Publication: Institute of Beasts

A new publication by Dutton and Swindells (which includes my essay on their work) will be launched on 15^th February 2011 at PSL in Leeds, in conjunction with the artists’ current residency and exhibition at PSL, entitled ‘Stag and Hound’. More about the project can be found at the PSL website here. My essay 'Moves Towards the Incomprehensible Wild' is a version of a much longer essay which will shortly be published in the online journal artandresearch in Volume 4, Number 1, Art and Animality.

About 'Stag and Hound' - artists' statement

'Stag and Hound' is the latest installment of Dutton and Swindells', 'Institute of Beasts' project - a project designed to temporarily house what the artists' describe as their more errant or wild thoughts. The works in the exhibition include objects, texts, animations and sound works which form an installation, both elegant and disturbing, that encodes a wide range of references. Stemming from the idea of an institute being something ordered and organized whereas 'Beasts' are unknown, erratic and mythologized, Dutton and Swindells divide their institute into conceptual departments, imposing a kind of idiosyncratic order, a gesture perhaps toward taming the erratic. Animated geometric forms and texts sit alongside inverted flower photographs, wall-drawings refer to celestial alignments, sound and music works are built by graphically re-interpreting activist slogans, a computer reads a pathetic and confessional soliloquy and a wall text appropriates spam e-mails selling 'Viagra'. The project has evolved into a multi-layered collage in which inconclusiveness and doubt are prioritized over empirical certainties, forming the critical sentiment that lies at the heart of the project. 'The Institute of Beasts' creates its own strange, yet strategic world-view with its chaotic aesthetic and sceptical notions of knowledge or knowing. For this outing of the project 'The Stag and Hound' the artists will install the exhibition ready for the launch on 20th January and then from 20th January - 16th February will be 'in residence' altering and shifting the exhibition, creating new works and points of resonance between existing works. The title references a tapestry 'The Stag Hunt' housed at the Cluny Museum in Paris in which the stag represents everyman and is hounded by dogs which represent the pitfalls in life such as desire, age or illness. Following on from previous installments of the Institute project such as 'The Dog and Duck' at the Kookmin Art Gallery, Seoul, S.Korea, the title of the show at PSL could also be the name of a pub, suggesting a space of potential conviviality but also of unexpected encounters.

Publication: Contemporary Art and Classical Myth

My essay 'Over and Over Again and Again, has been published in Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, which is out now and able to be purchased here. Contemporary Art and Classical Myth is edited by Isabelle Loring Wallace, Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia, USA and Jennie Hirsh, Maryland Institute College of Art, USA

Contemporary art is deeply engaged with the subject of classical myth. Yet within the literature on contemporary art, little has been said about this provocative relationship. Composed of fourteen original essays, Contemporary Art and Classical Myth addresses this scholarly gap, exploring, and in large part establishing, the multifaceted intersection of contemporary art and classical myth. 

Moving beyond the notion of art as illustration, the essays assembled here adopt a range of methodological frameworks, from iconography to deconstruction, and do so across an impressive range of artists and objects: Francis Alÿs, Ghada Amer, Wim Delvoye, Luciano Fabro, Joanna Frueh, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Duane Hanson, Yayoi Kusama, Roy Lichtenstein, Kara Walker, and an iconic photograph by Richard Drew subsequently entitled “The Falling Man.” Arranged so as to highlight both thematic and structural affinities, these essays manifest various aspects of the link between contemporary art and classical myth, while offering novel insights into the artists and myths under consideration. Some essays concentrate on single works as they relate to specific myths, while others take a broader approach, calling on myth as a means of grappling with dominant trends in contemporary art. 


About the Editor: Isabelle Loring Wallace is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia, USA. Jennie Hirsh is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, Maryland Institute College of Art, USA.

