Maurizio Nannucci’s recent Text Festival commission in Bury Art Gallery reads:
DIFFERENT LANGUAGES
SAME
PLACES DIFFERENT
PLACES SAME CULTURES
DIFFERENT CULTURES
SAME HORIZONS
To transcribe it as a line would be misleading. To write it in the column above or any parsing variation like it cannot represent the experience of viewing either: the text is a circle of neon light installed in the 1901 rotunda of the main Gallery entrance space in a way that makes it impossible to read as a coherent ‘sentence’ without the effort of a circular walk or spinning on the spot below it. And where is the start? The words occur in almost all sequences.
This architectural space has always instigated a peculiar valorised opening; it is actually quite small but its classical proportions distended upwards articulate grandeur and seriousness – qualities aimed at educating the early 20th Century working class of Bury in their proper (respectful) relation to culture. Calming and restrained, the space has remarkable historical Ideal resonances but Maurizio Nannucci’s installation adds a missing layer to complete the register of its public existence. It is as if the Victorian architects designed the space in the expectation of DIFFERENT CULTURES. The text works architecturally as tmesis. It works chromatically as tmesis. It works linguistically as tmesis.
The Bury Text Festival asked the fundamental question for artists who use language as a medium: faced with a modern world where the written word and sign overlays and consumes every environment, how can poets and text artists work with language? From advertising to road signs, from logos to global branding to digital communications, the visual/virtual hegemony of packaging, identity and commodity, text is the ontological and linguistic landscape to everyone’s existence. The Festival’s methodological survey of current aesthetic response described in TEXT identified five strategies: Materiality, Spatialisation, Parataxis, Intertextuality and Restricted Languages. And in various recent installations around the world Nannucci’s works have utilised one or more of these approaches, whilst bringing a unique textual phenomenology into the world.
Everyone locates texts in their world – be it stickers on their cars, novelty mugs or shirts with slogans, designer logos on watches, cars, clothes, texts on their phones, on and on, but fundamentally our texts are simply extensions, proliferations of a textual background radiation we are given and re-apply through what Jean-Paul Sartre called the hierarchy of mediations. Nannucci’s PLACES SAME CULTURE (exemplifying all others), parts the textual curtain, inserts itself, muscles in, “confronts two prosaic edges with one another … tmesis is a seam or flaw resulting from a simple principle of functionality; it does not occur at the level of the structure of languages but only at the moment of their consumption; the author cannot predict tmesis: he cannot choose to write what will not be read. And yet, it is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of great narratives” (Barthes). A question to leave hanging: is Nannucci’s use of English as opposed to his native Italian part of his dislocated effect, the place from which his cleavage and his insertion comes? What Bakhtin called the chronotope, the interpenetrating insoluble space-time-art unity of the work.
Intensely horizontal, a spinning plane between the ground and first floors, its midnight blue light (blue glass with T14 powder) penetrates and merges the upper and lower spaces. "It (colour) becomes an integral element in the writing, which is not only a collection of words but the material through which I express myself...Colour remains a primary fact. It is, after all, the first thing the viewer notices."
Nannucci’s Bury Gallery rotunda words have restricted themselves to
3 DIFFERENT
3 SAME
2 PLACES
2 CULTURES
1 LANGUAGE
1 HORIZON
but Escher-like its circularity changes the viewer’s relationship to its repetition, we experience a moto perpetuo; Steinian insistence replaces repetition, "like a cinema picture made up of succession and each moment having its own emphasis that is its own difference and so there was the moving and the existence of each moment as it was in me." In situ, incrementally the tmesis of SAME HORIZONS expands so each word, standing in relation to each other word, stands alone, capitalised, hand-written in a pure light, butterfly pinning the substantial ambiguity of language to twelve words. After all, what would the words “DIFFERENT LANGUAGES SAME PLACES DIFFERENT PLACES SAME CULTURES DIFFERENT CULTURES SAME HORIZONS” mean? no punctuation no beginning no end. These moments of turning repeat in the repetition of shapes, capitalised and reinforced by neon technical specification, PLACES SAME keeps a continuous line of bulb so that E F S M N seem to rhyme/chime, the mimesis of language, language imitating itself. Finally this self reflexivity of text functions on the metaphorical level, politically democratising language and location, in the words of the poet Philip Davenport, ‘challenging the Othering process’. DIFFERENT CULTURES SAME HORIZONS parts an institutional façade; it welcomes the public to their culture, it celebrates interactions between people and peoples: in its light it celebrates and restates the Enlightenment against approaching darkness.
July 29, 2005
July 09, 2005
King’s Cross suffering
“Northerner, this is your stop.” The immortal first line from Simon Armitage’s King’s Cross poem published in the Independent newspaper London Voices special reflecting on “an extraordinary week in the life of an extraordinary city”. The poem is one of Armitage’s more banal list descriptions which I forced myself to read. Given the scale of the subject, I wondered whether he had the capacity to rise the occasion. No chance. Much in the ‘spirit’ of “The Universal Home Doctor” poems, it falls into the strange disconnection from real experience. In that book, he torpidly rose to the challenge of DIY and gardening, giving the strong impression that he had run out of things to write about and, as a poet with limited innovatory language resources, moved onto novel writing. I am not saying that the poet would have to have been in the underground when the bomb went off to write but there continues to be inauthentic distance in his writing, which I think becomes particularly inappropriate with this subject matter.
“Or maybe,
Just maybe, you live. Here’s you on the News,
Shirtless, minus a limb, exiting smoke
to a backdrop of red melt…”
is a sequence of lines opening with maybe, just maybe, a fairy tale intonation as suitable for a whether Santa Claus is involved, with the absence of a limb a banal tmesis.
“Or maybe,
Just maybe, you live. Here’s you on the News,
Shirtless, minus a limb, exiting smoke
to a backdrop of red melt…”
is a sequence of lines opening with maybe, just maybe, a fairy tale intonation as suitable for a whether Santa Claus is involved, with the absence of a limb a banal tmesis.
A found poem on the same page of the newspaper:
Faith under fire
This fella helped me
choose my new kitchen
A new blitz - a
new world view
sale now on
bombings in London?
July 06, 2005
Lawrence Weiner
After a brilliant and very long day with Lawrence Weiner on Friday we went into the Text Festival public conversation. It turns out that my anxiety about his reputation for ‘difficulty’ was based on stories from the 60’s and 70’s when he was ‘set-up’ in unsympathetic anti-conceptualist forums – so our day was much more relaxed and conducive than I had feared. He was really pleased with the WATER MADE IT WET installation, which looked fabulous in the summer light. His RADCLIFFE HORIZION piece always looks good in the sun anyway. The poster archive show at Bury Art Gallery is also an impressive installation, though he thought that more of the posters could have been fitted in. He had read the Art Monthly review and disagreed with it but was very positive about the festival achievement, which was gratifying. The conversations through the day were relaxed and free-ranging. Of particular interest was the discussion of my methodological analysis of the current text situation. Since the articulation of the 5 methodologies in the TEXT, I have considered a potentially missing element in the equation – temporality. Not in the simplistic way of this being the Sixth Element (or the even more superficial recent analysis of the longpoem by Ron Silliman which statically operates only with a traditional undifferentiated classical model), but in an analogous quantum structure: Quantum Gravity Theory/M Theory postulates the structure of reality having eleven dimension (ten plus Time), and my current work follows a thread that this is mirrored in the Glass Bead Game of Text as five methods plus Time. Lawrence engaged with this with his recent thinking on the dialogue between Simultaneity and the Parallel. Some of his thinking in this resurfaced in the public conversation which will be transcribed and available shortly.
In preparation for the conversation cris cheek joined me and despite much briefing on how to approach the situation he immediately upset the intellectual openness of the discussion by flagging up his platform plan to question Lawrence on areas of writing, line length, compositional practice - which LW would reject as irrelevant
The Met had a great atmosphere, and there was a good sized and mixed audience of festival familiars, artists, students and curators.
Overall we talked for an hour and half covering Lawrence’s artistic theory and practice and issues facing artists in the 21st Century. The prickliness engendered by cris pushed Lawrence into preparing positions giving the conversation an edge which (people report) made for a tantalising debate (one poet in the audience commented that it was fun watching cris ‘intellectually bitch-slapped’) but it was annoying for me because it drove it away from the more thought-provoking ground of the Text Festival which required more trust and openness. Maybe this was never possible anyway and that that work had happened earlier in the day and will valuably resurface in the follow-up to TEXT which I have started working on.
In preparation for the conversation cris cheek joined me and despite much briefing on how to approach the situation he immediately upset the intellectual openness of the discussion by flagging up his platform plan to question Lawrence on areas of writing, line length, compositional practice - which LW would reject as irrelevant
The Met had a great atmosphere, and there was a good sized and mixed audience of festival familiars, artists, students and curators.
Overall we talked for an hour and half covering Lawrence’s artistic theory and practice and issues facing artists in the 21st Century. The prickliness engendered by cris pushed Lawrence into preparing positions giving the conversation an edge which (people report) made for a tantalising debate (one poet in the audience commented that it was fun watching cris ‘intellectually bitch-slapped’) but it was annoying for me because it drove it away from the more thought-provoking ground of the Text Festival which required more trust and openness. Maybe this was never possible anyway and that that work had happened earlier in the day and will valuably resurface in the follow-up to TEXT which I have started working on.
