about everything

Philip Davenport's new poetry book about everything will be launched on Friday 30 January 7-9pm at the Chinese Art Centre 7 Thomas Street Market Buildings, Manchester, M4 1EU. Refreshments will be served. The book will be on sale on the night for a special preview price of £9.99

Artists

A great meeting with Irene Barberis (http://irenebarberis.com/) from Melbourne, Madelon Hooykaas from Amsterdam (http://www.stansfield-hooykaas.net/) and Alan Johnston from Edinburgh (http://www.northernmirror.com/) - the ideas of projects and exhibitions will follow.

Journeys from the Holocaust

An art project in Manchester will commemorate the holocaust in poems displayed at Piccadilly Railway Station, Manchester. On Holocaust Memorial Day (27th January 2009) poetic texts created by older people, many of whom are holocaust survivors, will be displayed on the giant electronic billboard at Piccadilly Station, Manchester. The holocaust has often been linked to trains: millions of people, particularly Jews, were taken to concentration camps by train before being killed in the notorious nazi Final Solution during the Second World War. This artwork will give fragments from accounts of their journeys: to destruction and journeys of escape.

http://www.arthur-and-martha.co.uk/pages/kindness%20samples.htm Artist Lois Blackburn and poet Philip Davenport from the arthur+martha arts organisation have been working with older Jewish people at The Morris Feinmann Home, Manchester, exploring memories of and meditations on the holocaust. John Collins from Imperial War Museum North has worked with the team, bringing objects and personal stories from the museum collection to discuss.“This work is made up of family histories, refugee backgrounds and direct holocaust memories,” says Davenport. “We are interested in the bric-a-brac of people’s lives, the tiny moments, rather than grand history. Sometimes these little things can illuminate a far bigger picture.”

Maria Turner, Activities Co-ordinator at the Morris Feinmann Home, described the effect of arthur+martha’s work: “In a very sensitive and caring approach, the project has enabled our residents to talk about their experiences and express their feelings.”

Down with Excellence!

“No one in their right mind would say we don’t want the arts to be excellent. It’d be a bit like saying you don’t want your child to do well at school” – Paul Kelly, NALGAO Magazine Spring 2008

That’s alright then, because I don’t have children thankfully and have no interest in schools. So it’s time for this idea – and/or the public policy jargon – of ‘excellence’ to be challenged. I should have done this sooner, so bear with me parsing the term from some of its early usage in government-speak. As Andy Burnham, the Minister of Culture wrote in “Supporting Excellence in the Arts”:

“The time has come to reclaim the word ‘excellence’ from its historic, elitist undertones and to recognise that the very best art and culture is for everyone;” – so no pretence then, it is about the government laying claim to the word ‘excellence’.

And in July 2007, Andy Burnham, the Minister of Culture, announced that

“Targets were probably necessary in 1997, to force a change of direction in some parts of the arts world. But now, ten years later, we risk idolising them. Without change, we risk treating culture like it’s an old fashioned, unresponsive public service – not a modern, complex network of activity, with plurality of funding, with a sophisticated and complex relationship with its global audience. Without change, we’ll create an overly technocratic approach when we should want a transformational one, where we give you the power to take risks and be the best.” (speaking as both an artist and a curator, the government doesn’t have the power to give me the power to take risks).

I’d dispute the premise that targets were necessary in 1997 – it was bollocks then and its bollocks now. As has been noted in many other places this centralisation of culture has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with command and control.

The Minister went on
“The arts are probably one of the most highly regulated parts of British public life – it’s just that instead of OFSTED, you have critics, and instead of parents and pupils, you have audiences. You are highly regulated, but through self-regulation.”
(for non-UK readers OFSTED is the schools inspectorate). Does it need to be said that this is nonsense? Distorted beyond credulity and a telling comparison: disingenuously it simplifies the critical engagement dynamics of cultural production and equates and imposes the constricting demand side model of learning as a codified entitlement over creativity practice.

But still, the minister commissioned the McMaster’s report

http://www.culture.gov.uk/reference_library/publications/3577.aspx setting out to examine:

- How the system of public sector support for the arts can encourage excellence, risk-taking and innovation
- How artistic excellence can encourage wider and deeper engagement with the arts by audiences
- How to establish a light touch and non-bureaucratic method to judge the quality of the arts in the future

Given years of damage caused by the layers of destructive restrictive bureaucracy, stop-start funding and funding tied to distorting non-arts targets and concomittant risk-aversion and de-skilling of the sector that the Government targetolatry (the Minister’s own word) has created, this sounds remarkable; the subtitle of the report is actually “From measurement to judgment”. The ‘excellence agenda’ is the new mantra.

So let’s not be in our right minds then and come out against ‘excellence’, challenge their right to appropriate the word. Because under the guise of ‘excellence’ most of the old nonsense is still there. I recall the later Robert Hopper http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-5031851.html used to say that the arts are 90% like plumbing, but is the 10% that is the important bit. A decade or more of cultural policy that favours the plumbers over the artists has led to the public sector arts themselves losing sight of how important the actual art is and, supported by the education system also tailored to targetolatry, increasingly a generation of arts administrators, curators (etc) and even artists think like plumbers rather than artists.

