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Showing posts from 2007

Christmas (wedding) greetings

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Merry Christmas everyone.

Married in Venice

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A better excuse than usual for my lack of blogging: I've been in Venice getting married. A perfect day.

Stockhausen Died

Sad news today: Karlheinz Stockhausen is dead. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=T4RWBOA5SZZVTQFIQMFCFFWAVCBQYIV0?xml=/news/2007/12/08/db0801.xml I have enjoyed his music since I was first introduced to it in 1981 - "Set Sail for the Sun" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aus_den_Sieben_Tagen has been one of my desert island discs since I heard it back then. http://www.stockhausen.org/licht_by_malcolm_ball.html

Mr Worthington's Chapel

object in the eyes boxed and an object that knows too much or does too much saving saccade attention for delicious gauge symmetries so sweet equiconsistent so cold happen , recontextualised no artefact in all its capable of being dismantled digested and susceptible to dropping in frequency as it moves away private this groupish nature at face arriving at the same place at the same time our ideal fluids desired too in thick and thin telomeres of extra high relatedness our kitchen and bijective topos

Dynamic Rationalisation

As previously mentioned there have been no negative consequences for the Gallery & Museum Service in Bury since it was de-registered for selling the Lowry painting last year. The programme continues to be exciting and innovative and attract a lot of positive attention. Other UK public galleries taking their bat and ball home has had no effect on our programme, and when we have needed to borrow an artwork for an exhibition we have sourced it outside the [public] “Sector”, or more usually outside the country. In fact the only consequence I have noticed is that I get invited to speak on platforms at conferences considering collection and disposal policy. This is usually on the basis that Bury is a pariah service having done the dirty deed – so I guess it is usually expected that I should speak chastely about how desolate it is to be outside the fold. This isn’t my perspective at all. I am invited to yet another conference on Friday called “Dynamic Rationalisation”; the gist of this is

Excuses for laziness

My apologies for the long gap: I had a deadline to write 4 poems for a new journal coming out next year. I have a long entry to post by tonight but in the mean time I direct you to a periodic reminder of the bird flu situation - http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/h5n1/ - more than 90 deaths this year alone.

Birgir Andresson 1955-2007

Sad news today that Birgir Andresson died yesterday. Each time I have visited Reykjavik arrangements have been made for us to meet but each time for one reason or another we missed each other. After my installation at Safn, his collaboration with Ragna Róbertsdóttir was the next show. He has a couple of works in the ICELAND show at Bury Art Gallery at the moment and we hoped to show him more fully in future years. It feels like a destiny unfulfilled. www.i8.is/new/birgir.htm

There Would Be No Way

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The Myth of the North

It was with a mixture of nausea and exhilarating irritation that I had to visit the worst modern building I know: the Lowry Arts Centre ( www.lowry.com ). I find myself in that odd bind where something is so appalling you want to warn people not to go near it but at the same time wanting to recommend it so that you can share the adrenaline rush of experiencing something truly jaw-dropping. There is one angle that I don’t mind the Lowry from – that is on Google Earth where you can see that it was designed with some cube, circle, triangle structure. But from the ground it is an absolute stinker. There is no architecture logic from the outside, but when you go inside there is no human sense to it. It is no exaggeration that it makes me feel physically sick to be in there too long. If the spaces had been designed as a centre for Overactively Disordered children with colour blindness it would be excusable but the glaring juxtaposition of brutal purples with orange, red and yellow garishly

A personal post

For various reasons, it was my intention not to waste readers' time with personal details. Until recently, when it was pointed out to me that the odd thing that slipped in was becoming the raw material for someone writing a poem using my personal words. Marguerite Heywood has now sent me the poem, here it is: The personal words of Tony Trehy as a city boy I steered clear of all this outdoor Romanticism although personally I don’t subscribe to this equation that makes a child death more meaningful I don’t often mention Galleries in Manchester though I visit them frequently as a city-dweller, I’m not sure that I would class fishing rods as “everyday objects”, but maybe books are ok why should I suffer alone o fuck paradise for me would be a cross between Berlin, Venice, Manchester people, noise, excitement, food, culture it is going to sound like I am in grumpy mood no wonder the majority of us have moved to cities fired or maybe sometimes bored by the academic analysis and the power