June 26, 2005
The Empire Strikes Back (weakly)
It turns out that the website ‘interview’ with me, reproduced here 13 April 05, was a little disingenuous. By chance I stumbled on the site and found that it was something of a set up; although the questionnaire was published as written, it was contextualised with mocking criticism with a link to a Bloodaxe poet who irritably attacks my position. In the spirit of Silliman’s analysis of the fate of so-called ‘School of Quietude’ poets doomed to be forgotten, it doesn’t really matter which poet it is. But to paraphrase Socrates – a wise man can learn from a fool so it’s worth considering his arguments - some which is interesting.
First the criticism: how can the Text Festival claim to be anti-establishment and have some funding from the Arts Council. The tongue-in-cheek response is that this was acknowledged prominently in the opening exhibition with the display of four poems from Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Death to the Arts Council series. But the actual answer rests in the misunderstanding of what the Festival means by ‘establishment’. It is self-evident that the Arts Council is a wing of Government cultural policy and is therefore potentially/bizarrely dangerous to the innovative arts. But one wonders why the Bloodaxe poet misses the somewhat bigger ‘establishment’ issue of the festival being run by a local authority – galleries, theatre, and public art commissioning. The point is the festival is not aiming to bring down the apparatus of the state (not in its first year anyway); its critique is the established form of Poetry – not the infrastructure of corporate/state control.
His other non-poetry point is the way the Guardian sensationalised the event. I share his disappointment as I spent a good hour briefing the journalist on the issues and it was their idea to get quotes from Andrew Motion – to which I replied I wasn’t really interested in anything he had to say.
This leads on to the Bloodaxe poet’s next point: that the festival is too keen to say what it is not. Guilty as charged: The dominant "poetic" factor of established poetry is absolutely embedded in self-reflexivity, the first person, the voice of the poet, sharing an epiphanous moment, his or her narrow emotional life or simply a wry anecdote. Definitively its strength has not been in its writing but in its ability to establish itself as synonymous with the term ‘Poetry’ - so the Festival has to declare what it is not otherwise people will think that it is yet another tired promotional event of the mainstream. (The website expressed the concern that someone might stumble into the Text and be put off poetry forever. This made me smile, since someone is more likely to stumble across the poetry section of any high street bookshop and be put off poetry.) For the last 30 years, it’s only mechanism of renewal has been the rotation of regional dialects (hence the Liverpool poets, the Yorkshire accent careers of Simon Armitage and Ian MacMillan). This Bloodaxe fellow claims that there is no 'dichotomy' in UK poetry – apparently his 'mainstream' is too large, too fractured and too diverse but the US is allowed such a division “because there they have a much debated theory of a 'parallel tradition'.” Another aspect of the UK establishment – its complacent isolation.
I’d never heard of this writer until I saw his review so I needed to look him up to check his poetic credibility – after all the Festival’s agenda is to bring innovative language artists together and he may be someone we inadvertently missed. Here is the first stanza of a representative work from 2004 found on the net:
Since you ask, lass, this is how I get to sleep:
I've imagined a string of numbered planets
which loop and dip out towards the husk
of our universe; pretended to be a wren
tucked in a leaf, safe from the peril of sleet;
Oops. (doesn’t even pass the line-break deletion test: Since you ask, lass, this is how I get to sleep: I've imagined a string of numbered planets which loop and dip out towards the husk of our universe; pretended to be a wren tucked in a leaf, safe from the peril of sleet;)
Somewhat embarrassing - It’s clumsy writing even within its own terms. And surprise surprise: self-reflexive wry anecdotalism in a north of England accent – actually not even a very convincing one either.
According to him around 5 million adults in the UK write poetry from time to time within this number he guesses that only a few thousand are ‘interested in innovative poetry’ – sorry individuals on an island with no contact with the rest of the world, of course. Whether these guesses are true or not, in the UK we have the equivalent of Sunday painters and I-know-what-I-like Merchants running and defining contemporary art. In this environment it is difficult not to enjoy the pleasure of being “a wretched snob” as he calls it.
Bloodaxe man’s conclusion returns to the attack that collaboration is a government agenda to get better value for money out of its poetry subsidies. This is a wrong headed attack on the Festival because we have not promoted or programmed collaboration. There are artists who have collaborated but that was up to them not us.
But the final admission of ill-thought out cliché is:
“For me, poetry is a musical art form first, a linguistic one second. “
Absolute nonsense. Music is the musical artform, poetry is a language artform. On top of that what really irritates me when people trot this out is that they mean tonal music.
First the criticism: how can the Text Festival claim to be anti-establishment and have some funding from the Arts Council. The tongue-in-cheek response is that this was acknowledged prominently in the opening exhibition with the display of four poems from Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Death to the Arts Council series. But the actual answer rests in the misunderstanding of what the Festival means by ‘establishment’. It is self-evident that the Arts Council is a wing of Government cultural policy and is therefore potentially/bizarrely dangerous to the innovative arts. But one wonders why the Bloodaxe poet misses the somewhat bigger ‘establishment’ issue of the festival being run by a local authority – galleries, theatre, and public art commissioning. The point is the festival is not aiming to bring down the apparatus of the state (not in its first year anyway); its critique is the established form of Poetry – not the infrastructure of corporate/state control.
His other non-poetry point is the way the Guardian sensationalised the event. I share his disappointment as I spent a good hour briefing the journalist on the issues and it was their idea to get quotes from Andrew Motion – to which I replied I wasn’t really interested in anything he had to say.
This leads on to the Bloodaxe poet’s next point: that the festival is too keen to say what it is not. Guilty as charged: The dominant "poetic" factor of established poetry is absolutely embedded in self-reflexivity, the first person, the voice of the poet, sharing an epiphanous moment, his or her narrow emotional life or simply a wry anecdote. Definitively its strength has not been in its writing but in its ability to establish itself as synonymous with the term ‘Poetry’ - so the Festival has to declare what it is not otherwise people will think that it is yet another tired promotional event of the mainstream. (The website expressed the concern that someone might stumble into the Text and be put off poetry forever. This made me smile, since someone is more likely to stumble across the poetry section of any high street bookshop and be put off poetry.) For the last 30 years, it’s only mechanism of renewal has been the rotation of regional dialects (hence the Liverpool poets, the Yorkshire accent careers of Simon Armitage and Ian MacMillan). This Bloodaxe fellow claims that there is no 'dichotomy' in UK poetry – apparently his 'mainstream' is too large, too fractured and too diverse but the US is allowed such a division “because there they have a much debated theory of a 'parallel tradition'.” Another aspect of the UK establishment – its complacent isolation.
I’d never heard of this writer until I saw his review so I needed to look him up to check his poetic credibility – after all the Festival’s agenda is to bring innovative language artists together and he may be someone we inadvertently missed. Here is the first stanza of a representative work from 2004 found on the net:
Since you ask, lass, this is how I get to sleep:
I've imagined a string of numbered planets
which loop and dip out towards the husk
of our universe; pretended to be a wren
tucked in a leaf, safe from the peril of sleet;
Oops. (doesn’t even pass the line-break deletion test: Since you ask, lass, this is how I get to sleep: I've imagined a string of numbered planets which loop and dip out towards the husk of our universe; pretended to be a wren tucked in a leaf, safe from the peril of sleet;)
Somewhat embarrassing - It’s clumsy writing even within its own terms. And surprise surprise: self-reflexive wry anecdotalism in a north of England accent – actually not even a very convincing one either.
According to him around 5 million adults in the UK write poetry from time to time within this number he guesses that only a few thousand are ‘interested in innovative poetry’ – sorry individuals on an island with no contact with the rest of the world, of course. Whether these guesses are true or not, in the UK we have the equivalent of Sunday painters and I-know-what-I-like Merchants running and defining contemporary art. In this environment it is difficult not to enjoy the pleasure of being “a wretched snob” as he calls it.
Bloodaxe man’s conclusion returns to the attack that collaboration is a government agenda to get better value for money out of its poetry subsidies. This is a wrong headed attack on the Festival because we have not promoted or programmed collaboration. There are artists who have collaborated but that was up to them not us.
But the final admission of ill-thought out cliché is:
“For me, poetry is a musical art form first, a linguistic one second. “
Absolute nonsense. Music is the musical artform, poetry is a language artform. On top of that what really irritates me when people trot this out is that they mean tonal music.
June 19, 2005
Lawrence Weiner countdown
The opening exhibition of the Text Festival 'Text' finishes today. Get hold of David Briers brilliant review in Art Monthly (June) to see what you missed. The Artists Books show curated by Greville Worthington is still on and on 25 June the remarkable Lawrence Weiner poster archive (from Vancouver Art Gallery) opens for nine weeks. 1 July is the important date for your diary though, when Lawrence flights in from New York via Amsterdam for a conversation at the Met Arts Centre (tickets hotline: 0161 761 2216). Preparing for the 'interview' I have been reading HAVING BEEN SAID, the recent collection of his writings and interviews. While the Festival can fairly easily dismiss Official Verse Culure (despite its literary hegemony it pays the price in its cultural marginalisation) the greater theoretical problem lays in the art of Lawrence Weiner and his frequent rejection of any relationship between poetry and his use of language (in its art context).
