"Presumed Innocents", the trial: 10 years later

(news via e-flux)

Bordeaux Judge Reopens Decade-Old Child-Porn Charge Against Curators Marie-Laure Bernadac, Henry-Claude Cousseau, and Stéphanie Moisdon.

Indicted at the end of 2006 , after six years of investigations, long period during which no element was produced that could have fed the prosecution (the specialized unit for minors and the rectorship gave a favourable opinion) and after the attorney general of Bordeaux called for a not guilty decision in march 2008 the trial judge Jean-Louis Crozier has just decided to refer before the magistrate's court Marie-Laure Bernadac, Henry-Claude Cousseau, and Stéphanie Moisdon, for having, within the exhibition entitled "presumed innocent- contemporary art and childhood " organized 2000 in the CAPC contemporary museum of art in Bordeaux exposed " violent and pornographic art works "*.

With this decision—which, in an extremely unusual move, disregards the conclusions of a Parquet investigation—the entire national and international artistic and professional community, together with the cultural image of France, have come under attack and stand accused, offended.

For the first time in France, two museum directors and a curator are to be tried in a criminal court for exhibiting works of art that have already been shown throughout the world or put on view since the Bordeaux exhibition in art shows that have not elicited the least unfavorable reaction from the public. The thinking that went into preparing the incriminated exhibition, focused on a major subject of art history, was developed collectively and was shared by the relevant state oversight authorities.

This court case from an earlier century, fiercely, relentlessly prosecuted by a single judge in contempt of artistic creation and individuals' right to accede freely to all forms of art, is indicative of a dangerous obscurantist attitude. The trial will take place in Bordeaux under pressure from a local child protection association named La Mouette, in turn supported by an extremist press that has already been found guilty of libel against one of the accused.

How is it possible that what is considered viewable and acceptable everywhere else should not be so in Bordeaux? What will be put on trial in the Bordeaux magistrates' court a few months from now is the work and personal and professional conviction of three figures of the world of art and culture unanimously recognized for their commitment to that world. They have already received thousands of messages of support from all horizons.

This attempt to "criminalize" artists and other actors for their creative work, together with the cultural sites that diffuse that work, requires us to be extremely vigilant about censorship of this kind, whose perpetrators are ever ready to use noble causes such as child protection to authoritarian, liberticidal ends.

MARIE-LAURE BERNADAC, HENRY-CLAUDE COUSSEAU, STEPHANIE MOISDON
including works by Christian Boltanski, Gary Gross, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Elke Krystufek, Carsten Höller, Annette Messager, Ugo Rondinone…..

(Marlene Dumas, included in the exhibition,with one of her "obscenities." Photograph: Martin Godwin.)

Poets with the Barnster

P.Inman & Tina Darragh

Peter Inman and Tina Darragh arrived from the USA today for his reading in the Text Festival tomorrow, and their readings at the Other Room on Wednesday. (Pictured being initiated into the local beers)

Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.

It was interesting hearing people mention “Poor.Old.Tired. Horse.” at the ICA, London, before I actually went. http://www.ica.org.uk/Poor%20Old%20Tired%20Horse+19863.twl There was a frisson suggesting something important might be happening. For the capital, maybe, the Text Festival is peripheral, something, somewhere up north but this is an exhibition in a London institution. An altogether different status again and a status that could contribute to artistic/poetic progress: Poor.Old.Tired. Horse. is not that show.

There are three major problems with it (“No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition,” so maybe more than three problems will emerge as I think about it): a form of curatorial attention deficit disorder; a fragmentary curatorial logic; and curatorial dilettantism in relating the included work to the stated aim challenging that “stupidity [which] reduces language to words” (quote from Ian Hamilton Finlay).

I didn’t realise until after I had visited and started reading the catalogue how big the curatorial problem is. Part of this was due to my bad legs and it being literally a dozen years or more since I was last at the ICA and so I had forgotten how the exhibition spaces work; so I decided to start at the upper galleries and work my way down. This meant I didn’t perceive the failure in curatorial logic until I had got to the end – ie the beginning. Herein is the first sign of the curatorial confusion: the show has a narrative logic but doesn’t allow for the possibility of the visitor approaching the narrative counter-intuitively. To locate the intended flow then: Room one concentrates on Ian Hamilton Finley; Room two features a handful of the well-known Concrete Poets (Chopin, DSH, Kriwet) plus ‘other artists who …created interesting parallels to that of the concrete poets’ (Acconci, Andre, etc); Room three is an exploration of “artistic practices from the 60s and 70s, and the ways in which they were allied with poetry”; The last room, room 4 (or the first room for me) concludes the missed/promised survey with six ‘younger artists’. “Several are represented by text-based pieces, and others use combinations of text and image…”.

The bizarre curatorial ‘hole’ is in Room 3: which makes no sense at all in relation to the concept of the show. The Philippe Guston work stands up and is one of the highlights of the show for me, but what are the David Hockney drawings doing there? The pretext that they are responses to CP Cavafy poems is gossamer thin. They are great drawings but how do illustrations of poems ‘challenge stupidity that reduces language to words’? In same vein, Alasdair Gray illustrates a text, but the work doesn’t even have the justification of quality, the illustrations are execrably talentless, embarrassing Eric Gill simulations. And Robert Smithson’s ‘Encyclo’ is a terrible doodle, basically. This room is the evidence of curatorial attention deficit. Although there are problems with the survey in the first two rooms, this room seems to have nothing to do with the exhibition’s concept; either it represents the paper-thin knowledge of the field in the curators or some desperate shortage of work for which it became expedient to fill a space. And so ignoring the room 3 abrogation, the core of the show is room one and two. I found it surprising that Ian Hamilton Finley’s work could be shown in such a way as to diminish its impact. The installation manages to neuter Finley. In room two there are some great pieces (though it is actually dominated by the terrible spinning Sky Never Stops by Lilian Lijn); but in combination with the preceding Finley room, it only magnifies the question of why Bob Cobbing is not represented. If this exhibition were treated as representing concrete poetry, it would be as big a travesty as the one we have to put up with from the mainstream Hegemony of the Banal.