Reviews: '…a very timely volume, with a tight focus on a significant yet seriously understudied theme…addresses the almost complete neglect of the prospect that the decline of autonomous art portends not the rebirth of Christianity as the leading context for art interpretation but the re-emergence of older, more classical, hence more buried contexts of interpretation.' 
Gregg M. Horowitz, author of Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life



'As this compelling and revelatory volume proposes, classical mythology's rich territory and enduring stories of morality and the human condition provide a provocative lens through which to read and re-read the works of some of contemporary art's most celebrated artists.' 
Irene Hofmann, SITE Santa Fe, USA

Details

Imprint: Ashgate

Illustrations: Includes 16 colour and 64 b&w illustrations

Published: February 2011

Format: 244 x 172 mm

Extent: 410 pages

Binding: Hardback

ISBN: 978-0-7546-6974-6

A full contents list can be found here. 

The introduction can be read here.

Event: S1 Assembly

I will be chairing this event at S1 Artspace on Saturday 5th February 2011. 

S1 Artspace presents S1 Assembly on Saturday 5th February 2011, which concludes S1’s anniversary project FIFTEEN and launch of the new premises with a day of discussions, presentations, screenings and events that aim to reflect on the history, evolution and role of artist-led activity and the questions and issues facing artist-led activity today

S1 Assembly has been organised through dialogue amongst the S1 Studio Committee and will be based around four key areas of discussion: WHY/WHAT/HOW artist led activity, COMING OF AGE – how to move on without settling sown, TESTING SPACE and BEYOND SPACE – DIY, association and collectivity. Areas called into question include  the history of artist led activity as dissent, resisting institututionalization, models and aims of artist-led activity, creative ecologies, the relation of artist led space to wider ecology of city, the significance of the studio within contemporary practices as spaces of risk and speculation and the role of sociality in networks.

The event will include contributions from Neil Mulholland, Rebecca Fortnum, James Shorthose, Candice Jacobs (MOOT), Jim Prevett (Space), Megan Wakefield, Andy Abbott, Julie Westerman, Haroon Mirza, Thom O’Nions (The Woodmill) Megan Wakefield, Niki Russell (Reactor), (Tether) and The Royal Standard plus other speakers to be confirmed, and will be chaired Emma Cocker, a writer, Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University and S1 Studio holder. 

S1 Assembly aims to provide a platform for networking and will include a chance to view the FIFTEEN exhibition, look around S1’s studios and a temporary library made up of material contributed by artist-led groups and organisations across the country. A buffet lunch and cakes will be provided, followed by curry and drinks after the event, all contributed by S1 studio holders.

Publication: In Other Words In Other's Words And Other Words

My text, Without Rhyme or Reason on the work of Vlatka Horvat has been published in In Other Words In Other's Words And Other Words, in conjunction with Vlatka Horvat’s solo show at Bergen Kunsthall, which opened 21st January 2011. With texts by Nuit Banai, Emma Cocker, Tim Etchells, Naomi Fry, Hugo Glendinning, Matt Keegan, Tevz Logar, Matthew Lyons, Solveig Ovstebo, Graham Parker, November Paynter, Christian Rattemeyer, Jovana Stokic, and WHW. Designed by Ben Cain.

Project: Fragile Materials

I have been invited to participate in a conversation with artist Clare Thornton, as part of her research project Fragile Materials, which will form the basis of her 3 month residency at Aberystwyth Arts Centre May - July 2011. Clare’s research will feed into an artist bookwork that she is developing concerning the texture of conversation. I will be spending some time with Clare during her residency, walking and talking around these ideas. I have previously worked with Clare during The Summer of Dissent project at Plan 9 (Bristol, 2009) and as part of Urban Retreat, a project led by Sophie Mellor in Barrow-in-Furness resulting in the publication, Manual of Marginal Places. More as the project unfolds. 

Project update (September 2011)

The 'conversation' involved an intense few days of discussion, focusing on our shared interest in the motif of the fold and various conceptualizations of folding. Some of the thoughts and ideas from the discussions will be posted here shortly, and will undoubtedly be developed within future writing.