“…one must feel that the advances of poetry have remained within the realm of presentation. As long as experimentation is an aesthetic idea there most probably can be no significant advancement in what does then constitute poetry...” (LW)
If you would like contribute a question to the conversation, email them to me.
“…one must feel that the advances of poetry have remained within the realm of presentation. As long as experimentation is an aesthetic idea there most probably can be no significant advancement in what does then constitute poetry...” (LW)
If you would like contribute a question to the conversation, email them to me.
June 11, 2005
YSP
A great session was had by all last weekend at Partly Writing 4 (www.partlywriting.com) – hosted by the Text Festival at Bury Museum. The website will be expanded over the next few weeks with contributions arising out of the weekend’s deliberations. So I’ll not say much more about it here.
Also this week I visited the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It’s been a while since I visited the Park; though I had seen the new visitor centre I had not seen the recently completed Underground Gallery. Cutting to the conclusions of my visit, I think it is obvious that the focus on the development of buildings and the poison chalice of the Arts Council’s Sculpture Collection have badly distracted the Curators. The Arts Council’s lower priority for art as against Government sponsored Access seems to have had the (probably unplanned or even noticed) effect of dumbing down the placement and any artistic rigour of the works in the park. I didn’t bother noting the artist’s name because the work was so banal but a large area of the grounds have been given over to large ‘found stone blocks’ surface carved with animal decoration – good for school parties to sit around and copy. The Henry Moore’s looked increasingly tired in this environment. Some Barbara Heyworth’s seem to have been left behind after the great retrospective last year, but just reinforce the feeling that curatorially no-one seems to be thinking about how the grounds work. The new Underground Gallery turns out to be a fine space and features currently a large retrospective of William Turnbull in a strange ahistorical hang. I wasn’t previously very interested in Turnbull and the exhibition didn’t change that. The overall impression of the YSP is that it is a faded local authority park that the curators have left and it is now a tired playground for schools. Sadly I couldn’t find the Rückriem sculpture on loan somewhere in the gardens, so the only ‘visible’ contemporary work was by the brilliant text artist Shaun Pickard. Tellingly, his neon text has been dismally relocated from its striking location in the trees beside the visitor centre to the trough of a drainage ditch under a metal grill in the Orangery! Probably the biggest artistic outrage in the Park. There are 2 permanently (and properly) displayed Pickard’s at Bury Art Gallery and his one-man show as part of the Festival opens on 6 August.
Also this week I visited the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It’s been a while since I visited the Park; though I had seen the new visitor centre I had not seen the recently completed Underground Gallery. Cutting to the conclusions of my visit, I think it is obvious that the focus on the development of buildings and the poison chalice of the Arts Council’s Sculpture Collection have badly distracted the Curators. The Arts Council’s lower priority for art as against Government sponsored Access seems to have had the (probably unplanned or even noticed) effect of dumbing down the placement and any artistic rigour of the works in the park. I didn’t bother noting the artist’s name because the work was so banal but a large area of the grounds have been given over to large ‘found stone blocks’ surface carved with animal decoration – good for school parties to sit around and copy. The Henry Moore’s looked increasingly tired in this environment. Some Barbara Heyworth’s seem to have been left behind after the great retrospective last year, but just reinforce the feeling that curatorially no-one seems to be thinking about how the grounds work. The new Underground Gallery turns out to be a fine space and features currently a large retrospective of William Turnbull in a strange ahistorical hang. I wasn’t previously very interested in Turnbull and the exhibition didn’t change that. The overall impression of the YSP is that it is a faded local authority park that the curators have left and it is now a tired playground for schools. Sadly I couldn’t find the Rückriem sculpture on loan somewhere in the gardens, so the only ‘visible’ contemporary work was by the brilliant text artist Shaun Pickard. Tellingly, his neon text has been dismally relocated from its striking location in the trees beside the visitor centre to the trough of a drainage ditch under a metal grill in the Orangery! Probably the biggest artistic outrage in the Park. There are 2 permanently (and properly) displayed Pickard’s at Bury Art Gallery and his one-man show as part of the Festival opens on 6 August.
May 31, 2005
Zufrieden
how the ultimate in contemporary style and warmth = located at the heart of the hip city (meticulously designed = the hotel offers a small unique blend of style and luxury) enjoy the ultimate dining experience of our two star michelin restaurant (a a mediterranean style café = promises freshness = quality and variety in a cool and calming environment) combining the latest in beauty cosmetics from all over the world with a unique personalized thought service material action inserted into material practices (enjoy silky smooth skin from soothing facials or sharpen up at the nail bar) (relax into a massage or go for that all-over tan) this super-stylish hotel = it has real presence (great shopping and homo sacer inside a cool totalisation every day of the week and all) an oasis of calm amid the bustle (each room is unique and dramatic takes in both style and finish) vibrant raspberry and mushroom colours create immediate theatre in the rooms (the presence of an ethical symbol adds nothing to its factual content) (velvet and silk cushions and ambient lighting create that touch of luxury) to nothing in the world which is foreign to the mind (fill or) a classic suite in the original building (there are starters like ham consommé with pea pancakes or rich pigeon on a a potato cake with mustard cabbage) inventiveness might also run to a new name that will secure its place (in the gastronomic hall of fame) = signature starters (a version of the small day) really quite a substantial dish (one contests the meaning of the project at the very moment that one defines it) gently whisk together in a whole circular motion with your fingers = nihilation and the buttery flavor and texture of the mesclun duck balanced with the slight sweet
yet tart acidity of the raspberry coulis (life)
yet tart acidity of the raspberry coulis (life)
May 25, 2005
The End of the Moon
Laurie Anderson was in town last night performing her The End of the Moon solo show at the Lowry Arts Centre – the worse modern building in Britain. Probably the quotation from the San Francisco Chronicle that it was wry and witty was true but that was about it. They also called it hypnotic which it was in the sense that the flat plodding unvaried pace, dull lighting and bland musical interludes were sleep inducing. The piece is Anderson’s response to her residency at NASA and in that unique context is therefore even more disappointing. Formally it is merely a series of short anecdotes told in her slow wry American accent – not much more artifice than an after-dinner speech – interspersed with short musically bland violin playing. Given the technological context of the work, it was remarkable how simplistic her use of electronic media was - basically slight augmentation of the custom-violin and some sort of laptop keyboard providing slow rhythm filler. You could feel the sense of expectation when she picked up a small camera which began projecting its real-time image but this was dissipated by remaining at the size of a flipchart. There the experiment ended and she put it down again. To be fair, Anderson claims in the programme to be a storyteller and that is about all she is. The line of NASA narrative was interspersed with a couple of references to 9-11 as the Americans call it, which amounted to a metaphorical tale of a country walk, coming to the conclusion that the reason that the world hates Americans is because they are “jerks” and that New Yorkers will forever after have to live with a fearful eye to the sky. A sorry level of analysis and response.
“What’s newest about this piece is the words” she writes. Meaning only the narrative as it is written, there is no linguistic experiment or innovation.
“What’s newest about this piece is the words” she writes. Meaning only the narrative as it is written, there is no linguistic experiment or innovation.
May 20, 2005
Partly Writing
Partly Writing 4: Writing and the Poetics of Exchange
The Text Festival hosts this year's Partly Writing on 4-5 June 2005
Partly Writing 4 follows the model of the previous Partly Writing events: it is a weekend of conversations and discussions among a range of writers and text practitioners. It emphasises practice, research and open intellectual engagement. This year we are especially keen to discuss examples of social and artistic practice which you feel engage with the role of exchange as part of writing culture. These may be examples that you value and/or that you are actively generating in your own work. In what ways do contemporary writing arts engage with modes of exchange: as social and aesthetic bonds, gift-objects, gift-making activities, forms of circulation, negotiations, transits, limits, inhibitions?
Saturday 4 June 2005
WELCOME
Welcome from the Bury Text Festival (TT)
Introduction to Partly Writing (CB, CW)
Session One
Chair: Caroline Bergvall
Writing and Collaboration
In what ways can one say that artistic collaboration – with materials, with people, with places, with languages – is a form of exchange?
Is collaboration always predicated on exchange?
Is experimental writing predicated on the validity of collaboration (social as much as artistic)?
What are the limits of collaboration?
What is an artistic friendship?
Session Two
Chair: Carol Watts
Specific Economies
In what ways can we say that poetry is an artform currently marked by a gift economy?
What are the implications of this for the creating of bonds, both social and artistic?
What implications for the generation of work?
Do experimental writing practices function outside mainstream means of reward and recognition?
How do we assign value to such practices?
How do these economies traverse forms of practice outside and inside institutions (textual and otherwise)?
Sunday 5 June 2005
Session One
Chair: Tony Trehy
Intertexuality and Textual Borrowings
In what explicit or implicit ways do forms of exchange operate on at the level of the text?
What kind of view on writing and knowledge does intertextuality forward?
What do we understand by textual borrowing?
Do citational and appropriative practices inherently favour the development of poetic and cultural exchanges?
What are the politics at work? Are these always a sign of cultural resistance?
Session Two
Chair: Caroline Bergvall
Writing as Negotiation
What are the politics and pragmatics involved in writing practices that function responsively and/or more or less exclusively through social and cultural negotiations?
