On Jazz or Comedy

As regulars here will know it is only in recent times that I have begun to do readings. Previously I had taken the view that the work was specifically written for the page, with effects for the readers’ eye and silent voice. When I wrote “Mirror Canon Snips” for Melbourne the idea that it would be performed by moving readers through the installation caused me to become intrigued with the question whether it was possible to make them stumble by making the language of the poem too complex to read while walking. But then when I was persuaded to read at the Other Room, I discovered that there were things that I could learn from performing the poems which weren’t evident in silence. There were also dramatic effects that I discovered that were more for the entertainment of the audience – particularly the way Reykjavik opens when you read it. I remember recording the first part of the performance for me to review any insights in that reading, having not anticipated that it was also videoed by the Other Room and then put up on the website. While the things I needed to learn were captured by both recordings, it occurred to me afterwards that the movement of unfolding in Reykjavik or the reason why I wrote the poem “Lassitude” which informs the aural understanding of it would no longer be unexpected to future audiences. Around the time, I recall a comedian commenting that, while it paid much better than live performance, TV was very consuming of material. A routine on television could only be used once, with thereafter audiences knowing the jokes. Obviously having films and recordings online is an artistic resource, part of the poetic dialogue and an extension of a poetry readings meagre audience, but is there a down side? At Ron Silliman’s afternoon lecture at Birkbeck when he was over for the Text Festival, I asked him about this issue: whether each performance captured and broadcast online was in anyway like the consumption of the comedian’s material. Ron’s view was that the poetry performance is more like a jazz improvisation, with each reading being a fresh interpretation of the material.

I think this is probably true but the Oxjam reading last Sunday (again recorded) I was looking for something else again. I started the reading with “Doubt” from 50 Heads. Then the sections from the new book “Space The Soldier Who Died For Perspective”. For this reading I wasn’t interested in comedy or jazz.

I have referenced before William Carlos Williams analogy that writing (art) is like bridge building – the artist constructs the artwork cross a stream or mountain gorge, with the purpose of crossing: “Don’t blush to write a poem, stand up to it, provided it is a structure, a structure built upon your own ground to assert it, your ground where you stand on your own feet, in every man’s despite”. Expanding on his metaphor, he goes on to the next barrier to continue his journey, with the experience of previous bridges informing each subsequent solution. The function is the crossing. As Picasso said, it is for epigones coming after to make it look better. It is the job of critics to describe the bridge. It is for governmental hierarchies of mediation to erect signs and health & safety barriers to make sure the bridge or even obstacle of the stream are not perceived as worth crossing.

Often, especially if an artist’s work is not easy to fathom, I ask myself: what question (what gorge) is this artist trying to answer(bridge)? It is obvious I think for instance what question the Language Moment attempts to address. Although Sue says I shouldn’t say anything about the north west winner of the Olympiad commission – the Projected Cloud by Anthony McCall, because it will sound like sour-grapes, when you look at it from this perspective its question would seem not really worth asking. Most of its substance would appear to be engineering and technical – how the cloud is generated, how the projections work on the cloud, how it will ever exist in the windy environment of the Mersey estuary – not artistic. If the question context is the public realm question of the Monument, the bankrupt refuge of UK public art in the celebration of scale (Angel of the North, B of the Bang, Mark Wallinger’s White Horse, etc), the question to which all these refer has already been answered with more conceptual rigour by Lawrence Weiner with ‘AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE’. Coincidentally, having been brought up on the ‘Cheshire plain’ where presumably you will be able to see the new work, I can’t see how it can better than the steam columns of Fiddler’s Ferry Power Station (my Dad worked on that construction). This landscape was actually the inspiration for my poem “Yggdrasill” in 50 Heads. Maybe that was my answer to the question – deeper than McCall’s column will be, but depth wasn’t what the Olympics wanted obviously, maybe they wanted comedy.

Anyway, I digress. My reading of “Space The Soldier Who Died For Perspective” had a different function. By the time I came to read 50 Heads and Reykjavik I had lived with them for about 2-3 years, whereas Soldier was only finished in June. While some sections of it date back to exhibition installations around the world, the bringing them together, the re-structuring, the integration as a whole work are still as new to me as the audience who heard me read. A while back there was an argument going round that the radical understanding of the reader/audience was the most important aspect of contemporary poetic development. This is of course bollocks. It is the radical understanding of the writer that is most important. So the reading wasn’t a comedy or jazz, it was a test installation, it was stretching to grasp something spatial in the language - and so I wonder whether that is something that needs to be recorded.

