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

Inauguration of Donald Trump: Sequester the Bile

Sequester the Bile

1

Will this be filmed? Will I ever been seen again?

Déjà vu to pre-empt the desire to say:

this is me and that is them - as emphatic modifiers

If the signature is left as an empty list

A loser’s garden for a nobody,

nobodies, useless eaters as a forgetful functor:

their intropunitive ignorance of a soliton that goes ahead of us

Austere defenders of the right to pay towards the certificate

with or without fear.

2

Now conditionally bijective to now

A catalogue of comparatives and superlatives been here before

those heroes, holders or changes to the governance pathway;

recursive choice mildnesses

the indecisive

bring me the head of stupid

enjoy your day of barely disguised resentment, whispered irritation

catalogue systems of libraries, ideas cosy, mediocrity built after

                bombing,
trees all the same height are the same age

in estates of easily constructed isotropic housing

Apologies (labelled transitions between states)

when to compromise only generates compromise –

the axiom of determinacy

not the axiom of choice

standing despite all possibilities to fall

We are not going out onto that jetty,

it's dangerous and no one will thank us.
In the same way valleys are better than mountains

barbarous dissolution

its budget for the new management

You are pathetic and will get what you deserve

3

Architects of the future:

The tyranny of cardinal geometry, stars and grids with sightlines

our breath will create weather OUR BREATH WILL CREATE WEATHER

truly monumental … far exceeding all expectations for our 1000

years

our arch will be bigger than your arch OUR ARCH WILL BE BIGGER

                                                                           THAN YOUR ARCH

the wall detail of cracks and crevices, beautiful colours, fronds and teeny weeny microphylls

the worst thing that could happen

this absolute future looks bleak for vertebrates

Sequester the Bile

Combined with the Brexit vote disaster, Donald Trump winning the American election makes it clear that we have arrived at an historic moment when the idea of Progress itself is being turned back, when truth no longer matters, when the existence of humanity itself faces the abyss (Fascism, climate change, nuclear war, you know the list). As you know, I am dismissive of the portentous claims of Poetry, but there is a certain attraction to the Romantic image of the heroic poet standing against the apocalyptic storm to bellow ‘fuck off’ to the Darkness (I paraphrase obviously). In that shocking Trump week, I was reading a medical thing that talked about a process called sequestering bile. This seems obviously a metaphor for the requirement of this moment. It occurred to me that if poets were going to mean anything there had to be a global chorus that sequestered the bile of Trump etc on the 20^th January coincident with the Inauguration Ceremony. Poets would raise poetry to the status they historically claim with poems sequestering the bile; #SequestertheBile could trend alongside/surpassed the Inauguration hashtag. Anyway It’s there as an idea.

So in addition to the ‘Place’ collaboration with Jayne Dyer, I began writing ‘Sequester the Bile’ with the intention of publishing it on 20^th Jan.

A little after I started, I was approached by Tom Jenks and Steven Fowler to see if I would do something as part of the Enemies Project, a collaborative performance on 14 January at the Burgess Foundation in Manchester - http://www.theenemiesproject.com/northwest  The obvious collaborator for me on this is Helmut Lemke .

Having only just come out of poetry retirement, I am tempted to joke the Godfather3 line “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” or more recently from John Wick “You dip so much as a pinkie back into this pond, you may well find something reaches out and drags you back into its depths.” … on this occasion the something was the Enemies Project.

Anyway, the poem-writing has started. At the moment I am investigating two motifs: the Nazi policy of killing ‘Useless Eaters’ and the megalomaniac architectural dreams of the 1000 year Reich, specifically the proposals to build a triumphal arch in Berlin under which the Arc de Triomphe could fit and the Volkshalle Dome which would have been so huge that the breathing of the crowds it could hold would have created weather.  The useless eaters language resonates with the murderous Tory welfare policy which except for the absence of lethal injection is evil in plain view: google death rates from the ‘Fitness to Work’ test and compare with Nazi Aktion 14f13 criteria for murder.

And the grotesque gigantism of Volkshalle starts with a gold elevator.

As I say above I am under no illusion that poetry offers real resistance to the evil we face, but as I recently blogged about Paul Hindmith’s Mathis der Maher, the artist’s responsibility at times like these is to make art that contributes to the resistance. To belt and brace it though, I am actively working in the real world too.