What kind of poetics inform from context-specific negotiations?
How do they imply, involve and/or broaden audiences, communities of readers, constituencies of interest?
How might such negotiation-based work be generative of new kinds of aesthetics?
Are poetics of exchange always up for grabs or are they pre-empted by certain art-specific rules?
The Partly Writing website is currently amalgamating material from the past three events (www.partlywriting.com ).
The Text Festival hosts this year's Partly Writing on 4-5 June 2005
Partly Writing 4 follows the model of the previous Partly Writing events: it is a weekend of conversations and discussions among a range of writers and text practitioners. It emphasises practice, research and open intellectual engagement. This year we are especially keen to discuss examples of social and artistic practice which you feel engage with the role of exchange as part of writing culture. These may be examples that you value and/or that you are actively generating in your own work. In what ways do contemporary writing arts engage with modes of exchange: as social and aesthetic bonds, gift-objects, gift-making activities, forms of circulation, negotiations, transits, limits, inhibitions?
Saturday 4 June 2005
WELCOME
Welcome from the Bury Text Festival (TT)
Introduction to Partly Writing (CB, CW)
Session One
Chair: Caroline Bergvall
Writing and Collaboration
In what ways can one say that artistic collaboration – with materials, with people, with places, with languages – is a form of exchange?
Is collaboration always predicated on exchange?
Is experimental writing predicated on the validity of collaboration (social as much as artistic)?
What are the limits of collaboration?
What is an artistic friendship?
Session Two
Chair: Carol Watts
Specific Economies
In what ways can we say that poetry is an artform currently marked by a gift economy?
What are the implications of this for the creating of bonds, both social and artistic?
What implications for the generation of work?
Do experimental writing practices function outside mainstream means of reward and recognition?
How do we assign value to such practices?
How do these economies traverse forms of practice outside and inside institutions (textual and otherwise)?
Sunday 5 June 2005
Session One
Chair: Tony Trehy
Intertexuality and Textual Borrowings
In what explicit or implicit ways do forms of exchange operate on at the level of the text?
What kind of view on writing and knowledge does intertextuality forward?
What do we understand by textual borrowing?
Do citational and appropriative practices inherently favour the development of poetic and cultural exchanges?
What are the politics at work? Are these always a sign of cultural resistance?
Session Two
Chair: Caroline Bergvall
Writing as Negotiation
What are the politics and pragmatics involved in writing practices that function responsively and/or more or less exclusively through social and cultural negotiations?
What kind of poetics inform from context-specific negotiations?
How do they imply, involve and/or broaden audiences, communities of readers, constituencies of interest?
How might such negotiation-based work be generative of new kinds of aesthetics?
Are poetics of exchange always up for grabs or are they pre-empted by certain art-specific rules?
The Partly Writing website is currently amalgamating material from the past three events (www.partlywriting.com ).
May 03, 2005
poets and text artists
Thursday saw a great night at Bury Art Gallery with me in conversation with Carolyn Thompson, followed by readings by Robert Sheppard http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com/ and Mark Nowak (editor of XCP http://www.xcp.bfn.org/journal.html) from Minnesota.
The conversation with Carolyn went like this:
TT: I think the first place to start is the problem of performance. In discussing this event, it was immediately obvious that as a text artist you were not keen to translate or mediate performatively the 2 works on display. “Poets read; text artists don’t” (my quote not yours!) I know when we talked about this initially you considered (however briefly) possible use of readings, can you tell us that thought process and why you rejected them?
CT: Yes, first and fore mostly I’m not a performance artist. In fact it’s just these sort of occasions that I personally tend to shy away from! I do however understand that for some, there is a performative aspect to my work, however I want the experience of most of my recent pieces to be an intimate one for a viewer and completely unconnected to me. I feel performance would detract from the issues I’m trying to deal with here.
The only way I would have been happy with the work becoming part of a performance would be if I had nothing to do with it, would be if the translation continued and another artist were to take one of my pieces and translate it into a new work, their new work, without my input.
TT: Why Breakfast at Tiffany’s?
CT: I’ve always enjoyed Truman Capote novels and Breakfast at Tiffany’s in particular had always intrigued me. I had begun to look at novels which have been adapted into films prompted me to revisit the novel at it at this particular time. Love and relationships were increasingly becoming themes throughout my practice, and lets face it Holly Golightly is one of twentieth century literature’s romantic icons.
TT: Why were you willing to have it over hung?
CT: I intended to deal with the themes of loss and missed possibilities portrayed in the novel, and ideas of individuality and companionship, and the relationship between the two. My relationship with the piece was one of devotion and obsession, cutting and sticking all the words. Like a relationship between two people it involved patience and endurance. I wanted this to be evident in the viewing, so by placing it behind other works the piece becomes part of the furniture, like everyday relationships continuing around us, it can go unnoticed. It requires seeking out and nurturing, but it also subtle enough to be neglected and ignored. It also means that the viewer requires some trust in the artist, believing that the piece continues to run behind the others, and this trust in itself becomes part of the viewer’s me/you relationship with me as the artist.
TT: Does your title appear in the book?
CT: No it comes from a song which is actually unrelated. It seems reflect Holly Golightly’s role in the novel as a loveable rogue. She is loved by everyone yet faithful to no one: lover, friend or even herself. It also seemed to be a solemn reminder that although it is easy to view the piece as a romantic story, the me/you relationship in question may not be a secure and comfortable one, and the devotion and obsession may be of a sinister nature.
The title also reminds of the aspects of trust in the artist I’ve already mentioned. There is a natural desire I think in viewing the piece to believe in it, and not to query. It often doesn’t occur to ask questions whether what you think you are seeing is really the case, whether the words really do go behind the other works and whether they are really in their original position.
TT: Is there a thread in your thinking that connects this work/book with the American Psycho piece in the next room or your Winston & Julia piece from 1984?
CT: Yes definitely. In all of the pieces I’m concerned with manipulating and retelling novels. The editing and reconfiguring processes I’ve put the books through, have been decided beforehand like a set of rules for that particular piece. I’m trying to make the distinctions between authenticity and fabrication ambiguous whilst questioning the value of authorship. Through all of that my goal is to create new realities and/or fictions.
On top of this, all deal obsession, the obsessive nature of the character in each as well as the obsessive quality in the work.
TT: The other day I was giving a talk in the gallery and someone was amused by my observation that you could see that you’re so pretty is a later work than After Easton Ellis because you are moving away from the book towards a language concept. Are you conscious of this movement and is it a progress you see continuing?
CT: Yes I’m definitely conscious of it, it has been somewhat of a premeditated move, but I wouldn’t exactly describe it as moving away from the book towards a sort of language concept. It has always been the language that I’ve been most interested in, the book references that appeared in the format of earlier works were there as I wanted to use preconceptions of original source in order to influence interpretation of my subsequent adaptation. Whilst in Winston and Julia, I put it in a book format to create intimacy. The books became gifts, this gift of a love story, something intimate, like reading is an intimate pastime. With You’re so Pretty when You are Unfaithful to Me although references are still made to the book, the particular book from which the text came became less important, as the relationship between the me and you became the stronger element.
TT: One of the questions that is sure to come up is how is this work not Orwell’s or Ellis’s or Capote’s? What is your relationship to the original authors and texts?
CT: That’s really for an audience to decide. I want the viewer to determine the value of authorship and create their own parameters to the word and its connotations. I don’t deny that the original work is theirs, particularly with the Orwell and Ellis work, I am really only highlighting and celebrating something that has already been created. That’s why their names appear on the pieces.
TT: Familiar in other Artforms (for instance sampling in popular music), the idea of using splicing source texts for a new work – intertextuality – has been a recognised strategy since the sixties. It is one of the themes that the festival and this exhibition have identified as central to current text-poetic practice. Your work actually manifests the others - Spatialisation, materiality, parataxis and process-based restricted languages - especially in the Tiffany piece. Can you talk us through your response to this sort of analytical structure? (or) Are your texts informed by poetic/literary strategies and structures?
CT: Although I feel it more likely that my work references social behavior in contemporary popular culture than any poetic/literary structures, in saying that I’m fitting it perfectly into the intertextuality strategy. However I think it is almost impossible to create work which does not refer to the world in which we live and what is happening in the here and now.
Being engaged with the compression and reduction of information, and the ways in which existing material is reconfigured to create something new, I feel more than anything I reference popular culture including television, film and music as well as mimicking the way our increasing thirst and impatience for knowledge means our experiences become snap shots of a whole picture.
TT: How do you locate yourself in relation to the tradition of conceptual text artists (Weiner, Holzer, Kruger)?
CT: I don’t, as I don’t actually see myself as a text artist. I do however see myself as a conceptual artist who at this particular moment in time, is using text, or language, as medium as it’s the most suitable for my current body of work. I try to keep an open mind and not restrict myself too much by labeling myself as any particular type of artist, as I think it’s very easy to fall into the trap of feeling you must then conform to that, and consequently end up regurgitating the same old crap. So at some point in the future I may be using various other forms of media which I feel more suitable to depict the themes that I am interested in then.