UNFURL

Clare Thornton

Performance Installation

Saturday 3 September 2011, 1-4pm

Red Lodge Museum, Park Row, Bristol

Some of the ideas we talked about around folding relate to a forthcoming exhibition and performance installation that Clare is developing, entitled Unfurl, at the Red Lodge Museum, Bristol. A Tudor Lodge, the opulent setting for a tableau poised to unfurl. Pleats of delicate cloth, lengths of red ribbon, a model sits waiting for his painter. As the piece unfolds, the Artist’s material transforms the scene in our midst. The Audience are invited to come and go as they please, exploring the Red Lodge interiors and returning to the durational Performance as it unfolds over three hours. Unfurl is framed by the Artist's research into depictions of the Fold in paintings, historical interiors and in critical texts. Through the production of objects, garments and writing the Artist explores display, concealment and transformation.

Project/Publication: Lemonade everything was so infinite.

I have been invited by Marit Münzberg  to be involved in a project that takes as its starting point an unfinished sentence by Franz Kafka: Limonade es war alles so grenzenlos. 


Limonade es war alles so grenzenlos. 


(Kafka, Franz, Briefe 1902–1924, Fischer Verlag, p.491)

Limonade es war alles so grenzenlos. was one of Franz Kafka's last sentences published in the Aus den Gesprächsblättern in the publication of his Briefe 1902–1924. Hélène Cixous, who writes a short text on this sentence, translated it as 'Limonade tout était si infini' (which – in the english version of the Hélène Cixous Reader – is further translated as 'Lemonade everything was so infinite'.). Taking the translation 'Lemonade everything was so infinite.' seven titles will be published written by seven different writers/artists – David Berridge, Julia Calver, Emma Cocker, Rachel Lois Clapham, Marit Münzberg, Tamarin Norwood and Mary Paterson.

Each title will explore one of the seven segments of this sentence - 'Lemonade', ' ', 'everything', 'was', 'so', 'infinite', '.'. The titles will be published every three months starting in July/August 2011 with 'Lemonade' by David Berridge. While the first publication is in production Julia Calver will work on the second segment ' ' with the possibility of relating the content to what David Berridge has written/created in the first title etc ...

This form of publishing does not only aim to investigate Cixous's translation of the sentence itself, but also intends to explore the grammatical connection of the different words in the sentence, the possible interconnectivity/collaboration of different voice of the writers/artists, the words in their own grammatically disconnected function and ...

Each invited respondent will work with one of the segments from the unfinished sentence to produce a book/let in dialogue with Münzberg , which will be printed using a risograph process and distributed by LemonMelon publishing. 

More to follow as this project develops.

Exhibition/Project: Not Ready Yet

Not Ready Yet

curated by Niki Russell

For the exhibition Not Ready Yet, Tomas Chaffe, Emma Cocker, Tom Godfrey and John Plowman explore the notion of 'willful irresolution', inhabiting an empty shop unit as a space in transition, between uses. Their inhabitation of the building proposes to rehearse a different use, exploring the gap between previous and future function, where the site is approached as no longer shop and not yet exhibition. Activities unfold physically and temporally within this space, punctuating the extant architecture of the building in ways that remain somewhat expectant rather than certain. A review of the exhibition can be read here.

Image: Emma Cocker, Oh, When (expectant archive)

Oh, When: a research residency and archive

As my contribution to Not Ready Yet, I am proposing to undertake a ‘residency’, using the exhibition as the ‘frame’ or ‘conditions’ within which to work. The extant architecture of the shop unit is approached as an empty or expectant structure, a thinking space for exploring the relationship between rehearsal and irresolution, for developing an emergent taxonomy of unreadiness, a nascent vocabulary to speak of the not-yet-ready. 

Image: Emma Cocker, Oh, When (field proposal). 

Different spaces within the exhibition will be used for different stages or aspects of the research; each space will be ‘set-up’ in anticipation of its related activity, arrangements of expectant furniture waiting to be animated or activated through future use. The residency will be structured through a series of overlapping phases of activity, which might vary in length, not necessarily corresponding to the weeks of the exhibition. The first phase (see documentation below) is one of 'making ready', where a team of 'research assistants' inhabit the project's production space, assembling the archival boxes for subsequent research. Further phases of activity will gradually unfold over the course of the exhibition. During my 'residency' I will be also archiving notes and documentation here.  

Image: Emma Cocker, Oh, When (production space). 
With thanks to 'research assistant' Chloe Morley.



