Carol Watts

Carol Watts (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/staff/WattsCarol ) visited yesterday see the Irony of Flatness (picture 1) and discuss various project possibilities. Also shown introducing Phil Davenport to her "China" series - some of which will feature in the Text Festival anthology. Here is a sonnet from her 'Brass, Running':

IX

difficult and persistent is the light
and its qualities a haunting of precepts
her gunmetal sanctuary where breath mists
famished in its reckoning her absence is
a volume to be accounted for do you know
the desolation of measurement motes
descending second per second without
intimation think of the sound of light as
a guttering of limbs its rush a hunger
to sustain the evidence of breathing snatched
from other open mouths the denial
of burning is not harmless she is not here
is something inflammatory baptism: light
and water implicated in the frenzy of cities

Dancing Chairs and a Walking Woman

On a more positive note, the works in the Irony of Flatness (Bury Art Gallery until November) are definitely deserving of more attention. The first is Marianne Eigenheer’s video-drawing “Dancing Chairs and a Walking Woman”. This is a particularly resonant and exciting piece. It recalls Marianne’s experience of walking around the streets of Cairo, having a look round while she was there preparing for a forthcoming show. This meandering came to be represented in the artist’s distinctive arabesque coloured drawing, the depth of her line mirroring her unique sense of space. This drawing in itself became a thirty metre long work which has been exhibited in Germany/Austria (I forget where). During her walk she became fascinated by the way Egyptian men place their chairs in the street, a male gesture of dominance of public space; Marianne began photographing them. “Dancing Chairs and a Walking Woman” is the brilliant counterpoint of these two aspects of the walk – the meandering fluidity circling the sometimes ominous fixed points of maleness – video stills shifting between one set of images to the next spread across to two screens. The depth of Marianne’s spatial dimensionality in this work actually touches you to the core.


By the way, I’ve written the catalogue for Irony of Flatness which is now available for £2 from Bury Art Gallery.

Green Drops and Moonsquirters

Months ago in this blog (more than once) I lamented the state of the English public gallery curating, specifically, as an example I mentioned how it was literally impossible to get into Manchester Art Gallery Asia Triennial video installation because there were so many playing toddlers and crying babies. The Gallery has now gone one step further with its latest offering: Green Drops and Moonsquirters http://www.manchestergalleries.org/whats-on/exhibitions/index.php?itemID=44
Of course, because success in the UK galleries is measured by numbers of visitors rather than the artistic quality of exhibitions, this is already a huge hit. But for anyone with any interest in the arts it is truly desperate - the galleries of the City Art Gallery must be hellish. In Manchester, the powers that be are constantly exercised with the notion that the city aspires to being 'world-class'. Every international visitor I have had, visiting the City Gallery can't understand it. Manchester is a great place to live, but without a world class gallery you wonder how it can aspire to be a world-class city; moreover, with a programme like this it is questionable whether the City Gallery is actually an Art Gallery. Maybe the logic of endless years of New Labour cultural pejoration are generating a category of museum practice that at the moment is nameless but is actually an anathema to art itself. In a lot of ways, it is close to the Victorian paternalist notion of the museum as a mechanism for worker's education and betterment. After all, virtually from the cradle citizens are given performance targets. It is frequently noticeable that even young artists, arts development and curatorial staffs have this conditioning which has removed the capacity for free thought. The state managerial approach to public mobilisation through intravenous outputs and outcomes with objectives set in advance means that many young artists dont know how to experiment or challenge themselves without knowing what the result of the experiment will be in advance. State funded galleries are as much part of this cultural ecology - I used "cultural ecology" ironically there because that is the latest jargon bollocks being used by the Arts Bureaucracies. It has been a long running idea in theatre that exposing children and young people to drama you are creating the audiences of the future. But the implementation of this has been didactic theatre endlessly addressing 'issues' of bullying, sex education, "citizenship", etc. So rather than creating the audience of the future, this model is creating citizens who think that is what theatre is. The same is happening in galleries. Children visit galleries either in school parties or with parents. So the school visit teaches them that all art has to be explained and that you have to do worksheets when you visit a gallery/museum. When visiting with parents, you play, dress up and do activities, which teaches you that the gallery is an indoor play centre. This sort of thinking is what has led to some libraries now to be called "ideas stores". So what should we call this thing instead of "Art Gallery"?

The Other Room

The Pros and Cons of Screens

The 'Live Sites' giant screens project aims to leave between 45 and 60 screens in towns and city centres. The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games is supplying the screens and the BBC will provide the content, including live coverage of the Beijing Olympics and through to London 2021 and beyond. The project is funded from the National Lottery and commercial sponsorship. Local authorities will be responsible for maintenance costs.

CABE http://www.cabe.org.uk/ "fully supports the idea of creative access to the Olympics for the widest possible community through temporary large-scale screens around the country, it has serious concerns about leaving them as permanent installations." ..."Just when we're starting to create well-designed, civilised public space in many English towns, along comes a rash of intrusive neon screens," Sarah Gaventa, director of CABE Space, comments.

