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Showing posts from 2005

Pores 4

Pores 4 the journal of advanced poetics is on line now. Read essays from me, Alan Halsey, Allen Fisher, and Will Rowe, as well as work by Frances Presley, Phil Davenport and Bill Griffiths http://www.pores.bbk.ac.uk/4/index.htm

Twelve

for the first ethic of christmas my true love sent to me an ambiguity in a non-temporal truth for the second ethic of christmas my true love sent to me two hierarchies between body and soul and an ambiguity in a non-temporal truth for the third ethic of christmas my true love sent to me three veils of illusion two hierarchies between body and soul and an ambiguity in a non-temporal truth for the fourth ethic of christmas my true love sent to me four errors of dogmatism three veils of illusion two hierarchies between body and soul and an ambiguity in a non-temporal truth for the fifth ethic of christmas my true love sent to me five extrinsic justifications four errors of dogmatism three veils of illusion two hierarchies between body and soul and an ambiguity in a non-temporal truth for the sixth ethic of christmas my true love sent to me six phenomenal modalities five extrinsic justifications four errors of dogmatism three veils of illusion two hierarchies between body and soul and an a

The end of Public Art?

This week I received something (indirectly) from OPENSPACE in Edinburgh, sadly I think too late for my response to be included in the consultation. It is a “framework and matrix” for evaluation of public art projects. As I describe how it works you will probably lose the will to read to the end of this (or the will to live!) but the grinding bureaucracy of it is an important issue. The Matrix is a table chart with columns for “stakeholders” – “the professional artist”; columns for “the collaborating artist”, “the lead architect”, “the collaborating architect”, “the lead designer”, “the collaborating designer”, “the contractor”(!?) to be used if these people are in a project. Then under the heading of “project location” there are 3 columns called “Public organisation”, “community”, and “corporate/private bodies”. Then another 7 columns for funding organisations. These then are all the peoples (or parts thereof) that will evaluate public art projects. The rows titled “Values” are the 4

Countdown to 2006 and 2008

Don’t expect there are many people left reading this, as I have been away so long. Anyway, the Nannucci installation at Bury Art Gallery is very impressive, with its sometimes miraculous mixing of light creating a visceral effect if you view it for any length of time. It’s on until 7 January. And bar that the first Text Festival is over. Phew! I’m still doing the review but can say about 40,000 saw the exhibitions, and there is no way to count the number of people who saw (and continue to see) the public art commissions. From the lessons and new relationships forged it is hard to hold back from programming the next one straight away. As some will know I am taking 2006 off to write and research so the next Festival is fixed for 2008. For the sake of my health it will be shorter (maybe 5 rather than 9 months) but include the mix of exhibitions, commissions, performances and probably more multi-media work (the omission this time round). The Festival laid down an analysis of the current t

Last but not least

Tomorrow the last exhibition of the 2005 Text Festival opens at Bury Art Gallery with a new neon instalation by the Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Nannucci. My essay, featured here back on 29 July, is part of the 100 page catalogue which you can get for £12 from the Gallery. You can see more of Maurizio's work at www.maurizionannucci.com and there's some early stuff on UBUweb.

Venice and Edinburgh

As mentioned last – I’ve been away: first Venice then a conference in Edinburgh. It won’t surprise anyone who has been, but as a first timer: Venice was a revelation – really extraordinary. Ostensibly I had gone to catch the end of the Biennale and was prepared to be sceptical because of the hype and the romantic stereotypes but Venice was fabulous, a completely new experience – and much too good to think about contemporary art. I did get to the Guggenheim, most of which is not contemporary; the Rückriem-Nannucci juxtaposition was personally gratifying having worked with them both but aesthetically problematic. Not only that but the Rückriem piece has not been installed as it should, having gaps between the stone splits. The only other artist was the futurist Carlo Carra whose text collages were a revelation. My reading matter was William Carlos Williams’ Autobiography – a great read, full of poetry and medicine tales (two of my favourites!) – by coincidence the 1918 flu featured du

A New Text Postcard Pack

Sorry I've been away for a good while - Venice and Edinburgh, of which more in the next bulletin. Meantime, the latest postcard pack is available now, featuring Robert Grenier, Lawrence Weiner, me, Phil Davenport, Hester Reeve, Brass Art and Shaun Pickard. Let me know if you would like to receive one.

Pandemic Awareness Week

Mostly my interests here are cultural but ever since I was a teenage artist I knew of the early death of the Austrian artist Egon Schiele from the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. So over the years I have had occasion to note the rare references to it. The WHO has declared that it is not a question of if but when the bird flu spreading in the Far East will become the next pandemic. Preoccupied with the War on an Abstract Noun, the governments are not preparing and in reality could do very little to save the millions who are risk. You need to start thinking about this: http://aetiology.blogspot.com/2005/10/pandemic-influenza-awareness-week-day.html

The arrival of a captive audience

Earlier in the week, I had the pleasure of meeting Robert Grenier off the plane from San Francisco at Manchester Airport. Although having exchanged photos so we would recognise each other I thought to be on the safe side I would print out one of his recent drawn poems and stand with it opposite the arrival gate like people do with notices such as “TAXI – MR SMITH”. And something quite unexpected happened: virtually everyone who came through the gate paused to read the poem (without realising that it was a poem of course). I actually began to feel like I was doing a performance. One daft old American Fascist walked up to me, tapped me on the chest through the poem and said “I’m not Osama Bin Laden” - presumably mistaking Bob’s use of line with Arabic. But otherwise people seemed genuinely to be caught be the unexpected textual intervention. Another passing reader actually left the building and then returned to ask what it said! As well as making a mental note that this could well be

Questions of Ideology and Ideological Apparatus

…from Trehy’s Althusser’s Machiavelli’s Poetics (a work in progress) reading it yourself. Rather, these are two competing realizations of the work, each with its own set of advantages & limitations. Moreover - Charles Bernstein how why what why – the marginalisation of poetry, questions locating the battleground in reading and public rituals within the material existence of one ideological apparatus – culture. Is it possible to locate answers in an act of reading itself? Reading a reading of a reading? On the question of power (and assuming it) who better to read than Machiavelli? In questioning from marginalisation who better than the self-marginalised Althusser? (When a Marxist theorist murders a communist partisan [1] and the stillpoint of his emotional life, it takes 30 years to be theory again – how culture operates as an ideological state apparatus.) So what better than Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli? Not Discourses nor The Poet (which discredited recredited Althusser d

Thalurania Watertonii.

For anyone who has been back in the last few weeks and wondered whether I had packed this in, my apologies; one thing and another distracted me. Been to Milan which I didn’t find very interesting; and been working on an article for the next PORES; and started work on a collaborative project with the conceptual artist Kerry Morrison and the biologist Professor Alicia Prowse. We are working on a public art commission in a site of special scientific interest which abuts a new housing estate of hundreds of identical houses. The project will take about 18 months (taking into account growing seasons and nature stuff) so more of that in later times. So as not to bore with day-to-day anecdotes a quick word about Shaun Pickard’s one-person show in the Text Festival which opened a couple of weeks ago and sort of continues the nature theme. Thalurania Watertonii – Waterson’s Woodnymph. At first glance it’s not altogether obvious what Pickard is up to. At one end of the room there’s a wall-mount

The Tmesis of Maurizio Nannucci

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

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 inappropriat

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

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 misunderstan

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

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

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

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

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 Collaborati

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, how

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 wea

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

Arts Fairs International

http://www.artfairsinternational.com/articles/textfest_article.html

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 Futur