The excellence agenda becomes the pretense, the distraction from what is really being done. In support of it, we now have Improvement and Development Agency for local government (IDeA) (cute how they have appropriated the word ‘idea’ too) publishing “A Passion for Excellence – an improvement strategy for culture and sport”. One of the authors referred to this as “the result of a six year journey” – why didn’t the arts journalist who he said this to laugh in his face? Why didn’t any of the the artists in the consultation period just tell them to ‘fuck off’. Ah, ‘Passion’ that’s another word that they are co-opting: again Andy Burnham said: “I want to keep the passion and throw away the packaging of targetolatry. Setting culture free to do what it does best.” Government policy proves this to be completely untrue.

The author of ‘A Passion for Excellence’ said patronisingly “most of them [arts managers] know [what they are doing] and I’ve yet to meet one that doesn’t want to improve!” Apparently though one of ‘our’ problems is that CPA (Comprehensive Performance Assessment – yes, I know) was an opportunity, “but the arts never cracked the data sets”. Thank fuck for that! The day I crack or care about data sets is the day someone can put me out of my misery.

Anyway, the next ‘opportunity’ for the arts was Local Area Agreements – the latest Government targets regime imposed (sorry, agreed) on Local Government to make ‘local services better’ etc or make the targets they report look better. And surprise surprise nationally only 25% of LAAs have adopted in the government’s target on “engagement in the arts”. This is called National Indicator 11 (NI11) - “The percentage of the adult population in a local area that have engaged in the arts at least three times in the last 12 months”. Of course the low inclusion of NI11 in local council’s LAAs must be the arts fault too. I expect we didn’t crack some data sets, that’ll be it. Alternatively it could be that the arts actually don’t make it into corporate local government strategic planning because they are not a statutory service, so they can’t compete with the usual list of more important things like schools, bin emptying, highway maintenance, etc. Therefore obviously it’s also our fault because we haven’t provided evidence that the arts have any point - just prove how useful you are to these pointless performance indicator monitors (the Priests of Targetolatry?) and then everything will be alright, the money will flow. How many years have I sat in meetings when some arts bureaucrat has said all we need is more evidence of the value of our work? Even though the Minister concluded his statement with: “art has the power to change people’s lives, regardless of class, education or ethnicity… the arts would still matter – and I believe this passionately - even if they did none of those things. They are intrinsically valuable before they are instrumentally so. The arts hold the ring for our national conversation. They are where we find our meanings, individually and collectively”. Sadly the Minister’s passionate belief doesn’t stretch to supporting the arts without measuring them. With NI11 there will be a clear implication that excellence is to be judged on a scale of popular access, and how is that artistic excellence?

I was accused of slipping into polemic here the other day – though that was the original reason I started the blog – so here is a more specific rejection of their ‘excellence’:

The bureacracy has a contradictory patchwork of policy agendas which don’t actually allow the conditions for artistic excellence. Even in Arts Council policies it can often be hard to find mention of art. The government and its apparatchiks confuse excellence and access. Maybe we should be grateful for the small mercy of the demotion of idolatry of children from arts targetolatry in the new performance indicators: the other performance indicator is the number of visits to an art gallery by people over 16 (NI10) – but there are so many fallacies in these indicators. The statistics are gathered by something called the Active People Survey. A telephone research sample of 500 people in each borough. Are the arts really to take this form of information seriously? I was at a meeting of arts officers this week were, while there were looks of distain and weariness with it all, someone also said that these indicators were important to us all, and of course there were the younger officers who have been brought up in this environment (I think we are supposed to call it this ‘ecology’ nowadays) so don’t know any better.

One problem with the NI10 and NI11 is that they assume only to local impacts. Culture operates in a globalised context which makes the notion of local culture amputated if defined as an inward limitation (ie being local is only saying what you are not, not what you are). The Minister himself referred to culture’s “sophisticated and complex relationship with its global audience”.

It should also be noted that for the last decade the priority for public galleries has been number of school children visiting and number of school groups – the damage to art this causes I have bemoaned here before; but the criticism here is that suddenly galleries that have built (dumbed-down) programmes and staffing around a child-family audience are suddenly shifted to prioritising visitors over 16 (NI10). But of course this is disingenuous: very few galleries could get away with following the indicator and re-orienting the service to adults, because children are sacred and, as Paul Kelly indicated above, are verging on a standard against rational argument should be measured. What is actually expected is that you keep the child visitor numbers up and increase the audience which has been neglected – and it’s very few galleries that could make sense of a programme, interpretation or curatorial practice that can respond to the competing audience profiles. That word ‘respond’ is significant, because it is always about the response to the ‘needs of the audience’ not the direction of cultural production from the artists. As the man from the Passion for Excellence report says: ‘We as a sector need to be comfortable with setting our own objectives and standards that reflect what our communities want and need and delivering against them’. How can that be a recipe for excellence? Bury is a good example of many small towns – it is interesting as a place because it is equiconsistent with most other places. The baseline statistic for Bury’s level of engagement is 45.3% with the national average 45.2%. Meaningless surveys; you can bat then against each other. A recent demographic (Mosaic) analysis of the Bury population classified the largest proportion of local people (again about 40%) falling into the category “responsible workers with unsophisticated tastes”. A pretty desperate classification to belong to. “Our own objectives and standards that reflect what our communities want and need”: So what will they want? What will their needs be? More sophisticated taste? Irresponsibility would be contrary to government policy, I guess. John Maynard Keynes observed: “We have reach the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be”. Maybe the average is actually the new excellence.