Lemur

St Philip with St Stephen Church, St Philips Place( just off Chapel Street), Salford, M3 6FJ map below (0161 834 2041),
THURSDAY the 29th October , doors open 7.30pm, entrance fee: the usual £5

LEMUR are:

> Hild Sofie Tafjord performer and composer, plays french horn and electronics. She studied jazz and improvised music at the Norwegian Academy of Music. Tafjord has a solo project and plays in bands like Lemur, SPUNK, Agrare, Trinacria, Phantom Orchard Orchestra, She is one half of Duo FE-MAIL with the prolific and bonkers Maja Ratkje and she has collaborated with numerous artists like Wolf Eyes, Campbell Kneale, Matmos, Ikue Mori, Zeena Parkins,Otomo Yoshihide, Fred Frith, Zu, Evan Parker etc. She participates on more than 30 releases at a.o. Rune Grammofon, Asphodel, picadisk, ECM, Universal, Moserobie, Jazzland, Important Records, Psychform Records, Gameboy Records, OHM records. www.myspace.com/hildsofie


> Bjørnar Habbestad, flautist educated in Bergen, London and Amsterdam. Works as a chamber musician in INTONARE, improviser in LEMUR, noisemaker in REHAB, ensemble player in N ENSEMBLE, sound artist in HABBESTAD&LARSSON and electroacustician in USA/USB. His collaborators range from fellow N-Collectivists MoHa! through Lene Grenager/Hild Sofie Tafjord of SPUNK, pianist Ellen Ugelvik, bassist/bandleader Per Zanussi, John Hegre/Jazzkammer and a long list of ad hoc constellations. Habbestad founded the N Collective in 2003 and currently runs N ENSEMBLE, the collective ́s ensemble-alter-ego. He is also co-curator of the Bergen-based sound gallery LYDGALLERIET and half of the record label +3dB. www.myspace.com/quartetlemur


> Lene Grenager cellist, composer and conductor educated at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo. She tours regularly with her main ensembles SPUNK (rune grammofon), Lemur (+3db) and a duo with Sofia Jernberg (olofbright) . Grenager also performes solo and in various ad hoc constellations. She has collaborated with artists such as Mattin, Lucio Capece, Ellen Fullman, Mats Gustafsson, Harald Fetveit and Unni Løvlid and has performed at festivals like FIMAV Victoriaville, Ultima, Borealis, Banlieues Bleues, Stockholm New Music & Nordic Music Days. In 2006 she released her first soloalbum “Slåtter, slag og slark” (Euridice) . www.grenager.no


> Michael Francis Duch was born and raised in Trondheim, Norway and plays the Doublebass. He has been involved in about 20 recordings released in various formats. Duch plays the music of Christian Wolff and Cornelius Cardew in a trio with John Tilbury and Rhodri Davies and is a member of the rockband Dog & Sky, the dronetrio TRICYCLE , acoustic postnoise with the duo ORIGAMI TACET with Tore Bøe, and different other constellations. Ad Hoc collaborations with
Otomo Yoshihide, Taku Sugimoto, Sachiko M, Mattin, Mats Gustafsson, Peter Brötzmann, Jaap Blonk, Gert-Jan Prins, Christian Wolff, Tony Conrad, Cadillac, www.myspace.com/michaelduch

The Other Room

most perfect days there is nothing horizon
in the protocol we employ
Unwent, urelements we are not, with our grey the same as theirs



THE OTHER ROOM AT OXJAM

Sunday, 25th October, 13:45 start
Apotheca, 17 Thomas Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester M4 1FS.

The Other Room is organising an extra event as part of the Oxjam festival. For this event only, The Other Room will be at Apotheca, 17 Thomas Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester M4 1FS. Entry is free, but a donation to Oxjam is suggested. Read more about Oxjam at http://www.oxjammanchester.org. I will be reading including extracts from Space The Soldier Who Died For Perspective (also above).
Hope to see you there. Also reading:

STUART CALTON has published four books of poems: three with Barque Press, and one on his own press, Fenland Hi-Brow. His fifth, Three Reveries, is awaiting publication. He is also a musician who records and performs Free Improvisation and Musique Concrète under the nom de Dictaphone T.H.F. Drenching.