There is only really one intrusive screen in Manchester at the moment - in Exchange Square (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Exchange_Square.jpg) which isnt well-designed or civilised. Not withstanding the square's shambolic concept, confused further by a ferris wheel, I had always abhorred the ugly black-surround screen, seeing its broadcasts as offensive appropriations of the public arena. However, when I visited Tokyo with its urban landscape of multiple screens, banked high, tangled with neon, flashing, excitement, I realised that the problem wasn't the screens, it was how crap the English are at doing exhilaration in public. The screens are remarkably ugly in themselves but it is just as ugly that the Government public education/conditioning through the Olympiad that makes them really terrible. The aesthetic and social crime of it is the 'legacy' (a great Government word), which will be endless feeds of BBC breakfast TV and mind-numbing daytime soaps/quizzes and the banalities which pass for early evening news broadcasts.

http://www.cabe.org.uk/default.aspx?contentitemid=2652

Introducing Robert Grenier to the Cotswolds

After the Irony of Flatness, Sue and I introduced Bob and Suzy to the English countryside (since he's so embedded in the Californian countryside). While we were there, I did an recorded interview which will be available soon. But just after the tape stopped, Bob said "I'd like to add an addendum": which was -

"My imagination of coming over to Bury to do this work was that once we had set it forth on the wall, I would have opportunity to finally know what it was. I could read it. I could stand back from it. I could think about it. I could question whether or not these separate images went together with each other, how these images might have gone together. After the fact, the real work was setting it forth on in space on the wall and it’s not my business to know what it says, any more than it is for any poet who writes a poem. I might get different readings on things in passing, but especially with a work of this kind of complexity, organisation, over time. The main thing is to allow it to exist in some space, and I don’t have to worry about what it means it can just be. "

More from the Flatness Opening

Irony of Flatness Opens

A great opening. Pictures mainly of Robert Grenier's reading. Others to follow plus recordings of the performance itself.

Announcing The Irony of Flatness

Three Exhibitions open on Friday at Bury Art Gallery

An exhibition of drawings by international artists
19 July – 8 November 2008

As a mark-making act, drawing can simply be represented as (and be representational of) transferring the three or more dimensions of reality down to two – flatness. The Irony of Flatness is a challenging exhibition of contemporary drawing, which examines the possibilities and power of drawing. Through it, working with shadow, line and gesture, the artists taking part investigate the experience of the act, the space of the act, the moment of the act, and the concept of the act. Continuing Bury Art Gallery’s commitment to innovative international programmes in the north of England, the show features renowned artists featured include Marianne Eigenheer (Switzerland), Stefan Gec (UK), Rachel Goodyear (UK), Robert Grenier (USA), Kristian Gudmundson (Iceland), Alan Johnston (UK), Karin Sander (Germany) and Ulrich Rückriem (Germany).

The drawings featured investigate the full range of media that artists are using today – from animation and film to pen on paper to pencil directly on to the gallery wall. All challenge the irony of the drawings’ apparent flatness with spatial metaphor, line and void toward new dimensions, the presence and role of touch related as well as sight, observing the space between the lines and movement.

World Premiere: at the preview on 18 July, one of the founders of the American LANGUAGE poetry movement, Robert Grenier, will read for the first time from his poem series “64”.

The exhibition is supported by two solo shows:

“the nature of Bury”
Kerry Morrison is an environmental artist who works within the public domain, engaging with people whose lives are touched by their natural environment. She creates artwork in response to local environments relating them to the wider global context. In this exhibition she investigates the relationships between humans and nature, developing a process which will evolve the installation of material found and created over 16 weeks study in Bury.

“On G. Delph. St”
Berlin-based Steve Miller constructs non-animated film sequences, storyboard formats and single images concerned with the absurdity of context and everyday paradoxes of language and dialogues. Strongly colourful and sharply graphic, Miller generates a vibrant 21st Century urban style straight from the heart of European cultural excitement.

Preview Friday 18 July 6.30pm – 9pm

Dinner

Celebrating Phil Davenport's birthday, Sue did one of her legendary dinner parties: (pictures: Barney with Robert Grenier's shoes; + Phil Davenport & Robert)

Tonight Sue created:

• Roast spiced butternut squash soup + Prosecco
• Wild Mushroom Risotto + a Rosé (that Phil brought)
• Roast rosemary and garlic leg of Lamb with fondant potatos and parmiagiana + Greek Nemea (red Agiorgitiko grape) + a Merlot
• A trio of Lemon Desserts with Kir Royale

Countdown to Irony of Flatness

I'm happy now that the countdown to Irony of Flatness has begun - the exhibition opens at Bury Art Gallery on Friday. Yesterday, Robert Grenier (right) arrived from California and Steve Miller (left) arrived from Berlin.

Barney joins the Trehy household!

Budapest

Back from a great visit to Budapest. A good meeting at the 2b Gallery discussing possible future projects http://www.pipacs.hu/2b/2b.html and a fleeting introduction at the Young Artists Association http://studio.c3.hu/ which needs following up in the next visit. The food was great because Sue came with me and we had an apartment. Though there was plenty of champagne drunk on the banks of the Danube!

I also saw an interesting survey show of contemporary Hungarian art called WHAT'S UP at Műcsarnok http://www.mucsarnok.hu/ - I was particularly struck by El-Hassan Roza, Kis Varsó: Little Warsaw is Dead and Szász György, who I will no doubt keep an eye on for future possibilities.

Mirror Canon Snips in Melbourne

Mirror Canon Snips has been installed in The DrawingSpace - Melbourne. Here is an extract of the text (which forms part of the "Space" series of projects, following from Edinburgh, Reykjavik and next Berlin) More images from the installation when I get back from Budapest.