The word they have appropriated is not what they mean. Excellence is a quality, but despite the McMasters “from measurement to judgment”, the State performance indicators for the arts measure only quantities. The Arts Council of England attempting to paper over the cracks created by their paymasters are piloting peer review processes. There is a philosophic question in relation to their current model because it moves excellence from being an absolute to being a relationship. But the cultural policy problem is that the statisticians of the Government and the UK Audit Commission will completely ignore whatever evidence peer review generates. Last time the regional Cultural Development agencies tried to introduce quality into local government assessments (via the Regional Cultural Commentary), it failed to make it into CPA on the grounds that it had no objective measurable factors. So the arts will continue to be judged by the standards of plumbing.

All that said, I think also use of the actual word ‘excellence’ in the arts (rather than whatever they mean) is problematic. I have to say that I don’t believe that that is what artists do. I don’t think you would ever hear an artist say that they are driven by the goal of artistic excellence. On one level there is an implicaton of technical finish in ‘excellence’, it is a word you more comfortably expect to hear in commentary on the quality of orchestral playing rather than in relation to risk taking and innovation, because risk and experiment can be messy, unsuccessful, and maybe disappointing in immediate terms - that's why it's risk; but in risk artists move practice forward, make discoveries. It is interesting in Burnham’s speech that the artforms he most readily references are orchestral playing and theatre, and despite his aversion to “its historic, elitist undertones” both forms fit more comfortably in a critical framework of excellence because of their relationship to an original score/script, and especially in classical music a canon.

Burnham said: “The arts hold the ring for our national conversation”, that conversation will remain vacuous as long as the vocabulary of cultural dialogue is corrupted by the politics of central control and bureaucracy.

Base, Florence

The striking thing about the culture of Florence is that contemporary art is noticably absent. Talking to various Florentine artists and curators the common theme is the necessity to leave the city to work. So a tiny light in the contemporary darkness is Base (http://www.baseitaly.org/basenglish.htm) - a small two room art project space on Via San Niccolò. The current installation is a beautiful video projection called Fantasia by Grazia Toderi: http://www.baseitaly.org/Grazia%20Toderi.html. Accompanied by the sound of a light breeze, Fantasia is a gentle shifting panorama of Florence at night, or a dreamed collage of Florentine lights, horizons, districts or parks or groups of buildings slowly illuminate and drift mesmerically; overlaying this circles of lights dance and poetically spin in the imagined sky space. Brilliant.

work studies in schools

As if following on from my last comment, I happened to be in the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. The Victor Mann show on the top floor was mostly missable, made even less worth seeing when the visitor stumbled across the ubiquitous school group sitting on the floor. The 'artist-teacher' (not the actual artist) was asking earnestly "did you enjoy doing your drawings?" The group of fine young minds managed only to mumble nothing in particular. And then thankfully they filled out. The attendants began clearing up the mess of graphite they had left on the floor in front of the centre piece art work (the one on the website.)

On the next floor down, seeing the title "work studies in schools", with growing disgust I nearly didn't bother but thank god I did because it turned out to be one of the best shows I have seen in ages. Warm and intelligent, as the website says "remarkable not only for the unique picture it offers of school life in the 1970s, but also for its critical response to the tradition of documentary flm-making." The link gives a good account of Darcy Lange's show:

http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/programme/current/event/263/work_studies_in_schools/

and thankfully (and bizarrely) the only children in the space were the kids on the TVs.

Renaissance

X number of years ago, one of the interchangeable ‘arms-length’ wings of UK government came up with “Renaissance in the Regions” http://dmtrk.co.uk/renaissancenorthwest/DB-56/AboutRenaissance.aspx?dm_i=DB,FPW,4KBJA,PKV,1 – the (nowadays marginal) MLA http://www.mla.gov.uk/?campaignkw=MLA-Council “£150 million programme to transform England's regional museums.” Of course the sensible thing to do was to steer well clear of it – which I did. In its spirit of ‘disseminating good practice to the sector’, Renaissance puts out research findings from its activities. They don’t usually catch my attention but this one did:

“Creative Spaces is a programme of research about children's perceptions of museums and galleries, led by CapeUK. Children worked as researchers in four of the Hub museums. Each museum identified a research question, for example: ‘What would an art gallery designed by children contain?’ Then the children worked alongside the adults to find the answer.”

The obvious answer to the research question is such a gallery would be a pile of shite, but with such a daft notion, I couldn’t resist having a look at the report itself. http://i.dmtrack1.net/CmpDoc/2008/479/458_creative_spaces_report.pdf?dm_i=DB,FPW,4KBJA,PLF,1

It was only a quick scan because I am not that interested but one section really identified the scale of the problem:

“During the visit to the gallery, children enjoyed trying on clothes a great deal. However, several of them remarked that the clothes, and more generally the textiles on display, were not art. The visit could have broadened their perception of art or simply provided an indication that an art gallery could also have a play value.” [my italics] Maybe the visit could have broadened their perception of art or simply provided an indication that an art gallery could also have an artistic value.