Dinner with the Rothenbergs

A first meeting and a delightful evening with Jerry and Diane Rothenberg http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/rothenberg/ , (plus Phil Davenport) visiting the UK to present a paper at the forthcoming Kurt Schwitters conference in the Lake District. Conversation about poetry - obviously - and art and travel - "it was nice to have people round who came to enjoy themselves" as Sue said. For anyone who has been to one of Sue's extraordinary dinner parties, it will be no surprise that the evening revolved around her fabulous cooking: Starter: Spiced roasted butternut squash soup Wine: Prosecco from Veneto Fish Course: Grilled fillet of Salmon marinated with lemon grass on a bed of courgette ribbons stir-fried with ginger and chilli with a lemon tarragon and parsley dressing Wine: Alsace Riesling Main Course: Roasted boned leg of lamb stuffed with garlic, rosemary, lemon and parsley with a flagelot bean gratin and roasted vine tomatoes Wine: 1998 Stag's Leap Fay vineyard Cabernet

The Safn Installation

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Back from a great visit to Reykjavik - the launch of the eponymous bookwork and the spatial edit. Met many interesting artists and writers - of whom more in later bulletins. The Safn collection looked brilliant - in this latter photo you can make out Dan Flavin and Roni Horn.

Reykjavik

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The exhibition of my eponymous text opens on 1 September at the Safn Museum in the Icelandic Capital. The accompanying limited edition, hand-bound, publication is a new text-poem available from me or from Safn for £30.

More from MPA Gallery

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Above: Thickness by me; Monster by Hester Reeve; Atom by Mark Jalland; Shaun Pickard has a brilliant piece in also but I am missing a photo at the moment.

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18th August - 13 October Mid Pennine Gallery Yorke St Burnley UK www.midpenninearts.org.uk I have curated a new text show featuring Phil Davenport, Mark Jalland, Shaun Pickard, Hester Reeve, Carolyn Thompson and a new piece - " Thickness " by me. Preview is 6pm on Friday. I'll be doing a talk on Thursday 13 September at 6.30pm. More about it after it opens plus photos when they are available.

More from Iceland

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Iceland Preview

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Iceland

Friday 27 July 7pm I've curated this show at Bury Art Gallery, a exhibition of outstanding international art selected from the largest and most significant collection of contemporary art in Iceland. Pétur Arason and Ragna Róbertsdóttir have been collecting contemporary art for 30 years and have amassed a superb collection of leading artists from Minimalism, Fluxus, and Conceptualism, together with many important Icelandic artists, which they show at Safn in Reykjavik. This is the first time many of these works have been shown in the UK. The artists included in ICELAND are Lawrence Weiner, On Kawara, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Ragna Róbertsdóttir, Richard Long, Carl Andre, Birgir Snæbjörn Birgisson, Þór Vigfússon, Hörður Ágústsson, Karin Sander, Birgir Andrésson, Roni Horn, Ólafur Eliasson, Hreinn Friõfinnsson, Stanley Brouwn, me, Helmut Lemke and Tacita Dean. The show runs 28 July – 3 November 2007 For more about the Safn collection, go to www.safn.is

Secession

secession quickly satiated open-source as surface disregulation i are more discrete secession laughter over central dogma breathers experience concrete or abstract secession in application not in principle desquamate is nothing iff memento mori secession zugzwang and vertigo torsion secession spring, and all thickness waits the implicate order of other stations i are

Constellation of Luminous Detail

Phil Davenport's new poems can be heard at http://www.artradio.fm/

Luminous Detail Launched

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Friday night at Islington Mill: Helmut Lemke and Ben Gwilliam, two of the sound artists performing at the launch of Phil Davenport's new poetry cd "Constellation of Luminous Detail".

Adieux to Silence

To quote On Kawara: I am still alive. Most irritatingly my net connection has been broken, but more positively I have been busy completing Reykjavik, the text-poem and book for my installation at Safn in Iceland in September and briefly writing this piece called Shut UUUUUp for a show at the Chapman Gallery in Salford curated by Ben Gwilliam and Helmut Lemke. It has been noted that I rarely mention personal things here and in the same vein some of the reviews of 50 Heads have magnified my distain for mainstream poetry (and its reliance on the personal voice of the poet). This is actually not quite accurate since many of the Heads are quite personal. I also have a reputation for not explaining the poems – this is also not true. So… As Sound Artists, Ben and Helmut’s show set out to address the question of Silence… I have always been touched by the opening page of Simone deBeauvoir’s Adieux to Sartre in which she recounts that during some philosophical or political debate whichever one

Northern Mirror

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Radcliffe was worth a visit just to see the twelve stones by Ulrich Ruckriem, now with the addition of Alan Johnston's northern mirror sculpture to the same site, the Outwood Country Park is a special experience. Without exaggeration, Alan's sculpture is brilliant. I don't need to say much about it here, as the accompanying website is comprehensive, including Alan's voluminous research, image files and critical essays. http://www.northernmirror.com/