JAMES DAVIES has two short e-collections: The Manual Handling Process (Beard of Bees) and Acronyms (onedit). He has a collection Plants due from Reality Street in 2012. He is one half of the poetry/photography duo Joy as Tiresome Vandalism who have a collection aRb (if p then q) and are currently working on Absolute Elsewhere found in progress at www.joyastiresomevandalism.wordpress.com. In addition he is editor of if p then q and one of the organisers of The Other Room.

Kill Tony Trehy

There was a moment when I was pulling together the Language Moment structure when I knew that all the major organisational issues had been resolved. At that instant, even though I was very tired, I also knew that this would mean that by the time the event actually happened (if it did) I would have to have moved beyond it to stop myself being bored. I was reminded of Geof Huth’s proposal for my ‘death’ back in June during the Text Festival Thinking Environment workshop. We were considering the question: “What are the assumptions + obstacles that prevent the extension + intensification of the connective + transformative model which the Text Festival represents?” In one of the circuits through the participants, Ron Silliman suggested that the solution would be ‘to clone Tony Trehy’. Geof Huth picks up the story on his blog at the time (http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2009/05/it-was-metaphor.html ) “By the time the conversation wended its way around our circle to me—I was two people away from Ron, so it didn’t take long—I said something like, “I apologize, Tony, for what I’m about to say. But what we need to do is kill Tony. Whenever you think you’re doing something right, you need to do something different. Otherwise, you’ll keep doing the same thing but think you’re moving forward. The good thing, though, is that Tony knows how to kill himself. Over the past two days, in conversations with me, he’s shown how he is trying to find new ways to do things, to become something else than Tony Trehy.” It has been fun teasing Geof about the death threat, I think he apologised again in Finland. As I recover from the intense draining effort of getting the Language Moment ready, Tony Trehy had already been killed before it was submitted and now to finding the new things. The ambitious conception of the last six weeks or so has opened up global possibilities with new collaborators whom I look forward to creating new thinking with, but I look forward most to my own new thinking.

This week Sue and I are in Nice.

Crisis? What Crisis?

In 2006, the Arts Council of England (ACE) decided that as an arts organisation it should commission some new works itself, rather than its general remit of funding other organisation’s. It coincided with its new intranet/finance computer system. So the brief was that they would commission 9 new works – one for each of the Arts Council regions – images of which would be suitable for as desktops or screensavers for each individual officer to use on their computers. It was a strange internal selection process which they didn’t advertise. The first I knew about it, I had been the shortlisted to the last 2 for the north west region – I never knew whom the other person was.

So in response to the invitation to submit, empathizing with the existential antinomy facing individuals with a commitment to the arts in the context of a bureaucracy, I proposed a new text work which would set out to consider the question: how can a creative individual function (and survive the pressures of conformity) in the framework of institutional rigidity? It was a question which artistically resonated with my context too working in local government. As there were then 900 ACE staff (and therefore that many computers), and ACE’s logo is the three words in a circle, I envisaged a 900 times 3-word poetic form – ie a 2700 word poem. The final work would have at least 3 forms – a full 900 circle limited edition print; a 5 circle neon-text which early meetings indicated would be installed in the North West regional office; and the version on the intranet system.

My proposal ‘won’ the commission and I broke off work on 50 Heads to create the poem, which I’d called ‘Arena’. Everything went well and in a couple of months, I had pretty much finished the writing. I had a progress meeting with 3 ACE officers which was very positive except for right at the end, when one of them wondered whether my form crossed over onto ACE’s logo copyright. The consensus was that it didn’t but if it did, as ACE was commissioning the work, it could just grant use of copyright style for the work. It’s a bureaucracy so it was only to be expected that someone covering their back suggested we confirm everything was alright with their legal department. No-one expected a problem and I was told to proceed with costing the neon and getting the design specification sorted with my designer – which I did.

A week later, ACE email to say that the circle design is breach of copyright so the poetic form needed to re-configured. I asked for a meeting to discuss this judgement, duly arriving with about 30 examples of other company 3-word circle logos ready to argue that ACE couldn’t possibly have the copyright on the form. When the meeting happened it was a very strange thing. We met in the early morning before anyone else seemed to have turned up for work. In empty offices, it felt vaguely furtive. One of the deputy directors led the meeting and with slight embarrassment explained that the copyright issue wasn’t actually the problem. Instead, the word coming down through the organisation was that under the current government, ACE could not be seen to commission a work that suggested that there was an existential problem for creative people in a bureaucracy: the official position was that creativity was a valued element of the organisation and the staff had none of the problems that concerned me: there is no crisis. Note here, that no-one had actually read any of the work so they couldn’t know what it said. In one bound ACE had taken an existential crisis and thrown in some Kafka. After the meeting I had to re-write sections of the poem because I had not realized just how dark the constrictions on creativity went. Still embarrassed though, the ACE official offered to pay me not to continue with the piece – I was being offered a commission not to create the work!