The conversation with Carolyn went like this:
TT: I think the first place to start is the problem of performance. In discussing this event, it was immediately obvious that as a text artist you were not keen to translate or mediate performatively the 2 works on display. “Poets read; text artists don’t” (my quote not yours!) I know when we talked about this initially you considered (however briefly) possible use of readings, can you tell us that thought process and why you rejected them?
CT: Yes, first and fore mostly I’m not a performance artist. In fact it’s just these sort of occasions that I personally tend to shy away from! I do however understand that for some, there is a performative aspect to my work, however I want the experience of most of my recent pieces to be an intimate one for a viewer and completely unconnected to me. I feel performance would detract from the issues I’m trying to deal with here.
The only way I would have been happy with the work becoming part of a performance would be if I had nothing to do with it, would be if the translation continued and another artist were to take one of my pieces and translate it into a new work, their new work, without my input.
TT: Why Breakfast at Tiffany’s?
CT: I’ve always enjoyed Truman Capote novels and Breakfast at Tiffany’s in particular had always intrigued me. I had begun to look at novels which have been adapted into films prompted me to revisit the novel at it at this particular time. Love and relationships were increasingly becoming themes throughout my practice, and lets face it Holly Golightly is one of twentieth century literature’s romantic icons.
TT: Why were you willing to have it over hung?
CT: I intended to deal with the themes of loss and missed possibilities portrayed in the novel, and ideas of individuality and companionship, and the relationship between the two. My relationship with the piece was one of devotion and obsession, cutting and sticking all the words. Like a relationship between two people it involved patience and endurance. I wanted this to be evident in the viewing, so by placing it behind other works the piece becomes part of the furniture, like everyday relationships continuing around us, it can go unnoticed. It requires seeking out and nurturing, but it also subtle enough to be neglected and ignored. It also means that the viewer requires some trust in the artist, believing that the piece continues to run behind the others, and this trust in itself becomes part of the viewer’s me/you relationship with me as the artist.
TT: Does your title appear in the book?
CT: No it comes from a song which is actually unrelated. It seems reflect Holly Golightly’s role in the novel as a loveable rogue. She is loved by everyone yet faithful to no one: lover, friend or even herself. It also seemed to be a solemn reminder that although it is easy to view the piece as a romantic story, the me/you relationship in question may not be a secure and comfortable one, and the devotion and obsession may be of a sinister nature.
The title also reminds of the aspects of trust in the artist I’ve already mentioned. There is a natural desire I think in viewing the piece to believe in it, and not to query. It often doesn’t occur to ask questions whether what you think you are seeing is really the case, whether the words really do go behind the other works and whether they are really in their original position.
TT: Is there a thread in your thinking that connects this work/book with the American Psycho piece in the next room or your Winston & Julia piece from 1984?
CT: Yes definitely. In all of the pieces I’m concerned with manipulating and retelling novels. The editing and reconfiguring processes I’ve put the books through, have been decided beforehand like a set of rules for that particular piece. I’m trying to make the distinctions between authenticity and fabrication ambiguous whilst questioning the value of authorship. Through all of that my goal is to create new realities and/or fictions.
On top of this, all deal obsession, the obsessive nature of the character in each as well as the obsessive quality in the work.
TT: The other day I was giving a talk in the gallery and someone was amused by my observation that you could see that you’re so pretty is a later work than After Easton Ellis because you are moving away from the book towards a language concept. Are you conscious of this movement and is it a progress you see continuing?
CT: Yes I’m definitely conscious of it, it has been somewhat of a premeditated move, but I wouldn’t exactly describe it as moving away from the book towards a sort of language concept. It has always been the language that I’ve been most interested in, the book references that appeared in the format of earlier works were there as I wanted to use preconceptions of original source in order to influence interpretation of my subsequent adaptation. Whilst in Winston and Julia, I put it in a book format to create intimacy. The books became gifts, this gift of a love story, something intimate, like reading is an intimate pastime. With You’re so Pretty when You are Unfaithful to Me although references are still made to the book, the particular book from which the text came became less important, as the relationship between the me and you became the stronger element.
TT: One of the questions that is sure to come up is how is this work not Orwell’s or Ellis’s or Capote’s? What is your relationship to the original authors and texts?
CT: That’s really for an audience to decide. I want the viewer to determine the value of authorship and create their own parameters to the word and its connotations. I don’t deny that the original work is theirs, particularly with the Orwell and Ellis work, I am really only highlighting and celebrating something that has already been created. That’s why their names appear on the pieces.
TT: Familiar in other Artforms (for instance sampling in popular music), the idea of using splicing source texts for a new work – intertextuality – has been a recognised strategy since the sixties. It is one of the themes that the festival and this exhibition have identified as central to current text-poetic practice. Your work actually manifests the others - Spatialisation, materiality, parataxis and process-based restricted languages - especially in the Tiffany piece. Can you talk us through your response to this sort of analytical structure? (or) Are your texts informed by poetic/literary strategies and structures?
CT: Although I feel it more likely that my work references social behavior in contemporary popular culture than any poetic/literary structures, in saying that I’m fitting it perfectly into the intertextuality strategy. However I think it is almost impossible to create work which does not refer to the world in which we live and what is happening in the here and now.
Being engaged with the compression and reduction of information, and the ways in which existing material is reconfigured to create something new, I feel more than anything I reference popular culture including television, film and music as well as mimicking the way our increasing thirst and impatience for knowledge means our experiences become snap shots of a whole picture.
TT: How do you locate yourself in relation to the tradition of conceptual text artists (Weiner, Holzer, Kruger)?
CT: I don’t, as I don’t actually see myself as a text artist. I do however see myself as a conceptual artist who at this particular moment in time, is using text, or language, as medium as it’s the most suitable for my current body of work. I try to keep an open mind and not restrict myself too much by labeling myself as any particular type of artist, as I think it’s very easy to fall into the trap of feeling you must then conform to that, and consequently end up regurgitating the same old crap. So at some point in the future I may be using various other forms of media which I feel more suitable to depict the themes that I am interested in then.
April 28, 2005
Cambridge CCP
(If there is anyone out there, sorry it’s been so long – the festival has been hectic and draining. )
I managed to get to the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry at the weekend http://www.cccp-online.org/index.html. Great to see Simon Smith from the National Poetry Library, and of course Alan Halsey and Geraldine Monk again and meet some new faces.
The opening wasn’t auspicious though. Wendy Mulford, a Cambridge poet performed her work in progress the Unmaking - a poem about the highland clearances of the 1840s-1880s. As Kevin Nolan said in his introduction: 'what imagines itself as a periphery and what imagines itself as a centrality'. Even allowing for the absence the multi-media element (due to sickness) it was a terrible piece. The problem being flagged up in the introduction with the foregrounding of its narrative. Basically it is a simple 3 voice 'portentous' text mixing Gaelic and English source texts (without very much effort to experiment in the weave) interspersed with quasi-Celtic violin. Lacking tension or poetic interest, the sloppy intertextuality pathetically undigested and reminiscent of terrible didactic turgid community theatre verging on school play. The violin (played well) being mostly pseudo-atonal-Zen linear writing. I do not believe that the absent visuals could save this. Some really excruciating sections but a great pigeon accompaniment from the courtyard outside. The Highlands would have been cleared a lot quicker if the Scots had been bombarded with this.
In Translation
This was a great discussion on issues facing poetry translation in the context of globalisation of English. A very high quality debate with some really interesting analysis supporting the idea that learning languages as resistance to commodifying globalisation, and the importance of otherness of the translation (poetic artifice rather than communicative function)
The Saturday Evening Gig
Sue Clarke: the writing is strong but really she has no idea how to deliver her mammoth hypertextual work. Her magnum opus can't be fully grasped from snippets (in its I Ching-like form or ideas) and so the fragments had to be explained parenthetically and thus the reading was faltering and soliloquised. She acknowledged the impossibility of reading it but the reading attempted didn't address the problem performatively.
John Seed was quite stiff reading until he did his cut-ups and suddenly became animated.
Mark Nowak (USA) – This was the highlight reading for me, which is fortunate because after performing in Cambridge he is reading in Bury. Great stuff, powerfully paratactic intextualising with the form integrated into the argument. God knows what Mark thought about the bizarrely English intellectualism implied in the curatorial balance between disparate poets and rarefied academics. Maybe I’ll get chance to ask him tonight.
Evelyn Schlag (Austrian) - interestingly her poems in English appear mainstream but are interesting - perhaps demonstrating that it is possible to write good representational poetry; just that the English don't.
Sunday 'Cosmologies'
Arthur Gibson – presented a great lecture on Wittgenstein, logic and poetry. Cutting through all the wonderful stuff he said his suggestion that what was needed was boldness rang the loudest cord. He called for a counterintuitive approach focused on creation of a poetic/linguistic logic rather than a philosophic or scientific logic. We need a new poetic rationality not a sloppy appropriation of uncertain Science.
Unfortunately I didn’t see much more because I had a writing deadline of my own to hit so I was out and about writing and thinking in the Spring sunshine.
I managed to get to the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry at the weekend http://www.cccp-online.org/index.html. Great to see Simon Smith from the National Poetry Library, and of course Alan Halsey and Geraldine Monk again and meet some new faces.