Image: Emma Cocker, Oh, When (ellipsis). 

Publication: R.S.V.P. Choreographing Collectivity

My essay ‘R.S.V.P. Choreographing Collectivity through Invitation and Response’ has been published in the online journal Rhizomes, in their forthcoming issue entitled, Hives, Tribes, Assemblages: New Collectivities. This essay develops a paper presented at the Language, Writing and Site seminar, originally commissioned by ANTI, the festival of performance and site-specificity in Kuopio, Finland, 29 September 2010. My essay can now be read here.

Review: Words for Marking Time

My review of the recent ANTI festival in Kuopio is in this month's issue of Frieze magazine and can be read online here.

Conference: Re – (repeat, rework, rewrite, remember)

A proposed conference paper (developed in collaboration with Rachel Lois Clapham) has been selected as part of the forthcoming PSi (Performance Studies International) conference #17, which is entitled Camillo 2.0: Technology, Memory, Experience. The proposed paper Re – (repeat, rework, rewrite, remember) will critically extend some of the debates and issues that have been emerging within our collaborative project, Re –

Image: Re- Reader, Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, designed by Marit Munzberg. 
Documentation of Re- (UNFIXED), part of UNFIXED, curated by RfRS at FlatTime House, London.

Re – (repeat, rework, rewrite, remember)

Drawing on our ongoing collaborative project Re –, the performance document will be reflexively interrogated as a specific ‘technology of remembrance’, an interstitial site wherein technology, memory and experience collide. Re – is an iterative performance reading that responds to and is reworked against the specificity of each invitation to perform; it presses on two writers – and two writing practices – coming together to explore process, product and performance (of text). Re – is a conceptual framework for collaboratively exploring the tension between improvised/rehearsed; performance/document; live/recording; writing/written, the visible/invisible states of not knowing within the performed act of writing, through the collision of spoken, textual and gestural languages. Each performance stages the archive (save as) of its own coming into being, which in turn contains the trace of previous iterations. The work puts into question the relation between rehearsal, performance and documentation by blurring the line between these phases of practice, declaring them unstable categories. Each Re – reading enacts the making of its own documentation; the performance is also already the documentation of earlier dialogic thinking and making processes: there is always something that comes before. The documentation archives what is taking place whilst anticipating future action; existing as record of the ‘becoming past’ whilst intimating towards an unknown future moment, as a starting point or instructive score waiting to be inhabited again (differently). Re – explores the impossibility of singular, panoptic forms of documentation (and knowledge) that attempt to capture and archive the totality of an event, focusing instead on performance document as fallible fragment, where (analogous to memory) the shattering or splintering of documentation into manifold parts resists reassembly or recollection, remaining partial, incomplete. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, increasing the ways of documenting or archiving performance results in it being less known or knowable, less easy to grasp – evermore contingent. Fragments of documentation fragment and disperse any coherent memory of the originary event; overwhelming … losing … forgetting … editing something out in the process.  However, each fragment potentially operates as a germinal ground, a graft from which new or unexpected lines of flight might materialize. We will examine how failure or indeed refusal to fully save as can thus be generative, creating productive gaps for (re)making or reworking a performance anew.

Publication: Vlatka Horvat

I have been invited to contribute a text for a publication on the work of Vlatka Horvat, to coincide with her exhibition at Kunsthalle Bergen in Norway, at the end of January 2011. Horvat has invited a group of individuals – who she has worked with in the past – to each write a short text or a fragment about one of her works. Each person is invited to choose a single work or a strand of work to write about – it might be a response, an analysis, a point of departure to talk about broader ideas or connections. The publication is conceived as a collection of voices and responses, structured as a notebook of sorts, that attempts to speak to the cataloguing nature of much of Horvat’s work. The work I am proposing to focus on is This Here and That There.

The publication coincides with Horvat's exhibition, AS OPPOSED TO THE FRONT, BACK, TOP AND BOTTOM, at Bergen Kunsthall.


