality' of Sino-US war and, even since I started writing this, Putin has told the Russian air force to prepare for war. We now know what it felt like in Germany in 1933. The barbarians are at the gate and this time we have no excuse for ignorance – we have the lessons of history.

So what will the museums do? There’ll be rhetoric of more cultural democracy, participation, increased access etc. Museums have been educating and engaging with their communities for decades.... but their communities still voted to leave the EU. In the same way, Bury Art Museum has presented its audience with an internationalist programme for more than 15 years; its cultural aspiration being that Bury people shouldn’t need to go to Berlin or Basel to see the best international contemporary art, people in Berlin or Basel should have to come to Bury. But Bury was also one of the towns in which the majority voted for Brexit. 

So what should museums do? Cultural professionals often claim that it is a function of culture to challenge. In truth, I can think of very few museums that ever really challenge. How often have you left a gallery feeling challenged? And now culture faces an existential challenge and it cannot fail to meet it. The assault on humanity, decency, truth, even life on earth has been bewildering fast and, taken aback, the response of civilised society has been slow and confused.

The International Committee for Museums (ICOM) has a conference called 'Exhibitions Without Borders' this summer in Puerto Rico - a dependant US territory and therefore subject to Trump's proposed ban on Muslims entering the country. I asked ICOM what their position was going to be on this as clearly the exclusion of Muslim museums would be an anathema to the values of the organisation. ICOM and US-ICOM have announced that the ban is contrary to the values of museums, but is that enough? The US courts have knocked back the Trump ban but this is no time for complacency, the Regime are coming back with more bile. Maybe resistance is mobilising in the American Museums – I know that MOMA responded by showing artists from the banned countries and the Davis Museum  in Massachusetts removed artworks by immigrant artists leaving empty walls. So what can museums do? ('Community engagement', 'cultural democracy' blah, blah, have their place, but don't face the crisis head-on). 

Bury Art Museum and Sculpture Centre already has an international programme; and in terms of challenging, it is currently showing Riiko Sakkinen's critically sharp 'ABC of Capitalism',  Juntae Teejay Hwang uncompromising ‘Angry Hotel Propaganda’ (left) and Jez Dolan’s queer ‘Diary Drawings’ and 60/50. But Brexit, Trump and rising racism require a specific response. So this summer I’ll be curating an exhibition called ‘Foreigners’.

This won't be a show about immigration or refugees; it won't even be a show about foreignness. It won’t romanticise the Foreign as Other. We are being told to fear foreigners, to hate them, to blame them for any and every problem we face. The Foreigners exhibition will be a cultural action that defies fear with hope.

It is my belief that Museums should do more than collect/preserve history, they are part of the process of making it; the narratives we lay down now form our future past. This is a dark moment in history, the future of humanity and truth is at stake: Museums have to be on the right side of History.

We are accepting submissions from artists to be in the show at artgallery@bury.gov.uk

Listen Backwards to Advance

Today Helmut Lemke launched Listen Backwards to Advance (LBtA) in Bury. For the whole of 2017 he will work from the starting point of an archive of all his previous work to move his practice forward. He has moved everything that has anything to do with his artistic activities into the basement of the Fusilier Museum, opposite the Bury Art Museum – a process of creating a public archive, investigating a 40 year career in sound art as a durational public performance. It examines a European sound art practice through rigorous investigations of past work. This project unpacks one person’s creative practice and collaborations across Europe.

LBtA will be performed in two stages – a research and development stage from Jan to June and a second stage where he will follow questions that have been identified in the R&D stage.

The R&D and critical investigation will be public for 5.5 months in Bury Art Museum (Jan-17 - June-17) investigating and questioning issues that have determined and driven his practice.

As a performative event and ongoing exhibition he will create a publicly accessible Archive (1977-2017): Objects, Photos, Videos, Sound Recordings, Writing, Publications, Drawings, Sound Machines.