The opening wasn’t auspicious though. Wendy Mulford, a Cambridge poet performed her work in progress the Unmaking - a poem about the highland clearances of the 1840s-1880s. As Kevin Nolan said in his introduction: 'what imagines itself as a periphery and what imagines itself as a centrality'. Even allowing for the absence the multi-media element (due to sickness) it was a terrible piece. The problem being flagged up in the introduction with the foregrounding of its narrative. Basically it is a simple 3 voice 'portentous' text mixing Gaelic and English source texts (without very much effort to experiment in the weave) interspersed with quasi-Celtic violin. Lacking tension or poetic interest, the sloppy intertextuality pathetically undigested and reminiscent of terrible didactic turgid community theatre verging on school play. The violin (played well) being mostly pseudo-atonal-Zen linear writing. I do not believe that the absent visuals could save this. Some really excruciating sections but a great pigeon accompaniment from the courtyard outside. The Highlands would have been cleared a lot quicker if the Scots had been bombarded with this.
In Translation
This was a great discussion on issues facing poetry translation in the context of globalisation of English. A very high quality debate with some really interesting analysis supporting the idea that learning languages as resistance to commodifying globalisation, and the importance of otherness of the translation (poetic artifice rather than communicative function)
The Saturday Evening Gig
Sue Clarke: the writing is strong but really she has no idea how to deliver her mammoth hypertextual work. Her magnum opus can't be fully grasped from snippets (in its I Ching-like form or ideas) and so the fragments had to be explained parenthetically and thus the reading was faltering and soliloquised. She acknowledged the impossibility of reading it but the reading attempted didn't address the problem performatively.
John Seed was quite stiff reading until he did his cut-ups and suddenly became animated.
Mark Nowak (USA) – This was the highlight reading for me, which is fortunate because after performing in Cambridge he is reading in Bury. Great stuff, powerfully paratactic intextualising with the form integrated into the argument. God knows what Mark thought about the bizarrely English intellectualism implied in the curatorial balance between disparate poets and rarefied academics. Maybe I’ll get chance to ask him tonight.
Evelyn Schlag (Austrian) - interestingly her poems in English appear mainstream but are interesting - perhaps demonstrating that it is possible to write good representational poetry; just that the English don't.
Sunday 'Cosmologies'
Arthur Gibson – presented a great lecture on Wittgenstein, logic and poetry. Cutting through all the wonderful stuff he said his suggestion that what was needed was boldness rang the loudest cord. He called for a counterintuitive approach focused on creation of a poetic/linguistic logic rather than a philosophic or scientific logic. We need a new poetic rationality not a sloppy appropriation of uncertain Science.
Unfortunately I didn’t see much more because I had a writing deadline of my own to hit so I was out and about writing and thinking in the Spring sunshine.
April 13, 2005
Questions, questions.
I've been contacted by a new literary website opening up in June to answer a questionnaire about the Text Festival's critique of the mainstream: here it is -
1 The Guardian quotes you as saying that ‘poetry has nowhere to go other than being an anachronism or mild entertainment’. Which strands of poetry were you referring to specifically by using these terms?
I actually said: From advertising to road signs, from logos to global branding to digital communications, text forms the visual and linguistic background to everyone’s existence. Once poets were seen as developers of language and ideas, the creators of new ways of thinking and expressing, but now poets are irrelevant except as radio comedians or advertisement copy-writers. Faced with a modern world where the written word or sign consumes and clutters virtually every environment, the fundamental question is how can poets and text artists work with language?
Official Verse Culture pretty much ignores its Language context. Its (pre)dominant "poetic" factor is limited to representation of self-reflexivity, the first person, the voice of the poet, sharing an epiphanous moment or a wry anecdote from his or her narrow emotional life. As the American Poet Lyn Hejinian wrote: “The world is found to be meaningful, but not for and to itself; it is meaningful because perceiving it makes the poet special; the poet plunders the world for its perceptual, spiritual treasure and becomes worthy (and worth more) on that basis".
2 How are you hoping that the Text Festival will change the landscape of poetry?
The landscape of British poetry has a particular configuration related to its history since the ‘Poetry Wars’ 30 years ago. Back in the Seventies, while the American’s were breaking new ground with LANGUAGE Poetry, and the French continued to develop the ideas of OULIPO, the English poetry avant-garde were forced out of its brief dominance at the Poetry Society. With poetry now defined as the voice of the poet, the only innovation possible was a succession of dialects or accents. Hence the Liverpool poets, Yorkshire poets (Armitage and MacMillan), the recent vogue for the pastoral, and even the celebration of sub-cultural minority voices. The banality of the defining character of the landscape has successfully diverted successive generations of young poets – rebellion against the dominant poetic culture cleverly misdirected into content, leaving forms unchallenged. Poetry Slams and Rap are good examples of the trick. Poets (and audiences) mistake Slam delivery styles of performance for innovation – but the actual writing offers nothing new. Rap is no more than rhyming couplets with hard emphasis on the end beats. I can’t believe that alarm bells didn’t ring when Seamus Heaney said that Eminem is the most important poet of his generation. Of course Heaney would say that because (not withstanding his persona of rebellion) the Rapper’s ‘poetry’ as poetry is banal rhyming and challenges nothing.
The Festival set out with a critical analysis of the mainstream but it always aimed to be much more than that. Its main objective was engaging the debate between linguistically innovative poets and text artists. In a sense, it set out to ignore traditional practice and in part for that reason it has attracted much attention as an indication of the fragility of the British mainstream. The realisation that it has exposed the poetry emperor is naked. Internationally it has attracted interest because it is a vehicle for practitioners to try new things, make new connections, and more language writing forward.
3 A lot of people featuring in Text could simply be described as conceptual artists and there is a massive audience for that in Britain. Would you consider Tracey Emin’s neon word artwork as poetry? Is Kruger a poet?
“Simply”? Maybe. There is a massive audience as you say, but interestingly how much of that audience recognises or reads innovative poetry in the same way? The Festival is not saying that someone like Barbara Kruger is a poet. Its analysis is that the most interesting poets are working with the same range of linguistic tools as conceptual and textual artists – parataxis, materiality, spatialisation, intertextuality and restricted languages.
Tracy Emin's art is an interesting case to consider because her public exploration of her personal experience could easily be characterised within the pejorative self-reflexive banality of mainstream writing. But demonstrates the points of difference graphically. Compare her blue neon text
PEOPLE LIKE YOU
NEED TO
FUCK PEOPLE LIKE
ME
with mainstream rhymester, Sophie Hannah:
He has slept with the stupid and clever.
He has slept with the rich and the poor
But he sadly admits that he's never
Slept with a poet before.
The Emin is a better text work than the Hannah (extract) and is linguistically much more sophisticated while seeming more simple. That said, it is a relatively light-weight. This is one of the interesting areas for debate. Artists criticise poets for not seeing how their work operates in the non-linguistic sphere; poets criticise artists for their limited understanding of how words work.
4 Do you think there should be a Turner style prize for poetry?
Not really – there probably shouldn’t be a Turner Prize. With the same marketing the TS Eliot Prize could be elevated to have a similar public profile, but competitive award-based merit system in the present situation would be a dangerous reinforcement of the status quo. Establishment hegemony is sustained by the apparatus of publication, curriculum, academic appointment and awards. A poetry ‘Turner Prize’ would just be another vehicle for the system to tell everyone to read more indifferent writing.
5 Do you think that part of the problem of trying to get poetry deploying mixed-media across to an audience is that it is usually couched in academic terms? A lot of the poets featuring in Text seem to come from academic backgrounds and disciplines.
No. This is a misconception that some have made about the Festival. The medium is not the issue (mixed or otherwise). Language is the medium. TV audiences have no problem viewing incredibly complex manipulations of text on a screen. The poets in the Festival are investigating how language can be used. Forms actually support and surpass contents – whether a text-poem is a sound piece, neon, a screenprint or on a page is immaterial as long as it is integral to the intent.
I can only think of 3 poets in the Festival who could be described as associated with academia. The majority of the participants, although possibly occasionally involved, are not predominantly academic.
6 Do you think poets, marginalised as they are already, don’t want their poetry to be subsumed into other art forms?
No. As with the previous answer, concern about other artforms is irrelevant. It is the use of language that is primary. A good example would be the poet Caroline Bergvall – she arrived at the festival with her latest poetry book called ‘&’ and installed an associated multi-media animation using ampersands and a sound text with the composer Ciaran Maher deconstructing a blues song. Later in the festival she will perform a reading.
7 I would have thought that poetry develops best away from the establishment. Do you think that the poetry you’re featuring in Text is suffering because it doesn’t belong to the kind of poetry celebrated by the establishment?
All artforms – not just poetry – have historically moved forward, broken new ground in their rejection or surpassing of the established cultural practice. So on the contrary, the poetry featured in the Text poetically benefits from not being the kind of poetry celebrated by the establishment. I would argue that it is the mainstream culture in general and poetry readers in particular that are ill-served and suffer from the bland hegemony of Official Verse Culture. The exciting thing is that art/poetry history is a record of innovation and change – and now is the time for change.
1 The Guardian quotes you as saying that ‘poetry has nowhere to go other than being an anachronism or mild entertainment’. Which strands of poetry were you referring to specifically by using these terms?