BERGEN KUNSTHALL – NO.5:

VLATKA HORVAT

AS OPPOSED TO THE FRONT, BACK, TOP AND BOTTOM

21 JANUARY – 20 FEBRUARY

OPENS FRIDAY 21 JANUARY AT 8PM

Vlatka Horvat’s exhibition can be seen as a stage in an ongoing process for the artist, since she is here continuing her long-term iterative investigations of spatial qualities and relations. With a well established artistic strategy, where the method involves picking the existing apart, cutting out, folding/bending or weaving together photographic, textual or physical elements, she creates new, fictive potential for the relationships between space, body and object.

For the exhibition in NO.5 Horvat will be showing a major installation, as well as several new series of works on paper. Thematically, she has focused her exploration around the concepts of ‘the edge’ and ‘the centre’ as both spatial/physical and conceptual phenomena. Inherent in this is the idea that edges connote boundaries and limitations, whether in physical conditions like place and space, or in social relations in the form of normative expectations of interpersonal behaviour. Not least, the edge constitutes a concrete, defining entity when it comes to image production, since the framing does a great deal to determine the reading and the status of the picture. What is inside and what is outside? Where is the beginning and where is the end of an object, an image, or space? The notion of the centre meanwhile brings about a range of related concerns, as physical and spatial centrality tends to evoke questions about power and agency. Working through ideas related to the middle and the margins, the center and the periphery in this exhibition allows Horvat to explore both the visual economy of images, as well as the broader political and social implications of reconfiguration of images and space.

Exhibition: Wanderlust

12th January – 14th February 2011

Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University

A version from my serial project, Field Proposals will be shown as part of the exhibition, Wanderlust. Wanderlust presents a travel metaphor to mark out the places we wish to travel to through our work. Selected works pertain to a sense of travelling (whether spatially or conceptually), a speculative directionality or movement towards the future. The Field Proposals are an ongoing attempt to map or give shape to the conceptual landscape of a practice, where the identification of specific coordinates fails to provide any coherent or definitive structure, instead only revealing further zones of indeterminacy. The work obliquely refers to a process of mapping an indeterminate (conceptual) territory; the coordinates themselves often referring to processes of wandering, getting lost, border crossing, searches, quests, and the failure to arrive at a definite destination.

Background to exhibition: Wanderlust speaks of the places, real, imagined and metaphorical, that we travel to through our practice as artists, designers, thinkers and educators.  It invokes the desire to wander exploring the world as we find it, often straying from the path and discovering a new route.

 This exhibition is a snapshot survey of experimental practice across the range of disciplines in the School of Art and Design.  The works featured demonstrate the complex process of creation undertaken by practitioner / researchers within the School community.  Wanderlust is curated as a dialogic space, where varied and diverse practices are placed in proximity to each other, opening up possibilities of new discourses, collaborations and projects.  

Exhibition: Re- (Unfixed)

Below are some images of Re – (Unfixed), a new version from the iterative series Re – developed in collaboration with Rachel Lois Clapham. The work was shown at John Latham’s Flat Time House, as part of the exhibition UNFIXED curated by Reading for Reading’s Sake. The installation was presented in conjunction with a version of the Re- (Reader) (designed by Marit Munzberg). Re – (Unfixed) was periodically interrupted (or perhaps even activated) by a live reading.

Publication: Making Room for Manoeuvre

MAKING ROOM FOR MANOEUVRE;

or,

Ways of Operating along the Margins

Guide against guides—Beating the bounds— Skirting the centre—

As needs muster—Knowledge of the margins—Rehearsing spaces—

Finding the gaps—On being left open—Get involved—Drift—

Glean—Be Guileful—Between you and me

I am currently working on a text for the forthcoming publication, Manual for Marginal Places, which is being shaped around the following structure (above). This project extends the concerns and format developed within my earlier text The Yes of the No!, in order to reflect more specifically on how an inhabitation of 'margins' or the development of marginal practices might be used tactically to undercut the logic and values of the centre - where centre signals towards both the major (the dominant order) and the moderate (the medium, the mediocre, the middle-ground). The work draws on various user's guides or manuals including (amongst other things): Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys, Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, Georges Perec's Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Krauss/Bois Formless: A Users Guide, various philosophies that seem to offer pragmatic programmes for developing one's 'life as a work of art' through the cultivation of ethico-aesthetic 'ways of operating' (specifically Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualization of 'minor' practice) and work by Detienne and Vernant on cunning intelligence (metis) within Ancient Greek culture with its attendant form of productive knowledge (techné) and opportune mode of time/timing (kairos).

