EVENT: WRITING (the) SPACE

19 May 10.45 - 8pm

Old Mining Building, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS2 9JT

Contributors include David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker, Victoria Gray, Claire Hind, Mary Paterson

Charles Olson’s Projective Verse invites writing to be considered spatially, as OPEN, or as FIELD (of) composition in three dimensions. His proposition is one of text as space of action, of breath as punctuation, and of the bodily pressures of writing in which ‘form is never more than an extension of content’. Drawing together the practices of UK artists and writers, this day-long event attempts to further explore notions of physical and spatial writing, drawing on the installation Re – (WRITING (the) SPACE) and Olson’s notion of Projective Verse.

10.45 – 6pm: OPEN OLSON OPEN Laboratory


A laboratory exploring practice-based examples of Olson’s Projective Verse. Presenting is David Berridge talking on PHRASE POETICS and Olson’s “field”, Rachel Lois Clapham on FINGER and three dimensional ‘diagramming’, Emma Cocker explores the 'spacing' of extraction, condensation and close reading, Victoria Gray unpicks her performance of Loop (2011), Claire Hind examines voice and breath in response to Olson’s insistence upon the author’s body and Mary Paterson uses her online text 'Navigation Through Unbound' as a case study for writing the unknown. Audience space is limited so booking essential, please email rachellois@opendialogues.com.

6-8pm : How is Art Writing?


Dinner, drink and a live performance by Giles Bailey as part of the In a word…artists’ dinner series. Free but booking essential via rachellois@opendialogues.com or by clicking here.

This event has been developed in conjunction with the exhibition WRITING (the) SPACE, a presentation of the project Re – by Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker at the Wild Pansy Project Space. 

Exhibition: Re - Writing [the] Space

Writing (the) Space,  Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker at Wild Pansy Press Project Space, Leeds, including new Re- Reader designed by Marit Münzberg. More to follow soon.

Image: Re - Writing [the] Space, Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, Wild Pansy Press Project Space, Leeds, 2011

Updates: Drawing a Hypothesis

Image: Nikolaus Gansterer

I have been invited by artist Nikolaus Ganster to present a lecture/workshop for the Department of Transmedia Arts (University of Applied Arts in Vienna) in June. The lecture will be used as a space to specifically further ideas developed as part of my essay for Gansterer’s forthcoming publication, Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Research. Whilst in Vienna, we will also be developing ideas for a performative reading, which we intend to operate in conjunction with the launch of the publication (Autumn, 2011); and ideas around a possible international research project exploring expanded drawing practices. 

More information about Drawing a Hypothesis

Drawing a Hypothesis is an exciting reader on the ontology of forms of visualizations and on the development of the diagrammatic view and its use in contemporary art, science and theory. In an intense process of exchange with artists and scientists, Nikolaus Gansterer reveals drawing as a media of research enabling the emergence of new narratives and ideas by tracing the speculative potential of diagrams. Based on a discursive analysis of found figures with the artists' own diagrammatic maps and models, the invited authors create unique correlations between thinking and drawing. Due to its ability to mediate between perception and reflection, drawing proves to be one of the most basic instruments of scientific and artistic practice, and plays an essential role in the production and communication of knowledge. The book is a rich compendium of figures of thought, which moves from scientific representation through artistic interpretation and vice versa.

Contents

Drawing a Hypothesis (Preface), Nikolaus Gansterer

I Must Be Seeing Things, Clemens Krümmel

A line with variable direction, which traces no contour, and delimits no form, Susanne Leeb.

Grapheus Was Here, Anthony Auerbach

Asynchronous Connections, Kirsten Matheus

Figures of Thoughts, Gerhard Dirmoser.

Collection of Figures of Thoughts, Gerhard Dirmoser

The Line of Thought, Hanneke Grootenboer

Dances of Space, Marc Boeckler

Distancing the If and Then, Emma Cocker

Processing the Routes of Thoughts, Kerstin Bartels

The Hand, the Creatures & The Singing Garden, Moira Roth

Drawing Interest / Recording Vitality, Karin Harasser

Hypotheses non Fingo or When Symbols Fail, Andreas Schinner

Three Elements, Axel Stockburger

A Fragmentary Collection of Emotions and Orientations, graphically recorded, Christian Reder

Radical Cartographies, Philippe Rekazewicz

Measuring the World, Katharina Bösch, Christine Haupt-Stummer, Andreas Kristof

Subjective Objectivities, Jörg Piringer

The Afterthought of Drawing: Six Hypotheses, Jane Tormey

Nonself compatibility in Plants – The Floral-Animal continuity, Monika Bakke. 