Christmas

Anaesthetised: tmesis null waits. Wellsaid waiting most
unsatisfactory distant unsatisfactory. retelling and partook
looked – through me my eyes only vertigo between a city here,
a city sequestering there. any bleaker focuses vicariance.
random cities decant. isolated irregular spaces. intermission
from noble visions, lusting, and scripted continuance. Opera
progressively silence in viscosity, Dementia without fear factor
overrides the greed, we stop going out, more dying to a fade: 6
lines –
ignoring the risks of extreme events, mountains in winter and
connections, this jaw practice for death and lassitude, a totally
unknown image to demonstrate the importance laid
the foundation of expecting this behaviour of attachment bond
inference. the boredom of a border not crossed our role is
honorary our happiness gives way to the next.

Happy Christmas!!!

The Other Room video

http://theotherroom.wordpress.com/december-2008-videos/

Islington Mill Art Academy

Back in 1982, I was nearly thrown out of Loughborough College of Art for too persistently challenging the competence of my lecturers. And in 2003 after a brief waste of time at Manchester Metropolitan University's MA, I resigned in disgust at the disorganisation and mediocrity of the poetry lecturers. So I am comfortably in the camp critical of the state of arts education. Higher education has become a business that is less to do with transfer of knowledge or nurturing artists and more to do with administrations that generate fees and 'hit' targets disingenuously pretending that progress is constant. So it was a great pleasure last week to spend some time in conversation with the artists of the Islington Mill Art Academy.

http://www.islingtonmill.com/d.php?r=artacademy

http://www.islingtonmillartacademy.blogspot.com/


The Academy is a fascinating attempt by a group of young artists to education themselves, to develop their practice autonomously. Choosing their own influences, the artists invite practitioners to talk about their work, respond to the work going on and establish a creative dialogue.

Read

Well who would have thought it? It turned out that I could work out how to read the poems after all. It felt like the audience got what I was doing too. Most of it turned on speed and breath I think. I found that I edited really visually or semantically dense passages on the hoof hoping to at least get the flavour of the original. One of the audience said in response to this, that this was surely an argument for editing them out of the originals as extraneous. But I can't accept that; that way lays writing for performance rather than writing to write. The performance was just a snapshot of what the poems might be/were on that particular night. I suppose the contrary revelation for me was that I actually really enjoyed the experience and want to do it again.

The only thing I didnt do was read Calculus - because I forgot - minus the proper layout - because working that out on this page is as difficult as reading it. So here it is:

0. monotonic the fall. In the cot, of equilibria and reducing complexities, the baby recognised my death as our eyes another reason to avoid the butchery of children’s moment Cut, a form of transitivity when the engine stops and you can't go on, but you get out of the car and go on. A prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage one experiential state of the body to another implying augmentation or diminution in that body's capacity to act She reminded me of what we could have had - and it was remarkably paradisiacal, only less so. The dynamics hovering bird wings, the public are mad those that aren't found in any species in city park ascriptions of method. Two opposing points connected by positive and negative charge tired but it was there, something about never getting there – the slender margin language object – daily routine of back and forth sine wave study to the quaint notions of windswept steppe and desert’s unequal presumption of innocence without fear of retributive access will be the end of memory: 1

The Other Room

The Other Room on 3rd December I'll be reading with Carol Watts and Scott Thurston.

See http://theotherroom.wordpress.com/

This may be a surprise if anyone notices, because I virtually never read - as a matter of artistic 'policy'. Putting aside issues of reading as marketing, my writing contains its own investigative imperative that is driven by the need to solve problems of language and space; generally if a problem is solved by the writing itself, I don't see any need to read it to anyone - if someone wants to know whether my solution was viable or useable they read it themselves. In addition, formally my texts tend to use visual resonances, rhythms of layout or word shape, counterpoints of line beginnings and endings which I can't see how you could punctuate vocally without introduction sound accents that are not equivalent. On top of that personally I am dyslexic reading aloud.

I'm buggered if I can think of a good reason why I am reading but I am.

So here is the problem I have: I am going to read poems that should not be read and which I am not able to read!

Therefore, (obviously) I will start with the toughest one to read: Mirror Canon Snips. This was written as an installation on the staircase at the Melbourne DrawingSpace. Originally, as part of the show preview, I envisaged as well as the installation there would be a performative element; two readers one at the top and one at the bottom of the stairs would ascend/descend reading the text, finishing when they had swapped places. As this was in my mind from the start, I found myself asking - is it possible to write something that is so difficult to read that it causes someone walking on stairs to trip and fall over? Starting from a position of not being able to read the poems for all the reasons about, my Other Room reading begin with a poem that aims to make the reader to fall over.

Second, I will read from Reykjavik, (written for the Safn Museum) which if you havent seen it is a single line long line poem in a concertina form - meaning that there are multiple readings/directions in which it can be read. So who knows which one I will find?

After this I will go to some poems from 50 Heads - although it has been read in public, it hasn't been read by me. First I will read Calculus - because there is a huge dyslexic episode on the page at the beginning of it. Then I will go to Entscheidungsproblem - appropriate because it asks the question: "is there some procedure which could solve all problems one after another?" (that is actually the first line) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entscheidungsproblem . Of course by this point both me and the audience will be losing hope that a solution is possible and so Lassitude will be the next poem. And as I know in advance that I cannot achieve my goal, the final poem will be Underachievement.

The reading can't succeed because it is impossible - therefore it will be a success.