So the final room is the six younger artists. The first criticism is that six is too many for such a small space. Second, the temporal leap from 60’s concrete and conceptual artists to 2009 suggests that the textual practice of that era is a discontinuous tradition that is only now being rediscovered. Which is rubbish. Of the 6, Anna Barham , Matthew Brannon, Karl Holmqvist, Janice Kerbel, Frances Stark and Sue Tompkins, I found no-one particularly interesting. In the context of the rest of the show, I had the impression these were young artists who have some text in the work, and the curators have such a limited grasp of what is currently going on that the inclusions are there by curatorial accident. When you look at the jumble of the catalogue the evidence seems to support this. The first half details the show and the second half is a ‘collage or texts and illustrations…”. Not in itself a source of issue, except when you go from Haroldo De Campos and Eugen Gomringer (neither in the show) to an essay about William Carlos Williams followed by Matthew Brannon’s “Words on a Page” (which is in the show), you have to think that the whole event is either aleatory or ignorant.

Nine Catalytic Stations - Paul Neagu

I wasn't familiar with Paul Neagu's work until this week, when I accompanied Marianne Eigenheer to the Flowers Gallery where part of the Neagu archive resides. A teacher of Anish Kapoor, Neagu died about 5 years ago and is regarded as Romania's most important 20th Century Sculptor. Marianne is curating a small show of his work on behalf of the Neagu Estate (Yolanda pictured with Marianne and friend & curator, David Thorp) in September at the Romanian Cultural Institute in London. Yolanda gave me a disc of images, here's one to whet your appetite before the show:

London - Others Seen

Holly Pester

The USS Enterprise-D has met the USS Fearless in order to take on a Starfleet propulsion specialist who will perform an upgrade on the warp drive. When specialist is ready, Capt. Picard orders the Enterprise to warp 1.5. As the ship accelerates, The Enterprise puts in a massive burst of speed. The specialist grabs his console and starts to "phase" in and out of view, noticed only by Wesley.

On the bridge, La Forge tells the captain they are passing warp 10, and Data later says that their velocity is off the scale. Picard orders a full stop, and the Enterprise drops out of warp. When he asks for the ship's position, La Forge replies incredulously that they have traveled 1 billion light years. Outside the ship, clouds of cosmic dust and energy beings swim in a never-ending blue abyss. Data concludes that they must be at the edge of the known universe and it will take them 300 years to get home.

Down in engineering, Wesley is talking to the specialist. He tells him he means no harm to the ship or the crew – he made a mistake. He is exhausted now, and Wes offers to get his mother, but the specialist declines. Wes then says that from looking at the warp equations he thinks time and space and thought are all one thing. This surprises the specialist, who tells him never to say such a thing again "in a world that's not ready for it."
Picard orders general quarters and tells the crew that they are in a region of space where thoughts become reality, and that they must try to subdue their thoughts.

The specialist is brought to sickbay where Picard tells Dr. Crusher to wake him. They must leave this place before their own thoughts cause the ship to be destroyed. The specialist wakes and tells Picard that he is actually a Traveler from another plane of existence. He is traveling through their galaxy, observing them, using his knowledge of propulsion to get passage on Starfleet ships. He meant no harm to the Enterprise. He tells them Humans shouldn't be here for a long time, until they have learned to control their thoughts. Picard asks him if he can get them home. He tells him he will try. He then asks for a private word with Picard. Scene 4:

Picard has watched Wesley leave:
PICARD: Strange how he seems to care for you.
The Traveler nods -- touched.
TRAVELER: He will forget me in time. Which is as it should be.
(eyes Picard; then)
It is Wesley I wanted to speak to you about.
PICARD: The boy?
TRAVELER: (nods) It's best you do not repeat this to the others... especially not to the mother. Whatever may happen, it is best it proceeds naturally.
PICARD(hurriedly): I must get my ship back; do we have time for this?
TRAVELER: Yes. He and a few like him are why I travel.
(sitting upright; intent now)
You have it in your power to encourage him without interfering...
PICARD: Encourage him in what?
TRAVELER: How shall I explain? Are you acquainted with the intricacies of what is called here... music?
PICARD: Somewhat.
TRAVELER: And musical genius such as I saw in one of your ship's libraries. One called Mozart, for example?
(at Picard's nod)
Who as a small child wrote astonishing symphonies as you call them... whose genius made music a tangible reality to be not only heard, but also seen and felt beyond the ability, the understanding, of others?
Traveler begins coming to his feet, Picard supporting him.
TRAVELER: (continuing) Your Wesley is such a person. Not with music but with the equally lovely intricacies of time, energy, propulsion...(gestures) ... and the instruments of this vessel which allow all that to be played.
The Traveler begins moving weakly toward the hatch leading to the corridor.
TRAVELER(continuing):You are right, I must hurry now...
(pausing at the door)
You are right in something else. He is also just a boy for now. He should be encouraged... but told none of this.

How relevant is the Text Festival to Bury?