I actually said: From advertising to road signs, from logos to global branding to digital communications, text forms the visual and linguistic background to everyone’s existence. Once poets were seen as developers of language and ideas, the creators of new ways of thinking and expressing, but now poets are irrelevant except as radio comedians or advertisement copy-writers. Faced with a modern world where the written word or sign consumes and clutters virtually every environment, the fundamental question is how can poets and text artists work with language?
Official Verse Culture pretty much ignores its Language context. Its (pre)dominant "poetic" factor is limited to representation of self-reflexivity, the first person, the voice of the poet, sharing an epiphanous moment or a wry anecdote from his or her narrow emotional life. As the American Poet Lyn Hejinian wrote: “The world is found to be meaningful, but not for and to itself; it is meaningful because perceiving it makes the poet special; the poet plunders the world for its perceptual, spiritual treasure and becomes worthy (and worth more) on that basis".
2 How are you hoping that the Text Festival will change the landscape of poetry?
The landscape of British poetry has a particular configuration related to its history since the ‘Poetry Wars’ 30 years ago. Back in the Seventies, while the American’s were breaking new ground with LANGUAGE Poetry, and the French continued to develop the ideas of OULIPO, the English poetry avant-garde were forced out of its brief dominance at the Poetry Society. With poetry now defined as the voice of the poet, the only innovation possible was a succession of dialects or accents. Hence the Liverpool poets, Yorkshire poets (Armitage and MacMillan), the recent vogue for the pastoral, and even the celebration of sub-cultural minority voices. The banality of the defining character of the landscape has successfully diverted successive generations of young poets – rebellion against the dominant poetic culture cleverly misdirected into content, leaving forms unchallenged. Poetry Slams and Rap are good examples of the trick. Poets (and audiences) mistake Slam delivery styles of performance for innovation – but the actual writing offers nothing new. Rap is no more than rhyming couplets with hard emphasis on the end beats. I can’t believe that alarm bells didn’t ring when Seamus Heaney said that Eminem is the most important poet of his generation. Of course Heaney would say that because (not withstanding his persona of rebellion) the Rapper’s ‘poetry’ as poetry is banal rhyming and challenges nothing.
The Festival set out with a critical analysis of the mainstream but it always aimed to be much more than that. Its main objective was engaging the debate between linguistically innovative poets and text artists. In a sense, it set out to ignore traditional practice and in part for that reason it has attracted much attention as an indication of the fragility of the British mainstream. The realisation that it has exposed the poetry emperor is naked. Internationally it has attracted interest because it is a vehicle for practitioners to try new things, make new connections, and more language writing forward.
3 A lot of people featuring in Text could simply be described as conceptual artists and there is a massive audience for that in Britain. Would you consider Tracey Emin’s neon word artwork as poetry? Is Kruger a poet?
“Simply”? Maybe. There is a massive audience as you say, but interestingly how much of that audience recognises or reads innovative poetry in the same way? The Festival is not saying that someone like Barbara Kruger is a poet. Its analysis is that the most interesting poets are working with the same range of linguistic tools as conceptual and textual artists – parataxis, materiality, spatialisation, intertextuality and restricted languages.
Tracy Emin's art is an interesting case to consider because her public exploration of her personal experience could easily be characterised within the pejorative self-reflexive banality of mainstream writing. But demonstrates the points of difference graphically. Compare her blue neon text
PEOPLE LIKE YOU
NEED TO
FUCK PEOPLE LIKE
ME
with mainstream rhymester, Sophie Hannah:
He has slept with the stupid and clever.
He has slept with the rich and the poor
But he sadly admits that he's never
Slept with a poet before.
The Emin is a better text work than the Hannah (extract) and is linguistically much more sophisticated while seeming more simple. That said, it is a relatively light-weight. This is one of the interesting areas for debate. Artists criticise poets for not seeing how their work operates in the non-linguistic sphere; poets criticise artists for their limited understanding of how words work.
4 Do you think there should be a Turner style prize for poetry?
Not really – there probably shouldn’t be a Turner Prize. With the same marketing the TS Eliot Prize could be elevated to have a similar public profile, but competitive award-based merit system in the present situation would be a dangerous reinforcement of the status quo. Establishment hegemony is sustained by the apparatus of publication, curriculum, academic appointment and awards. A poetry ‘Turner Prize’ would just be another vehicle for the system to tell everyone to read more indifferent writing.
5 Do you think that part of the problem of trying to get poetry deploying mixed-media across to an audience is that it is usually couched in academic terms? A lot of the poets featuring in Text seem to come from academic backgrounds and disciplines.
No. This is a misconception that some have made about the Festival. The medium is not the issue (mixed or otherwise). Language is the medium. TV audiences have no problem viewing incredibly complex manipulations of text on a screen. The poets in the Festival are investigating how language can be used. Forms actually support and surpass contents – whether a text-poem is a sound piece, neon, a screenprint or on a page is immaterial as long as it is integral to the intent.
I can only think of 3 poets in the Festival who could be described as associated with academia. The majority of the participants, although possibly occasionally involved, are not predominantly academic.
6 Do you think poets, marginalised as they are already, don’t want their poetry to be subsumed into other art forms?
No. As with the previous answer, concern about other artforms is irrelevant. It is the use of language that is primary. A good example would be the poet Caroline Bergvall – she arrived at the festival with her latest poetry book called ‘&’ and installed an associated multi-media animation using ampersands and a sound text with the composer Ciaran Maher deconstructing a blues song. Later in the festival she will perform a reading.
7 I would have thought that poetry develops best away from the establishment. Do you think that the poetry you’re featuring in Text is suffering because it doesn’t belong to the kind of poetry celebrated by the establishment?
All artforms – not just poetry – have historically moved forward, broken new ground in their rejection or surpassing of the established cultural practice. So on the contrary, the poetry featured in the Text poetically benefits from not being the kind of poetry celebrated by the establishment. I would argue that it is the mainstream culture in general and poetry readers in particular that are ill-served and suffer from the bland hegemony of Official Verse Culture. The exciting thing is that art/poetry history is a record of innovation and change – and now is the time for change.
March 30, 2005
March 23, 2005
The Tragedy of
In the suite of Text Festival images available to the media, the one by me most often picked up is the tragedy of althusserianism (here’s a good place to look at it http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2005/03/text-festival-begins-in-ten-days.html ). The key moment in this visual poem is the following line, he is. One of the things the poem seeks to do is replicate the experience of mystery – the majority of readers (even if they have heard of Althusser) will not know what althusserianism is, or what the tragedy of it is. If that mystery is lived with, the question next is: is ‘he’ Althusser? Or is ‘he’ someone else? This set of questions is actually what the poem is about. You can stop there, you don’t know, that is the tragedy.
Louis Althusser was a fascinating figure and he and his wife Helene are frequent references in my work. In the 60’s he was a major figure in French Marxism. Ten years his senior, Helene had been a communist fighter against the Nazis. Reading his autobiography The Future Lasts a Long Time you get the sense that her real politics substantiated his academic Marxism. She comes across as deeply emotionally dependent on him and it is difficult to find him sympathetic with her low self-esteem battered further by his blatant infidelities. Throughout his adult life, while being this major theoretician of Marxism, he suffered bouts of mental instability resulting in frequent institutionalisation. One night Althusser emerged insane from their apartment at the Sorbonne having strangled the woman he loved. There was some speculation at the time that their relationship had become so sad that Helene had actually wanted him to kill her. He was judged too ill to be tried for murder instead being committed to a mental hospital. From being a public philosopher in the French intellectual mould, he went to being an insane killer. At the centre of the story is the tragedy of the love between Louis and Helene which he destroyed without knowing why. In philosophic terms there is also the lesser tragedy that althusserianism was destroyed with Helene. I found that in the last page of the autobiography he diminished himself even further because he implies a hope that readers will sympathise with him; and there is the actual terrible instant when the love of Helene is lost completely. And so the tragedy of althusserianism… he is.
Manchester’s City Life Magazine used the poem to accompany their coverage of the Festival, but edited down the middle so the word althusserianism is not there! I am delighted: I have been working on ways to represent greater depths of his tragedy and what could be better than complete erasure? Mis-attribution of the poem itself - the caption says it's by Bob Cobbing.
Louis Althusser was a fascinating figure and he and his wife Helene are frequent references in my work. In the 60’s he was a major figure in French Marxism. Ten years his senior, Helene had been a communist fighter against the Nazis. Reading his autobiography The Future Lasts a Long Time you get the sense that her real politics substantiated his academic Marxism. She comes across as deeply emotionally dependent on him and it is difficult to find him sympathetic with her low self-esteem battered further by his blatant infidelities. Throughout his adult life, while being this major theoretician of Marxism, he suffered bouts of mental instability resulting in frequent institutionalisation. One night Althusser emerged insane from their apartment at the Sorbonne having strangled the woman he loved. There was some speculation at the time that their relationship had become so sad that Helene had actually wanted him to kill her. He was judged too ill to be tried for murder instead being committed to a mental hospital. From being a public philosopher in the French intellectual mould, he went to being an insane killer. At the centre of the story is the tragedy of the love between Louis and Helene which he destroyed without knowing why. In philosophic terms there is also the lesser tragedy that althusserianism was destroyed with Helene. I found that in the last page of the autobiography he diminished himself even further because he implies a hope that readers will sympathise with him; and there is the actual terrible instant when the love of Helene is lost completely. And so the tragedy of althusserianism… he is.
