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Showing posts from 2006

Reciprocity

0. Among equals every friendship asymptote leans heavily towards any closeness order we like tenderness by suitable choice of vocabulary: fused groups collected together as stable alloys, our description not sensitive to a starting time will have constant energy. You do find people have phenomenal capacity, deeply intersecting an infinite number of times. Less serial, this small fusion supporting even when they lose – limbic symmetry of everyone's relations to each other, neither one contains the other. Abelian and free. Performed formants thus permitting longer musical notes to be sustained often over huge distances and times, the more precise the delight we feel in its frequency. Individuals touching intimately feel its vibrations, celebrate the humour of unexpected beats, art and exchange conducive to simply connected space, two points can be continuously transformed into every other, conformally and bijectively mapped emotions good despite rules that the proposition adds nothi

Site Visits

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I had the great pleasure of spending the weekend doing site visits with Alan Johnston and Masayuki Yasuhara ( http://www.novaialiustra.com/index.htm ) . Pictured in the cold and damp beside an Ulrich Ruckriem stone at Outwood Country Park, Radcliffe. They will be doing a collaborative installation in the same park.

Poem

0. Speaking of Text Has Spoken of the hottest day, ice cold cider competing with the sun, the heat and cold of bodily effects; Suppose a thing is sitting on the edge of a table, how did it not go backwards from the floor, to a still-life, an old clock ticking, opening the controlled shipment [language] adds a fresh embarrassment, fresh flowers appointed explosive to a moving/shifting interference containing enough resources to describe that situation. His lyric cul-de-sac, friendly to nature, bucolic idyls devoutly promoted over other plant species must be effected. Condensation decoheres a droplet about to slip down. Boolean, the text past pain replaces memory, pseudogenic decomposed into modules, decomposition matters to text's comprehensibility and maintainability. Grass appears blue, the sky appears green immediate knowledge and its object, effective coupling, measures how much extra perturbation, a given perturbation generates, awards, dialects, compromises, obsequies sung or

two top people

I've been a bit preoccupied with creating a new work for the Arts Council, which is now near enough done bar the final production. Anyway, in the meantime, this week I heard from two top people so thought I'd point you to have a look at them. Carolyn Thompson was one of the discoveries of the Text Festival - the subtly of her work I have a lot of time for. www.carolynthompson.co.uk The other person worth checking out is Stefan Gec . I was pleased to hear from Stefan after a bit of a gap. www.stefangec.com

The Eighth Square

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Also from Koln: I don’t usually bother mentioning exhibitions I’ve seen unless they are worth the mention – there is so much bad art in the world you could be overwhelmed if you wasted time thinking about them – but the current show at the Ludwig Köln is worth of special attention because it is surely the stinker of the year. http://www.museenkoeln.de/english/museum-ludwig/ Not only is the ‘art’ jaw-droppingly laugh-out-loud terrible but the curating and display is at the level of a cross between a high school parents evening and a trade fair. Whoever laid this out has no understanding of light, space or aesthetic experience – or they had been lumbered with this joke art and was attempting to show what they felt by magnifying the badness.

Back from Köln Again

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All been happening recently: back from the Douglas Gordon in Edinburgh and off to Köln with a new commission from the Arts Council in the bag. As usual I stayed with Ulrich Rückriem (and Tessa Howe) and got loads of new writing done. Ulrich was on good form with more than 20 commissions/exhibitions this year! Frustratingly he doesn’t take any notice of the Net so I can’t really point you to links to see any of them – I suppose they are findable somewhere. Exciting development: Ulrich has handed me the programming of artists residencies and research exhibitions Red House and Barn in Ireland. So here's a picture of Ulrich's installation: I'll start in the New Year.

Sorry for this laziness

Since returning from Japan, I have been very lazy about updating this blog. As Sartre said you have to decide whether to tell or to do, so I have been doing - mainly the ongoing 50 Heads project. One of which is below. At present I am in Edinburgh for the Douglas Gordon shows (of which more when I have seen them without the preview crowds). Expectation 0. what it is for the "given" to be "taken"; Who I was What was I When was it Where was I an event whose probability is not 0. The absolute future may not be well -defined for every inability to develop its own knowledge -intensive growth has not had immediate negative effects on aggregate measures of prosperity. Or as fools once said: building a new formation for common space omitting the fundamental importance of ISBN. 0: doesn’t bode well and compromised truth measures the lower threshold described as ‘no more than one at or below lower threshold.’ The absolute future of the event consists of all events which c

Japan visits

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I'm back in the UK now, so will get back to writing rather than holidays snaps!