The other day, someone higher up the bureaucratic food-chain asked: “How relevant is the Text Festival to Bury? Is it something that the ‘ordinary people’ of Bury can appreciate? Or is it something just for specialists?” The word ‘specialists’ was said with that wary intonation suggesting something dirty. The conversation was short (with the question of how will we answer the charge of elitism formed with the single word – “elitism?”). This is of course a dangerously phrased question: not in whether it can be answered but that it can be asked. The root of this is the cancer of State-control and audit validation of art. Public money is spent so art must be accountable (primarily in the financial meaning of the word); as the bureaucracy can’t actually compute ‘art’, it has to count the audience. As often mentioned here, the Government Performance Indicators for the arts are all audience counters. In this context, poetry is a form that is doomed. Poetry has either a solitary audience (the reader) or tiny audiences (the reading). Almost by definition then, Poetry is irrelevant (although the Text isn’t just poetry). The logic of relevance is that poetry shouldn’t be programmed. The problem for the fools who count art is that like many public galleries, Bury has an audience figure that floats and doesn’t really vary from around 45-50,000 visitors per year (except the year when someone proposed to close it to save money and the figure went up to 68,000 – an indication that even people who don’t visit think that there should be public galleries). Although I haven’t had the visitor figures for the Festival yet – because it hasn’t finished – anecdotally the audience figure is on the high side of normal and the response has been positive - almost like the visitors appreciate it. It does ‘feel’ like there are people coming specially to see the exhibition – the scary ‘specialist audience’ - but observing the majority of people in the gallerys they are ‘ordinary’ people who have just come in to see what is on, school groups, families with their kids, etc.

This picture raises the counter questions: ‘ordinary people’ looking at a Ming Wong video – as mentioned on 17 June, Wong achieved special mention by the Venice Biennale judges; in the eyes of the art accountants could Wong be dangerously close to being an elite practitioner? Not only that, he is from Singapore but lives in Berlin: Blimey! He must be elite and irrelevant to the experience of ‘ordinary folk’ in Bury. Except Wong’s videos are universally enjoyed, they are funny and challenging and full of filmic references that are part of the global culture that informs the local.

Fundamentally the question is the Corporate failure of aspiration. In the boring bits of my job I frequently see government policy directives that insist that services should assess community aspirations and then design services to meet those. Only today I read a funding bid project description that said that the project must “ensure [that] residents understand and support the project aims and objectives by development of a Community Learning Agreement plus individual agreements mapping out people’s own targets.” This is supposed to be aimed at disenfranchised communities. How about having an objective to empower residents to tell someone ‘ensuring that they sign up to a Community Learning Agreement' to fuck off? This is the problem: the ‘ordinary people’ are allowed/expected/ensured to aspire to ordinariness. Why not aspire to have one of America’s most important living poets do his first UK reading in Bury? Isn’t it aspirational and even, (dare I claim it) inspirational to see contemporary art from all over the world in a small northern town? Maybe if we could get the audience to sign Learning Agreements when they enter the gallery or the theatre there wouldn't be a problem.

Ron with ‘ordinary Bury person’ Florence

Ming Wong Special Mention

Coincident with two works featured in the Text Festival, Ming Wong has achieved special mention at the Venice Biennale:

Life of Imitation
7 June - 22 November 2009

"The Jury of the 53rd International Art Exhibition has assigned one of the four Special Mentions to Ming Wong for his works in the Pavilion of Singapore.
The Singapore Pavilion, entitled Life of Imitation, stages the co-existence of multiple worlds where language, gender, appearance and traditions constantly negotiate with one another. In playful and imperfect acts of mimesis and melodrama, this exhibition attempts to hold the mirror up to the Singaporean condition related to roots, hybridity and change.
Wong explores the performative veneers of language and identity through his own "world cinema" - a series of video installations based on well-known works and artistes in Asian cinema. The mood is further enhanced by billboards painted by Wong and Singapore's last surviving billboard painter Neo Chon Teck, and movie memorabilia such as photographs of old cinemas in Singapore, paintings, drawings and transcripts, depicting the creation process of Wong's video installations and the entire exhibition itself. "

Surely every artist's aspiration - simultaneously showing in Bury and Venice.

Thanks to Marianne Eigenheer for pointing out the announcement.

From Basel to Bury

Blimey! that was a day of art: straight from VOLTA5 to the Text readings. Opened with Judy Kendall, great performances by Nick Thurston and Jesse Glass (travelling further than I to do the gig) and a film from Sarah Tremlett.

Recordings of these and all the other readings will be available soon.

Thanks to Phil for looking after Jesse and his family while I was on the plane.

VOLTA5

and tomorrow

The last Basel thing I can fit in is Volta 5 http://www.voltashow.com/

then it's onto a plane for the next installment of the

TEXT FESTIVAL

Friday 12 June - 07:30
Bury Art Gallery, Moss St., Bury
Free admission

An evening of experimental poetry and sound in the company of Japan-based Jesse Glass, Nick Thurston, Sarah Tremlett and Judy Kendall.

(For anyone following the progress of "Space the Soldier who died for Perspective", the next book, I finished it yesterday. The publishers, Veer, will get it next week).

Holbein to Tillmans

As mentioned the Schaulager is a great space and experience to visit. From Wikipedia: “Designed by the renowned architectural office of Herzog & de Meuron under commission from the Laurenz Foundation, the Schaulager was opened in 2003 in Münchenstein outside Basel and was conceived as an open warehouse that provides the optimal spatial and climatic conditions for the preservation of works of art. The collection of the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation forms the main core of the Schaulager. The institution functions as a mix between public museum, art storage facility and art research institute. It is primarily directed at a specialist audience but is also open to the general public for special events and the annual exhibitions.”