Post-Heads

I'm happy to see that Ron Silliman appreciated 50 Heads: http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Tony%20Trehy More on which I will write next week when I return from the European Museums Forum in Spain: http://www.europeanmuseumforum.org/

50 Heads read

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Around 50 people turned up for the launch party for 50 Heads . As Orwell observed - Poetry readings can be grizzily affairs - so instead of me reading, I invited other artists to interpret a poem each. Alan Johnston, Phil Davenport, Hester Reeve, Helmut Lemke and Mark Jalland did the honours/did me the honour. Phil opened with “ Reciprocity ”. Alan read “ Yddrasill ”. Then sound artist Helmut Lemke did a brilliant interpretation of “ Entscheidungsproblem ” - this involved a tape of him reading it underpinning reading a strip of the poem spooling along a fishing rod, periodically punctuated with a yarrow stick inserted into holes in the rod. This was followed with “ Faces ” from Mark Jalland who, with intense clarity, took up the challenge with about 15 minutes notice. Hester ended the readings with “ Place ”. Then we ate Chinese and drink happily.

Poetry Collection Launch

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50 Heads my new poetry collection published by Apple Pie Editions written during 2006 in Venice, Cologne, Reykjavik, Tokyo, Edinburgh and Manchester. Friday 27 April from 7pm food and drink and guest readings Venue: LotusBar & Dim Sum 35a King St Manchester M2 6AA It's ticket only. email me for details.

Cologne

I'm off to http://www.koelnmesse.de/wEnglisch/artcologne/index.htm this week. All being well I will spend some time going round with American Poet Marjorie Welish http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/welish/ I'll be staying with Ulrich Ruckriem and getting him up to speed on the proposals for a new gallery in Radcliffe. http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=426&storycode=3084049&c=2&encCode=00000000012c4954

Plymouth and the Trojan Frog

Tony Lopez is to be congratulated on a very successful (if over-academic) conference at Plymouth University – “Poetry & Public Language”. One of the high points for me was Will Rowe’s opening paper - which I am pleased to say he has said I can reproduce here soon. Other highlights for me where the papers presented by Piers Hugill and Allen Fisher. As with all this sort of event some of the most interesting dialogue takes place in the coffee breaks and over dinner. ‘Ecocriticism’ Oddly though, the paper that most fired me to response was the worst. Richard Kerridge’s preamble to it can be read on Carrie Etter’s blog at http://carrieetter.blogspot.com/2007/04/underlying-propositions.html . She raves about it but maybe that is because she works with him. Anyway, the most damnable phrase of the paper comes at the end: “poetry could not have any subject matter more important than this [climate change]”. I don’t think I have actually come across this thing called ecocriticism – though ma

Mobile again

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http://www.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.21423 Last week I was at the National Maritime Museum for the Lawrence Weiner Opening - please to catch up with Lawrence and finally meet Alan Charlton, an artist whose work I have appreciated for some years and looked forward to meeting. At the weekend, I'm down to Plymouth for the Poetry and Public Language conference. http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/pages/view.asp?page=17709 Things have been a bit hectic up to now, but I hope to do a more detailed report on the conference when I get back.

Mobility again

Following from the Mobility think-tank in Tokyo which I attended last September, there are plans to produce a bi-lingual book of the papers and notes of the discussions. Bizarrely, the editor, Dr. Deliss has asked me to agree a version of my paper that removes complexity of argument on the basis that the Japanese language can't translate complex English(!) and that there are sections she doesnt understand herself. I can't remember: is it Pound or Adorno who dubbed academics as "competing supplicants"? I gather others are having similar problems so the publication seems a pointless exercise. Anyway, I have withdrawn by paper from the publication. I did do an edit that I am happy with; here it is: The inverse geometry of contradiction is the dominant direction of travel, by-passing the demand that maps (originally concentric) serve as aids for accurate measurement. Place (as a continuous function) and Placing matter little and. Geography, landscape, location, the quain

Sligo's Secret Theory of Drawing

I've made the pilgrimage to The Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo in Ireland to see The Secret Theory of Drawing http://www.modelart.ie/galleries/contemporary.html The gallery has a great feel and very conducive spaces - one of those places where you think "what would I do here?" rather than as I often think "I'm glad I don't have to do anything here". Coaimhin, who I first met at my Edinburgh show at Sleeper, has put together a thoughtful show, circling, I think, around the act and the space of drawing. I was particularly impressed with Alan Johnston's wall drawing - I've seen a lot of Alan's drawing in the last 12 months and this one I found very refreshing, somehow free and relaxed, and relating beautifully to the architectural space. The other high point for me was Patrick Ireland's Portrait of Marcel Duchamp. Bojan Šarcevic’s wall-bound ‘drawings’ were also very striking. The show is much better than the "Draw" show at M