There didn’t seem much point in going on – especially as I was now regretting breaking off from 50 Heads to be messed about like this – so I accepted just to get out of the ‘Trial’. And the poem was actually written so it could be published as some other time despite ACE.

For some reason this memory has resurfaced this week.

Busy as usual

Again not much time to write: busy developing my new website, just finished proofing the new book "Space The Soldier Who Died For Perspective", which gets launched on 15 November at the London Small Publishers Fair; and a rush job developing an artists' books project with Foligno Museum (Italy) - apparently the town in which Dante's Inferno was first printed.

Bigger than the Olympics?

While we await the decision from the Olympic Selection Committee, the big news is that Barney has been called for an audition with a modelling agency.

Oh no! It’s National Poetry Day.

It’s that dismal day again. As Charles Bernstein noted “poets are symbolically dragged into the public square in order to be humiliated with the claim that their product has not achieved sufficient market penetration and must be revived by the Artificial Resuscitation Foundation (ARF) lest the art form collapse from its own incompetence, irrelevance, and as a result of the general disinterest among the broad masses ...”

(http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/044106.html)

“Our” theme this year is Heroes and Heroines. Ostensibly this resonates with the spirit of the time, daily stories of backs-to-the-wall heroism in the war, while at home according to the media, citizens need courage just to step out of the door in the face of yob violence. Similarly it is fairly obvious that Carol Ann Duffy should have been invited to be the poet in residence for this her first year as the Poet Laureate. However, there is a poetry politics subtext in the theme. The celebration of heroes and heroines recycles Official Verse Culture’s axiomatic narrative assumptions. The implication for this heroic day: the Poet achieves sufficient market penetration after all, aspiring to cultural relevance, to centrality in our increasing militarization, aspiring to Homerism, “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” (Lynn Hejinian).

Anyway, the on-going artistic crisis for the Hegemony of the Banal is no more evident than in this year’s TS Eliot Prize: ‘the most important poetry prize in the UK’ went to Jen Hadfield:

"I will meet you at Pity Me Wood. / I will meet you at Up-To-No-Good. / I will meet you at Stank, Shank and Stye. / I will meet you at Blowfly."

With their canon telomeres wearing so thin, National Poetry Day could really pass us by without recognition or comment – I’ll bet there are people reading this who didn’t know it was National Poetry Day – the mainstream reaching new levels of incompetence, irrelevance, and general disinterest, but there was something new in the call for involvement from the organisers this year.

“We need lots of pictures of poetry in public places - on buildings, written on pavements or walls (though naturally we don't condone vandalism, ahem.....), in local landmarks or sculptures. Send us the best pictures you can and we'll post them in our gallery closer to the day. I've attached examples to show you the sort of thing I mean - poems on buildings or street furniture, in graffiti or on t-shirts.” I find it interesting that the attempt to renew begins to turn to public art. Manchester has a number of examples of poems on the wall – all of them bad poems. And this is part of Banalists’ problem: they can not address the fundamental issue which is the inability to address the quality of the writing.

Anyway, here’s my contribution to the ‘festivities’, from 50 Heads:

Quiescence

0: Scuttering under a blue cloth within the inquorate grain
of memory, can rigidity be said? As hero as shaman.
Quotidian fantasy too direct competition for resources,
travelling that demands special kinds of travel insurance.
Fluents have no time to relax and straighten before
celebrated release in flexural waves. Its shattering energy.
A lantern to find an honest man? Some particles escape
through evaporation, also that microwater bacterially
small in the matrix of solidity. We must accept. Direction
of travel statements imposed bijective quietus, spending
patterns, election to representative bodies more serial
measured in responsibility quorum. Monument lions
drowned out formants immobilised in narrow happy-
clappy tunes. La, la, la for the rest complete transfusions
ensure none of the recipient’s blood is left at the scene;
though surgeon’s forgotten instruments as a verb for
human development starred ill I aspire as a critical advice
giver: the world looms the same everywhere: 1

Special Event 'Paul Neagu' exhibition

Thursday 8 October 2009, 7 - 9 pm
Romanian Cultural Institute, 1 Belgrave Square, London SW1X 8PH

Hyphen-Ramp, Serpentine Gallery London, 1976. © Paul Neagu Estate
Talk in the Gallery
Artists and Curators: Is there a difference between artists, with their special knowledge of working processes, and curators, with their special understanding of exhibitions, in creating a show?

with: Marianne Eigenheer, artist and curator, Basel / London; David Thorp, curator, London; Stephen Foster, Director of the John Hansard Gallery at the University of Southampton.