Coincident with last year’s Basel was a brilliant double show of Andrea Zittel and Monica Sosnowka, both beautifully displayed in the pure white spaces. To allow the Kunstmuseum to receive the Van Gogh landscapes show, the former’s collection moved to the Schaulager this year. Last year’s experience had been so good, I wondered whether what appeared to be a convenience driven survey could be particularly interesting. Curatorially it is a tour de force. The concept of the show consciously views the works, both contemporary and historical, with today’s eyes. The brochure talks of the astonishing connections between the works – this hyperbole is slightly misplaced though I think. Many of the connections are very striking such as a great accumulating presence of On Kawara date paintings (http://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/13/work_1309.htm) circulating Fischli and Weiss Table installation – the latter probably would have left me cold but in this juxtaposition Fischli & Weiss became as potent an existential presence as Kawara. Another great one is Joseph Beuys’ 1965 “Snowfall” made of 32 felt blankets weighing down fir tree trunks on the floor, beside a Mountain landscape with smashed trees from the 1620s. It read as a criticism to say the brochure is hyperbolic; I’d also say it is falsely modest: The monumental outer wall on the lower storey is hung “like a mine of still unformed raw material. Countless paintings are spread out, only roughly sorted, above, beside, and beneath one another across the entire length of the wall. Each painting can stand for itself, but at the same time it invites to look within the spacious presentation for its partner or groups to which it could belong.” This could even be called disingenuous: as, far from it having a sense of categorising still to come, it actually stands as one of the most subtly balanced and controlled installation I have ever seen. The curator who organised that wall has one of the finest eyes I have ever come across.

As a footnote, it is interesting to compare this show with the Giacometti show and the Visual Encounters – Africa, Oceania and Modern Art which are both on at the Fondation Beyeler which I saw earlier in the week http://www.beyeler.com/. Another great architect's building (Renzo Piano). The Schaulager also features a couple of Giacometti’s which are much better served by being given lots of space to breathe and therefore carry the existential potent that you expect from his work; the Beyeler installation packs in too much work and in the crowding (added to by the huge visitor numbers) the sculptures are distracted and lessened. The paintings come across as much stronger because standing front of them framed alone on white walls they remain powerfully intense. The Visual Encounters installation has some very fine set piece juxtapositions: the connecting space between the two shows features 9 Giacometti figures connected by a long Monet water lilly painting to some wood carved figures from Cameroon in front of a Cezanne; A gallery of Rothko paintings with vitrines of African masks, Leger paintings with Oceanic sculptures, more Cezanne Bathers with work from Mali, etc. (Mondrian doesn’t work in this context I think); but there is something strangely unsurprising about the Encounters, in a sense it is too balanced spatially. The Schaulager manages to be perfectly tuned while offering the tingle of risk, and the pleasure of seeing the risk pulled off.

Brunch at the Schaulager

What a great place is the Schaulager
http://www.schaulager.org/en/index.php

Art Basel 09

“nearly 300 leading galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. More than 2,500 artists, ranging from the great masters of Modern art to the latest generation of emerging stars, are represented in the show's multiple sections.”

Too much to take in obviously. Prepared by the visual overload of last year, kept more of my attention in reserve so as not to burn out too quick (though resistance can’t last for long), and tried to give myself a specific focus – looking for interesting text works/artists for the next Text Festival. There were some but not many – I will return to my findings on Texts in a summation blog bringing together thoughts on this from all the shows.

Gallerists, dealers selling – prices lower now (offered a very nice Edmund de Waal for reasonable 5 figure sum.) “They won’t sell for less than 1.1 million”. “You must give me a call when you are next in New York”; So many spaces you get lost. The people as interesting as the art - much more surgical enhancement than I am used to seeing. Made arrangements to meet an artist in Madrid. Scribbling down names I want. Can I remember now? A great small space with drawings of Klimt, Schiele, Beckman, Dix; LAWRENCE BEING LAWRENCE Cathy Pilkington “Elsie” (4obvious reasons: a super-real cute dog asleep) sore feet KosuthADJECTIVEADJECTIVEADJECTIVElalla Essaydi Jaume Plensa Song of Songs Tatsuo Miyajima Counter line Marijike van Warmerdam various trees (for the nature show in Bury next year) AYSE ERKMEN, Gabrielle Basilico photographs, nearly knocking 27.AG.1995 (Kawara) off a wall, Glen Ligon tedium; everything else...

Meanwhile, back in Salford

Art Unlimited & Liste 09

Actually except for the free Champagne, it was pretty limited, and Liste 09 - supposedly the feast of new and emerging artists & galleries, was decidedly lacking in anything worthy of emergence. Hopefully, the Art Fair proper tomorrow will be more interesting.

A Boat as a Vessel

In the same building as the Architekturmuseum, Kunsthalle Basel has a solo show by UK artist, Lucy Skaer called: A Boat Used as a Vessel. This was an interesting installation too, playing with the mathematics of pattern, planar shifting and method transparency. Greatest pleasure came from her use of old furniture, antique tables, used as printing blocks, the tops carved into, inked and printed off. In the first room, a multi-leaf table centred in the space was mirrored on the walls by these prints, each different – depending how many leaves had been pulled out – and augmented with a simple graphic symbol or a colour, gave a sense of monumentality.