My own involvement in the Urban Retreat project was as an artist-writer, where I was invited by Mellor to produce a text that would elaborate or elucidate some of the concerns and issues – the threads, themes and even theories – emerging from within the project. My text, alongside other fragments, materials, images and reflections generated through the project, have since been collated by Mellor as the basis of a bookwork entitled The Manual for Marginal Places (published by Close and Remote, Spring 2011).  

My writing was informed by the live engagement and participation in other Urban Retreat events and through time spent in the Barrow-in-Furness landscape, alongside an ongoing exchange of postal correspondence between Mellor and myself. The text was thus produced as a response to – or through – various embodied encounters experienced within Barrow – the challenge of ‘street training’ with Lottie Child; a dérive through the town’s industrial margins with Laura Oldfield Ford; looking for (un)likely nightly shelter with Mellor; waking early and walking bare foot to Piel Island, warily in the gap of time before the tide turned; a night lodging in the tenement flats, the once-residence of Barrow’s dock-working community; the inimitable taste of hand-picked samphire and of rosehip and of found yellow plums; mild sea-sickness; a fear of quicksand; the acrid smell of piss that hits you from within the many military pill boxes that litter the shoreline; the conversation about the best places to climb, whilst sitting on that curb, with that girl on a bike, when everyone else had gone.

Exhibition/Project: UNFIXED

Image: Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, Re- (UNFIXED), 2010

READING FOR READING'S SAKE: UNFIXED

2nd December—4th December '10

Reading for Reading's Sake is an ongoing platform for a discursive series of events that shift in geographical and conjectural location with each installment.


Flat Time House is pleased to host a weekend of events organised by Reading for Reading's Sake with David Berridge, Maurice Carlin, Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, Patrick Coyle, Ella Finer, John Hill, Helen Kaplinsky and Stefan Sulzer



To read is to absorb, comprehend, determine and evaluate. These processes come to pass not only in the interpretation of a text, but in the perception of any given material. All material is data to be read, accordingly all material is privy to the particular positioning of a participant within a given time and space. 

John Latham understood books as symbols of fixed knowledge. The printed word, inscribed for its purpose in a particular moment lays unchanged, whilst the universe moves on regardless. How can artists reactivate the fixedness of publications and make the words move with the universe?

Contributors to the programme work with an attention to the publicness and privateness of any given reading moment and the activation therein. Certain discourses reappear across works in the show, most prominently: collectivity and singularity, text as score, pedagogy, haptic gestures, instruction and fallibility, displaced words, the mediation of one text with another, dissemination, dialogue, bodies of knowledge, publishing as performance, and the fixedness of the printed word. 



Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker
Re – (UNFIXED) 

Re – is an ongoing, iterative performance reading that presses on two writers – and two writing practices – coming together to explore process, product and performance (of text). For UNFIXED, Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker present a re-iteration of Re – that essays the relationship between performance/document, live/recording, writing/written through the collision of spoken, textual and gestural languages. This re-staging (of a previous performance, Re – Afterlive) attempts to re-activate or unfix how the performance document functions, where the disparate parts or fragments of documentation inevitably begin to fall out of sync, creating the potential for new connections and relations between the different elements of the work. Presented side-by-side, two monitors relay fragments of a performance, two facets of the same event rubbing up against one another: the promise of dialogue. A live spoken text fluctuates in and out of the installation – sometimes as a scheduled reading for an audience, at times unannounced, on other occasions silently – at first attempting to synchronize with the elements presented on the monitors, but gradually failing to keep pace over time.