'Paul Neagu' - a film by Ruxandra Garofeanu, 2003
UK Premiere, a Romanian TV production
Translation, subtitles and editing by Lucas Florian

The event is part of the 'Paul Neagu' exhibition, first major show of the British-Romanian artist's work in London, five years after his death.
Curated by artist Marianne Eigenheer (London/Basel) & Iolanda Costide (Paul Neagu Estate London). A partnership with The Paul Neagu Estate.
Sponsored by: Mr. & Mrs. Sh. Canatacuzino, Mr. & Mrs. G. Iacobescu, Mr. & Mrs. M. Radoi, Princess Marina Sturdza, NTA Projects Ltd. Chartered Architects, London.
The exhibition is open at the Romanian Cultural Institute until 16 October 2009.
Free entry.
www.icr-london.co.uk

The Other Room

Wednesday 7th October, 7.00pm
CRAIG DWORKIN (video presentation) and MICHAEL HASLAM.

Old Abbey Inn, 61 Pencroft Way, on Manchester Science Park, M15 6AY, UK

Admission is free.

www.otherroom.org

The Figure of the Question is in the Room

The Figure of the Question is Death
The Figure of Interrogative Philosophy
The Figure of the Question is in the Room

The James Lee Byars at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park http://www.ysp.co.uk/view.aspx?id=688 is great show - split between the Bothy Gallery and the Chapel. The former has some truly beautiful pieces. The first room features a huge scroll partially unrolled with a single drawn line - a remarkable sweeping gesture. In an intimate space, the QD, IP, QR gold columns were powerfully affecting. The installations in the chapel are less powerful, being reconstructions - interesting configurations of Byars but strangely parenthesised by his own quotation "I cancel all my works at death!"

The context that made the show look even better was its juxtaposition with the utter banality of the endless Peter Randall Page retrospective on at the same time.

The Language Moment

Yesterday was the big day - the Language Moment was presented to the North West Panel of the Olympic Artists Taking the Lead Commission. I was accompanied in the presentation by Phil Davenport and Diana Hamilton from the Hamilton Project
http://www.thehamiltonproject.co.uk/projects/. I haven't said much about the proposal here or anywhere else really - basically because I was working too hard on it to the last minute. But now it's in and we await the decision - it will be announced on 22 October.

The Language Moment is a festival of international language in art, recognising and creating a cross-artform dialogue from poetry to sound art, from sculpture to multimedia. The Commission would create new worldwide possibilities for art and communication. In so doing, it aspires to change the course and discourse of contemporary art and poetics establishing a new definition and a new field of international linguistic art practice and dialogue. It would locate Manchester at the centre of this breakthrough.

Its structure is envisaged in three interconnected parts:

Seeds. Truce. Legacy.

Seeds (2010-2012)

Building audiences in the North West and beyond, creating a sense of excitement, engagement and understanding about creative uses of language and the possibilities of dialogue between languages. Working with regional arts development agencies, Time to Read, North West libraries and local arts services, venues and artists, it will feature:

• Community and schools projects – integrated into the Olympic Get Set structure
• Taster performances and temporary installations
• Academic symposia engaging with theory & analysis of contemporary language art
• Global networking of text-based artists
• Pre-festival professional development workshops
• Negotiation with artists and partners in identifying sites/forms for new commissions
• Programme development and planning
• First phase marketing activities

Truce

Mirroring the Ancient Olympic truce, in which the Greeks stopped fighting so they could train and compete, the Language Moment would run for the same symbolic 60 day period – referred to as the Language Truce.