In another space, she had suspended a whale skeleton behind panels so that it could be glimpsed through the gaps and mirrored this with large drawings on paper on two facing walls. These drawings are schematic and decoratively buried in layers of pattern echoing the stuttering presence of the whale skeleton.

Actually my only problem with the show comes (as is often the case) with the verbiage accompanying it: “The play on words in the title rests on the formal and fucntional correspondence of the two nouns. The title reveals the multilayered process of naming and attributing meaning: while a boat can both literally be a vessel, it also becomes the vessel to hold the meaning of the title…” Save us from artists using language. If the title is so important why are “as” and “a” uncapitalised? If the two nouns are commutative and equivalent why isn’t it “A Vessel”? If it would have been “a Boat” but for the first “a” being at the beginning of the sentence, we have the issue of an artist interrogating language but not really. There’s a lot of it about.

Better little Gestures - “The Madness of Madelon Vriesendorp”

Having viewed the disappointing Little Theatre of Gestures at the Kunstmuseum yesterday, it was a revelation to see significantly better little gestures in “The World of Madelon Vriesendorp” at Basel Architekturmuseum. www.sam-basel.org I don’t think I know any of her architectural works, but this show of paintings, postcards, objects and games from 1967 to now is brilliantly exciting. It features watercolours, prints and films of New York iconic buildings in surreal landscapes engaged in sex, climbing through holes, crumbling, with the Statue of Liberty sometimes naked, sometimes sleeping, sometimes also crumbled and over topped. Setting out to collect bad paintings, endless collections of postcards of New York, kitsch objects of mind-numbing oddness the Vriesendorp wunderkammer is a Sir John Soanes museum http://www.soane.org/ for the 21st Century – apparently her house is full of this stuff; it’s as if an artist with talent made Gormley’s "Field for the British Isles", but more than that, this doll-world doesn’t care that you are there looking at it, it lives without the observer. The exhibition has that excitement you feel as a child in a model village or how museums used to be before the edicts of 'education' and worthiness.

Against this you have totally bizarre objects, a city of tiny failed objects – a smiling sketelon dog wearing a hat and smoking a pipe, a laughing nun on drugs, a shark eating a baby, King Kong atop the Empire State Building holding a naked mermaid – which nevertheless have the hysterical delight of jaw-drop wonderment that says “who the hell thought of manufacturing that?”.

Little Theatre of Gestures

The current show at Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel,
http://www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch/en/exhibitions/current/little-theatre-of-gestures/ was an unexpectedly depressing affair in an otherwise very pleasant day (Basel continues to be delightful - pictured waiting for the river-powered boat). As the exhibition copy ducks out of claiming anything too portentous for the show "not aiming to give an overview on the formal and informal codes that constitute our communiciation in daily life, but instead to gather artistic positions for a mutual play on smaller or larger deeds." The dismay lay not so much in the artworks themselves, though some warranted little attention, but rather in the curation of that 'mutual play'. The spaces of the Gegenwartskunst Museum are quite dynamic and possibly challenging to work with as not many rooms seem to have much in the way of a right-angle, but the juxtaposition of the works often seemed arbitrary or too obviously clumsy. The only set piece that worked was Sol le Witt's pencil wall drawing of circles and grids opposite Bruce Nauman's "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths"; but what was a white painted geometrical frame by le Witt doing in dialogue with a Roualt painting of clowns. There were a number of occasions where artists reappeared on different floors of the gallery, implying a spatial dialogue that transcended a reading of the mixing as incoherent, but this was then countermanded by the top floor being given over exclusively to Joseph Beuys. They may have been positing him as the apotheosis of artist qua gesture but this cut across any non-linear, non-hierarchical, ahistorical reading that may have been proffered in the rest of the layout.

City Trees

Basel is delightful in June, and quiet this week, with all the art crowd at the Venice Bienniale until next week. What you can't get from a blog/twitter is the miraculous smell in the streets. We are pretty sure that it is the trees which are in flower. Being a city boy, I don't know or particularly care what type they are, just remember that Andy Warhol once complimented City Trees over their country cousins because "they work harder" - this week in Basel they are putting extra effort in.

The Olympics of the Art World

Off today to Basel. A few days writing and sight-seeing then it is the Art Fair. All being well I will be blogging from there. www.artbasel.com

Back on 12 June just in time for the next Text Festival event featuring Jesse Glass, Nick Thurston, Sarah Tremlett and Judy Kendall. www.textfestival.com/when/view-12

The Other Room

My first show

I have been reading Hans Ulrich Obrist's A Brief History of Curating - which has had the effect of triggering reminiscence. My first show was a display of war etchings by the British Sculptor Michael Sandle. Pictured - his most famous work, I think, A Twentieth Century Monument.

Since getting out of Downing St, I've been too busy to do much thinking here. Still focused on finishing the new book, which is on target now and should be completed in Basel next week. Otherwise, I seem to have been tied up in funding issues: I came up with the idea of an international Sculpture Triennial for the North West, which is now going after about £1.5million from different governmental funds; and then there have been various funding applications related to the partnership with Tampere, Finland.

Grin Variations

The film created with students of the International School in the Hague with Phil Davenport as part of the Text Festival can now be viewed at http://www.darrenmarsh.co.uk/Grin.htm

or, of course, at Bury Museum.

Patience

Arthur+Martha invite submissions to blog address http://patience-project.blogspot.com/ as part of gathering insider accounts of illness. If you, or anyone in contact with you or your organisation, would like to send material to the blog, we would be delighted to receive it. Please circulate this to anyone you think might be interested. The PATIENCE collection will particularly focus on the experiences of older people. It will be published as a set of pamphlets and a book and also documented online.