On the importance of scientific research in relation to the humanities, Walter Seidl

Strong Evidence for telon-priming Cell Layers in the mammalian olfactory bulb, Nardo, M. L.; Adam, A.; Brandlmayr, P.; Fisher B. F.

Expected Anomalies caused by increased Radiation Activity, Christina Stadlbauer

On Pluto 86 Winter lasts 92 Years, Ralo Mayer

The Unthought Known, Felix de Mendelssohn

wiry fantasy or the electronic line is also a handwriting and itself effects the overcoming of its system, which it draws, constructs and leaves: into the poetical eye, too, which has dreamed its original state of pure perception and launches itself into the dialogue as source, Ferdinand Schmatz

During the Summer I will be developing a series of performance presentations in collaboration with Nikolaus Gansterer to launch Drawing a Hypothesis (which are scheduled for the Autumn at a number of venues including MUHKA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; KNAW, The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam in collaboration with Jan van Eck Academy; and the Secession, Vienna in collaboration with the University of Applied Arts Vienna)

Publication: To Have and To Hold

I have been invited to contribute a text to a forthcoming publication that expands on a project entitled To Have and to Hold, which was curated by NVA, a Scottish environmental arts organization, for the Venice Architectural Biennale, 2010. The Scottish Government & Creative Scotland in partnership with the British Council worked with NVA to represent Scotland at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. NVA’s contribution to the Biennale focused on a project that they are currently involved in at a site near Loch Lomond that includes a late-modernist ruin. Their involvement in the biennale was staged through a series of events aimed at provoking debate and discussion around the proposed redevelopment of this site.

More about the broader project here:

More about the the events in Venice here:

The proposed interdisciplinary publication will include invited contributions from architect Ed Hollis, geographer Hayden Lorimer, architect Henry McKeown, landscape designer Tilman Latz, Adam Sutherland from Grizedale Arts and myself. It is being organized and edited by Gerrie van Noord.

Book Launch: Manual for Marginal Places

Manual for Marginal Places is the inaugural publication commissioned by closeandremote (Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter). The publication brings together my recent text, ‘Making Room for Manoeuvre; or Ways of Operating Along the Margins’, with text and images from artist, Sophie Mellor. Manual for Marginal Places was launched on 14 May 2011, as part of the event, Just Do(ing) It: Artist-led and self-organised cultural activity as resistance to Capitalism (see here). Manual for Marginal Places can be purchased on Amazon here.

Manual for Marginal Places is explored by David Berridge in his blog post ‘ART WRITING LANDSCAPE: WALKING (S)MILES THEREFORE AHM MARGINAL SOUND POET THEREFORE’. In this post Berridge proposed to interrogate, “Four art writing projects (that) unfold relationships and possibilities of, for and about landscape. Strategies for observing then recording the results, or maybe the other way around; scores for intervention; missives for those in the field right now or chair- bed- page confined explorers of type/ book/ screen (e)scapes. Handbooks for weaving together art as life life as art art and life, or as yet un-thought combinations of neither.”

Extract from Berridge's post:

“I’m still absorbed in MANUAL FOR MARGINAL PLACES, which I also presented as part of the ART CRITICISM NOW event in Dublin, and whose notion of manual has also been generative for this blog since. A source book, then, documenting (1) letters sent by Sophie Mellor to Emma Cocker whilst the former was spending a short time living without money in Cumbrian towns and countryside; (2) Cocker’s replies in the form of a series of prose texts/ poems on marginality. A dialogue, then, but one open to its breaches as much as its connections.

Initially, MANUAL reads as epistolary novel, with Emma and Sophie’s texts alternating, although Sophie’s soon disappear, and Emma unfolds her prose sequence solely in relation to (Sophies) images. This structure reflect’s how Sophie’s project (she was also a co-curator of the project) was itself a test to generate a set of ideas and practices for future work. It demonstrates the tricky status of such activities (briefly living rough as a funded artist), where art is both deprivation and privilege, the act itself both pretense and very real.