He will:

• ·      Hold a series of PUBLIC consultations and round table discussion to focus on elements of practice,
• ·      Catalogue previous work and documentation,
• ·      Reconstruct installations as temporary experiences,
• ·      Perform extracts of work,
• ·      Invite experienced practitioners and thinkers (1 individual and 1 panel per month) to:
• ·      exchange knowledge and experience
• ·      define relevant historic steps and developments in sound art
• ·      extrapolate and critique significant chapters of his artistic journey.

 I wrote the following essay for Helmut Lemke’s installation during the 2013 Venice Biennale, and thought now is a good time to repost it (with a slight edit) to explain the important of his researches in Bury in the coming year:

Since the 1970's Helmut Lemke has developed site-specific concerts, performances and installations. His endeavours have taken him to concert halls and outdoor markets, to Galleries and Museums and to the frozen seas off Greenland, to Function Rooms of Pubs and to International Festivals. He has presented his work all over the globe, collaborating with other Sound Artists and Musicians, with Dancers and Scientists, Visual Artists and Architects, Poets and Archaeologists, Performance Artists and Wildlife Rangers. He has experienced many audible sounds as well as those made audible through creative interventions, and fundamentally come to understand the site the sound requires.

Through these investigations into sounds, some obvious, some familiar, some to be found, he has become a Cageian presence, not in the sense of musical or poetic lineage but as the value proposition conduit for a contemporary insight into sound itself. Lemke has observed that sound is behind you when you gaze toward the horizon: he places us in that moment, and constructs for us the awe of our relationship between the sound he unveils and the phenomenology of presence in that environment. This pursuit and representation of the fundamentals of sound is driven by his conception “über den hörwert”, a Marxian analog of the surplus value of hearing. His aim to represent a specific environment through its sounds at a specific moment requires listening with all senses. Accepting the impossibility of resonating the actual sounds heard in the moment he heard them, he constructs a conceptual aural present. Lemke talks about the tools he uses to communicate sounds heard to non-witnesses of the original, the remarkable articulation of his line, - raw and skeletal - poetry, visual poetry, onomatopoeia, soundpainting, photography and sound recordings, uncovering the democracy of microphones. He states his attempt to describe, to reproduce the experience of sound itself, its thickness, the ontology of being in sound, but this is not accurate: in fact, he becomes the act of hearing. In the offering of his approximations, objective and subjective improvisations, Lemke evokes memories of sound, and more, posits the second hearing, ours, in a new existential space, as a synesthetic osmosis. His quiet declaration of inwardness tunnels us into him and our ears are replaced by his. To know of the source of a sound helps to imagine it. Lemke is the source of the sound because whether or not his listeners really hear what he has drawn, written and document, verification lays in his trust in the audience’s willingness and capacity to absorb the inspiration and imagination of being. Reflecting declarations of purpose from Lawrence Weiner, William Carlos Williams et al., Helmut Lemke makes art useful to us, we can cross the bridges he has made for us.

Lemke has made himself the disembodied microphone, the universal hearer/ signifier of the sounds in the forest that no-one is there to hear, the teacher, the artist, the beekeeper. 

The Australians Are Coming (to Bury)

Over the next week/month Bury celebrates Australian contemporary art. On Saturday afternoon (yes, I know it's an odd time), two shows - one an installation  Illuminating configurations : re forming the line; edges, splats and cuts by Irene Barberis and (curated by Irene) a survey of contemporary Australian drawing featuring 100 works. I'm very excited to see Irene again, we first met in Tokyo back in 2006 and it's always a pleasure to see her and her work. (some of you might have seen her installation in Bury alongside Mike Parr in 2011). 
Both shows run to 13 August. The Contemporary Australian Drawing has organically evolved from six previous exhibitions around the world, from Chicago and Rome to Dubai. The participating artists were asked for a visual response to two texts on writing/drawing, taken from essays by Serge Tisseron and Michel Butor, “All Writing is Drawing’, and ‘the Space of Writing, what is that?’.  