Art is capable of depicting the impossible or invisible: hope, pain, joy, fear… states and emotions sometimes inescapable with ill health. We will explore some of our most powerful and yet most elusive moments - times of survival.

Paracetamol Soup, the recent arthur+martha exhibition of work made in healthcare settings, was reviewed in The Guardian (article by Penny Anderson and photostream at http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/apr/29/arthur-martha-artists ).

The Big Issue will include a feature about arthur+martha and PATIENCE on May 25th.

"a blessing: daffodils
the light, a relief
a relief (the darling)
it comes slowly."

(speak poem, Cherry Tree Hospital , 2009)

Studio visit

The Bury Gallery show following "Agency of Words" (Text Festival) has a working title of "Not At This Address". The initial impetus for this was the observation that there are some very interesting artists working in Manchester (but with clearly international locus and impacts), who have not been properly presented in the city, because of the Manchester's curatorial weaknesses, previously touched on here. It is of course a similar situation with the poetry scene - internationally significant poets disconnected from the local structures. (A case in point, the other day, I bumped into Michael Schmidt, http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=665 who seemed much more interested in his just-bought bags of summer berries and fuzzing over Barney than he was that Ron Silliman had been in town. And he didn't mention the Text Festival at all!).

So in preparation for the next exhibition, I visited 3 artists at Rogue Studios last week, http://www.rogueartistsstudios.co.uk/opportunities.asp : Pat Flynn (picture), Andrew McDonald and Magnus Quaife - all of whom will be in show. I don't know whether they would agree but while each artist had a very distinctive voice, I sensed a single commonality in their individual questioning of the divergent boundary between reality and conceptual space. Coincidentally Pat and Andrew are both routed in sculpture but have gravitated toward digital practice: Pat Flynn (re)creates objects and environments in software generating images and sculptures eerily mathematically real but reflecting the uncanny valley of between consciousness and object. Andrew McDonald also resolves sculptural dimensionality by turning to the digital. Andrew's scratchily drawn remarkable Beckett landscapes and unspecified warehouse interiors around which a headless man called John endlessly circulates are at once both tragic and affirming. http://www.axisweb.org/ofSARF.aspx?SELECTIONID=15794 He also creates shocking lightening room-illuminated cinematic tableau.

In similar questioning of perception, expectation and reality, Magnus Quaife takes images and interrogates them directly on that ground. Primarily working in watercolour, Magnus has a series of rural idylls, some rough re-paintings historic landscapes, featuring the box cabinet of one of the first super-computers used to simulate the real world; or seeing images of May 1968, and finding instead images of quirky images of life of the period, which converted into faded graphics accumulatively create an unreal era of non-memory.

Other artists so far confirmed for the show are: Sarah Sanders, Brass Art, Jesse Ash, Maurice Carlin, Amy Pennington, Rachel Goodyear, Rachel Well, and Alison Erika Forde. There will also be a sound art event during the show. It was interesting talking to the 3 artists that none of them had visited Bury Art Gallery since its innovative programme began (and that's probably nearly a decade now!); just as they don't situate their practice in the local and therefore why should they, Bury positions itself in the international context; However, my thinking is that the curatorial practice assumes that important artistic debates are moved forward more significantly through the dialogue between artforms as well as within them - hence events like the Text Festival.

(Tomorrow: down to London for the Comtemporary Art Society reception at 11 Downing St.)

we make money not art

A new experience of the Text Festival launch was the way events bounced-referred around different blogs. In that spirit of pointing to interesting things, the other blog that I frequently look at is we-make-money-not-art. Regine Debatty's report on the Knowbotic Research is worth a read.

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2009/05/positions-in-flux-panel-1-art.php

a few left traces

Neil Carver, Ben Gwilliam, Tomas Korber, Helmut Lemke,
Lee Patterson, Matt Wand, Hainer Woermann

Chapman Gallery, University of Salford
Performances Saturday 16th May 7-11pm, Free
Exhibition open: Monday 18th May – Friday 5th June

‘a few left traces’ is a performance and exhibition concept initiated and curated by Ben Gwilliam and Helmut Lemke (both featured in the Text Festival). It will be taking place at the Chapman Gallery at the University of Salford as part of the European Night of Museums and is organized and funded in co-operation with the Arts Unit. Following on from a previous event in 2007 (then the silence increased), ‘a few left traces’ is both a performance event and a subsequent exhibition that unpicks sound/music as an Interdisciplinary Art Practice, bringing together thought and debate as part of the process of making.

On Saturday, the 16th May from 7pm to 11pm, 7 musicians and sound artists collaborate together on one communal surface (20ft x 8ft table). The invited participants are established artists from the UK and abroad. Central to the performance is making new improvisations and to try new collaborations between players who have not done so before. Risk and experimentation are important.
The Audience will experience a performance evening of various improvisations and collaborations that happen in different arrangements of performers.

It is from this performance that the exhibition will form as a document to the processes that took place within the collaborations.

A body of work will be left in the gallery that comprises of:
- Recordings of the process in sound, video and drawing, individually and as a whole and
- Collected objects left over from the sound generating events.

These 'Left Traces' are assembled and projected back onto the table as the exhibition, exposing the temporal and musical processes (traces) that happened in time.
More info at www.arts.salford.ac.uk

Happy Birthday, Barney!

The Barnster is one today!