I wonder if these tensions – which are part of the project’s energy, not a critique of something it is unaware of – are also apparent in the text itself. Here is No.12 – Drift. I offer it here, out of context, as an example of a text that has drifted into this new context and location here, curious how in doing so it maintains or loses a sense of MANUAL:

Wandering operates tangentially; it detours, dallies, takes its time. To wander is to drift, becoming a little aimless or unanchored; it is a tactic for getting lost. Its disorientation subjects the commonplace or unnoticed elements of one’s familiar environment to the estrange scrutiny of a stranger’s glance. Navigational aids and maps might be misused for wilful disorientation; guidebooks become tools for defamiliarization and mis-direction as much for finding one’s way. Drifting is a mode of attention that lags behind the trajectory of more purposeful thought, yet other knowledge(s) become revealed in the slipstream of intention, in its shadows and asides. To catch the drift is to gauge the tenor of the subtext, to become attuned to what is left out or unspoken, to what is said in what remains unsaid. Become practiced in the art of wandering and of drifting thought. Follow in the footsteps of others who have wandered from the beaten track. Yet, remember too, that wandering necessarily wanders; its restlessness wills against the delimitation of any single genealogy or definitive theory of its dérive. To wander wills towards remaining unfixed, towards the condition of unbelonging. (40)

Sophie’s texts are reproduced handwritten notes sent from the field. Cocker’s are printed blocks of text on a white page, but their sense of removal is also evident in how their propositional nature removes particulars of person and place, even as it explores a landscape that is both a physical chronicle of nature’s edgelands and a conceptual territory indebted to certain histories of art practice and theory/ philosophy.

Some of Emma’s texts have the feel of a list turning towards litany. The absence of gender or identity for the speaker or addressee, but their simultaneous confidence and stridency, allows a phantom “we” and “us” – maybe “I-thou” – to form alongside the text, one which may also seem absurd and with which we may disagree.

In other sections this subject is not “he” or ”she” but “one”, a subjectivity that is everyone and no one, self and other, confession and avoidance, a deliberate anachronism. Part of the texts own frame and music, it moves uncertainly beyond it, another way these paragraphs fold back into themselves to better propose themselves as objects of use." David Berridge, 2011, http://verysmallkitchen.com

Publication: Towards an Emergent Knowledge of the Margins

I will be contributing a book chapter entitled 'Towards an Emergent Knowledge of the Margins' to the forthcoming publication, Emerging Landscapes. Drawing on my experience of involvement in the recent art project, Urban Retreat (2010), in this chapter I explore the specificity of the marginal landscape as a space of emergence or even emergency, an uncertain or indeterminate territory always at the cusp of being redrawn or re-conceptualized through the prism of both representation and production. Reflecting on specific aspects of the project, Urban Retreat, I explore how the inhabitation of margins requires the development of creative tactics, a ‘productive knowledge’ necessary for operating critically within their unstable terms. This chapter reflects on what can be gleaned from the experiential encounter with a particular marginal place, examining how such tactics might constitute the basis of a manual for living a life in marginal times.

Emerging Landscapes Publication

At a time of environmental crisis, shifting geopolitical boundaries, and economic downturn, Emerging Landscapes ponders the state of landscape and its future, mapping those practices that creatively address the boundaries between possibility, opportunity and action in imagining and shaping our world. Drawing on the productive synergies that emerged from the recent Emerging Landscapes conference, this publication seeks to discuss the potential and limits of landscape studies as a cross-disciplinary field of research.



Event: Temporary Association

Charlotte Morgan and myself will be contributing to this event at One Thoresby Street, Nottingham (on behalf of S1 Artspace)

Temporary Association, Nottingham

Tuesday 19^th April, 2011 From midday

The Temporary Association is a concise introduction and update on the activity of four UK based organisations; Spike Island, Eastside Projects, S1 Artspace and One Thoresby Street. 

Speakers Include:

Marie-Anne.McQuay, Helen Legg - Spike Island, Bristol

Ruth Claxton, Gavin Wade - East Side Projects, Birmingham

Emma Cocker and Charlotte Morgan - S1, Sheffield

Bruce Asbestos - One Thoresby Street / Stand Assembly, Nottingham

Publication: Cultural Borrowings

The publication Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation (ed.) Iain Robert Smith is now available to buy as a hard copy here. The publication was previously only available as an online resource and e-book here. Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation includes my essay ‘Ethical Possession: Borrowing from the Archives’ which investigates the appropriation or 'borrowing' of existing found-footage and archival material within artists' film and video through the prism of the work of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi. 