Mori Tower

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Toyko Subway

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Tokyo nights

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Mobility

Next week I am off to Japan for 3 weeks, attending while I am there the Metronome Think-Tank at the Mori Museum. Here are the questions we will be talking about: "Firstly, mobility (impermanence and variability) within new types of institutional structure that connect art and education; and secondly, mobility in the movement of ideas, transported by artists and art practice that will affect the future definition of faculties of knowledge. First session: Offering a distillation of key characteristics that define the conceptual and organisational make-up of new small-scale associations, these presentations will encourage discussion on mobility and impermanency within the actual structure of new forms of institution. a) Can knowledge be mobile? What forms of knowledge travel, who shifts them from one place to another, and how does their content alter? What forms of knowledge do not travel or translate and why? b) Why are artists coming back to the question of education and under what

New Scientist Poetry

On my way back from Düsseldorf, I indulged myself with my new addiction: New Scientist magazine. Imagine my shock when fuck me if there isn’t an article by Simon Armitage about the relationship between science and poetry. It stands out immediately because every other article is characterised by depth analysis whereas this reads like it has slipped in by accident and should have been in the Reader’s Digest. “Science by another name” as it is called, despite claiming to explore the links, starts out with a first column of personal anecdote demonstrating that poets really are as disconnected from scientific thinking as their stereotype. He concludes with a short poem: “Being more in tune with the feel of things than science and facts, we knew that the tyre had travelled too fast for its size and mass, and broken through some barrier of speed, outrun the act of being driven, steered, and at that moment gone beyond itself towards some other sphere, and disappeared.” (I took the liberty of r

More Madness

Just stumbled on this: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/08/put_the_blame_where_it_belongs.php Apparently evolution is least accepted in Turkey closely followed by ... America. Coincidentally to my good impressions of my visit, Iceland comes top on rationality too.

Visiting America?

The 'security alert' only delayed my flight to Reykjavik by a few hours - arriving at 3am in the end. But the madness of travelling to America is played out each day on the TV. So I have to ask: why continue to visit America? The question is actually academic for me because I decided when Bush bombed Iraq that enough was enough and adopted a personal boycott. I don't expect this effected the Evil Empire but made me feel better. Recall we all enthusiastically boycotted South Africa. I have been interested for a while in the debates that took place in Germany before the Second World War among artist and writers around whether it was better to stay in the country to resist the rise of Nazism or go into exile. Ultimately most of those who stayed were either dead or compromised. After Bush's last election 'win', there was a brief period of talk about liberal Americans emigrating. Whether they did or not isnt my question. Even if my decision is silly to other people,

Back from Reykjavik

Back from Reykjavik. I can’t recommend this trip too highly; I guess it is just like you’ve seen it on TV – geysers, mountain ranges, glaciers, wild Martian landscapes – though, as a city boy I steered clear of all this outdoor Romanticism. Reykjavik itself: It is an unusual city, low-rise, sprawling, reminiscent of a cross between Douglas and Ramsay (in the Isle of Man. There was a great feeling. Lindsey Gordon from Peacock Visual Arts in Aberdeen recounted from someone else the Icelanders are like the Irish would have been if they had not lived under the English. But the commitment and understanding of contemporary art was marvelous. The reason for my trip was to see Alan Johnston’s show at Safn Museum http://www.safn.is/english/index.html – which I had, in my slapdash way not researched so it turned out to be a 3 person exhibition with Séan Shanahan and Ragna Rόbertsdόttir. Alan Johnston works are almost invisible. His wall drawings are made of short, irregular pencil marks, closel

Sartre on Genocide

The stream of images and reports of the continued American-back Israeli evils triggered my return to Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1967 article Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide, written in his capacity as President of the International War Crimes Tribunal. http://www.sartre.org/Writings/genocide.htm It is not surprising that a search of American websites, even/especially academic philosophy ones, that there is remarkable vitriol aimed at Sartre (one of my heroes). As this tends to be at the level generalised dismissal, I guess it is as much based on fear and hate of someone who got them bang to rights. Anyway, the striking thing about re-reading the essay is that simply replacing the Vietnam references with Iraq/Lebanon and America with Israel/America you get a pretty trenchant and accurate indictment of the current practice of genocide. As I write this, an Israeli on the TV has just said that as far as he is concerned for every Israeli who is killed 1000 Lebanese should die. As it is, they are

Vinculum

0. "interrupted pendulum" with equal probability finding grains spinning up or down, some part which cannot be assessed, only non-zero within ourselves, and the amount of each does not depend on the presence of the other, fundamentally non-local fields are to accelerations as falling is to shopping, tales of passing vicariance, conserved so long as the masses did not interact; preyed on and preying, fearful of collision preyed on and preying between them. Prognosis varies from hope here to fear there and fear here and hope there. Senescent memory loss, language deterioration, poor judgment appearing first as function. Under the continuous symmetry of time translation symptoms continue as a daily torment and will do, despite all our bijective vinculum to someone non-local; conjugate variables appear separated, that old couple can only cleave together until they are cleaved apart, the system of fear to curl up with cumulative mistakes, a smell like tobacco, tired leather and ur