European Museums Forum

If I hadn't been busying myself with the Text Festival, at this time of the year, I would hope to be at the EMF, which this year took place in Bursa, Turkey. My friend museum consultant Benedetta Tiana set up her blog coincident with the event and here is her story of how it has been: http://bt-museumconsultancy.blogspot.com/

Silliman's response to the Text Festival

In case you don't read the Silliman blog, he has put up thoughts about the Festival:
http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/

apple pie editions

Apple Pie is a lab for poetic artefacts: art objects, billposters, prints, CDs, photographs, as well as books. The list contains work from invited artists, poets, musicians and collaborators.

http://www.applepie-editions.co.uk/

Back from London

Arrived in the metropolis yesterday in time for lunch with Ron, Will Rowe and Carol Watts, followed by Ron’s workshop at Birkbeck. Ron talking brilliantly and continuously (with questions) for 2 odd hours. Then he, me and Carol went to the London Review of Books for coffee. Then Carol left to sort out the details for the evening, and Ron and I chatted about books and writings and especially the paucity of poetry sections in books shops. I bought Viktor Shklovsky’s Knight’s Move.

Ron’s Birkbeck reading had a more durational feel than his Bury reading because he read only two works: Quindecagon and the registration mark (Blogger won't insert the character as it appears in the book). It was a good size audience and there was a good question and answer session at the end. One of the questions was why it had taken so long for Ron to read in the UK and when would he read again. There has already been such massive interest in the plans for the Text Festival – so I can reveal that I have already begun to shape it and am negotiating with both Ron and Geof Huth to return with new projects. So if anyone out there has any ideas they have for the next one, feel free to propose them to me. After the reading, a group went for an Italian meal, where I mostly chatted to Marianne Eigenheer and Ron about Russia, Mexico, and American politics. And with Carol Watts about the plan to take a Bury Poems style Text Festival-on tour to some US venues. This morning I had an interesting conversation with Patrick Fabian Pannetta, continuing our (now-called) “Proxy Conversation” book project.

This morning before my train, I popped into Tate Modern (which is never a disappointment because I visit it with low expectations). Although I had gone to catch the Rodchenko & Popova and the Roni Horn shows, I got distracted by “Poetry & Dreams”

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/CollectionDisplays?showid=1258 – which I have seen before but, developing recent curatorial thinking from the Text Festival shows, I am now working on an analytical essay on “Curating Poetry”. This will come out in a post Text publication which will hopefully also include essays from Tom Konyves on videopoetry and Geof Huth/Joanne Fitton on Text and Archives, and anyone else I think will fit into it nicely to move the Text Festival dialogue on. Anyway, on inspection, the curatorial principle behind Poetry & Dreams seems to include no relation or concept of poetry except maybe some romantic non-poetics notion that a hang that sort of juxta-floats lyrically around is poetry. As the show is actually a pretext for the Tate to show their Surrealist permanent collection, it seems totally bizarre to not represent the role of the Surrealist poets in the movement. The show is a useful example for my essay of art curators who know fuck all about poetry .

(a la Huth & Silliman) Books received:
Peter Jaeger – rapid eye movement (Reality Street Editions)
Wendy Mulford – The Land Between (Reality Street Editions)

The Coincidental Laureate

As various other bloggers noted during the Text Festival, Carol Ann Duffy was coincidentally confirmed as the next poet laureate. In the blogs I saw there was only mild criticism of quality of her writing, though I felt that the irony hung in the air that it should be announced in Manchester concurrently with (but disconnected from) the Festival. However in the Thinking Environment Symposium on the Festival Sunday there was more open anger at the appointment. The symposium was an invitation only workshop for the festival artists, premised on the idea that Festivals and conferences usually expect things from their participants and don’t very often give them something back (except some small payment). The artists were offered the space to develop their thinking about their own practice and collaborative ways forward for innovative work (I will return to this in a future blog). The anger expressed at the Duffy appointment was not a major feature of the day’s thinking but is worth thinking about. On face value the anger is legitimate (especially for UK poets who had to live with the doggerel that Andrew Motion came out with and who have not much greater expectation of Duffy). I certainly have complained about the dismal quality of laureate writing many times here and elsewhere, and sometimes with the same anger. However, in the Thinking Environment it occurred to me that the anger was misplaced. We complain that Poet Laureates are mainstream poets – and frequently not even the ‘most capable’ of that empty ‘school’. But actually that is the job description: the poet is recommended on a list drawn up by someone in Government and presented to the Queen who chooses the one she likes. The poet is then approached indirectly to see if they would accept if asked. If they accept they are appointed if they refuse they were never asked – because a subject can’t refuse the Monarch. Even poets in the mainstream have problems with this; I vaguely recall that Andrew Motion wasn’t the first person who wasn’t asked. As a person, when I have met her, Carol Ann Duffy has always been nice to me – I remember her appreciating my explanation of how to read Lyn Hejinian’s Writing is an Aid to Memory and she was once very kind when I needed personal support, and I also had a sense that there was at least some backbone of (feminist) political principle. Fundamentally and obviously the Poet Laureate is the Establishment’s representation of itself, it is an appropriation. This era’s mainstream poets accept because of the carrot that they can use it to promote poetry in general; it is represented as a platform, so despite the obvious negatives, these poets think that they can use it to get more people reading. I don’t see any evidence of Motion achieving this; admittedly he is such a poor poet reading could hardly be helped (he is now Chairman of the Museums Libraries & Archives Agency, which is an equally pointless governmental organisation).