Event: Extra Curricular

I have been invited as a guest writer/reader as part of the project Extra Curricular at Spike Island. For Extra Curricular selected writers/artists/curators have been invited to suggest a text that they are currently reading or, equally, one they have read many times and frequently reference in their practice – whether theory, fiction, manifesto or any other form of 'text' – which will be used as the basis for a reading group seminar. I am not yet sure what text to propose – maybe something by Victor Turner (whose writing on ritual and liminality I have been returning to as part of my research for a book chapter for the publication Liminal Landscapes), or perhaps something in relation to productive knowledge or techne (with its attendant form of timing <kairos> and cunning intelligence <metis>)?

New work: Close Readings

I am in the process of developing a new project entitled Close Readings, interested in how fragments of textual language can be used within performance as oblique strategies, as points of provocation or evocation, instruction or interruption. I propose to approach the notion of close reading or of an ‘explication de texte’ as a tactic through which to interrogate the performative dimensions of written text, for exploring and developing new strategies for presenting and interrogating language within the context of a performance based practice. Here, close reading is not understood as the critical attention paid to the meaning of words themselves as signs, but is instead interested in those meanings produced by looking at words ‘close up’, through a process of visual magnification or close visual attention. Like conventional forms of close reading, the project focuses on paying close attention to individual words, syntax and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read or presented, drawing on the Latin origins of the word explicare (as in explication de texte) which means to unfold, to fold out, set forth. The research is concerned with exploring the threshold space where writing or text collapses into its component parts (ink and page), or the point where the sense or legibility of a word is rendered illegible or nonsensical the closer it is attended to, as writing slips towards image. The intent is to rethink the term ‘close reading’ as a specific visual research method, in which language becomes subjected to close microscopic scrutiny through the technologies of film recording and projection. 

New work: Condensations

I am currently working on a concept for a publication, which uses the notion(s) of condensation as the framing principle through which to draw together a body of recent and (forthcoming) writing. 

I am developing the term condensations to describe a specific mode of writing, which includes the production of condensed prose ‘sections’ (often in serial form) alongside other models of writing constructed through the assemblage of fragments and extracts gleaned from extant work. The notion of condensations as a term to describe a mode of writing is developing through reflection on the methodological connections between a number of recent projects including Pay Attention to the Footnotes, The Yes of the No!, Making Room for Manoeuvre, Re- (Writing) as well as the ongoing project Field Proposals and 'texts' produced in collaboration with Rachel Lois Clapham as part of the iterative project, Re- . More to follow soon as this project develops.

I have been thinking about the term 'condensations' after reading a short extract by artist, Haegue Yang on research as 'condensation':

"It might sound absurd to bring up a scientific metaphor to address how I would like to construct my 'output', yet it seems proper to say that I strive for a kind of 'condensation'. I imagine metaphorically that I preserve cool air in me as long as I can, until the temperature difference is so great that water drops collect in the bottle ... I believe that in such 'blind' and 'silent' communication, which feels abstract, there is a negation of learned knowledge, obtained information and individual experience that opens people up to others in an unprotected way", Haegue Yang

Publication: [...]

Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry, Apeirophobic Framework (2011) production still from HD Video

A new publication by Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry, featuring works from their current tour and texts by myself and Brian Dillon, published by VIVID and designed by James Langdon will be launched at ArtSway on 11 June 2011. The publication will be launched in conjunction with the exhibition, Apeirophobia, Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry (16 April - 12 June 2011).

‘Apeirophobia’ means a fear of the future - a phobia that compels sufferers to plan every element of their lives so that they know exactly what the future has in store for them. Apeirophobia is one part of an international touring programme of new work commissioned in collaboration with VIVID and Danielle Arnaud - with the exhibition at ArtSway featuring works from each stage of the tour. These works explore Kihlberg & Henry’s ongoing interest in the condition of the viewer in time and space.

I have been working on a structure for a non-linear or even woven text where the reader is not encouraged to follow a single written trajectory but rather explore overlapping and interrelated paragraphs. A footnoting system is proposed to run through the text, where each paragraph becomes the footnote for another which in turn becomes the footnote for another. 

