Text Festivals: Five Actions Plus Time

If the last post was a little too long to wade through, in a nutshell the Text posited that we were in one of those historic moments when different artforms are cross-fertilising, and specifically around language through five modes of operation, namely, parataxis, intertextuality, materialisation, spatialisation, and restricted/constricted processes. In that first iteration I had lumped time-based arts across the latter three practices, but in later explanations I began to refer to the Text’s criteria for inclusion being ‘Five actions plus Time’. The Festival opened with a survey show of work by the recently deceased Bob Cobbing, guest curated by Phil Davenport and Jennifer Cobbing; the sound installation ‘Little Sugar’ by Caroline Bergvall, and the main exhibition I curated simply called the ‘Text’, which spanned the theoretical basis of “art that can be read as poetry and poetry that can be viewed as art.”

Installation view: Bob Cobbing 

The rest of the nine months featured solo exhibitions by Lawrence Weiner, Maurizio Nannucci, Shaun Pickard, Alan Halsey, exhibitions of artist’s books curated by Greville Worthington, different alphabets curated by me; public art from Lawrence Weiner – WATER MADE IT WET and the gallery atrium neon installation (pictured below) by Nannucci.

There were numerous performances from too many poets to mention but headlined by Robert Grenier – the start of a long relationship with Bob that led to Bury having one of the biggest collections of his work, and certainly the biggest outside the USA. If you’re interested in more details of the festival’s activities, I’m pretty sure I blogged about most of it at the time, so it’ll be searchable.

Returning to the observation that the festival’s concept was difficult for some to grasp, I’ll share an anecdote which confirmed to me that we were on the right track, or at least it entertained me greatly at the time. Our Media Relations were handled by the incomparable Catharine Braithwaite. One day, Catharine rang me to say that she had an international arts magazine interested in featuring the festival and that the art journalist wanted to do a phone interview with me. Fine, I thought, we set it up for later in the week. All sounded positive until she cautioned me to be prepared for him because he really knew his stuff, was rigorous and could cut through art-speak nonsense when he heard it. So, the interview started with me duly serious, taking onboard her warning. Even with my explaining the Five Actions analysis, there was a tone in his questions that suggested he was thinking: ‘am I interested in covering this?’; so I fell back on a shorthand formulation I had used in other conversations, saying: “Look, if I program Lawrence Weiner in front of an arts audience, they’ll know who he is; but if I program Ron Silliman with the same audience, they won’t. Similarly, a poetry audience will know who Ron Silliman is, but not Lawrence Weiner.” There was a long silence at the other end of the phone, and then rather sheepishly, the journalist said, “I don’t know who Ron Silliman is.” After that, the interview was smooth sailing.

On to the 2009 Text Festival. After nine months I felt that I had exhausted the subject (and the audience) of the Text – and I was certainly personally exhausted. In anticipation of that, I had arranged a 12-month sabbatical for 2006 – during which I wrote my first poetry book 50 Heads. This came out in 2007 after I returned to Bury. Various review copies were duly sent out and unexpectedly I got calls from different friends saying that Ron Silliman had reviewed it on his world-famous blog.

“While there are poets in the U.K. who are close to langpo personally – Tom Raworth in particular – there has never really been anything you could call a language school, as such, in Britain. I hear this equally as a techno descendant of someone like Prynne, a concept that strikes me as very odd indeed. And a sign that Trehy isn’t really like anyone else at all.

Trehy is an eminently readable poet, tho you have to pay attention as you proceed through each work. He promotes this further with a vocabulary that is large and sometimes technical.” (excerpt)

Preview viewers of Liz Collini wall-drawing

It seemed only polite to thank Ron, so I emailed him. But just staying ‘thanks’ seemed a bit thin, so I threw in, “if you ever fancy performing at the Text Festival, we’d be delighted to have you.” To be clear, I had no intention of doing another festival – it was a spare of the moment throwaway remark. At that point I still felt it had done everything it needed to do. Ron replied almost immediately saying: “I get an invitation to perform in the UK about 3 or 4 times a week, but I guess the Text is the important one, so I’d be pleased to attend.” I don’t remember ever telling Ron that the only reason for the 2009 festival actually happened was simply to host him! That said, I put as much effort into it as the first and it was again a success. For me, the personal moment I savored came on the night Ron performed. I had created a mixed programme for the evening, as was the Text way, opening with some Italian sound works, a Scottish storyteller, German turntablist/sound artist Claus van Bebber, followed by Ron. I was standing alone in the dark with him backstage waiting for him to go on and he said with obvious excitement at the evening, “this is just what I am about.” 

And onto the story of why there was a 2011 festival. As part of the 2009 funding for Ron’s travel, a gig in London was included. I accompanied him down to Birkbeck for the performance. One little anecdote, a handful of people (assuming that the Text must be a biennial) regretted that they had missed the 2007 festival. To which I replied that it had been the best one. Anyway, during drinks after the reading, someone enthusiastically wanted to know when the next festival would be. Admittedly having had too many drinks and flushed with positive vibes, I calculated how quickly I do another, and the date popped up ‘2011’. So there it was.