Text Festival

I've not been up to writing here for quite a few weeks due to illness mostly. Anyway, to prove it has not finished me off, I point you to the Text Festival website www.textfestival.com which is beginning to accumulate the shape of the forthcoming events.

Seville Biennial

Just back from Spain where I managed to see the Seville Biennial http://www.fundacionbiacs.com/biacs3/index.php in the Monasterio de la Cartuja de Santa María de las Cuevas. I thought as I entered that it is a brave curator who has “Miraculous Moments” written over the entrance. I have a number of responses to the show: the actual experience of individual works; the fairly clear but fragmented curatorial concept and then the catalogue. Luckily I didn’t read the latter until after I had seen the show. Particular highlights for me were
Tamás Waliczky’s ‘Landscape’ - http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/stories/storyReader$5790
Rafael lozano-hemmer’s ‘Tercera persona’ http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/eproyecto.html
Austrian Ruth Schnell’s ‘Retinal Scripts’ were a striking effect installed at various locations around the site. At first glance these appeared to be simple lines of small lights but as the website says “hologram-like words that are generated by transmitting high frequency light impulses to light diodes ... Grasping these words requires an agile viewer and an intentionless gaze. Thus, the eye that scans the light horizontally itself becomes the support of the image. This phenomenon effective here is the so-called after-image.” Lights actually writing on your retinal.

Anyway, I walked through part of it then took a wrong turn and ended up in what looked like an architecture MA degree show. But having tracked back and tried again from another direction I realised that this was still part of the Biennial, just not very interesting part. After a while it was much of a muchness; and it surprised me when I got to the end of the circled tour and that was it; maybe it’s me, but with the linear layout of the exhibition, I would have finished it with some set-piece or conclusion.

Giving the curators the benefit of the double, I turned to the catalogue to see if I had missed the subtlety of their conception. The director Peter Weibel writes that the biennale’s artistic risk is to take on the role of technology, science and media in art, architecture and ambience. This premise may well be the problem, since I don’t see that that is that much of a risk. Weibel’s essay then sets out the reasons for taking the risk. These are:
A call for emancipation: epistemé and techné
This argument is that dating back to the Ancient Greeks who mad the distinction between higher forms of knowledge (mathematics, geometry, etc) and lower forms (painting, architecture, music, etc), aesthetic organisation mirrors social (class) organisation. “The emancipation of the artes mechanicae is one of the conditions of the emancipation of the slaves in the name of democracy. To emancipate the slaves means to emancipate their form of knowledge and practice…To abolish class separation it seems necessary also to abolish the separation between the arts…The dissolution of class society implies also a dissolution of the separation of the arts.” I don’t believe that this is the interrelation of the arts to democracy.

A plea for democratization: Technics, Science and Culture
“Still today technology is under suspicion to be the opposite of culture, a manual but mindless practice or competence.” I think that the project to engage with science and technology is timely but Weibel does the possibilities that this throws up a disservice. The evidence that is advance here comes from sources dating from periods between 1925 and 1966, clumsily out-of-date the analysis misses the real excitement that artists should and are engaged in through dialogue with the truly miraculous moments of recent scientific discoveries. Having identified the false dichotomy in types of knowledge in his call for emancipation he reinstalls the split in an analysis that talks of “technology as a humanising tool that can create a new equation between the masses and art”, to the point where he declares that “who is against technics is in fact against culture, but not only this, he is also following an inhuman impulse”. Who exactly is this? “To be against the alliance of technique, science and art means to be against democracy, the masses and human progress”. But who seriously is?
“It is so important that we change this separation and make the so-called passive consumer an active producer by means of interactive art that unites intellectual and manual labour and abolishes the separation of labour and therefore the separation of classes.” This begins a frequently reference but totally illusory notion that interactivity somehow represents free action. “Media activated and experienced by the public, the observer, the viewer, the user is the true democratic and human use of media”. This reminds me of a current TV advertisement that more and more people are joining the revolution…with their use of the Braun electric toothbrush.

You_niverse: Interactive Art and the participatory Universe
This illusion of interaction as free action is carried further in this concept of You_niverse. Taking Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle – the act of observation at the quantum level changing the state/location of the observed particle – as a model for the universe as fundamentally participatory. Putting aside the Science, which says that the uncertainty principle only applies at quantum level, this is a shoehorning argument to get to an ontology which skips Materialism in favour of the desperate magic canker of participation. As Dave Beech recently wrote in his excellent Arts Monthly article “Include me out!”: … “There is a temptation, within the earnest tradition of participation, to treat it as a solution to the problems endemic to the whole range of established forms of cultural engagement, from the elitism of the aesthete to the passivity of the spectator, and from the compliance of the observer to the distance of the onlooker.” And specifically relevant to the Biennial’s claim that interactivity art is somehow empowering, “the participant typically is not cast as an agent of critique or subversion but rather as one who is invited to accept the parameters of the art project”.
The essay concludes with a key point: “the Biennial’s goal is the participation of the public. There will be a democratisation of art. The audience is the star, not the artists. The emancipation of the masses through technology: art not for the masses, but by the masses.” Speaking as one of the audience, I can say without self-deprecation that I was not a star of the show, and looking at my fellow visitors, sharing the serial ontology of progression, they certainly sparkled no more than me. “The encounter with art at the biennial of Seville will make people euphoric” – it didn’t do that for me either.