Continuing Heatwaves and bombing

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Amid the continuing heatwave here, I had cause to re-visit Bury and found the above addition to the little park smack in the middle of the town, opposite the art gallery. The Fusilier's Regiment plans to open a museum beside the park so this is part of that campaign. In the sunshine, with the young family picnicking behind it, the horror of our support (deferential to the US) of Israeli warcrimes struck home particularly hard. For anyone who wants to know what is really going on (which you have no chance of knowing from the mainstream media), I think these are good sites: http://electronicintifada.net/new.shtml http://www.electronicintifada.net/lebanon/

Philip Davenport and Ian Hamilton Finlay

Trumpeted here a few posts back, Philip's IHF show has opened to rave reviews: http://living.scotsman.com/visual.cfm?id=1041702006

Helmut Lemke at the Cornerhouse

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I don’t often mention Galleries in Manchester, though I visit them frequently, mainly because most of the programmes in the city are so dismal that I find it difficult to raise the interest even to be critical. Helmut Lemke’s site specific installation Klangeln VIII at the Cornerhouse ( www.cornerhouse.org ) is a welcome relief. Originally from Germany, Helmut is a Research Fellow in Interactive Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University and is on Fellowship at the University of Salford. According to the exhibition hand-out: “Lemke’s work customises everyday objects, making them surprising components within installations…his work has an important visual dimension, drawing attention to the environment it is constructed for….” As you can see, thankfully this is not a sound work that requires the use of headphones. To continue using their description of the piece: “Klangeln VIII features oversized bows that play a number of strings criss-crossed above the heads of visitors. The Klangeln a

Mercury Hymn

M e r c u r y h y m n ian hamilton finlay is dead works by ian hamilton finlay and philip davenport preview 14 July 2006 7pm H e a r t F i n e A r t L t d Third Floor 6 Waterloo Place Edinburgh EH1 3EF Scotland 0131 556 2289 www.heartfineart.com exhibition 15 July - 1 August gallery open Friday to Monday 2pm-6pm or ring 07973988471 for an appointment

website updated

www.tonytrehy.com

Back!

A few people have mentioned in passing reading what I put here, which is a little embarrassing just now because I haven’t put anything here for a while. So a quick update is in order to show it is still live – I promise something more theoretically interesting soon. I’m just back from Amsterdam/Delft where I had a pleasant meeting with Martita Slewe of the Slewe Gallery (www.slewe.nl ) and saw Alan Johnston’s installation – sorry I didn’t take any photos but it was really too subtle for do justice photographically and I expect some will appear on the website if they are not there already. I also did a load of research on the follow-up to Vertigo, which before I went had the working title ‘amsterdam’ but has a different name now. In the meantime, I have finished another of the “50 Heads”, so here it is: Method 0. Iff means testing is a system of inertia by proxy of that excluded middle. Iff they would sell the people’s park, pulling the ladder up to test behind us. (Obsequious masses a

Liverpool Edinburgh

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Sorry for the long gap in updates: been busy. About 50 attended the Walker Art Gallery gig, at which I read: extracts from Vertigo, On Naming of Shadows, Zufrieden, and the last stanza of a new poem in response to Rückriem. I was also able to insert a temporary text in the Rembrandt room: Pictured above it says: "since this room is the best of all possible rooms there might be no such best room if the series of possible rooms formed a continuum of increasingly good rooms ad infinitum and if there were no such best room we cannot fault art for failing to create the best since to do so is as impossible as say naming the highest number point in the picture represents an event a point in space at a single moment, an orchestrated reduction, a room full of air equals the number of phase-space dimensions is 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 things" Following this, I have been back up in Edinburgh, which I am more and more impressed with. On Friday I did a talk about the Vertigo

Walker Gallery Reading

I am reading with Phil Davenport and sound artist Ben Gwilliam at the Walker Art Gallery Liverpool on Saturday from 2pm. I'll also be creating some temporary text installations in the galleries. Free entry - come along.
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Finally I have images of the Sleeper installation; if you go to www.sleeper1.com you can see more and download the poem VERTIGO.