Palatine. descending begins with both registers. of the sequence are important. the undiagnosed wait. a. shimmering caused by the highest perceivable frequency and the inability to focus on the multitude of rising tones. Rise and going. Proposed that the piece be revised and realized the lower threshold won’t be treated as if it is between the upper and the lower threshold, rather all entrances are timed in such a way that the ratio between successive pitches is the subsequent voice imitates the initial voice only weakening. the peristaltic itinerary of thought stooping to the prone who must shade. the ability to breathe necessary to stay alive; iff not sufficient to stay alive, there is categorically no upper threshold – but the pause/non-zero on the landing to breathe necessary (to be) above an illusion of ever-deeper, should be used only for uncomplicated work of short breath. Amusia the collapsing material. Vertigo o the Cut for a crashing chord. the scale of a moment of first or last anniversary in between and leaving footfalls as the breathers and catalysis. Amusia? Pedagogy us only with amusia. spiral similarity equals a dilatative rotation, the product of a dilatation and rotation – the upper and lower thresholds exactly one octave apart.

Green Drops and Moonsquirters

Months ago in this blog (more than once) I lamented the state of the English public gallery curating, specifically, as an example I mentioned how it was literally impossible to get into Manchester Art Gallery Asia Triennial video installation because there were so many playing toddlers and crying babies. The Gallery has now gone one step further with its latest offering: Green Drops and Moonsquirters

http://www.manchestergalleries.org/whats-on/exhibitions/index.php?itemID=44

Of course, because success in the UK galleries is measured by numbers of visitors rather than the artistic quality of exhibitions, this is already a huge hit. But for anyone with any interest in the arts it is truly desperate - the galleries of the City Art Gallery must be hellish. In Manchester, the powers that be are constantly exercised with the notion that the city aspires to being 'world-class'. Every international visitor I have had, visiting the City Gallery can't understand it. Manchester is a great place to live, but without a world class gallery you wonder how it can aspire to be a world-class city; moreover, with a programme like this it is questionable whether the City Gallery is actually an Art Gallery. Maybe the logic of endless years of New Labour cultural pejoration are generating a category of museum practice that at the moment is nameless but is actually an anathema to art itself. In a lot of ways, it is close to the Victorian paternalist notion of the museum as a mechanism for worker's education and betterment. After all, virtually from the cradle citizens are given performance targets. It is frequently noticeable that even young artists, arts development and curatorial staffs have this conditioning which has removed the capacity for free thought. The state managerial approach to public mobilisation through intravenous outputs and outcomes with objectives set in advance means that many young artists dont know how to experiment or challenge themselves without knowing what the result of the experiment will be in advance. State funded galleries are as much part of this cultural ecology - I used "cultural ecology" ironically there because that is the latest jargon bollocks being used by the Arts Bureaucracies. It has been a long running idea in theatre that exposing children and young people to drama you are creating the audiences of the future. But the implementation of this has been didactic theatre endlessly addressing 'issues' of bullying, sex education, "citizenship", etc. So rather than creating the audience of the future, this model is creating citizens who think that is what theatre is. The same is happening in galleries. Children visit galleries either in school parties or with parents. So the school visit teaches them that all art has to be explained and that you have to do worksheets when you visit a gallery/museum. When visiting with parents, you play, dress up and do activities, which teaches you that the gallery is an indoor play centre. This sort of thinking is what has led to some libraries now to be called "ideas stores". So what should we call this thing instead of "Art Gallery"?

Twilight Readings

Just before my recent travels, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park sent me a copy of Simon Armitage’s YSP published book – The Twilight Readings http://www.ysp.co.uk/view.aspx?id=460. According to the introduction, to celebrate the park’s 30th anniversary, Armitage was offered a residency. Armitage asked to be described as visiting artist rather than visiting poet. “I imagined working with the physicality of language – seeing poetry as a fashioned and fabricated substance, sculpted from words…”

Not actually capable of that, Armitage ended up writing two types of poems:
“The first anecdotal, prose-looking things, like stories… The second were translations from the Wakefield Mystery Plays, the cycle of mediaeval religious pageants which are closely associated with the region… I chose five dramatic monologues, each one having some relationship with the intended setting, and translated them form the original Middle English into contemporary [sic] (but still colloquial) verse.” This passage is near enough a statement of Armitage’s practice in general. The first poem in the book is not by him, but by Robert Frost – The Road Not Taken. In this context, the ‘poet’ is so uncritical he doesn’t recognise that the last 3 lines are actually an ironic indictment of the rest of the writing:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The first Armitage poem is “My Camellias”. It is enough to describe it as he does – an anecdotal, prose-looking thing, like a story. It is pretty poor even by Armitage’s standards, but the shambolic typography is really worth a mention. If you have seen 50 Heads http://www.tonytrehy.com/poet_1.html you will know that I have a particular penchant for blocked poetic texts, the way beginning and end lines work across and down the block. I hadn’t realised that it could be done so badly. Taking no account of any of these possibilities, Armitage may well have put the final look of this “poem” in the hands of the book designer, which is not an acceptable excuse for the erratic dissolute kernelling. I can’t really replicate the layout here. Maybe, again, the last 3 lines indict:

he looks are me with a wounding expression, one which suggests that in his all-seeing, all-knowing eyes I am little more than a complete and undisguised and irreversible dandelion.

To give a flavour of the second type of poem: Third Torturer

Look out yourselves and mind your bones
for I come hurtling all at once
and damn near broke both bollock stones
so fast hurried I hither.