All artists were supplied with a standard size and weight paper. The thoughtful and enthusiastic response of all artists concerned has resulted in this extensive exploration and examination of the themes, ‘All writing is Drawing’ and ‘the Space of Writing'. 

The Australian intervention in the Sculpture Centre is Jayne Dyer working in collaboration with Wayne Warren. Funnily enough I met Jayne in Beijing through an introduction from Irene Barberis, and we immediately got on very well. She has shown in Bury before - you might remember her piece in the Text Festival.

Last Thing previews on 17 June, inspired by Paul Auster's 'In the Country of Last Things'; the book presents a world where architecture and space constantly vanish, preventing individuals from building their own identity relative to the space they inhabit. An arena where matter is scarce and what is available is regurgitated until it becomes unrecognizable or depleted. 'Last things' documents fictional spaces about to disappear. 

Three great shows not to be missed. 

Women in Art - Bury Art Museum

Funny how when you're busy you don't notice you're own patterns. I only realised this morning that all the contemporary art installed currently at Bury Art Museum is by women artists: Liz West "Colour Collection" in the Museum;

Alison Erika Forde "There's Nothing for you here" in the gallery;

Jo Clements "Retrospective" in the video gallery

Hilary Jack "The Late Great Planet Earth" in the Sculpture Centre

And Penny Anderson's 'Speech Bubble' Christmas Tree on the Ring Balcony

 

I quite like that there wasn't a plan for an all-women display - and it was just the brilliance of the work that brought it together. 

Two new shows at Bury

Total Recall

Phil Davenport installing his "The Weather, in lipstick" -
and part of Marco Giovenale's "asemic encyclopedia"

As mentioned in the previous blog, this year is the 20th anniversary of me starting work in Bury - the 4th of August to be exact. I only came across this by accident in some old job papers and thought maybe we'd have a party or go for a quiet meal - whatever. Anyway, I mentioned it to Phil Davenport some months back in passing and it turns out a surprise was hatched. Phil talked to Derek Beaulieu over in Canada and the two realised that it was not only my 20th anniversary but also the 10th anniversary year of me creating the Text Festival. To wit, the pair invited various artists involved in the Text over the years to make a commemorative artwork. Though I should say that I am humbled and honoured that so many artists actually did (I am, of course), typical of Phil and Derek, instead of celebrating my genius or my contribution to the history of art/poetry, adopted a framework of memory -  as they say: "How do you remember the people who are important to you? How do you conjure your shared past? Is it in images, a sound, a smell, a touch? Or do you use words?" I've obviously not quite cracked the cult of the personality, but still it's flattering and very nice of everyone. 

Part of Erica Baum's Total Recall

The result is a pop-up exhibition which was installed this week. Originally it had a fancy/obscure title TEXTfestschrift but Erica Baum's piece "Total Recall" so nailed the moment, that as the installation unfolded it felt like that had to be the title of the display. To make it manageable/low cost, Phil and Derek limited everyone to A4 paper, which magnifies the displays guerrilla aesthetic in the classical space of the Gallery ring balcony.

The exception to the A4 rule came from Lawrence Weiner who suggested installation of a work originally made for Leo Castelli in 1977. It was very flattering for Lawrence to make the connection between me and Castelli. 

TOTAL RECALL includes work by local, national and international text-based artists and poets - lots of whom have become friends over the years of dialogue and exhibition (eating and drinking) together: angela rawlings, Barrie Tullett, Bob Grenier, Carolyn Thompson, Cecilie Bjørgås Jordheim, Darren Marsh, derek beaulieu, Emma Cocker, Eric Zboya, Erica Baum, Jaap Blonk, James Davies, Jayne Dyer, Jesse Glass, Karri Kokko, Kristen Mueller, Lawrence Weiner, Leanne Bridgewater, Liz Collini, Lucy Harvest Clarke, Marco Giovenale, Márton Koppány, Matt Dalby, Mike Chavez-Dawson, Paula Claire, Penny Anderson, Peter Jaeger, Phil Davenport, Rachel Defay-Liautard, Ron Silliman, Satu Kaikkonen, Sarah Sanders, Steve Miller, Seekers of Lice, Steve Emmerson, Steve Giasson, Tom Jenks, and Tony Lopez - more works than we had wall-space to display so there are various conceits that allow access to all the works. 