Vertigo

Off to Edinburgh to install my exhibition at the Sleeper Gallery ( www.sleeper1.com ). The show previews on Friday 28 April 6pm – 8pm, then runs for a month – have a look and let me know what you think. It is accompanied by a long-ish poem, like the show, called Vertigo (ISBN 1 904443 10 9) which you will be able to get via Sleeper. On my first visit to the space I was struck by its incredible white-cubeness. This seemed to be the ‘traditional’ contemporary gallery space we are all used to, carried to almost abstraction. Going from the Gallery to the yard outside (which in Scotland is called ‘an area’); I got to wondering what is the relationship between the experience of a real space and an abstract space and also the notion of Space itself. Following discussions with Professor Graham White of London University, (www. dcs.qmul.ac.uk/~graham), the poem was written in Köln and Delft in Holland. The show carries the linguistic investigation into the multi-dimensions of the Sleeper spac

The Golden Rule

http://www.guardian.co.uk/monarchy/story/0,,1696083,00.html The poet laureate, Andrew Motion, and the master of the Queen's music, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, have written a work together to mark the monarch's 80th birthday. Davies has set a poem called The Golden Rule, written for the occasion by Motion. The poem “tackles”, at the suggestion of Maxwell Davies, "changes in the natural world, and people accelerating those changes, sometimes positively, sometimes not. And through those changes and in and among them, the Queen remains the same". The piece was performed at a service at St George's Chapel, Windsor, today and at Windsor festival in September. Sir Peter described Motion as "very sympathetic and professional - he knows exactly what he's about". That’s as may be and as a anti-monarchist you’d think I won’t care, but demonstrating the dire state of British Official Verse Culture, he certainly knows exactly nothing about writing poetry in the 21s

Palermo Restored

My poem in response to Blinky Palermo's Edinburgh Art College 1970 installation ( http://www.eca.ac.uk/palermo/index.htm ) has now been published by Greville Worthington as a limited edition card. The layout means I can't really represent it here, but I'm happy to post it out to anyone who requests one - while stocks last!

Back from Koln

Just returned from spending time with Ulrich Ruckriem in Köln, Germany. For those who don’t know his work, here’s a quick introduction: A couple of sites featuring gallery installations: http://www.donaldyoung.com/ruckriem/ruckriem_index.html http://www.artseensoho.com/Art/ACE/ruckriem98/ruckriem1.html A couple of sites public art works: This one shows the projects that I commissioned in Radcliffe http://www.irwellsculpturetrail.co.uk/trailitem.asp?ID=19 This one is the piece currently showing at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park http://www.ysp.co.uk/view.asp?id=213 Anyway, I had a great time working in his studio and managed to finish the publication which accompanies my show in Edinburgh in May. And in long conversations got an insight into where Ulrich’s work has moved to. In most people’s mind his work is characterised by huge stone installations (of which there are still 12 commissions still in the pipeline in the next 2 years) but the latest works feature a remarkable departure – dema

Everlandia

Following a line of research I came across Everlandia today (at the ICA, I think). http://www.everlandia.net/ "Everlandia is a journey of a special/personal kind. It playfully confronts an individual with their fantasies, needs and desires. It challenges the imagination to pick and compose from those landscapes, plants and animals, which most accurate express the image of the individual's dreamland. Their Everlandia. The invented land remains the property of its creator and is saved on the web page. The visitor will be able to send it from the gallery as a postcard and of course keep it in their heart." What is striking when you look at the actual products is how the construct actually limits rather than challenges the imagination of the user. In the end it is more the idea that you could fantasise about your ideal landscape rather than create it through this project. As you will find if you have a go, you have a limited number of landscapes, most of which I for one wou

More bad things happen?

Anyone who has talked to me for any length of time will have the impression that I have a scary certainty about the impending doom of the bird flu pandemic; as mentioned previously here, this fear and accrued knowledge stretches back to reading of the death of the Austrian artist Egon Schiele. I have been confidently warning anyone who will listen for about two years that the pandemic is imminent. The world-wide news services are not helping to clarify the danger – although bird to human infection is pretty deadly – realistically how often do you come into contact with a live bird? The real pandemic will come as the disease mutates to be contagious human to human; then we are in big trouble; find out more at http://avianflu.typepad.com/ and http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/h5n1/ . I have written to my member of parliament about it and used the Freedom of Information Act to examine the preparations of my local authorities. While you still could, I bought my Tamiflu and high-spec medical

Seen and Heard

As On Kawara would say “I am still alive” and so thankfully is my dad after his emergency triple bypass operation. The Venice trip was a good way to start the year: January is definitely the best time to see Venice – the weather is pleasantly spring-like and there are hardly any tourists so most of the galleries and fabulous churches were empty. The poem I went to write – responding to the Blinky Palermo installation at Edinburgh College of Art ( http://www.eca.ac.uk/palermo/index.htm ) is being published as a limited edition by Greville Worthington and should be available shortly. With little structure to my time now I am writing the last weeks have been punctuated with what I have seen and heard. The British Art Show is in Manchester at the moment but there is nothing to distinguish from it. It’s one of those shows that don’t make you angry with how bad it is, more it provokes a sense of melancholy that the banality of the work (supposedly surveying what is going on in British Art) i

Next stop Venice

Happily, I have left the Bury set up for 12 months travel, writing and research. Next stop Venice: reports when I get back.