Manchester’s City Life Magazine used the poem to accompany their coverage of the Festival, but edited down the middle so the word althusserianism is not there! I am delighted: I have been working on ways to represent greater depths of his tragedy and what could be better than complete erasure? Mis-attribution of the poem itself - the caption says it's by Bob Cobbing.
March 20, 2005
March 19, 2005
Text Day!
Today the Text Festival opens. The staff have done a remarkable thing to get it ready in time - special mention must be given to Laura Minta. The run up to opening has been characterised for me by end-to-end press and media work - Amusingly the Guardian story today simplifies the complex issues of text to poetry by personifying it into an argument between me and Andrew Motion (someone who I have never met and I expect has never heard of me), and an unfortunate seeming direct attack on Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy. Anyway, BBC Radio 4 have done a great piece on Friday's Front Row arts programme. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/frontrow/index.shtml
March 07, 2005
A Town That Shall Remain Nameless
A satellite of the City and a northern Metropolitan borough, the town has been a regeneration priority attracting government development funds for more than a decade. Early on when local government had little idea of how to regenerate the funds were spent on clearance and highway improvements; so the first phase was manifest with amble parking and empty plots. Later the landscape architects got their drawing boards on it so that new spaces were created with the human interest of walking through a diagram. I remember a great visiting sculptor commenting that the town landscape architect designed in two dimensions rather than three. As the years of urban banality carpeted the town, a separate thread was pursued through the arts; major and minor public art works were commissioned around the town. There came a point where the town was a neatly laid out as it was going to be and the real question of what the town was for as its manufacturing base declined became increasingly obvious. In the context of globalised culture, there is no reason (except lack of imagination) why any town can’t generate its own 21st Century identity and purpose. This town had already works by some significant international artists and had a working relationship with one of the leading figures of international architecture. There had been the opportunity to commission a radically new type of cultural facility and with it work had been done to create a new concept of social cultural provision, but the inertia of bureaucracy and lack of imagination allowed the chance to slip through the town’s fingers. So only the new school was left as a possibility. It would probably be the only public building erected in the town within the foreseeable future and it would influence the social development and educational achievement of generations of the town’s children. As private developers became increasingly attracted to the town, a high quality 21st Century school, architecturally ambitious, would be a landmark symbol of the level of town’s aspiration. There had been a proud history and there could be a new future; local councillors appreciated the argument without necessarily knowing how to think about their town as more significant than in their experience of it declining. Despite the Education Department’s promises of pursuing models of best practice, there was an obvious and ominous silence about the process by which an architect would be engaged with the project. Then at a meeting of Officers last week, a ‘design team’ was mentioned - in passing quickly on to the subject of the importance of laying out the new playing fields. A Design Team? Who are they? They are … we were given names of individuals. What was the company? Something and something Partners. They had built a sixth form college somewhere nearby. It was noted that this hardly excited the prospect of the project being delivered to the previous commitment for a landmark building. The Education Department’s defence was that these architects had been recommended by the Direct Works Department! Hilariously at this point said Department declared that the criticism of these architects was unfair - they were “reputable”. Reputable. Not exciting, innovative, ground-breaking, contemporary, or award-winning even. The new school’s architects are reputable; interchangeable with the other words you can use for the town’s municipal efforts – neat and banal and off-the-shelf.
I will never live in this town which will remain nameless (in every sense) and will never have children go to its school. If I did the quality of my life would be diminished – the more so since but for laziness, inertia and limited imagination it could have been so much better.
I will never live in this town which will remain nameless (in every sense) and will never have children go to its school. If I did the quality of my life would be diminished – the more so since but for laziness, inertia and limited imagination it could have been so much better.
February 27, 2005
Cobbing Retrospective
It seems only a few days ago that the Galleries where covered in dust and workmen but already Philip Davenport and Jennifer Cobbing have virtually finished the hang of the Bob Cobbing retrospective. It’s been great to see the excitement of the hang and the discovery of how remarkable the work is as it is curated categorically in his progress from sound-language toward abstraction. The show’s centre piece is part of the massive 300 book collaboration Bob did with Lawrence Upton, but there are so many gems in the show it will be a must-see event opening on 19 March.
February 20, 2005
Text - the manifesto
The Text catalogue arrives back from the Italian printers this week, care of a fine design by Alan Ward (Axis Design). A few thoughts on the book, written before Christmas last year:
It separates itself from the world 'phenomenologically' - the cover represents the world outside with its Manchester street scene. The whole text is in inverted commas. But of course this isn’t possible, once inside layers of symbols, text and reference accrue again. The first being that it is modeled on another text - John Cage’s The Future of Music: Credo (from Silence). This was partially because the Text needs a manifesto now as contemporary music did then. Having decided to replicate Cage’s structure some time after having read it, I returned to re-read and discover he had done what everyone who has ever written a manifesto does: he attacks the current state of things, points out the direction that new things are (likely) going and waxes lyrical as to why that will be better. But the final future is actually only a humanistic principle, the manifesto can’t prefigure itself, its promised future. The Text book reiterates the questions of the festival:
From advertising to road signs, from global
branding to digital communications, text
forms the visual and linguistic background
to everyone’s existence.
Once poets were seen as developers of
language and ideas, the creators of new
ways of thinking and expressing, but now
they are seen as irrelevant; condemned
as copy-writers, radio clowns or curriculum support.
When written word and sign consumes and
clutters virtually every environment, how
can poets and text artists create new
meaning with language? What are the
innovations and devices that can progress
the tradition of poetic innovation?
The analysis of the current bankruptcy of the mainstream is implicit in the question. So what are the elements of the future? In the catalogue, as in the contextual first exhibition opening on 19 March, I identify 5 text practices common to linguistically innovative art: Parataxis, Intertextuality, materiality, spatialisation, and restricted languages (ie process/system writing).
So far, no-one has proposed a sixth element in this Glass Bead Game; although I have had a criticism that it is too American in its source referencing. This is partially true because Official Verse Culture has done such a good job at atomizing the alternative in Britain, but it does miss the comparisons with French/German OULIPO which offers another possibility ignored in these shores.
As with all manifestos, ultimately it will be a futile gesture but it is having a vision of a better future that brings it about.
It separates itself from the world 'phenomenologically' - the cover represents the world outside with its Manchester street scene. The whole text is in inverted commas. But of course this isn’t possible, once inside layers of symbols, text and reference accrue again. The first being that it is modeled on another text - John Cage’s The Future of Music: Credo (from Silence). This was partially because the Text needs a manifesto now as contemporary music did then. Having decided to replicate Cage’s structure some time after having read it, I returned to re-read and discover he had done what everyone who has ever written a manifesto does: he attacks the current state of things, points out the direction that new things are (likely) going and waxes lyrical as to why that will be better. But the final future is actually only a humanistic principle, the manifesto can’t prefigure itself, its promised future. The Text book reiterates the questions of the festival:
From advertising to road signs, from global
branding to digital communications, text
forms the visual and linguistic background
to everyone’s existence.
Once poets were seen as developers of
language and ideas, the creators of new
ways of thinking and expressing, but now
they are seen as irrelevant; condemned
as copy-writers, radio clowns or curriculum support.
When written word and sign consumes and
clutters virtually every environment, how
can poets and text artists create new
meaning with language? What are the
innovations and devices that can progress
the tradition of poetic innovation?
The analysis of the current bankruptcy of the mainstream is implicit in the question. So what are the elements of the future? In the catalogue, as in the contextual first exhibition opening on 19 March, I identify 5 text practices common to linguistically innovative art: Parataxis, Intertextuality, materiality, spatialisation, and restricted languages (ie process/system writing).
So far, no-one has proposed a sixth element in this Glass Bead Game; although I have had a criticism that it is too American in its source referencing. This is partially true because Official Verse Culture has done such a good job at atomizing the alternative in Britain, but it does miss the comparisons with French/German OULIPO which offers another possibility ignored in these shores.
As with all manifestos, ultimately it will be a futile gesture but it is having a vision of a better future that brings it about.
February 18, 2005
Grenier Festival Performance
In the early stages of curating the opening exhibition of the Text Festival, I wanted to show Robert Grenier's seminal poem, Sentences, (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/grenier/ ) and after some research found a rare copy located in a library in California. Sadly, the complications and costs of borrowing it were unsurmountable, but spotting mention on Silliman's blog of a Grenier show in New York, I pursued the link ( http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/grenier/boesky2004.htm ) Ironically, it turned out easier and cheaper to buy 9 new works than to borrow Sentences. A conversation started up - initially around having copyright permission to reproduce the poems for education and publicity purposes. It turned out that Robert had become aware of the Festival and was actually quite keen to attend. Today we confirmed the visit: Robert will read at the Festival on Thursday 29 September.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Corriedoo
This week I was pleased to receive the first issue of the Corriedoo newspaper. Back in 2017, Helmut Lemke and Kerry Morrison moved to S...
-
Back in 2005, I launched the International Text Festival in Bury, Manchester. It's aim was to question, curate, display, distribute, ar... -
As per the last blog, the first novel of my post-UK period, The Family Idiots , is near enough finished (just proofing, etc) so I have mov... -
Having done virtually no research about Leiria before I arrived, I was very enamored with it - a very charming little town, given what I im...