How is this contemporary? This is the most damning criticism of the Armitage poetic project (shared by all the mainstream poets – Carol Ann Duffy, etc) – modern poetry didn’t actually happen. This is not simply the legitimate reassessment of earlier sources; it is the erasure of 20th Century poetry. For anyone who knows my position on the British mainstream my response to this piss poor book will not be a surprise, and it is not actually the book that has provoked me to write about it. It is instead the initial decision of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park to employ Armitage in the first place. YSP is not the only visual arts agency/gallery to employ such poets. And it is really unacceptable for visual arts directors/curators clearly knowing nothing about contemporary poetry to blunder around in the artform. It is interesting to compare how in contemporary art the imperative is towards innovation and the new, whereas poetry is treated as immutably frozen in a pre-modern moment. Galleries and other visual arts agencies think engagement with poetry represents them as more catholic when their choice of poets exposes them as ignorant.

Dreamer? Are we the only ones?

Visiting an infant/primary school to discuss possibly curating a community-based commission, I waited in the corridor outside the Headteacher's office before the meeting. On the wall, presumably contributing to the development of young minds that use the corridor, there was a poster with a close-up of a young teenager (wearing make-up) slightly smiling, looking directly out of the picture at the viewer. The caption read:

"dreamer?

but you're not the only one.

achieve economic wellbeing"

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.

Waiblingen, Germany

I'm in Waiblingen on the outskirts of Stuttgart at the moment, http://www.stuttgart-tourist.de/ENG/city/waiblingen.htm - guest of the local authority; as Bury is loaning about 70 Turner prints for the opening exhibition of their new gallery. http://waiblingen.de/sixcms/detail.php?id=14920. Conceived and guided to completion by my friend and long-time curatorial collaborator, Dr Helmut Herbst. I've taken loads of photos but not got the connection to load them from here - maybe when I get back to Manchester. As is often the case with this sort of opening, you can't really appreciate the gallery just now because most of the views of the architecture are cluttered with marques for the celebratory activities, concerts, etc. The German politicians and the accompanying academics that come out of the wood work on these occasions have a particular penchant for very long speeches - which seem interminable especially when you can't understand German. Sadly, as is the way of the world, the politicians are most excited by the new art school building beside the gallery, which you can already see will distort the policy towards artless education agendas lacking the art that could give the whole some meaning and forward impetus. Together, these two new buildings could be great spaces with the old 17th Century museum building forming a triangle – we can only hope that art that got Waiblingen this far survives.

http://www.kunstschule-rems.de/inhalt/webcam.html

On Monday, I move on to Basel for the Art Fair.

After Thoughts

The most affirming part of attending the European Museums Forum was seeing that there are plenty of museums out there not corrupted by English anti-intellectualism or New Labour. You see curators who quote Proust (“the truly imperfect earth is not one which is devoid of masterpieces of art but one which is full of them and does not know how to love them or preserve them”) rather than their performance indicator regime. The comparison was most striking comparison for me was the presentation by Weston Park Museum in Sheffield (http://www.sheffieldgalleries.org.uk/coresite/html/WPM.asp) and Museo degli Sguardi. Rimini's Ethnographic Collections (http://www.riminiturismo.it/CMS2/main.php?elemId=322&classId=33&lang_index=1&seq_index=7).
The former proudly told us how their public had been completely involved in every stage of the design and selection of displays; how they had won the Guardian’s Family Friendly Museum of the Year Award; how the community was at the heart of the museum. It reminded me of my last visit to Manchester Art Gallery which has a similar ethos, when the galleries could only really be described as a massive crèche – during the video installation in the Asia Triennial it was literally impossible to enter the dark space to see the work because it was full of toddlers and crying babies. However, of the 40 odd curators who presented at the Forum (including me) this year, I was most struck by Maurizio Biordi from Rimini. He didn’t speak English so was translated by his assistant. Contrary to the dominant UK model of vacuity, over-loaded social conditioning and curatorial deskilling, he talked about The Museum of Impressions – a museum in a place where people don’t go for cultural tourism, the museum itself is not ideally located in the town, the museum houses an inconceivably curious and out of context collection of relics from various continents assembled by numerous travellers and collectors. I met some really good people, museum directors I am keen to work with, but Maurizio Biordi’s commitment to thinking, to looking at the object was inspiring.

Dublin

Here I am in sunny Dublin. Initially I am here to work on Mirror Canon Snips in time for the Melbourne installation in June; later in the week I am here for the European Museums Forum. In a break in the work yesterday morning, I took a pleasant walk in the sun through St.Stephen’s Green and round to the Douglas Hyde Gallery. http://www.douglashydegallery.com/. There was a video installation by Willie Doherty made up of a quite nicely shot footage of a winter wood (apparently near Belfast) intercut with shots of a concrete urban housing estate, overlaid with an enigmatic soft-accented deep-voiced narrative of visiting either or both. It had the feel of Robbe-Grillet’s great snapshot set on a forest walk and filmic Last Year in Marianbad – both of which I find more satisfying: I strongly recommend RG’s book Snapshots – but the Doherty piece is harmless enough. There was also a small selection of key objects which informed a booklet published by Paul Mosse by the Gallery. This was a delightfully whimsical selection and better than the Doherty in its lack of pomposity.