The smartest summary comes from Derek Beaulieu’s blog at the time: “On April 27 and 28th I will be installing an original concrete poem in the windows of the Bury Art Gallery as part of the Text Festival. In addition to that installation, the festival includes my Prose of the Trans-Canada and my Box of Nothing. The Festival also includes visual poetry from Satu Kaikkonen, Eric Zboya, Geof Huth and a tonne of other international poets; performances by Christian Bok, Ron Silliman, Karri Kokko, Jaap Blonk and more; installation work by Pavel Buchler, Simon Morris and many others. This is the 3rd bi-annual Festival
 and promises to be an incredible affair." This is a link to Derek’s blog about his experience “An irresponsible act of imaginative license” #8: The Text Festival, Part 1. | derek beaulieu's blog

And again, fully satisfied with 2011 festival I was convinced that was it. No More. I found various occasions when I was actually saying out loud there would not be another.

2012-13 my project activity shifted completely to touring exhibitions in China. And then 2014 came. Again, its initiation was triggered by something exterior to my intention. Long story short, Bury restructured the Gallery complex to create a new Sculpture Centre on the ground floor and it needed a sufficiently high profile opening show to establish its credentials in international practice. Who better to launch it than Lawrence Weiner, who had by then a long association with Bury and a number of his works sited around the Borough. (Coincidentally, on the same night he opened in Bury, he also opened shows in Rio and Milan). Of course once the Weiner show was likely, the logic of an accompanying Festival was inevitable. Artistically the Festival was strong and by this one, the audience was knowledgeable and committed, but as Sue had warned me, my health wasn’t at its best and I must admit that I missed a large part of the opening weekend due to my collapse.

I retired in 2019 but would almost certainly programmed a fifth event with a new conception. So it couldn’t happen (and probably wouldn’t have anyway due to COVID), but I have continued to develop the analysis that would take things forward and will be posting these ideas after these commemorative posts.  

con creta - Leiria

 Having done virtually no research about Leiria before I arrived, I was very enamored with it - a very charming little town, given what I imagine was an extra frisson by the near complete decoration of the centre for Christmas. I was a bit early for the start of the letra festival, so I visited the Banco das artes galeria for an exhibition of (primarily) drawing by Álvaro Siza – Drawings. Banco das Artes Galeria, Leiria. Obviously I'm very familiar with his architecture (his famous School of Architecture is at the end of our street), but his drawings were a revelation. No Photos allowed so you can look it up. 

con creta catalogue

Then I went to the Galeria Quattro for an installation of concrete poetry from the collection of Fernando Aguiar curated by Sal Nunkachov. 

From there we moved to Sal's miraculous shop/workshop of concrete and sound poetry Paperviewbooks  where I bought what must be the book of my year Derek Beaulieu's Catalogue Saisonée  and Christian Bok's new (blue) umlautmachine 

Sadly, I had to return to Porto before the evening performances but Christian will be coming north for a few days next so I'll find out what I missed. 

Immanence and the Library of Babel

I have not read Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel”. I am a very slow reader. I only read with a purpose. It is sufficient to know from Derek Beaulieu (and everyone else who has read it) that “The Library of Babel” posits a universe embodied in a single interminable, honeycomb-like, library. Borges’ literary repository holds every potential combination of letters arranged without a card catalogue, dooming the denizens of this collection to wander the stacks searching for meaning. “For writers, Borges has issued both a condemnation and a challenge. By proposing an effectively infinite library … Borges lays claim to every book within the library’s holdings: there are no books that an author could propose which Borges’ library does not already contain. When faced with the ontological nightmare of the Borgesian library, a writer has two choices. They can either shrink from their task, believing that there are no remaining original ideas that Borges has not already placed within his collection, or they can see Borges’ library as freeing them from the onerous weight of originality. Within this tact, the author must assert the poetics of choice—writing for them has become not a matter of creating art but selecting art. To be a writer is to artistically select a single volume from Borges’ shelves and assert that volume as particularly worth examination and consideration.”

Hmm, to be a writer is to select a single volume from Borges’ shelves and assert that volume as particularly worth examination and consideration. Is though? The rules say we only have two choices, apparently.

I’ll see your Borges’ library and raise you Hilbert’s Hotel. David Hilbert’s hotel has an infinite number of rooms and is full of an infinite number of guests. What do you do if more guests arrive? Ask everyone to move up one. Or as I have frequently opined in my working life – The solution to a problem is always bigger than the problem itself. That is why, by the way, the Text Festival was not a poetry festival.

'Canon' - Text Festival 

Anyway, returning to the Library, assuming its possible 10^1,834,013 Universes, even if there is one in which I have read Borges’s Library of Babel, there is still a problem. The number of books in the library is irrelevant; the number of rooms is irrelevant. Perhaps the most mundane proof of the fallacy is that all the books have already been written and this is an ‘ontological nightmare’: The concept of that constriction is based on a misunderstanding of Possible Worlds theory. As philosopher David Lewis posited - every world is spatiotemporally and causally isolated from every other world. So the ontological problem, if it is one, only applies to an existentially impossible writer who exists across universes.