The essay by the co-curator Won-il Rhee was even less realistic. I haven’t really got time to critique it fully but a flavour of it can come from the putative questions that the works on display provoke: “Will I throw aside the new and undeniable digital reality when faced with the analog reality?” I couldn’t help remembering the scene from Under Siege 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Siege_2:_Dark_Territory when Steven Seagal has fought his way to the mad scientist who has password locked a computer controlling a deadly satellite. The baddie declares Seagal is too late; the computer can not be stopped, whereupon the hero shots the scientist through the computer. Rhee’s following question: “Should I still cast aspersions on the imagination?” made me laugh out loud. And so did the next: “Should I accelerate your [sic] exploration into the extended time and space, while enjoying a risky tightrope walk on the border between reality and imagination?”

Returning to the reason for linking science and art. I think that there is a much better reason than the old arguments put forward by the curators, and it is the opposite of the privileging of the audience, the opposite of all these notions of the active viewer, the radical reader (from the poetry world); The most important thing about science is not the discoveries but the method. The act of investigation, the attempt to hypothesise, the primacy of rigour. The most important process in art is driven by the same requirement.

Berlin

I went to Berlin ostensibly to attend the Zebra Poetry-Film Festival http://www.literaturwerkstatt.org/index.php?id=494&L=1
but who needs an excuse to visit your favourite city. The Poetry-Film Festival was execrable. The audience (at least starting out) was impressively large, so it is a double crime to have such poor work showing. Pretty much all I saw was either weak narrative poetry voiced over or subtitled to mediocre illustrative film images; or generally coming out of Eastern Europe/the Balkans laugh-out-loudly-bad Kafkaesque nightmare animations. The fare could be summed up as a festival of banal verse illustrated by plodding film-workshop shorts. “Again and Again” was an 11 minute documentary filmed in a glass factory in the Myanmar countryside with a subtitled and spoken Buddhist poem accompanying. The German producer stood up at the end and talked about her documentaries and how this film by The Maw Naing had come out of a film workshop she had set up in that country. And that is all you could say about it. It certainly did not represent any example of a new art/poetry form. It was a little sad really that the young Myanmar artist was so ill-served by the importation of the Western documentary model.
BlauwBlauw (Bruised) was a Belgian film by Sandy Claes, Miguel Declercq and Daan Wampers featuring a naked woman in an empty room. An animated blue bruise appeared on her body and in stop-motion moved and expanded around her until it bound her in blue elastic ropes, pulling her and tying her to the room. Some words about poetry appear on and off. The makers spoke about it representing domestic violence but this notion was fundamentally dissipated by the absence of violence in the language.
The best worst example of UK practice was Cul-de-sac by Sandra Ensby and a poet who I don’t know called Benedict Newbery. The poem was the usual English poet-first person lilting along about melancholy, slow small life dying and the comforts of pointlessness. The film was a simple watercolour style illustration again. When Newbery spoke he pretty much summed up the problem. He said that Endsby had seen the Zebra Competition and as she had seen his work somewhere emailed him to ask for 5 poems from which she could choose one to animate for the prize. The audience chuckled at the English ingenuous amateurism of it all. But this was the admission of the festival: the works on show are (mostly) film-makers who acquire poems which they illustrate with image. The poems are stuck in an unchallenged linguistic history so these works advance nothing. The Festival programme claims ‘there is no other comparable presentation of poetry films… the most important forum for an independent art form fusing poetry, film and new media.” Unfortunately, if they are able to maintain this eminent position unchallenged the real possibilities of language art and the time-based media will be peripheral.

Thankfully Berlin has endlessly more exciting possibilities and this visit was one of the most brilliant I have ever had. On the Friday I met with Patrick Panetta who was a great guide to more galleries than I can remember. Things that stood out though were Ming Wong at MKgalerie http://www.mkgalerie.de/ and Josephine Meckseper at www.arndt-partner.com. I was also pleased to see Maurizio Nannucci's ALL ART HAS BEEN CONTEMPORARY at the Altes Museum http://www.museumstechnik.de/en/projekte/beleuchtung/Nannucci-Schriftzug.php .

Lawrence Weiner was a constant presence of course, in various galleries and on street corners. The El Sourdog Hex http://www.elsourdoghex.org/browser/weiner.htm had some nice pieces though there was also a sense that you get a lot nowadays that Lawrence is surveying himself, locating himself as a future historical figure.

I also had the pleasure of dinner and Ukrainian Champagne with Steve Miller and his girlfriend Sonya. Steve’s current installation in Bury is a deeply interesting show which I will talk about soon (when I have been able to convert some of the images to do justice in the blog format).

Zebra Poetry Film Festival next

Just back from the European Museums Forum in Bertinoro Castle, Italy http://www.ceub.it/index_en.cfm

There's lots to report but I am now off to Berlin for the Zebra Poetry Film Festival http://www.literaturwerkstatt.org/index.php?id=494&L=1 - so I will have post a double report when I get back next week.

two 'gigs' to see

Next week I am in Bertinoro, Italy for the European Museums Forum Workshop “Museums And Local Resources: A European Perspective” http://assembly.coe.int/Museum/ForumEuroMusee/Workshop/workshop_Index.aspso I will miss two gigs that I would like to have seen:

Marianne Eigenheer is doing a talk about her work and the current Bury Art Gallery Exhibition "the Irony of Flatness" at 12.30 lunchtime on Tuesday 30th September.

and the other is
The Other Room
Wednesday 1st October 2008 at 7.00pm
The Old Abbey Inn, 61 Pencroft Way, Manchester
David Annwn, Caroline Bergvall, Joy as Tiresome Vandalism
I've not seen Caroline since the last Text Festival so I am disappointed by the clash. I can highly recommend both events.

