Somehow connected to the booklets outlining virtual events that I've been working on (see here and here) and to the recent writing I did on the Michelangelo Pistoletto installation at Venice (see here), I came across this great Pistoletto project from 1976 - One Hundred Exhibitions in the Month of October comprising a series of proposals for exhibitions/works all thought up and described during that month. The quite comprehensive Pistoletto website here says "One Hundred Shows was a sort of recipe book of exhibitions and works, many of which were later carried out; these include the video Who Are You? (1976), Overturned Furniture (1976), The Hoof (1979), Segno Arte (from 1993 on) and Free Space (1999)".

You can download the text One Hundred Exhibitions in the Month of October by Michelangelo Pistoletto (PDF), here.

Two favourites amongst the proposed exhibitions:

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"Restoration of the world"

Instead of drawing on the road or on the sidewalk as beggars do, I fix broken pieces of public places, taking as one does when restoring works of art, a color Polaroid before and one after the job. Next to the photograph I explain how my father, besides being a painter, also taught me restoration and how I now make art restoring the world where it is broken.I leave my hat next to the finished job in the hopes of a penny or two. Besides showing a global view of the world, this work attracts attention to minimal details. It also shows the evident separation between the artificial world, which can be restored, and the natural world, which is always perfect and therefore cannot be restored.

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Completely empty gallery. There is a sign at the entrance saying: "Each person, before entering, must write in the book which part he is going to play inside the room."

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Another great resource I came across recently is The Diary Revisited by Ian Breakwell, hosted at Anthony Reynolds website and made as part of Ian's AHRC fellowship project at Central Saint Martins. Breakwell died in 2005 and much of his work comprised on-going diary projects, shifting between text, drawing and photography. There's so much great material at The Diary Revisited it's hard to know where to start - and exploring there already led me on something of an Amazon jag getting hold of books and a BFI DVD of Ian's TV Diary project, short video works and other stuff.

I chose a couple of Breakwell's diary fragments to quote below. What's fascinating to me - aside from the great blank comic tone, and the eye on (often scatological) urban detail -  is that it's such vivid visual writing. And in many of the entries there's a kind of clear or evident visual grammar to the event or scene described - a symmetry, or an echoing, a set of lines traced, a mirroring, a colour link between one thing and another and so on that really makes one thing about linguistic composition in very particular way. The first of the entries below is great for how it multiplies and escalates from the first image, whilst the second of them I love for the set of intersecting horizontal and vertical lines and traces it draws in the space of three sentences.

16th April 1982

London.

Two young girls on the tube train sniffing glue out of plastic bags. They try to talk to each other but give up and sit side by side picking their noses. A girl sitting on a street bench with a fibre-tipped pen stuck up her nose. Glue-heads stumbling round the fruit market, sniffing out of plastic bags and eating peaches, juice running down their chins. The taste of summer: peaches and glue.

13th February 1982

London. Butts Café, St John Street, EC1

A man carrying a polythene bag full of tongues sits down at the café table alongside a woman who is scratching her leg. A man walks past the window with the headless carcase of a deer on his shoulders. On the other side of the street the second-floor window of the Dream City Massage Parlour For Men is raised and a slender hand with long red fingernails slips through the gap between the curtains and flicks the ash from a cigarette out onto the street below where a man with his trousers round his ankles is shitting in a doorway.

The paperback of my novel The Broken World is out on the 3rd September.
There's a small review from today's Guardian here.

In the event that any of this is news to anyone here you can also find online various older press and blog reactions, mostly from last year when the hardback came out. There are reviews at Scotland on Sunday, here, at Frieze, here, at Big Dumb Object, here, at Popdose, here, from Marcus Gipps, here and at TotalSciFi, here. There are interviews with me about the book at Subba Cultcha here, at Metro, here and (once again) at Big Dumb Object, here. The book has it's own site here. If you're inclined that way you can even become fan of the book on Facebook, tho I have to say that making a direct link to that here is beyond my ability and current attention span.