'hrafntinna'

More from Recursive Shadows (photos by Steve Walton) ; The beautiful glass and lava construction by Icelandic artist Ragna Róbertsdóttir. When I was in Reykjavik last year I wrote the poem 'hrafntinna' for her, part of my ongoing "The Canon" sequence. ('hrafntinna' is Icelandic for Obsidian.) Although the blog format buggers up the line endings, etc., here it is:

cleavage black grey red tunnelling a permanent record of the mechanical impact, standing parallel to the cube. The core of many processes we take for granted slipping across an apparently uncrossable horizon. Because tunnelling efficiency also drops off with distance. Vicariant daughters and sons – our hierarchy of mediated imposition asks of recursion and definition and positive lineage. Extracts. The rules bleak if embodied in processes brought into close proximity, the rippling, gradual curves scented with conchoidal fracture grown by rifting and crust through the apparent crowding inside. This square glass boundary breaks flexural waves in release. Its stillness ripples and cracks and fractures in crystals taking the lower energy release ratio with periods of relative quiescence;

cleavage until cleaved apart commuted between here and far-field glass mountains parallel to a diagonal plane. Functionally colourless even if it is not actually colourless nearly colourless, endless until its edge is thought said in another way within the new complexity felt more fullerene than its touch; same grey colours devotedly to projection of latent collections, houses, spaces, gaps, with containers and contents and objects leaning, a veritable thinness, objects cleaving to the dichotomy of sagas within the part of larger orders of magnitude observed across small fissures emanating from the bulb of percussion - naturally occurring obsidian monotonic the fall which is an absence like streets. Her divergent boundary, action, situations, fluents with no time to straighten before frost’s northern cleavage expanses in value the absence of a family of well-understood random slips parallel to the lateral planes but horizons and fractures in crystals with periods of relative quiescence between particles defined random as shear history in piles of brimstone in the prepersonal intensity of every hand. The peculiar property possesses presenting the proportion, the likelihood of proportion to the size of the formation and propagation of cracks tears in materials ranging from glass to lava variations thrown, the direction of the tear or tears, the roughness of a fractured surface which resembles cracks and tears; the percolation of fluids through disordered media through beds framing their corrugated filter-law. Functionally black even if it is not actually black wind whistles in the light of northern rock , a cleavage, absence like streets transparent framing somewhere close to this poset edge, parallel to a vertical Prism by weight structure of dust coral shell glass nature orbits debris of her hill sphere formation, her specifically her without the rain there and not there would pry loose any plenary behaviour metastable and legal fiction: independently peopled who do not follow any natural planes of separation: Tunnel: most readily over distances comparable held in prisms fine-grained igneous and rock freezes symmetries that are continuous motions without sufficient time in the presence of impurities and depending. Recursive divergent boundary, action, situations, fluents with no time to straighten before frost whence isolation’s peripheral horizon informs anyone anywhere of dusts other

Recursive Shadows

Alan Charlton

Ulrich Rückriem

Ragna Róbertsdóttir

curated by Tony Trehy

at Bury Art Gallery

I'm particularly proud of this show - now open until 5 July.

The Guardian comments about it:

"Far from being clinically purist, this kind of minimalism, with its whisperings of otherness and almost hypnotic technical application, is fully capable of provoking a hearty sense of wonderment"

What do you want

Returning shame-faced to my tumble-weed blown dusty blog. It's not that I have been lazing around, just I was too busy to write. I think it was Sartre who wrote that you have to decide between living and telling. Anyway, I had a couple of things to do in Scotland, then preparing for the China-Tibet residency which I was invited to do - then all that fell apart as the Chinese started shooting the Tibetans, so that's off - and now I have to do a new piece for a new installation in Melbourne by the end of May - so I've been writing it. O also had a great holiday in Alicante - on which I also wrote, mainly the next book project "Space" in which the Melbourne piece has become a part.

Anyway, that's not very interesting for you. So just to get myself back into the swing, a couple of things to mention. Went to the Other Room, http://www.openned.com/manchester/ at the Old Abbey Inn last week to hear Alan Halsey, Geraldine Monk and Tom Hanks read. A really good night and the venue is a remarkable find. It's Robert Sheppard and Alex Middleton plus others next on 4 June - which I strongly recommend (though I will miss it because I'll be at the Basel Art Fair).

The other recommendation is "What Do You Want" the current exhibition at the Cornerhouse, part of the Asia Triennial Manchester 08. http://www.cornerhouse.org/art/info.aspx?ID=376&page=0
Shaina Anand's CCTV Social is a deep and thoughtful, Surekha's video of an adolescent girl floating through the sky is a thing of beauty. On the top floor, Tejal Shah has achieved something simply to make that difficult space worth visiting. On the down side, in the Cafe, Jasmeen Patheja's framed texts make the mistake of treating language as if it were transparent.

Bob Grenier & Charles Bernstein

In July, Robert Grenier returns to Bury Art Gallery for the exhibition of drawing I have curated called "The Irony of Flatness". This will be the first time the entire 64 poems of the Bolinas series have been shown. It'll also be the first time that Bob has read from the pages (rather than projections).

In the meantime, Bob and Charles Bernstein have been in conversation which is now published in "Jacket":

http://jacketmagazine.com/35/iv-grenier-ivb-bernstein.shtml

I'll be interviewing Bob during his visit for a future issue of "if p then q":

http://www.ifpthenq.co.uk/about.html

Rhythm + Blood Quartet

Gauge Symmetries: work in progress

every pattern generated this way will be either periodic
or quasiperiodic asymptotic (un)bound nearby tender
flaws are locations what they know not what they miss

Alan Robbe-Grillet

Another of my heroes has died. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Robbe-Grillet

Robbe-Grillet's Snapshots were a major influence on my early writing. Project for a Revolution in New York and the Voyeur are two of my favourite novels and Last Year in Marienbad is both a great film and a great cine-novel. It's rare I think to find a screenplay that reads as a major literary work over and above its filmic function. Even his autobiography Ghosts in the Mirror is worth the time, being my favourite of the genre after William Carlos Williams' Autobiography.