In the Universe where Duchamp and Beckett are available to testify, I call them as my expert witnesses and turn to the Shannon number. Mathematician Claude Shannon in calculating the complexity of chess, found that 10¹²⁰ games were possible. He was trying to demonstrate the impracticality of solving chess with the brute force of computer power. This did not stop programmers from seeing Chess as the ideal analogue for computer ‘intelligence’; ultimately leading to the then World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov losing to Deep Blue in 1996-7. Claims were of course made that the match presaged the symbolic end of human intellectual dominance, and, less important to some, the end of Chess. Now? Who cares? The current question in chess is whether Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen is so good that he has ‘broken’ chess.

More specifically the idea that meaning has to be found within an infinite, modular (but closed) library is fallacious. Alain Badiou observes in The Immanence of Truths “[There are] four different types of infinities based on special properties: operative transcendence (inaccessibility), resistance to division (compactness), the existence of a very large ultrafilter (completeness), and the existence and property of an elementary embedding (the degree of proximity to the absolute of one of its attributes).” Not having read the short story locates me (and you) in a universe where there is an outside to the library. Lawrence Weiner observed “anything that exists has a certain space around it; even an idea exists within a certain space” and from that vantage point, the infinity which the library exemplifies, rests with its shaky claim to completeness. I/you are not constrained by it because we can view it from the outside. Further, as Badiou also notes, “A set will therefore be said to be finite if all its elements are definable, which means that they are inscribed in the dominant language in the form of well-identified properties, known to everyone.” Libraries and books are known to everyone. Library of Babel turns out to be a trap for the unwary – let’s face it, it’s a pretty shit library if it hasn’t got catalogue, it’s not a library – it’s a shambolic warehouse. And frankly there aren’t actually that many books I can be bothered to pull down from the shelf, as I wander, “every infinity requires wandering” (Badiou), even if we imagine that we are within this constricting self-important pile of books, there remains the space between the aisles, it is the same space in which Camus imagines Sisyphus happy, the infrathin space within a space of Duchamp’s ‘Opposition and Sister Squares are reconciled’, in its restless mobility the agency of the writer takes a rather jaunty precedence over the passivity of the idle reader or the bespectacled librarian cliché.

 

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"

The Other Room

The Other Room is putting on an extra, one-off event at The Town Hall Tavern, 20 Tib Lane, Manchester, M2 4JA on Saturday, 18th May, 5 pm start. The readers are derek beaulieu, Tom Jenks and Holly Pester. Details of all three readers are below and previews of each will appear on The Other Room site (http://otherroom.org/) in the coming weeks.

derek beaulieu is an internationally-recognized text artist, conceptual writer and literary critic. He is the author or editor of 15 books, the most recent of which are Writing Surfaces: The Selected Fiction of John Riddell (co-edited with Lori Emerson) and Please, No more poetry: the selected poetry of derek beaulieu (edited by Kit Dobson) both of which are published by Wilfrid Laurier Unversity press. He is the publisher of the acclaimed smallpresses housepress (1997–2004) and no press (2005–present) and is the visual poetry editor at UBUWeb. Beaulieu has exhibited his work across Canada, the United States and Europe and currently teaches at the Alberta College of Art + Design and Mount Royal University.

Tom Jenks co-organises The Other Room and administers the avant objects imprint zimZalla. He has produced and performed four collaborations with Chris McCabe for SJ Fowler’s Camarade project, the most recent of which, I Boris, is a contemporary re-working of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. Recent publications include a p.o.w. broadside slugs/snails. A 100 poem sequence with accompanying visuals, streak artefacts, is forthcoming from Department Press. He has published two collections with if p then q (A Priori and *) and his third, items, a 1000 fragment verbivocovisual sequence, is being launched at this event. He is a PhD student at Edge Hill University, where he is researching digital technology and innovative poetry.

Holly Pester is a London-based sound poet and researcher. Her work experiments in frequencies of speech, song and articulated noise. She has performed at text, art and poetry events including the Prague MicroFestival (2012); Text Festival (2011); Serpentine Poetry Marathon (2009), and was a writer in residence at this year’s dOCUMENTA 13. She has just completed a practice-base PhD in Sound Poetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Holly Pester’s collection, Hoofs, was released with if p then q press in 2011. More at http://www.hollypester.com/

The Other Room

Derek Beaulieu at Bury Art Gallery

Interview with Derek: http://bit.ly/auKkRI

Dinner

Welcoming Derek Beaulieu and Kristen Ingram arriving from Canada, David Osbaldeston and Katie Craven joined us for one of Sue's celebrated dinner parties:

The Menu

Spicy roasted red pepper and lime soup (accompanied with an Alsace Reisling)
Sue’s Crispy Prawn Toast with a dipping sauce
Pan-fried Sea Trout fillet with ribbons of courgette with chilli and ginger with a lemon and herb dressing (accompanied with a Spanish Albarino)
Home made clotted cream strawberry ice-cream, meringue, strawberries and strawberry sauce

(On Wednesday, Derek will be reading at Bury Art Gallery at 1pm and at the Other Room at 7pm)