Through April-May 2012, the festival would celebrate and make accessible language in all art forms

• Exhibitions in most of Manchester’s major galleries & museums
• Public art commissions and world premiers of new performance works
• Temporary installations (sound, visual, multimedia, etc) in arts and non-arts locations
• Poetry and other language performances across multiple venues and in public spaces
• Community projects and workshops
• Broadcasts of community projects locally and across the Live Site Screens
• New publications and launch events
• Residencies & artist dialogues with artists from all over the world coming to Manchester

Legacy

I think it is fairly obvious that the language moment is coming - looking at any artform shows artists engaging with language as a material and field of enquiry; though the understanding of the possibilities are clearly variable. There is an historic possibility to grasp. Fundamentally as the Commission concept focuses on the importance of the artist in celebration of the Olympics, it is also celebrates the pursuit of risk, of the artistic unknown, of innovation, of discoveries yet to be made – and the Language Moment by its very nature grasps for something new. Its ultimate legacy will be the legacy of the new.

In the insanely short time I was allowed to develop the idea I managed to confirm more than 100 artists from 24 countries - it could have been much bigger with more development time - supported by most of the galleries in greater Manchester plus various other partners such as Shisha (South Asian Arts Agency), Mid-Pennine Arts, the North West Libraries network, etc. To all the partners who helped and all the artists who trusted me to pull them into a conducive moment, I say thank you. In addition, I pulled together a delivery team, which in the words of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in the last episode of Star Trek Next Generation, "I would trust with my life". To all of them who worked hard to develop their sections of the proposal, I would offer my thanks.

Paul Neagu at the Romanian Cultural Institute

Discussing art collecting

Yesterday at the Buy Art Fair at Urbis http://www.buyartfair.co.uk/ I took part in the panel discussion of "Public/Private: Institutions and Developing a Market for Contemporary Art."

The others on the panel were Lewis Biggs (Liverpool Biennial), Mark Waugh (A Foundation), and Paul Moss (Workplace Gallery).

I quite enjoyed the discussion but think it was only just getting started when we ran out of time. My main position was that most UK public authority galleries have been driven by governmental non-cullture priorities for so long that curators have been artistically de-skilled and don't have curatorial confidence to be validating players in the art market; in this context, the Arts Council's ambition for more adventurous collecting policies is mostly a fantasy.

Angels of Anarchy

Last night, we attended the preview of Angels of Anarchy at Manchester Art Gallery.
There was a big crowd, which made looking at the show not so easy - previews generally are not the best time to actually see an exhibition. Rarely for the Gallery, this show made me think I would probably go back to see it without the crowd. I admit that my interest in surrealism has always been limited so my knowledge of women surrealists, who, as Jeanette Winterton pointed out in her opening remarks, are as marginalised as most women in avant-gardes. Therefore it was pretty much all new for me (except vaguely Lee Miller.) I found that the works which I most frequently looked at the label to see who had done pieces that stood out were consistently by Eileen Agar (http://www.redfern-gallery.co.uk/pages/artistinfo/121.html ), her self-portrait in pen & ink of 1928 was a beautiful drawing made somewhat poignant by the inscription "for peter". "Ladybird" is another worth seeking out and her collage "A Thousand Thanks. Letter to E.L.T. Mesens" is a great piece.

The photography of Emila Medkova was also a powerful discovery for me. I'll also recommend an exquisite still-life watercolour "Caballito Mexicana" by Frida Kahlo. One or two Dora Maar's stood out too.

The disappointing aspect of the show is in the curation. It goes for rather predictable thematic categories - "portrait/self-portrait", "still life", "interiors". In the latter section, I could only write "nil" in my note book, and again in the section "surreal objects" - nil.

http://www.manchestergalleries.org/angelsofanarchy/

BBC interview

A very conducive interview for BBC north west by Steve Rawling about the Language Moment. Apparently the BBC are filming all 5 of the shortlisted candidates and will show them just before the public announcement.

He filmed me in front of Shaun Pickard's neon text "Darwin" and the video animation "Grin Variations" edited by Phil Davenport from his work with schools in Bury and the Hague.

I'm Back

Well except for the project in Finland, the last 6 weeks have been completely taken up with preparation of the final submission of the Language Moment. The process of drawing it together, as well as being exhausting, has been remarkable for the massive extension of my global contacts and the universal excitement it has generated from everyone I have been discussing it with. I don't want to say too much about the project yet, it seems a little like tempting fate when I still have the presentation to do to the Panel on 29 September. After that I'll describe it in more detail - suffice it to say that it will involve more than 100 artists and most of the main venues in Manchester. The team I have pulled together who will help deliver it could change the world given the chance - so let's hope we get it.