The ordinary can be absolutely banal

I read in the latest brochure from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park http://www.ysp.co.uk/view.aspx?id=3 that Simon Armitage is Visiting Artist 2007 with the usual line that Armitage “is widely regarded as one of Britain’s foremost contemporary poets”. Before I go on to my point on poets and galleries, to locate this ‘foremost’ talent, here is an extract of my review of his book ‘The Universal Home Doctor’: “With one or two exceptions the familiar Armitage narrative/narrator runs throughout this slim volume. There are a small number of one-line joke ideas milked till the faint smile wears thin. And Gardening and DIY feature heavily. No gardening with attitude or allegory here, not the artisan invention of Titchmarsh or the visionary passion of Diarmuid, instead there is the feeling that indifferent varnishing of his summer house (in the poem of the same name) or the banal drama of strimming pampas grass evidence too long around the house scratching about for an idea. In The Jay – featuring

Iceland Bury

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Last weekend I had the pleasure to host a visit from Petur Arason and Ragna Róbertsdóttir from Iceland (pictured at Outwood viewing Ruckriem's most recent installation. I've mentioned their great Safn museum before ( http://www.safn.is/english/index.html ). In July, I will curate a show drawn from their collection at Bury Art Gallery. Although the dates are to be confirmed, I will show some of the new thickness texts in Reykjavik before Christmas.

Must see gigs

I'm away when these are on but if you get the chance you shouldn't miss: Philip Davenport & Hester Reeve Poetry/Performance 12 February 7.30pm The Octagon Theatre, Bolton, UK £4 (£2 concession) Ticket Office 01204 520661 or online Philip Davenport makes poems from shopping lists, fashion magazines, porn, overheard conversations... Davenport is one of a new wave of experimenters who are as much artists as they are poets. HRH is the conceptual persona of UK artist Hester Reeve. She is a performance artist who encompasses live art, philosophy, drawing and photography. Philip Davenport has a second reading on 21 February 1pm at Adelphi House, Salford University

Bird Flu update

Up to now the only not art subject I comment on is the bird flu situation. With the first big UK outbreak of the season at the Turkey firm down south, I thought I'd return to it. The media will reassure everyone that the outbreak is contained and is not a threat to the population, which is true. Given our cultural disconnection from live fowl, the chances of it being caught in Britain are tiny. The threat is in the virus evolving across the species barrier in the far east or Africa. The latest news I read in the New Scientist was that it has made a significant leap into cats. This phenomen had already been noted - it had been killed a tiger in a zoo in Singapore, I think. But this latest research found thousands of cats had died from it in Indonesia. This is one of those worrying developments. Although much is unknown about the 1918 pandemic, there is evidence that there was a flu-like pandemic in pigs at the same time as the human pandemic. I've read some things that say it co

Cultural Vandalism

Reading the European Museums Forum bulletin ( www.europeanmuseumforum.org ) Bury's decision to sell the Lowry painting resurfaced. Apparently the Director of the National Gallery, Charles Saumerez Smith described it as "an arbitrary act of cultural vandalism". Bollocks . The Taliban destroying the statues of buddha ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamyan ) is cultural vandalism; the US Army destroying ancient Persian archeology sites with a massive base in Iraq is cultural vandalism. Bury didn't burn the bloody painting. It sold it. If this was such a threat to the cultural heritage, why didn't the National Gallery buy it? Either they didn't have enough money - which was the same reason that Bury had to sell it - or it wasn't important enough to 'save' for the nation - which contradicts the claim that it was too important for Bury to sell.

Disposals, Local Authorities and Fine Art

I have been invited to speak at a Museums Libraries Archives North West (MLA) symposium on the issues around disposal of artworks today. The reason being Bury Art Gallery & Museum’s recent sale of its LS Lowry painting to balance the budget. The MLA’s response was to de-register the Museum from the national network. Since the curatorial practice has been directed to international partnership and local communities, this disconnection has virtually no direct effect on the museum. It’s a government target dropped but hey, I see today a leaked government memo admitting that they will fail to meet their cleanliness/anti-superbug target in the Health Service – so in the scale of things Bury museum isn’t killing anyone so that’s a good thing. Its difficult to know in advance whether Bury has been invited for a real dialogue about how to deal with the threat culture faces or whether it is a session for potshooting. I am treating it as the former. I plan to start in about 2002 when Hull