I was joking earlier - I am very grateful to everyone who sent something - there's some great things - I'll revisit and talk more about individual works in a later blog. 

Marton Koppany: "Concrete Poem - for Tony Trehy"

Bury Art Museum and Bury Sculpture centre

Just two weeks off the opening of the Bury Sculpture Centre and the launch of the fourth international Text Festival. Pulling the forthcoming programmes together has been one of the toughest workloads I can remember for various reasons beyond my control; but I think it is a programme to celebrate: I'll  expand on the individual aspects as it gets closer to the day, but I'm pleased to list some really great people involved in the Text: Lawrence Weiner, Ron Silliman, Phil Davenport, Simon Patterson, Riiko Sakkinen, Jayne Dyer, Caroline Bergvall, Penny Anderson, Jaap Blonk, Derek Beaulieu, Sally Labern & Bobby Lloyd, Tim Etchells, Sarah Sanders, Carolyn Thompson, Marton Koppany, Vanessa Place, Jez Dolan & Joseph Richardson, Peter Jaeger, Liz Collini, Mike Chavez-Dawson, Maria Damon, Juxtavoices, Rhys Trimble, Debbie Walsh, Richard Barrett, Tom Jenks, Bobby Parker, Lucy Harvest Parker, Tim Allen, Steve Giasson, Andrea Cotton, Carol Watts & Will Montgomery, Eran Hadas, Jorg Piringer, Rachel Smith, Erica Baum, Flo Fflach, Holly Pester, Rachel Defay-Liautard (that was the order I could remember them in I've probably forgotten someone). 

The Public Typing Pool

The Text Festivals - the Book

On occasion, I think, people interested in the ideas we have been working with in Bury have been stymied by my preference for the next project rather than the past project. But the Text Festival has been breaking new ground since 2005 so maybe inevitably it has developed a history that needs to be acknowledged. The Text Archive developed by Holly Pester through the AHRC funded partnership with Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre responded to  that imperative. And now hot off the Plymouth University Press, "The Text Festivals: Language Art and Material Poetry". You can acquire this must-have publication from here or via Bury Art Museum shop (slightly cheaper). Tony Lopez has done a great job - not least getting me to do my bit for it. As he wrote in his blog the field of enquiry that the festival has opened up urgently needed focused secondary work which can inform and develop the ongoing dialogue. Phil Davenport's seminal anthology The Dark Would clearly operates in this capacity.

The new book includes new essays by me, Derek Beaulieu, Christian Bök, James Davies, Philip Davenport, Robert Grenier, Alan Halsey, Tony Lopez, Holly Pester, Hester Reeve (HRH.the), Carolyn Thompson, Carol Watts and Liz Collini - whose work is also on the cover. (Indulge me, I can't resist quoting the Plymouth site): 

"It is a remarkable phenomenon that the foremost among recent sites of this interrogation of boundaries has been a series of festivals located in Bury, on the outskirts of Greater Manchester. World leading artists and poets have been brought together in a range of exhibitions and performances that demonstrate a new and productive collision of different cultural enterprises and expectations."

Anyway, now the Light Night is done and the Sculpture Centre announced, my next job is completing the curating of the future Festival opening in May 2014 (which got delayed by the other two); being part of this 'remarkable phenomenon' should be in your diary already.  

Bury Sculpture Centre

News of developments will be thick and fast over the next few weeks; lots of things are coming to fruition – finally. 

