Event: Site / Sight Lines

Images: Emma Cocker, Site / Sight Lines, 2011

Site / Sight Lines

Friday, 10th June, Institute for Transmedia Art, Vienna

Workshop/Seminar

Fusing practical and conceptual concerns, this one-day workshop with Emma Cocker and Nikolaus Gansterer investigates how the performative practices of wandering, waiting, drawing, writing and reading can operate as creative ‘tactics’ or methods for navigating or negotiating space differently to expectation, convention or habit. By mapping or diagramming how spatial relations are organized and orchestrated within various public spaces, workshop participants will be encouraged to devise ways through which to draw attention to or even interrupt these habitual social patterns or flows. The workshop will explore and test how invitations, instructions or even drawn scores can be used to activate different ways of navigating or traversing public space, producing temporary and experimental forms of connectivity and social interaction.


Documentation and reflection from the workshop will be gathered here.

Image: Emma Cocker, Diagramming Relations, test propositions

Guest Lecture: Emma Cocker

The workshop 'Spatial (Inter) Relations' will be preceded by a guest lecture at the Institute for Transmedia, Vienna, on Thursday, 9th June


UK based artist-writer Emma Cocker reflects on how public space is both produced by and productive of the ways in which it is inhabited or lived, how it can be reworked or re-conceptualized through the prism of both artistic representation and production. Referring to selected artists’ projects including her own collaboration with the performance-based collective Open City and the recent publication, Manual for Marginal Places, Cocker will explore how the performative practices of wandering, waiting, drawing, writing and reading can operate as creative ‘tactics’ or methods for navigating or negotiating space differently to expectation, convention or habit.

Events: Manual Reading

During June, I will be presenting ideas at a number of forthcoming events where I propose to elaborate upon the invitational or instructional aspects of the ‘manual’, with reference to various examples of ‘manual’ including the recently published Manual for Marginal Places. Events include:

TRAVERSE

Traverse is the inaugural exhibition at new Bristol gallery, Geneva Stop. Traverse features new video work by Close & Remote and the book launch of ‘Manual For Marginal Places’, which includes text by Emma Cocker and images by Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter.

X Libris

Site Gallery play host to a series of book-based discussions around the themes: 'Public', 'Machines', 'Manuals' and 'Maps'. I will be involved in the session on 'Manuals' which will take place on 14 June. As part of this session I explore how aspects of Baden-Powell's boy scout manual 'Scouting for Boys' can be considered as a kind of proto-conceptual script; its suggestions and propositions akin to the instructive imperative of Perec's Species of Spaces and Other Pieces or even certain Fluxus scores.

Image: Artist Bob Levene during the X-Libris event with a copy of Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys.

Background to X Libris Book Club 3 - Manuals

From Douglas Adams' 'Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy' to George Perec's 'Life: A User's Manual', we will explore the guide books, user's guides and manuals generously donated to X Libris. Artist Bob Levene will discuss her contribution, 'A User's Guide to the 21st Century' and Emma Cocker will introduce her book 'Manual for Marginal Places' created in collaboration with Close and Remote:

“To be useful, a manual often needs to give the user an overview of how a thing works and then more detailed information on its application and maintenance. In this case the manual format is extracted from the mechanical and re-directed towards the desire or yearning for authentic experience. Unlike the well-known Haynes automotive manuals, this book does not offer a complete strip down and rebuild of a location; it makes suggestions in the direction of raw experience. Away from how things work and toward how you might work.” (closeandremote.net)

Presentation: Close Reading / Open Reading

I am in the process of testing out some new work, in preparation for my presentation Close Reading / Open Reading, which is part of the Writing (the) Space Event, Thursday 19 May at Wild Pansy Press Project Space. Close Reading / Open Reading investigates the capacity of methods of close attention for producing uncertainty, indeterminacy and formlessness rather than fixing or clarifying any single, stable meaning, where paradoxically perhaps, the more something becomes scrutinized the less it becomes known. Within my practice, processes of extraction, fragmentation, listing, footnoting and cross-referencing become used for generating 'openings' rather than conclusions, for appearing purposeful whilst remaining without clear or discernible intent. 

My presentation will move from considering my recent collaboration with Rachel Lois Clapham (Re -) towards introducing aspects of my more emergent research collaboration with artist Jim Boxall entitled, Close Readings. As part of this new research project we propose to explore the notion of close reading or of an ‘explication de texte’ as a tactic through which to interrogate the performative and spatial dimensions of written text. 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 the spatiality of words ‘close up’, through a process of visual magnification or close visual attention. Close Reading / Open Reading explores 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. I envisage future experiments emerging from this presentations exploring the relationship between the practices of flitting and lingering (over a text). 

Event: RaRa & Manual for Marginal Places Launch

On Saturday 14 May, S1 Studios hosted the RaRa symposium,  Just Do(ing) It: Artist-led and self-organised cultural activity as resistance to Capitalism and the book launch for closeandremote's Manual for Marginal Places. Images from these events to follow here and also on S1 Studios forthcoming facebook pages.

Image: RaRa symposium, an S1 studios hosted event at S1 Artspace, 14 May 2011

Details about the event

Just Do(ing) It: Artist-led and self-organised cultural activity as resistance to Capitalism.

Building on previous RadicalAesthetics-RadicalArt (RaRa) events that have focused on the theoretical and socio-political landscape of a ‘radical (art) praxis’, this event in an artists-led space in Sheffield continues the exploration of strategies, tactics and work being carried out ‘on the ground’ by artists and cultural activists towards a better world. How might we begin to understand artist-led or self-organised art activity in this light?  What examples of DIY, informal or purposefully marginal art practices exist which aim to imagine, create, or operate within new spheres for cultural activity? How do such practices resist and/or maintain a critical relationship with the dominant order and state capitalism? How does the empty but increasingly inescapable rhetoric of Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ effect or alter the stakes of such practice? What role do practices of subversion operating ‘within and against’ the system play in this struggle?

Image: R ebecca Gordon-Nesbitt's presentation

Speakers include:

-  John Holloway (Professor of Sociology, Insituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico, and Leverhulme Visiting Professor, School of Geography, University of Leeds. Author of Change the World without taking Power (new ed. Pluto, London, 2010) and Crack Capitalism (Pluto, London, 2010).

-  Leeds Creative Timebank (Alternative economy initiative http: //www.leedscreativetimebank.co.uk/)

-  Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt (Sheffield-born writer and investigative researcher).

-  Milena Placentile (Winnipeg based curator, writer, researcher)

- with special video contribution from Gregory Sholette (US-based artist/writer on informal art practice, author of Dark Matter, Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, 2011)

This one-day event – initiated by Andy Abbott (Black Dogs and University of Leeds), in collaboration with Jane Tormey/Gillian Whiteley (Loughborough University) and S1 (www.S1artspace.org) - aims to provide a space for discussion, critical reflection and evaluation of such questions and tactics through the example of current practice and writers on the subject.

RaRa is a Politicized Practice Research Group project. 

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...

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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.