Enjoy. And please spread the word!

I'd heard about but then somehow 'forgotten' the Pistoletto installation only to 'remember' it immediately on entering the gallery in Venice - a narrative scenario which must account for a lot of encounters with art these days (arriving to see the thing you have already had described at some length). The line of second-hand description in my head was a warning about how dead the scene of the work might feel, comprising as it does the residue of a performance in which a room lined with large mirrors in ornate gold frames have been smashed, the floor now littered with broken mirror shards, the mirrors themselves still hung there floor to ceiling, cracked and shattered in diverse ways. But somehow I wasn't even drawn to even try imagining the past action of breaking the mirrors, happy instead to find the life in the room at the moment of my being there, seeing everything via its doubling into partial and repeated reflection. I liked that. The reality of the room and the people in it cut up, distorting through the crack lines in the mirrors, the whole scene endlessly fragmented/absented/replayed in part by the holes and shards of what reflective surface remained.

A space of stories, pasts, associations. I had to think of Pistoletto's long journey thru his work with the mirror and reflections, as well as recalling Andre Stitt's motto "art is not mirror it is a fucking hammer", itself a re-versioning of Mayakovsky's "Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it."

More than anything though I loved the accidental drawings and large scale Rorsarch tests producing by the breaking of the mirrors and the partial revelation of the blackness of their backing - bold graphic shapes that here and there brought to mind figures, or animals, whilst elsewhere they resisted any kind of narrative 'reading'; each mirror a set of cracks, shapes and holes  that both incorporated the world as reflection and blanked it as absence. Thinking a lot about what art can capture and what it cannot, about these formal compositions in identical rectangular frames, produced by violence and to a certain extent by chance - contained or frozen chaos. About what we see of reality even, and what escapes us.

Later there was Saburo Murakami's Muttso no Ana (Six Holes) (1955) - a set of rents and holes torn or poked into brown paper stretched on a timber structure, so simple and perfect, violent, echo of an action, beautiful - again with this form of an object that both gives and denies a view on the world.

Later still there was Roman Ondak's Slovak Pavillion which fashioned the interior of the space as a kind of compacted extension of the exterior, planting trees and bushes throughout, a path running down through the centre, as if the inside were no inside at all. There was a hint of ruin here, a faint suggestion that the space for culture had somehow been abandoned and partly overgrown, though still so evidently tended of course and with no drama added to the building, no theatrical decay. Instead here outside and inside have simply folded into each other, to make a kind of Escher space, at once genuinely perplexing and completely banal. This sense you see often in Roman's work I guess - that the work can be simply an amplification of (or focus pull on) something already present or implicit. And/or that, however deliberate, clever, and articulate the placing of the work is, it also, somehow, aspires to invisibility.

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Our work, our trade, our business, like that of certain drug dealers, doctors and psychiatrists perhaps is always one way or another the job of slowing time or the shattering of it, or the stretching, bending or speeding of it. The big clock of the now bent double, forced to a limit, or cranked up, condensed to hell. The strange yet necessary job we have in rooms like these, of getting time to drip, pulse, echo, loop, freeze, shimmer, explode.

I love those strange gaps or holes in time which appear in performance, in rooms like this one, gaps or holes that deny physics, break the clock, where you think for a moment that time has stopped or slowed, or that it was stopped or forgotten but that now in now this moment only it has started again, remembered. I love the ways in which - watching – you are forced (connected to - seduced, tricked, lulled or self hypnotized) to abandon the sense of time – to let go of time here perhaps, to somehow enter another. Or to enter that temporary space where time does not notice, does not matter.

Or conversely. To enter the space where time is instead highly marked, measured, marched, announced, eked out, dripped like water clock or water torture, ticked and tocked. No forgetting, no transport, just the click clack of feet, the clatter of fingers on keyboard, the fact of here and now. One. Nothing. Two. Nothing. Three. Nothing. Four. Five. Connected to blankness and complexity.