If p then q

James Davies, formerly of Matchbox, has launched a new journal "if p then q" - which promises interesting things, not least a four-part poem by me in the first issue. You can read part one sample "iff" on the journal's new website: http://www.ifpthenq.co.uk/magazine.html

the site the sound requires

Thursday 7th Feb at 6pm at the Cornerhouse Gallery.
Book launch
Helmut Lemke's new book.

Leeds

A couple of weeks back, I took myself off on a writing break to work on Gauge Symmetries [previously mentioned]. I most like doing this in a continental city, there is something liberating for writing being in a city where the language isn't English. Post-wedding finances dictated that I go nearer to home this time so I ended up in Leeds. Thankfully I didnt go to Leeds for the visitor experience and therefore it didnt disappoint as it wasnt very interesting; but a special mention should go to Leeds City Art Gallery. http://www.leeds.gov.uk/artgallery/ which I advise you to visit if you are passing nearby. I can't remember the last time I went in an English gallery that impressed me, so Leeds Art Gallery deserves to be celebrated. The restored Tiled Hall is a fabulous Victorian interior. The curation of the permanent collection is beautifully balanced and even the temporary show, the Northern Art Prize, was worth seeing.
http://www.northernartprize.org.uk/

Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope won the Prize ultimately, and I have to agree it was a brilliant installation.

Alan Johnston at the Cornerhouse

A chance to hear Alan Johnston talk at the Cornerhouse tomorrow morning, details:

http://www.cornerhouse.org/events/info.aspx?ID=1235&page=0

Some months back Alan completed a new commission on the Irwell Sculpture Trail, which is supported with lots of images and analysis at
www.northernmirror.com

Our Passing Resemblance

The latest exhibition at Bury Museum "Our Passing Resemblance" looks at, among other things, representations of the family. Curated by Alison Green and myself, it features one of my favourite artists, Shaun Pickard. Here pictured. Pickard's inspiration is from Darwin's notebooks. The title/caption reads "Case must be that one generation then should be asmany living as nowTo do this & to have many species in same genus (asis). REQUIRES extinction." This text was added to the drawing in the notebooks at two different dates (indicated by different coloured ink), and is quoted from "Charles Darwin's Notebooks, 1836-1844"

In Rainbows

Much has been made of the on-line release of Radiohead's latest album "In Rainbows" though I am struck about how little has been made of Radiohead's latest album "In Rainbows". Having now listened to it enough times to be fair to any subtleties, I inclined to the view that its online release is its distinguishing feature. Having been astonished by their live performance in Manchester a few years back and owning all their albums, I am disappointed. It is interesting to compare this release to "Hail to the Thief". The latter was an event. Radiohead were ubiquitous, large sections of the album were broadcast and discussed. The only discussion I have seen in the media is the one about what this form of release means for the music industry. I wonder what the release means musically. Listening to it, my memory goes back to the back road from Castletown in the Isle of Man leading passed the derelict Witch's Mill towards to Port St.Mary which ten year olds walking with their grandparents could never have completed in the dry heat of one of those childhood summers that we all imagine happened. http://www.dankarran.com/photography/isleofman/castletown/

WHENCE ISOLATION’S PERIPHERAL HORIZON IS TO ANYONE ANYWHERE OTHER UNIFORM DIRECTIONS ISOLATED TREES LANDSCAPE AND PASTS LOCATED BRANCH EMBEDDED BRANCH WITHIN THE DISTANT END OF A TREE BLOOD VESSELS BROUGHT INTO CLOSE PROXIMITY SELF-SIMILAR TO ANY PHASED TRANSITION SAYING THIS IDEA THIS THRONE THIS FORTUNE THIS HILL METHINKS THIS OVER-FITTED SPACE LANGUAGE PERPENDICULAR TO TRANSVERSE PLANES OVERCAST WITH FREQUENCY BROADCASTS

Predictions for 2008

It's that time of year when people are supposed to make resolutions and predictions, so here are mine:

I will be working with sound artist/musician, Helmut Lemke, and dancer/choreographer, Ruth Tyson-Jones, on a collaboration with the working title "Gauge Symmetries" - investigating the nature of space and movement (pictured) ; I'll also be writing the follow-up to "50 Heads" called, at the moment, "Portrait". Jean Paul Sartre's fascination with the notion of complete apprehension of an individual has been a preoccupation of mine for years. He wrote:

“the most important project is to show that fundamentally everything can be communicated, that without being God, but simply as a man like any other, one can manage to understand another man perfectly, if one has access to all the necessary elements”.

He pursued this through his mammoth "the Family Idiot" analytical biography of Gustave Flaubert. The concept of understanding an individual completely is politically problematic and philosophically inevitably impossible. It is a project beloved of Government accountants and target setters who have even less capacity to achieve it than a philosopher. But quixotically, I wonder whether it is possible for a poet to get closer to it. The strategy that seems to be forming in this stage of "Portrait" is to approach specific individuals through a relationship of all individuals.

Two other things I can predict with some confidence: in Bury I will curate an exhibition called "Recursive Shadows" with work by Alan Charlton, Ulrich Ruckriem, and Ragna Robertsdottir in May; and in July a drawing exhibition called "The Irony of Flatness" featuring Alan Johnston, Bob Grenier, Marianne Eigenheer, Ulrich Ruckriem, Stefan Gec, Hester Reeve and a new text by me called "Flatness" also to be written.