I think it is instructive to look at the Royal/Establishment use of a different artform: visual art. Does anyone get irritated or angry about the Royal Portrait painters? Every few years a mediocre artist that we have never heard of gets commissioned to paint the Queen’s portrait. It is a news item and the only question inevitably is whether the painting looks like her, with the only question to the nobody painter being ‘what is she like as a model?’ It doesn’t register at all in the art world because visual art has an autonomy of purpose, intent and public-private economy which is driven by newness and the next thing (discussion of the Blairite access corporatism of the Tate & other Empires is too much of a digression here). So the nearest Monarch-Government can come to appropriating contemporary art is the Culture Minister attending the Turner Prize or super-star artists at cocktail parties at Number 10: a reflected glory that they can be modern and cool – a state artist would be kitsch. The idea that the Queen could announce that the Turner Prize winner will be designated the official state artist would be laughable, and the official portraitist is in the same way below even that. The anger at the Poet Laureate is often focused on the question of who it is and that there are so many more interesting poets who could do it better, but this is to lose the argument before it starts. The Poet Laureateship is itself the denigration of all poetry. Instead of anger, which exemplifies the artform’s weakness, maybe derision and laughter would be more productive, allied with counter-naming (as Ron Silliman argued in the Thinking Environment): So the post should generally now be referred to as the State Poet – call it what it is – or the Poet Lackey or the Puppy Laureate (although even Barney would refuse the Queen’s offer – Who am I kidding? if she included doggy biscuits, then like the poets who take the job, he will do anything – but at least he would have the transparent canine integrity and lack of conceit to be driven by the urge for biscuits rather than the pathetic obsequiousness of wearing their collar).

London

Off to London today for Ron Silliman's Birkbeck reading and spending time with Marianne Eigenheer & Patrick Fabian Pannetta discussing future projects. Because of the pressure of organisation of the Text, my blog relied on photographs but I hope to write more thoughtfully on the train and post by tomorrow.

Text Festival images

Ron Silliman explains poetry to Barney

Agency of Words

Opening Agency of Words

The exhibition opening was a great success (except for me dropping my camera just before it started - so no photos of my own; this is from Nancy Huth - me with Ron and Geof). There were about 100 present and lots of friends. Geof's reading was great and with people in the spaces the curatorial concept still held true. I'll expand on the show and its works when I have the official photos.

Curating The Agency of Words

Curating The Agency of Words was an interesting challenge, given the disparate works that I had selected. One of the elements of my curatorial style is the importance of understanding the spaces and spatial relations between works, the proportions and sightlines of the gallery and the often subconsciously influenced meanderings of the viewer. I would characterise this as something along the lines of a classical minimalism. As I located the works in preparation of the hang it became clear that there was something missing, the works did not gel together. Standing in the middle of the gallery, I realised that the problem was the absence of a problem. My thinking returned to my 50 Heads poem "Entscheidungsproblem" which opens with the line "is there some procedure which could solve all problems one after the other?" This was a theory from the history of mathematics that suggested that ultimate all problems could be solved through each solution resting on previous solutions. It was disproved by Gödel. But it raised the question whether artists do/can or should think that they accrue creative (or in the context of the festival) linguistic solutions. (Another reference to 50 Heads is the location of 3 Carl Middleton Apology prints - the book finishes with a poem called Apology")

So the curation invited Entscheidungsproblem at its centre - which takes the form of Helmut Lemke's fishing reel version of that poem. While now there was a central context, the implications of this were that my usual interest in 'manipulating' the perceptions of the viewer through balance and location of interest could no longer hold sway. The composition of the show now needed to orbit its central question: so the artworks function very subtly turned inwards either actually or implicitly. With the linear reading of the spatial experience re-oriented, the relationship of the works as (found) objects begins to feel more Duchampian, and with the addition of a 19th Century Grandfather clock (textual face) the curation does what it does.

As Marcel Broodthaers said: "Every exhibition is one possibility surrounded by many other possibilities which are worth being explored"

Staff Briefing

"Before I begin the briefing about the works in the show and the ideas behind it, I just want to say that in any career there will only be a few occasions in which you can say something magical happened, the people who you work with gelled together to achieve something remarkable. It has happen to me twice before in my working life; and now I can say it has happened for a third time. I'd like to thank you all for making this a special moment"

The Agency of Words opens tonight.

Irony of Flatness

The Standardised Moment


How to spell it antiquarian divestitures of fact and faction
the bubble that pops as it expands realization like the intake
of breath on a cold day the truth of neither ether Nora
what falls as rain arrives as water we see within the chalice
the frequency of a complex system repetition inspires preservation
instinct toward flight away from return the right of the left of
the rest arabesques of colour and the chairs in rows and tiers
the physiognomy of a clown at birth humour without teeth
teeth with teats their judgement and the interference haunted
by morning what goest away returneth again take a message
to Garcia y Vega notes written on palms text degenerated
by fronds Kafka knew the way to beetlehood though being
a cockroach seeing faster as ink blots seeing slower as it,
just interminable specific it each pencil of coincident
value a marker of meaning a maker of meant “Just one
thin meant?” a diminution of obsequies to an increase of word
a tendency to overestimate the importance of our own experience
on the hither side of any on the thither side of zither How long
does a moment require? flattened-out epiphanous justifications
decoherence, dreams and decay lotions and potions but

I gave Geof Huth a copy of "Irony of Flatness" (published last year) yesterday and within an hour I had back his response in his poem-a-day exercise. About the same time, Marianne Eigenheer confirmed the forthcoming arrival of a sequence of her drawings which we are acquiring for the Bury Art collection. So here you get them together, as I did.

(again, Geof's blog of yesterday's Test events is definite).