[A fragment of mine on time, which appeared in different versions, here and there in various lecture texts I've done in the last few years].

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Next day we're at the Iceland Pavilion in the Palazzo Michiel dal Brusà, a 14th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal near the Rialto. shows his ongoing performance/installation/project  (not sure what the right word is there) titled The End. He's working each day to paint a portrait of the same guy - his model for the project (Haukur Bjornsson, also a painter) - and there's something truly wonderful about the space he's creating. You feel time differently, that's for sure. The studio sprawls towards the open doors at the far end, opening to the water in beautiful afternoon light. Canvases lean and hang everywhere, the floor and tables are strewn with paints, beer bottles, wine bottles.... music plays from a cd player, a few old chairs, an acoustic guitar. Ragnar is talkative and friendly when we arrive (I know him a bit from Manifesta last year), while Haukur lies more or less naked and more or less asleep on the green sofa, a blanket draped over his midriff. For a moment or two the project they present looks like it could be a mockery of what an artists life might be at this point - there's something colonial, dandyish, almost 19th century about the scene - but at the same time it's quite genuinely idyllic, warm, generous. We chat about this and that. For some reason I'm explaining that the t-shirt I'm wearing features a text description of Texas Chain Saw Massacre until Haukur waking/stirring corrects me  - it's The Hills Have Eyes of course, he points out. These dandy types know their schlock B-horror movies. We laugh a bit.

I guess more than anything what you feel in there, at The End, is the slowing of time, the entry onto another continuum - it's a six month project, six months that they'll be there, six months on one portrait a day, only the ebb and flow of visitors and the shifting light marking the hours as different, the paint accumulating week in week out on the canvases - at once boring and gripping I guess, the same body in the same room endlessly re-seen with the same eyes, portrayed with the same tools, intense macro focus. You feel the commitment of time, the commitment to time, slow time, the taking of time, and in the rush of Venice (and the drastic schedule some of us are on constantly) you can take a deep breath in this space, which is really something of a gift. An impossibility (of many different kinds) made manifest.

On the way out check we check Ragnar's video work in a side space -  a darkened room with five projections which time and space have been remixed quite differently. On each screen there's a winter scene - mountains, ice, snow (the Rocky Moutains in fact) - and in each of these landscapes we see Kjartansson again, sometimes alone, sometimes with another guy (musician Davið Þór Jónsson), mostly in longshot, other times in mid-shot. In each case they're playing instruments... on one screen a grand piano, on another a banjo plus mic, in yet another it's a drum kit stood at the edge of a lake or by a line of snow laden trees. Their isolated exterior figures, always dwarfed by the landscape, attempt (and succeed in making) a kind of long distance musical jam, their song building between the audio of the separate projections. It's like the inverse of the 6 month focus on one model in one room in the heat of Venice, instead a fifteen minute dispersal and repetition of Kjartansson (and Jónsson) in set of distant exteriors.

Following on from my scurrilous Events at The Downturn series of virtual events for Amsterdam earlier this year (see here), this week sees the publication of a new programme of unlikely, impossible, disgusting and largely imaginary events, this time for Forest Fringe up in Edinburgh during the festival there. Titled Summer Specials: EVERYTHING MUST GO, you can pick up a copy of the pamphlet at Forest Fringe, Bristo Hall, above The Forest Cafe, on Bristo Place, 5 minutes walk from the high street. Forest Fringe is a miniature festival within the festival, trying to make space at the Edinburgh Fringe for the kind of work that might not otherwise find a home there. Co-directed by Andy Field and Deborah Pearson Forest Fringe is now in its third iteration and this year has stuff from Ant Hampton, Third Angel and many others. Full programme and info here. I'll be doing yet a third virtual programme (and a lecture on my work) for a project called Playtime at Bentonsalon in Paris in the Autumn, see here.