Carolyn Thompson in Porto

the nature of bury

As a curator no matter how much you trust your judgement that an artist will do something interesting, it is still a scary moment when the artist proposes an installation that starts with an ‘empty’ gallery. Whether you take a hard-line on the degree of rigour which an audience faces or not, curating an empty gallery at the start can be daunting. Conceptual environmental artist Kerry Morrison http://www.morrison-prowse.com/kerry/ ostensibly started from just that point in her current show ‘the nature of bury’ at Bury Art Gallery.

Actually the gallery turned out not to be empty, it is filled with a question: “where can I discover the nature of bury?” Kerry has for a number of years working in collaboration and dialogue with the scientific method – the gallery opened with the pregnant ‘scientific’ equipment which would be used to gather the samples, statistics and observations of the nature of bury – the display of a methodology of enquiry. I am pleased to write that Morrison’s query was instantly a sort of consciousness of the gallery space, an almost tangible ontology of her question. Having asked six people the question, she mapped their responses and began a series of artistic-scientific field trips, returning with specimens, new knowledge, new insights.

She writes “I choose my next exploration site from the conversations have with passers by at the current site. A map drawing of the next destination will accompany the first map drawing of the first. Travelling with my cabinet of research materials - a camera, sound recording equipment, jars and receptacles of various kinds, observation logbook sheets, crayons, pens, pencils, and a map of bury - I proceed from the gallery to the selected site of investigation. Upon arriving at the given destination I explore this nature of bury. Meeting people, and talking to them about what I am up to is an important element of the work. Through conversations I hope to discover anecdotes and points of interest relating to ‘place’ and the nature of the place. Each conversation I have will end with, “Where’s another good place discover the nature of bury?” (I paraphrased that lot)

What I find remarkable is that the question she leaves ‘hanging’ in the gallery has gained weight as her researches have begun to fill the space. Her exploration of the identified sites of the nature of bury has, as she intends, returned apparently scientific objective samples and observations, and in this very action she draws the parallels (and exposes) the subjectivity of scientific and artistic investigation of the world. She illuminates the ambiguity inherent and the greening-soon-to-be unquestionable nature of what n(N)ature actually is. In this regard even her lower case title is an insightful touch (I do like an artist who sees the subtler points of the language).

Personally I have no interest in nature or the environment – countryside is the dismal gap between cities as far as I am concerned. I recall Picasso once said that if he went for a walk in the landscape, it gave him green indigestion which required him to relieve the overload of his senses with green or landscape paintings. This always seemed daft to me – one because there is no comparison between the sensual overload of a city street with the monotony of the rural and two, sharing the metaphor of green indigestion, a more sensible care of one’s ‘stomach’ is not to ingest in the first place. When Kerry asked me where the nature of bury was I replied an old chemical site (which has become a site of special scientific interest due to the eco-systems evolved from contamination) and Radcliffe town centre. All that said: I have to own up to a great and growing fascination with the discoveries and objects of nature that Kerry is accumulating in the gallery. Maybe this is how I want my nature anyway – in a gallery (or a good park is acceptable) – either way the in turns beautiful, organic and clinical reification of nature, its artistic scrutiny, draw me (of all people) more frequently back than any recent show to see what new insight her accrual of the nature of bury has to offer.

The show runs 19 July - 8 November

Footnote:
After all I have said about the problems of galleries as crèches, the gallery had just such a out of control children problem overflow into Kerry’s installation. A more thoughtful piece on this to follow.

Peace Demo

WE have the annual irritation of New Labour's party conference this week - Manchester streets are sealed off, police patrol in vast numbers, helicoptors hover overhead night and day. On the first day on which the sun seems to have shone all year, it was great to see the End the Wars Demonstration roll into town.

"The decision to withdraw the poem was not taken lightly"

The banning of the Carol Ann Duffy poem "Education for Leisure" in a GCSE poetry anthology has ripped around the world understandably with the outrage against censorship and also simple-minded stupidity.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/09/banned_books.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/sep/04/gcses.english

As I read this story the thing that struck me was not the fact that the Educational bureaucrats could be so easily bounced into Reaction - it is the defining characteristic of such people - be it in health services, local government or education. The thing that stands out, which sadly isnt being said by anyone, is that the poem is a stinker. Apparently they only had 3 complains and it was withdrawn; wouldnt the world be a better place if 3 complains that it is bad poetry could have got it withdrawn - that wouldnt have been censorship, that would be saving poetry itself from the banality which is its fate.