Project: WRITING (the) SPACE

WRITING (the) SPACE

Wild Pansy Press Project Space

4 May - 19 May 2011 (Mon-Fri 9-6)

Old Mining Building, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS2 9JT

‘If I hammer, if I recall in, and keep calling in, the breath, the breathing as distinguished from the hearing, it is for cause, it is to insist upon a part that breath plays in verse which has not (due, I think, to the smothering of the power of the line by too set a concept of foot) has not been sufficiently observed or practiced, but which has to be if verse is to advance to its proper force and place in the day, now, and ahead. I take it that PROJECTIVE VERSE teaches, is, this lesson, that that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressure of his breath.’ Extract, Projective Verse, 1950.

Charles Olson’s Projective Verse invites writing to be considered spatially, as OPEN, or as FIELD (of) composition in three dimensions. His proposition is one of text as space of action, of breath as punctuation, and of the bodily pressures of writing in which ‘form is never more than an extension of content’.

WRITING (the) SPACE presses down on and around this unique poetics of writing in contemporary performance related practice - in particular, the possibilities of performance writing in spatial and physical terms. WRITING (the) SPACE is conceived as a period of action research within the Wild Pansy Press Project Space.

For WRITING (the) SPACE, Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker present a new iteration of their ongoing collaborative project Re –, which essays the relationship between performance/document, live/recording, writing/written through the collision of spoken, textual and gestural languages. This iteration of the project addresses the emergent grammar of Re –, exploring the spatial and physical possibilities of writing through the installation of disparate performance documents. Extracted fragments from earlier conversations rub against mute utterances of a finger diagramming, nails pink; a spoken text of dislocated phrases; partial scores awaiting activation; punctuation, the space of breath. Re – (WRITING (the) SPACE) is open to the public from 4 - 19 May, 9-6pm Mon-Fri.

WRITING (the) SPACE Event, 19 May 10.30am – 8pm

Drawing together the practices of diverse artists and writers, this day-long event attempts to further explore notions of physical and spatial writing, drawing on the installation Re – (WRITING (the) SPACE) and Olson’s notion of Projective Verse.

10.30-6pm: > OPEN > < OLSON > < OPEN <.
A laboratory exploring practice based examples of Olson’s OPEN text. Presenting: David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker, Victoria Gray and Claire Hind. Audience space is limited so booking is essential, please email rachellois@opendialogues.com.

6-8pm : How is Art Writing?
Dinner, drink and conversation on the last day of the exhibition as part of the In a word…artists’ dinner series. All welcome but booking essential via In a word...

 ///

WRITING (the) SPACE is developed by Rachel Lois Clapham (Open Dialogues) in partnership with New Work Yorkshire and supported by In a word…


In a word... is a research programme profiling an ecology of radical writing practice in, around and from Yorkshire. http://writingencounters.squarespace.com/in-a-word/

Open Dialogues is a UK collaboration, founded by Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson, that produces writing on and as performance. www.opendialogues.com

New Work Yorkshire is a proactive, engaged and mutually supportive collection of individuals who aim to develop a vibrant and diverse New Work sector in Yorkshire.

Wild Pansy Press is an art collective, a small publishing outfit affiliated with Leeds University Fine Art and a public venue for experimental works which use the practices of reading, writing and publication as their medium and/or content. wildpansypress.com

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Images

1 The Company of Men" by Charles Olson, typewritten manuscript with handwritten notations, September 13, 1957, from the Charles Olson Research Collection.

2 Re- (Unfixed) Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, 2010. Courtesy the artists.

Review: Maelfa, Sean Edwards

I will be reviewing Sean Edward’s current solo show, Maelfa, at Spike Island (Bristol), for a forthcoming issue of Frieze magazine. The Maelfa Shopping Centre, Llanedyern, situated on the outskirts of Cardiff, is the focus of Sean Edwards’ latest project. Built around a block of high-rise flats in a council estate in the mid 1970s, the Maelfa centre was once a thriving microcosm of the wider city but declined over the subsequent decades. Edwards undertook a residency in the centre ahead of its planned demolition, making a careful study of the still functioning yet near derelict space, creating a series of new works. Due to the recession, however, plans to develop Maelfa have now been put on hold with the centre still functioning day to day. The central piece of the exhibition is a slow paced, silent video that touches upon a sense of poignancy associated with disappearing communities and failed utopian aspirations. The video will be accompanied by an installation of photographs, prints, models and other ephemera relating to the project, specially commissioned for Spike Island's central galleries. Maelfa expands the artist’s interventions into everyday systems and is the artist's first major UK solo show in a public space.