Anyway, normal service is resumed here now.

Tampere

Tuire arrives at Ikko where we were staying.
http://www.ilkko.fi/eng/indexeng.html

Tuire did a remarkable job looking after our party, translating and sorting everything out with endless energy.

Older people from Bury and Tampere dancing together

Lunch with Karri Korro, who drove up from Helsinki

Project evaluation:

and finally:
Home and Barney with his Moomin brought from the Moomin Valley Museum
http://inter9.tampere.fi/muumilaakso/index.php?lang=en

Back to Finland

From tomorrow, I am back in my favourite Finnish city, Tampere. Cultural mobility is the buzz phrase in most debates about globalisation, but usually this refers to artist mobility. My take on it is broader, including communities themselves. Bury had previously taken a group of older people to Stuttgart who were learning to write plays. I was presenting this experience to a European Museums seminar in Bertinoro, Italy after which the Finnish delegation approached me to do a similar project with them. So here we are. The group we are taking are older people who are participating in a dance project led by Ruth Tyson-Jones. The programme includes dance workshops, meeting Finnish older people to exchange experience, seeing museums, etc, etc. Personally, I'm looking forward to the Sara Hilden Art Museum opening on Friday http://www.tampere.fi/english/sarahilden/
Saunas will be ubiquitious; but I draw the line at jumping into lakes - that degree of closeness to nature verges on psychosis.

I'll also be meeting Karri Kokko the poet-organiser of the Vispo Residency back in July. We'll be looking at Finnish involvement in the Language Moment. I've been too busy on it to say here much about progress with it. It has been and continues to be an intense piece of work. Whether it comes off or not, I guess that just this phase has tripled the size of my network - and at last time of counting I had nearly 100 artists confirmed from 23 countries.

If Not This and

If Not This opened as the audience entered the building with Helmut Lemke's "if not this...WHAT THEN & if not at this address...WHERE ELSE?" - a very witty durational configuration of Helmut sitting on a chair with a bucket on his head, a high up bottle of water slowly dripping down onto the bucket. Audience members were invited to drop written comments into another bucket beside him (my comment pictured above)

He picked up each written comment and mumbled it from inside the bucket and attempted blindly to scrawl on the outside of the bucket. A very amusing piece.

Up in the main gallery, I welcomed the audience and introduced the rest of the artists.

First up Ben Gwilliam: he performed molto semplice e cantabile. Prior to the gig, he had made a mould of a vinyl disc of Beethoven's Sonata No 32 and from this created casts in ice. Taking these from a specially brought in fridge, he placed them on turntables: abstract and swirling, the rhythm created by spinning discs was hypnotic and vaguely African, melting created an extraordinary counterpoint, with different pick-ups subtly altering the pace and nuances of sound. Suddenly the ice grooves would give up and the 'instrumentation' would become harsher, more mechanical, urban and then it slowly faded to a recording akin to applause like ice being swept away or paper torn, melting unevenly the discs undulated to become more like massive waves breaking. A new disc was added, a re-invigorated rhythm this time sounding more like series of explosions offered as variations.

Matt Wand began his untitled installation by locating and then turning on reprogrammed Nintendo Gameboys attached to equally sized amplifiers, the texture of sound built a futuristic industrial landscape; circulating in some pre-determined order, Matt then lowered the amps into various sized glass jars which had the effect of shifting the soundscape into a musical register more melancholy, reminiscent of the opening organ music sequence progression down the hotel corridors of Last Year At Marianbad. Adding lids to the jars dimmed the tone colours and altering the lid positions and a shift in the pre-programmes slowed the movement, became more melodic drifts, it shifted again to be up lifting and full of hope and after hope, the amps now on top of the jars so that they added resonance which with the contrapuntal threads moving, surpassing hope to celebration akin to bells ringing on a Dickensian Christmas Day happy ending.

Lee Patterson began his performance by dropping bicarbonate soda into amplified glasses of water, this initiated a collage of sound-cloud samples of underwater pre-recordings of a local canal, a local pond and a nearby wire fence, with live action of poured water from a kettle, amplified springs and assorted pieces of metal pinged - an overlaying, a gentle throbbing like a breeze in motion on the basilar membrane bends stereocilia. I was reminded of John Cage's experience when trying out a soundproof isolation tank - he reported listening to the boom of his heart and the rush of his blood.

(Ben and Lee preparing before the gig)