The final prediction is that I will plan the next TEXT FESTIVAL which will run from May to August 2009. I am inviting submissions for proposals for commissions, exhibitions, publications and performances in the next few weeks. The official announcements will be forthcoming but if your only source of information is this blog, you can email submissions/proposals to t.trehy@bury.gov.uk or post them to Bury Art Gallery.

Happy New Year

Christmas (wedding) greetings

Merry Christmas everyone.

Married in Venice

A better excuse than usual for my lack of blogging: I've been in Venice getting married.

A perfect day.

Stockhausen Died

Sad news today: Karlheinz Stockhausen is dead. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=T4RWBOA5SZZVTQFIQMFCFFWAVCBQYIV0?xml=/news/2007/12/08/db0801.xml

I have enjoyed his music since I was first introduced to it in 1981 - "Set Sail for the Sun" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aus_den_Sieben_Tagen has been one of my desert island discs since I heard it back then.

http://www.stockhausen.org/licht_by_malcolm_ball.html

Mr Worthington's Chapel

object in the eyes boxed and an object that knows too much or does too much saving saccade attention for delicious gauge symmetries

so sweet equiconsistent so cold

happen, recontextualised no artefact in all its capable of being dismantled digested and susceptible to dropping in frequency as it moves away private

this groupish nature at face

arriving at the same place at the same time our ideal fluids desired too in thick and thin telomeres of extra high relatedness

our kitchen and bijective topos

Dynamic Rationalisation

As previously mentioned there have been no negative consequences for the Gallery & Museum Service in Bury since it was de-registered for selling the Lowry painting last year. The programme continues to be exciting and innovative and attract a lot of positive attention. Other UK public galleries taking their bat and ball home has had no effect on our programme, and when we have needed to borrow an artwork for an exhibition we have sourced it outside the [public] “Sector”, or more usually outside the country. In fact the only consequence I have noticed is that I get invited to speak on platforms at conferences considering collection and disposal policy. This is usually on the basis that Bury is a pariah service having done the dirty deed – so I guess it is usually expected that I should speak chastely about how desolate it is to be outside the fold. This isn’t my perspective at all. I am invited to yet another conference on Friday called “Dynamic Rationalisation”; the gist of this is that it is alright to dispose of collected items as long as you have some plan that legitimizes it. The opening question I find most strange: “Selling the art treasures: When is it ethical to sell works of art?” So the discussion starts from the same muddle-headed confusion in which it has been mired throughout. Just commenting on the lack of rigour in its wording – artists sell works of art, gallerists and collectors sell works of art. So presumably that is ethical. The implication then is that when a public gallery buys a work (from someone who sells it ethically) it achieves a designation of art treasure and in which miraculous state it is protected for eternity. But no, it is more complicated – you can sell it ethically if you have created a dynamic rationalization for the sale. So where Bury went wrong was that instead of selling it for the dynamic rationalization that I identified – the work didn’t fit aesthetically or historically into the collection and that with the Lowry Centre 20 minutes away the public could see much better examples of his work nearby – the Council acknowledged its financial crisis and tied the sale to saving the whole museum and the rest of the collection. Subsequently however nearly half of the value of the sale has gone back into cultural and museum spending. So it turns out that Bury is guilt of half an unethical act because if it had spent all the money on the museum everything would be ok. But failing to get over itself, “the Sector” still sulks about it.

“The Sector” and the politicians have constructed a description of the world that bears no relation to what is actually going on – the former because of its own fear, weakness of vision and lack of leadership, and the latter because it is responsible for the low value/manipulation of culture of its own ends.

Dealing with governance first, the contradictory positions of the government agenda comes out in the DCMS response to the Culture, Media and Sport Parliamentary Select Committee Report on Caring for our Collections Session 2006/7. The committee find it “incongruous that no sanction at all should apply to local authorities which choose to close museums and disperse collections… it is right that there should be sanctions for those museums that sell parts of their collections purely to meet the financial needs of the council.” In relation to Bury, this is already confused: Bury Museum didn’t sell part of its collection, the local authority did. This judgment is confused about whether it is the local authority or the museum that should be sanctioned. Their very next paragraph beggars this: “Museums & Galleries are a discretionary local authority service and their funding is a matter for the relevant Council, its councilors and the local community”. So these services are discretionary but if a council decides to no longer provide them or to reduce it, then it (or its museum) should be punished. How does that work then? Herein of course is the root of the weakness of the sector – museums are not statutory so when finances are pressured or the government makes the easy “difficult decision” to spend our billions on bombing foreigners, they are the most vulnerable to cuts. This is why the self-righteousness of some of the delegates and platform speakers at these disposals conferences is so laughable – Bury just happened to be the first, it could just as easily happen to them; there are growing examples around the country where the museum has simply been closed completely. Instead of attacking the immorality of Bury, the Sector should have been campaigning with it to protect museum funding, to make museums statutory like libraries or schools.