The first is the announcement that Bury’s exhibition spaces are being expanded, with the creation of the Bury Sculpture Centre. Following the Borough Library Review, large new spaces have become available and given our long term leadership of the Irwell Sculpture Trail project, the logical or maybe visionary conclusion is to create an international focus for sculpture in Bury. We've got some Arts Council funding and the first year’s programme well developed. Barring accidents we should open the new venue with the Text Festival – and who better to inaugurate in the context of Sculpture and Language than Lawrence Weiner. (How many more reasons do you need to be at the festival opening weekend?) 

After Lawrence's show there'll be an exhibition investigating the artistic dialogue between East and West (building on our experience and networks in China/Japan and Europe.) And big moment in this will be the venue’s first international conference: the  European Sculpture International Forum. I’ll be heading off to this year’s event in the Hague to start preparing for that. Along with an exhibition of Contemporary Japanese Art in the Bury Art Museum, the two shows will be part of the Manchester Asia Triennial.

So there’s my excuse for not blogging recently: I’ve been busy.

Of Time And

15 June – 14 September 2013

Bury Art Museum is pleased to present Of Time And, an exhibition of new

and existing works by Evangelia Spiliopoulou.

Evangelia Spiliopoulou's work proposes new aesthetic and poetic functions for everyday objects and tools. In her series of digital Office Drawings, made with Microsoft Word Office software, she uses her knowledge and skill in classical observational drawing to create graphs and diagrams reminiscent of technical illustrations or instruction manuals. But rather than practical information, the drawings convey a sense of disorientation, like puzzles in which words and graphic elements seem to contradict conventional logic. They are maps of a mental process of free association and an intuitive response to the play of meanings suggested in words.

Her new work Thermohygrograph², created for this exhibition, achieves a similar effect by the most economical means. It consists of two identical devices for measuring temperature and humidity in museums put side by side. The seemingly tautological gesture amplifies their practical purpose for the functions of the museum while also transforming them into an artefact on display and allowing our imagination move freely between the two.

Evangelia Spiliopoulou (b. Greece, 1981) initially studied drawing and fine art in Athens and in 2009 completed MA Fine Art at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. 

Spiliopoulou currently lives in Manchester and is represented by Bureau.
 A special launch of Evangelia’s exhibition is being held at Bury Art Museum on Saturday 15 June, 14:00-15:30. This is the perfect opportunity to meet the artist and find out more about her work. Refreshments available

Beauty Outside the Object

In a meeting earlier in the week, a curator suggested setting up a reciprocal peer review system where curators from nearby galleries could visit each others spaces and offer suggestions for improvement. The example offered was new eyes would be able to spot interpretation labels that might not work very well. Though I didn’t say anything at the time, as you might guess, I thought to myself that I would hope that such a visitor wouldn’t fine a label to review.

Because I have been working on the international touring project for most of the year, I have not curated anything in Bury pretty much since the Text Festival; so imagine the near paternal pride I felt when I popped into the Gallery to see the latest show Beauty in Utility curated by our museum curator Susan Lord: not a single label in sight. In discussion with Susan, she used phrases like “what’s wrong with people experiencing the mystery of not-knowing?” I almost feel my mission is complete! The obsession with museums as education has made the visitor experience didactically one-dimensional and devoid of creative space or invitation for imagination. 

As it is a Bury show that I have had nothing to do with, I can say with a certain impartiality and keenness that Susan has created an exhibition of tranquil beauty, demonstrating that curating is more than simply locating objects and images in a space. Informed by and offering up ideas of beauty in utility (the title tells says exactly what it contains in the tin), the exhibition displays tools from the museum social history collection in a central display + a corner of element, in dialogue with a handful of very cleverly curated wall based artworks by Liz Collini and Ian Hamilton Finlay plus a couple of Victorian industrial drawings. The show functions on so many levels and is all the more powerful for them being present unverbalised. At its simplest the show articulates the osmosis of function with formal beauty and the only issue I would take with it is that rather than the beauty residing in the objects or in the juxtaposition between them, it lays in Susan’s brilliant curation.