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.

 

National Poetry Day

Twitter tells me that somewhere in the world it's National Poetry Day and in the threatening context of the Conservative Party conference which thankfully ended yesterday in Manchester, I thought I'd put up a poem from my last book: The End of Poetry. It's called 'Intolleranza' after Luigi Nono's socialist opera  

Intolleranza

Lower than vermin

… the gates are opening. Our murderers are here.

Suspended Song

Today: Conceit: will shoot us truth construct it Instruction all

Bijective the quiet fragile of this work to be silent and 

Instead the listener who is silent.

minuend individual receives

From it, fretting is overwhelmed we an idea opposed

mereologic fragility and have a collective

A new audience and a presence of nilpotent

unfolding of a silence to die in company

null conquest of the interior of musical structures taking Different forms, shining paths as revolt.

FIST. FITS. The favoured design for the future

Flow class features

I will love you from beyond the grave

… the gates are opening. Our murderers are here.

I'm Back!

The publication of my interview about the Text Festival with Derek Beaulieu in Jacket, which was actually concluded just after the Festival, turns out to be coincidental with my ability to return to blogging. It’s been an odd year or more social media-wise. Almost overnight, I went from active and frequent verbosity to near silence, which probably seemed a bit odd to people who follow these writings. Initially there was an element of exhaustion post-festival exacerbated by the urgently depressing/infuriating battle to save cultural services from the sado-monetarist onslaught of the evil which is the coalition government. Paradoxically, the solution to the threat that I came up with precluded even more public comment. To the many participants and followers of the Text Festival, an inclusive open maybe even rambling dialogical event, it may be counterintuitive that my next major cultural project has to be developed in large part through confidential negotiations but that has what has been engaging me for the last 12 months.

Finding the solution to the threat to cultural provision was an interesting challenge. The problem could be defined thus: the arts in the UK had spent the last 20 years justifying their legitimacy by association with other fields - mainly social, education and welfare policy. The arts had developed a body evidence tailored to impacts on government indicators for social cohesion, learning, health & well-being, etc. The problem came when the new fundamentally anti-social government re-defined public policy as simply related to its cost. By this criterion, the arts are buggered – all that social good stuff is meaningless to politicians whose rightful place is in the Museum of Dead Bastards Heads.  The knee-jerk response from the arts sector was to re-double its use of the arguments and evidencing of arts as social value, because this had mitigated the worst extremes of previous cost-cutting assaults – although tellingly not without notable cultural losses. By definition this was a doomed strategy this time round and there developed almost a feeding frenzy of cultural cutting. Going to museums meetings during that period involved seeing lots of haunted resignation. It occurred to me early on that the arts’ response was inadequate – primarily, I suppose, because I was never convinced in the first place that art needed to be justified through its contribution to non-cultural agendas. Readers of my blog will have observed this over the years as I have criticised, for example, art in regeneration where you get bad environmental development because it is driven by the artistically compromised; or my attacks on the nonsense of the Kids in Museums organisation which turns cultural facilities into vacuous crèches; or my smugness over my "intrepid resistance to interpretation", etc. All the solutions on offer in those early days were either administrative or financial – move around or share the deckchairs, shed staff or cut budgets. Once you head down that road, you have lost the argument and might as well shut up shop straightaway.

So I set up to find an artistic solution.

The answer turned out to be unexpectedly simple: We should curate our way out of trouble. The arts should do what Art does. Specifically: to curate exhibitions and projects aimed at international galleries and networks; to move the cultural horizon beyond the constricted UK context to where there were still opportunities for funding and partnerships committed to culture qua culture. It may seem simple now but I lost count of the number of meetings at which someone said: why has no-one thought of this before?

I had imagined that this would be the way forward for Bury, but unexpectedly galleries and museums across the north threw their hats into the ring realising that it offered opportunity to all. Pretty quickly I had lost count of how many had joined the project – it is somewhere around forty now, I think.

I planned to focus on Japan initially, as we had experience working there; but as the British Council got involved we were quickly steered to China as the UK’s top priority: hence my trips to China in October 2011 and April 2012 to negotiate and set up projects. As much of the detail was delicate, diplomatic and intensely demanding, confidentiality became essential to progress the plans: so behind the scenes me and my team (who have been remarkable) have been working on the hardest, most complicated project we’ve ever attempted; meanwhile outwardly, my social media presence was near silence.

However, as the first project of this new vision is close to opening, it’s now time to resurface. I’ll expand on the project in a future blog, but suffice it to say our team has put together an exhibition called “Toward Modernity: 300 years of British Art” - drawn from 19 UK museums and touring to 6 national museums in China. So I’ll be in Changsha (Hunan Provincial Museum pictured) again in September for the opening and then again in Beijing in November. In between I’ll be in Austria and Italy setting up a new partnership in the area of public art and creative industries and in the early new year I’ll be in Japan and maybe South Korea working on more touring exhibitions. (It’s not just me; by the way, members of my team are booked for the European Sculpture Network in Celle, Germany in September and the Glasgow Europe conference in November. As I write the incomparable Kat McClung-Oakes is in Tampere, Finland, setting up our Turner exhibition and Josef Minta has just come back from an EU digital museums conference in Barcelona).

Having ‘worked through’ the transition from the Text Festival to world tours, I thought that my observations in the interview with Derek would now seem out of date but I think it still covers what I thought of the Festival. As I predicted despite my protestations I am now working on a 2014 Text Festival, and as I projected then, the questions that seemed to me unacknowledged challenges for poets will probably surface; although maybe not, as poetry has seemed less and less relevant as the year has passed: my latest poetry book will be lucky if it is read by 50 people; the exhibition I have organised in China will be seen by 4 million. Maybe this was one of the reasons why my book was called “The End of Poetry”. 

 

I have missed blogging: I originally started blogging because I liked moaning about crap books, films and exhibitions. And over the last year there have been many things I could and should have moaned about, but now I’m back! 

The End of Poetry

I wrote The End of Poetry in October 2010 in Tampere, Finland. On my return to Manchester I was then buried in the planning and preparation of the 2011 Text Festival and after that went straight into setting up the international projects (most notably in China); so I didn't have time to think about poetry. Thanks to patience and persuasion of Irene Barberis at the Metasenta in Melbourne, with some editing the poems have made it to print. The book will be available via Metasenta shortly, but I have a supply now. 


It is a collection which opens with a return to the 'heads' form I used in 50 Heads, followed by my response to Luigi Nono's opera Intolleranza (seen from the grim position we find ourselves in the collapse of capitalism) and then a sequence of 23 poems mirroring the tormented and treacherous last days of Louis Althusser counting down to his murder of Hélène Rytman. In the imperative spirit of stepping outside his/its intense enclosure, the book finishes with an unconnected short poem written in China in October 2011 called "Beijing".