Preview of Frieze review

Sean Edwards

Spike Island, Bristol

"Sean Edwards’ exhibition at Spike Island – his first major UK solo show in a public space – was named after the Maelfa shopping centre on the outskirts of Cardiff (close to where the young Abergavenny-based artist grew up, and where he undertook a residency in 2009). Like many other postwar building projects, Maelfa and its neighbouring estate never fulfilled its planners’ hopes; the shopping centre was never fully finished, falling into decline even whilst in development. Borrowing from the writing of Robert Smithson, Edwards describes it as ‘becoming a ruin’ or ‘a ruin in reverse’. Since its inception Maelfa has seemed somehow ‘out of time’; moreover, proposals to demolish it have also been put on hold – it has always been in limbo.

Visible traces of the place recurred throughout the exhibition: a series of large-scale giclée prints pasted to the gallery wall captured grainy fragments of Maelfa’s interior, their detail degrading towards abstraction. Barely discernible were the corner of a door in Tiles, the inscription of a hand-written sign in Note or the edges of aged graffiti bleached by white light in Daylight (all 2011). In one corner, Four Windows (2010-11), a group of precariously propped wooden ovals, visually echoed the elliptical motif of Maelfa’s shop unit windows; their visual simplicity belied the labour invested in their multi-layered construction. Edwards’ practice of oblique referencing was extended in a large plywood structure, The Reference (2011). 

Sean Edwards
, The Reference
, 2011
. Photo: Jamie Woodley, Image courtesy the artist, Spike Island, Limoncello and Tanya Leighton Gallery

Suspended from the ceiling, its meticulously filled and sanded curves referred to the roof of a former reference library (here inverted and scaled down 5:1). Edwards skillfully inserted the architecture of one place into that of another; details from Maelfa’s locality lured the viewer towards the awkward corners of Spike Island’s notoriously challenging layout, its habitually underused or peripheral spaces activated through physical interventions or illuminating light. Central to the exhibition was Maelfa (2010) a silent and slow-paced video in which the glide of a tracking camera navigates a line through the shopping centre’s covered arcades, capturing the indeterminacy of its everyday life seen through, whilst also simultaneously reflected back, in the glass of shop-front windows. The slow flow of movement was disorientating, making it difficult to discern reflected shapes from physical forms, to locate the position of the camera in relation to what was being filmed.

It is tempting to view Edwards’ treatment of this site in nostalgic terms, as a melancholy lamentation reflecting upon the failure of Utopian dreams, or a product of the artist’s desire to reconnect with a place frequented in his youth. However, this privileges the contextual narratives surrounding Maelfa at the expense of other critical questions or concerns. The exhibition certainly extended Edwards’ interest in ways of seeing (sculpturally), where an acute form of observation emerges through the practice of cutting or slicing through a space or structure, revealing what is beneath the surface by effectively sanding back the layers or by exposing a cross-section. Here, the track of the camera operates akin to the sculptor taking a plane to wood, where skimming the surface of a place draws attention to unexpected grain and texture. Winter Light Between (2011) reflected a similarly sculptural imperative: two slide-projectors chart the passage of sunlight carving an illuminated shape across the curved surface of a wall. Edwards’ interest in the poetics of space is less concerned with the sensibility or quality of poetic representation, as in exploring how something physical can be constructed, de-constructed, re-constructed. Architectural theorist Jan Turnovský has noted how, ‘Poetics is related etymologically to the Greek term poiein, which means “to make”. This is the root of the term poiesis: fabrication, production.’ He adds that, ‘The maxim of the poetic is not to fix meaning but to offer a choice of possibilities – an indeterminate open-endedness.’ ‘Maelfa’ confused singular interpretation by demanding to be read in multiple ways. Counter-intuitively, the determinacy of Edwards’ reference to a place causes the work to fluctuate between the specific and generic, figurative and abstract, between formal and autobiographical concerns. To refer to the poetics of ‘Maelfa’ is thus not to describe its style (adjectivally, even pejoratively), but instead signals towards the critical nature of its open-endedness, the unresolved or unfixed relationship between its component parts."

Emma Cocker, 2011

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.