Programme: 

Thursday 2 December 6 - 9pm


6pm Launch of GO WITH ME

Library of offprints * run by Helen Kaplinsky and Maurice Carlin


7pm Performances by David Berridge, Patrick Coyle, Ella Finer and John Hill



*An offprint is an excerpt from a larger publication. Please bring an offprint to donate to the library along with an instruction for reading to accompany this. Visitors are invited to borrow offprints from the library over the weekend. On Saturday afternoon there will be a discussion of readings made over the period of the show. Donations to the library will be taken throughout December



Friday 3 December 12 - 6pm


2pm Flat Time Seminar A discussion of John Latham's theoretical writings with Flat Time House's Mental Furniture Department


3.30pm Reading as Publishing Workshop and presentation by David Berridge



Saturday 4 December 12 - 6pm


2pm Screening of Stefan Sulzer's project The Reading Room


3pm Re - (Unfixed) A reading by Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker


4pm GO WITH ME drop in reading group to return and discuss texts in the library



Events are free and open to all. To RSVP for a specific event and for reading lists please contact info@flattimeho.org.uk



Over the past year Reading for Readings Sake have organised a series of symposia focused on reading, through artistic practice. Over 20 programmed events have taken place at venues including Spike Island, Bristol, Islington Mill, Salford 

Publication: Permission Granted

My essay Permission Granted has been accepted for a forthcoming issue of the online journal, Drain, focusing on the theme of Power.

Excerpt from Permission Granted ….

"This text is a reflective meditation on the power of a form of invitational yes that can be witnessed at play within certain art practices. It is an interruptive and potentially dissident species of affirmation that has a specifically inceptive function: provoking a form of thinking and being differently. This yes is an act of recognition, of being able to attest to or accept the existence of what had previously remained hidden or undeclared. It is the speech act of the witness whose testimony cannot deny what they have seen, that cannot be denied. Or else it can be experienced akin to the clearing at a film’s denouement when things suddenly fall into place; a flash of inspiration or illumination visualized as a light bulb being switched on, the Eureka moment of discovery or breakthrough. Yes signals a state of having found it, of having attained the telos sought. Yet, yes might also describe a gradual awakening or sensitizing towards that which has been ignored or unnoticed or has hitherto remained invisible, a sense of raising awareness or the finding of something that had not been consciously pursued. Another yes then, akin to the nascent clarity forming from within the mists of some dissipating fog. A form of affirmation that emerges hesitantly at first, where the declarative stalls to make space for a less than wholly certain yes, the slow ‘oh, yes’ whispered by the curious attending as events unfurl or are unraveled. This is a yes that requires some prompting, needing to be drawn out or persuaded, coaxed. Wavering at the edges of no, this yes requires the making of a commitment before knowing what that commitment will require. It asks for a leap before looking, a statement of conviction or of confidence made in the doubtful space before things have been fully resolved or worked through. Indeed, the yes of this particular text needed some provocation, some incitement; it had to be called. However, the call that invites or invokes the as-yet-unknown yes is not like the authoritative power whose permission sanctions only the already known or knowable, but rather operates itself as a form of affirmation. It is a hopeful yes that scarifies the ground, creating germinal conditions within which the unexpected might arise; it wishes to be surprised. The yes that invites rather than endorses is a call to action; it signals towards the possibility of an insurgent form of affirmation. Come on then! What are you waiting for!"

Background to Drain (Issue: Power)

This issue of Drain attempts to expose the cultural faciality of power, as well as manifestations of power as simulacra, which obfuscate traditional inquiries into its construction.  If power connects the virtual and the actual, how does cultural creativity channel or destabilize this connectivity? The corporate-academic-entertainment-military-industrial complex and its front-end, the global information machine floods us with images, and images of images, to cause sensory overload, and yet at the same time, acute sensory deprivation. Most of all, power entrenches a visual literacy that allows us to see only its style, leaving us unable to access other ways of seeing and becoming. How can we parody this visual literacy, and the speed, cadence and grammar of this power and its affects? If the simulation of power is necessary and absolute, can creative acts and molecular politics slip through the surveillance and desensitizing of territorializing systems? This issue of Drain invites artwork, papers, and other creative works to actualize answers to these questions and re-channel them into different connectivities, ways of becoming and conceptual production.