Cairo : Sound Constructions

Group exhibition from 7 till 30 September 2008
Location: Factory, 1st Floor
7 September, 8:00 pm: Opening
8 September, 8:00 pm : Viennoise – a performance by Mahmoud Refat
Voices, melodies, and sounds fill the space of every city. Noises waft through the air, their origins often unknown. In the ebb and flow of sound, we find our way through the world, or get lost in it—dissolving into a sea of cell-phone ring tones, and re-emerging with the call of a name. Voice and identity are inextricably linked, connecting us to each other while defining us individually.
The sounds of a city can feel like an embrace, but at other times they threaten and disturb. In the privacy of the home, city noise is shut out—but complete silence is rarely achieved. Thus, the artists featured in this exhibition do not attempt to quiet Cairo but instead add their own sounds to it: Their works layer and echo, interpret and describe, both acoustically and visually. Sounds will not only be heard, they will also become visible.
Featured artists: Barbara Armbruster (Germany), Marianne Eigenheer (Switzerland), Zoe Irvine (UK), Hadel Nazmy (Egypt), Mahmoud Refat (Egypt), Beat Streuli (Switzerland).

القاهرة: تراكيب صوتية
معرض جماعى من 7 حتى 30 سبتمبرالمدير الفنى: باربرا أرمبروسترالمكان: المصنع والدور الأول
7 سبتمبر، 08:00 م : الافتتاح8 سبتمبر: 8:00 م : فيينواز - عرض لمحمود رفعت
تملأ أصوات البشD8 والأشياء والنغمات فضاء كل مدينة. وتنطلق ضوضاء عبر الهواء غالباً ما لا يعرف مصدرها. وبين علو وانحسار الصوت نجد طريقنا عبر العالم، أو نتوه فيه – غارقين في بحر من نغمات الموبايل، لنعود مع سماعنا نداءً لاسم. يرتبط الصوت والهوية بشكل لا يمكن فصله، متجلياً في ربطنا ببعض عندما نعرّف أنفسنا كأفراد.

يمكن لأصوات المدينة أن تبدو كما ل و كانت تعانقك، ولكنها في أوقات أخري تهدد وتزعج. في خصوصية البيت، تُحبس ضوضاء المدينة بالخارج – ولكن يندر تحقيق الهدوء الكامل. لهذا، فإن فناني هذا المعرض لا يحاولون تهدئة ضوضاء القاهرة، إنما يضيفون أصواتهم الخاصة لها: أعمالهم تتقابل وترجع الصدي، وتفسر وتصف، سمعياً وبصرياً. لن تُسمع الأصوات فقط، ولكنها ستصبح مرئية.

فنانو الم9رض: باربرا أرمبروستر (المانيا)، ماريان إينير (سويسرا)، زوي إرفاين (المملكة المتحدة)، هديل نظمي (مصر)، محمود رفعت (مصر)، بيت سترولي (سويسرا)
Gallery hours in Ramadan
Saturday till Wednesday: 11:00 am – 2:00 pm & 7:30 pm – 10:30 pm.
Thursday off, Friday 7:30 – 10:30 pm.
مواعيد الجاليرى فى رمضان
السبت حتى الأربع: 11:00 ص – 2:00 م و7:30 م – 10:30 م
الخميس مغلق، الجمعة 7:30 م – 10:30 م

The Reality Street Book of Sonnets

Having recently received The Reality Street Book of Sonnets http://www.realitystreet.co.uk/ edited by Jeff Hilson, I was struck by the exhilarated curiosity one feels when in the presence of a great anthology. I counterpose this feeling with the contrary feeling you get from the salad-mixing of popular anthologies. Bookshop poetry sections offer two shades of negativity in this regard: pick up an anthology at random and you either have that sinking feeling that these people can get away with such sloppy publishing and concomitant sense of superiority you get from seeing these feeble efforts. As Ron Silliman wrote in “In The American Tree” – “[this] anthology is a record of the debate”, but there is an endless stream of imbeciles chattering at the moment. Anyway, these thoughts cause me to return to something I’ve not read for years – ‘A Pamphlet Against Anthologies’ by Laura Riding & Robert Graves. The essay argues that there are only 3 types of anthology that are acceptable:
A non-professional, non-purposive collection, such as the poet’s or amateur’s scrapbook; the rescue-anthology, the value of which is primarily historical; and third – the anthology that is criticism. I think there is a fourth. The question of the form of an anthology is a live one for me at the moment because I am in the process of editing one to accompany next year’s Text Festival. The Book of Sonnets is a particularly good one. It made me think about really good anthologies: “In The American Tree” obviously, Rothenberg & Joris’s definitive “Poems of the Millennium”; “Other” Caddel & Quartermain; the Chicago Review “New Writing in German”. With very positive feelings about the Book of Sonnets, I am pleased to note that the Text Anthology (probably not its final title) shares a number of poets – Tony Lopez, Carol Watts, Robert Sheppard, Alan Halsey, (that I can remember without looking at the list). But having returned to the Riding and Graves, I note they also have a lot to say about the implications of classification within what they call a true anthology – approaches mentioned include alphabetical order of poets’ names or titles, or chronological by birth or death of the poets. Silliman divided In The American Tree geographically – East and West Coast. The fourth type I think is the most exciting to delve into, to read – in the way Lawrence Weiner means with READ ART. It is, as Silliman comments in his introduction the poetic conversation of …“The nature of reality. The nature of the individual. The function of language in the constitution of either realm. The nature of meaning. The substantiality of language. The shape and value of literature itself. The function of method.” So I still have the question of how I will construct the Text Anthology. I’ll want it to do those things. “Anthologies are not facts, but individual viewpoints over complex fields of information.” So it will be a curation.

Anyway, off to Toronto now.

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.