The Select Committee report goes on: “Where a local authority seeks to close a museum or otherwise disperse the collection, the community may seek the help of their councilor who can raise a Community Call for Action requiring the decision be scrutinized.” This is somewhat cheeky to say in the context of Bury; the councilors made the decision to sell after 2 full Council meetings and much consultation. That sentence disingenuously implies that a local authority decides to shut the museum on a whim or philistine putsch. What is much more likely is that this option will be part of a greater crisis where, as it was in Bury, it is a case of sell a painting (or close a service) or shut an old people’s home, or employ less teachers, etc. You get still get local people asking why Council’s waste any public money on art as it is, so the notion that a Community Call for Action is going to save the Gallery over something else is nonsense. It should be noted too that Bury’s decision was made using the full processes of local government democracy whereas no-one voted for the people in the MLA and Museums Association who made the decision to sanction.

Bury gets a specific mention in the report: MPs join the chorus of disapprobation (rather than offering a political solution like calling for museums to be made statutory services), and go on “…we share the concern of the sector that other local authorities may be encouraged to follow Bury’s example, not least by the unexpectedly large sum raised by the sale. We believe that this would be a retrograde step.” It was not good for Bury to be in that position but it was national political policy and local government funding that created the crisis. The punishment and (getting tedious) criticism of Bury is nothing to do with the morality of selling art, it is aimed at scaring other authorities that might see this as a route out of a crisis. What I find fascinating in the subsequent developments is the full realization of pointlessness and irrelevance of the “Sector’s” structures. The MLA has decided that Bury can’t re-apply to join its club for 5 years, but the rumours abroad are that the MLA itself may not exist by then. It was obvious from the start that the “Renaissance in the Regions” policy was no more than a process of centralizing control creating a structure which obeyed government performance indicator culture for not much more money to make it worth it. Bury didn’t seek admittance to this pen for that very reason.

Interestingly the converse of disposal, acquisition, is touched on in the Select Committee paper: “Whether or not the gap between museum’s acquisitions budgets and the cost of acquisitions is properly described as a “crisis”, there is a clear decline in their power to keep collections growing and an urgent need for action to restore museums’ power to develop their collections. We are, however, concerned that the very high prices now commanded by great works of art are calling into question the feasibility of public art galleries regularly continuing to compete for them against enormously wealthy individuals and institutions.”
Gratifyingly, Bury has continued to compete in acquisition of “great works of art” for years. Personally, I think that it is not how much money you have but how cleverly you direct it. The telling phrase is “great works of art”, of course. Capital-centric in both sense of the word, the establishment locates artistic value in economic value. It is a further sign of cultural hegemonic decline that the Imperial of International collecting has shifted away from Britain.

Excuses for laziness

My apologies for the long gap: I had a deadline to write 4 poems for a new journal coming out next year. I have a long entry to post by tonight but in the mean time I direct you to a periodic reminder of the bird flu situation - http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/h5n1/ - more than 90 deaths this year alone.

Birgir Andresson 1955-2007

Sad news today that Birgir Andresson died yesterday. Each time I have visited Reykjavik arrangements have been made for us to meet but each time for one reason or another we missed each other. After my installation at Safn, his collaboration with Ragna Róbertsdóttir was the next show. He has a couple of works in the ICELAND show at Bury Art Gallery at the moment and we hoped to show him more fully in future years. It feels like a destiny unfulfilled.

www.i8.is/new/birgir.htm

There Would Be No Way

The Myth of the North

It was with a mixture of nausea and exhilarating irritation that I had to visit the worst modern building I know: the Lowry Arts Centre (www.lowry.com). I find myself in that odd bind where something is so appalling you want to warn people not to go near it but at the same time wanting to recommend it so that you can share the adrenaline rush of experiencing something truly jaw-dropping. There is one angle that I don’t mind the Lowry from – that is on Google Earth where you can see that it was designed with some cube, circle, triangle structure. But from the ground it is an absolute stinker. There is no architecture logic from the outside, but when you go inside there is no human sense to it. It is no exaggeration that it makes me feel physically sick to be in there too long. If the spaces had been designed as a centre for Overactively Disordered children with colour blindness it would be excusable but the glaring juxtaposition of brutal purples with orange, red and yellow garishly slanting off at made angles, floors that slope illogically while adding the colours and texture of public toilet blue flecks is maddening. I wouldn’t ordinarily mention this as the building has been there for a few years now and, while it has the same effect on me each time, it is hardly noteworthy. As usual (on my rare visits), I despair at the clumsy geometry and bad lighting of the Lowry galleries themselves; so nothing new there. There is a brilliantly bad column in one of the galleries blocking a series of sight-lines in front of some Lowry drawings which I always make the effort to visit just to confirm to myself that the architect who laid out the spaces was an idiot.

The thing that especially fired me this time though was the current temporary exhibition. Generally the Lowry exhibition programme is not very exciting – maybe the badness of the spaces infects that too – but the current show “the Myth of the North” actually magnified the general annoyance of the Lowry experience. Curatorially the display is fabulously poor – half-arsed ‘sets’ of stereotyped back-to-back terraced housing, daft plastic stone/brick walls, one enjoying the set piece of an umbrella and a suitcase leaning against it. There seems to be no curatorial thread running under these dismal displays. The brochure says that it is “an amused look at how others have chosen to see us”, but by the curation says that is how the Lowry curators see us as well. Lowry’s own paintings are done no favours in this environment (these are supposed to be the guardians of his work!), by association with the tedium of these northern stereotypes Lowry is relegated to being a local painter of local, now extinct, scenes of grime. A sorry state of affairs. A much more insightful show of Northern-ness is the Factory exhibition at Urbis http://www.urbis.org.uk/page.asp?id=3149 – among other things an exhilarating example of what is achieved if a phenomenon is driven by inspiration and creativity unencumbered by a business plan and target bollocks.