Local newspapers carried a typical story of a man who had been sending text messages out of a coma. How he had been in that coma a long long time in a hospital of the city and how all family and nurses and all that had by then got used to the slow rise and fall of his breathing, the ocassional twitching of fingers, shifting of toes, movement caused by evacuation of bowels etc. And then how the mother of the guy one day went by to visit, unexpected and alone one winter afternoon and noticed his thumb was moving, twitching, nervous, circling, stark against the white sheets. And how one thing led to another and a small crowd assembled to stare, and how when his uncle came by he remarked that with all that movement it looked like the man might be texting in his 'sleep'. And although laughing and incredulous, larking around almost they tried it with a old Nokia that belonged to his step-dad, just like the one he had before, and his mate Kev or Baz (according to different reports), bent his hand around it, the digits a strange combination of eager and inert. Also how the brother begged them not to do all this, saying that it was all too much disrespect, too much against nature, that "they should leave him coma in peace" (sic) but that reason prevailed and soon there was a near dead man lying horizontal, familly and a few stray nurses/night-porters gathered round and the phone in his hand. Of the thumbs continued movements, and the texts he started to send. Strange texts the paper said, very strange. As if maybe written in a texting slang of another era, or in the code-word argot of some unknown teenage tribe, or maybe perhaps gibberish. They called in a psychic, a texting expert, a poet etc to pass for a panel of opinion and still none the fucking wiser. Paper reprinted a few of them messages also. Dumb combinations of letters that did not make words, but chilling sounds and people of that town wrote in to claim that they could read messages printed there but no one really confirmed or believed. A few weeks running the papers featured the bloke, in many editions, with a few pictures and all speculations about what strange zone he was communicating from, between life and death they said, most likely. Local radio even used his texts as an introduction to songs each Saturday morning and invited listeners to call in or even send their own texts to interpret them. But then came the matter of his bill, and in the end, what with the familly skint and the general down-turn, there was no one that wanted to keep paying it and communications, 'such as they were' the paper added in a late attack of cynicism, ceased.

The Live Art Development Agency and Tate Research have just announced that artist Anne Bean and I are the two recipients of their joint Legacy: Thinker in Residence Awards. Very exciting. The awards have been set up in recognition of the breadth of influence of Live Art practice in the UK today, and to acknowledge its achievers and achievements over the last few decades. The awards - which follow a complex shortlisting and application process - are focused around ideas of legacy, documentation and archive in the broadest interpretation of these terms and give Anne and I, in our own distinct ways, a fantastic opportunity to research the legacies of performance in art historical contexts, examining the processes and challenges of archiving live work, and looking at our own performance practice in relation to these.

Press statement with all the details after the 'Read More...' link, below.

Three fragments from my application here, the first of them reworking a short text I wrote a while ago in another context:

Years ago Forced Entertainment rented a couple of garages on the edge of Sheffield. It was in these dank, dark and insecure places that we stored for a long time the boxes of old objects and costumes, as well as the sets and other constructions made for previous performances, and the collected raw or nearly raw materials of one kind or another (timber, furniture, steel bars, scaffolding, random ‘interesting’ items) which we thought might be of use to us in some as yet unimagined project, at some time or another in the as yet unimagined future. To each we paid occasional visits, retrieving one thing or another, searching for lost items, or for things for which we’d newly imaged a use. At a certain point the lock on one garage became so rusted that it was impossible to enter, whilst the other developed leaks in its roof, an arson attack badly damaging its doors, thieves breaking the windows, stealing some sound equipment and so on. The garages were unstable, entropic. Mostly Richard would drive up the mud track to them alone, bringing things back in the van, along with reports on the troubled status of the buildings and their much-beleaguered contents. Some newly-mildewed curtains he might bring back, or a crate of shrunken costumes, a wind machine, an overhead projector lacking a plug – stuff that we could use, skip or salvage.  

The garages, I used to joke, were not so much real places as they were a state of mind - a mental space pitched perfectly between an exhausted past and an intense future set of possibilities – a psychic store of both memory and potential, the discarded and the yet to be imagined.
 
*

Archive to me is a dispersed accumulation of traces. Primary materials – performance objects, constructions, notebooks, papers, drawings and computer files are here and there in Sheffield. Secondary materials are here, there and everywhere. Some of it (as video recordings of performances and rehearsals) is in the British Library Live Art Collection, some of it (as photography) resides in any number of neg files and on any number of hard drives at the studio of Hugo Glendinning, yet more of it is in publications (texts, essays, more photographs) or in other people’s and institutions collections of texts, photographs and videos. None of these accumulations is remotely definitive, nor would I especially wish them to be. All bear some relation to the garages I mentioned above, where a degree of disorganization of the materials distorts and transforms the possibility of their use or comprehension. Again, so be it. Archive to me is by its nature provisional, off-centre. Remaindered from live practice it is emphatically not the thing. It is a residue, sometimes an almost accidental left-over of the work, sometimes a deliberate record, but in any case always a material that waits to be transformed as a kind of work in and of itself.
 
*

Perhaps two things lie at the core of my diverse artistic practice, especially regarding performance. The first is an interest in the unfolding of events in time – structuring experience and processes over time, manipulating (sculpting) time and building chains or sequences of events that work with and through time itself as a medium. I’m thinking both of dramaturgy, in the theatrical sense and in the expanded sense that comes to us via performance studies. I’m also thinking of the rather different kinds of unfolding temporal structures that backbone the durational works that I have made, witnessed or written about. The second core to performance for me are the various ways in which the form constructs presence – ‘actors’, viewers and the relations between them – and in the economies through which presence in this sense is negotiated, deployed and manipulated; a playful and always live triangulation between all those who are present, in space, and of course through time.
 
What I’ve begun to work with intuitively, and what I would like to explore very much further through the opportunity of Legacy: Thinker In Residence, is a set of correlations between these fundamental properties of performance and the qualities of quite different forms like the page, the photograph, and text. Through my numerous text-based projects in visual arts, through my work in fiction and through my critical writing on contemporary performance I’ve been exploring for some time the ways that text always conjures (stages) presence, and the ways that its progress on and over pages is (or parallels) a kind of temporal performative process. The page, for me at least, has something that might be considered a dramaturgical now – a moment in the process of narrative or argument, a moment, or set of moments in which the presence of reader/viewer and writer or staged subject find themselves together, in different realities but joined across space and time. This now of the page is what grips me - the present moment, this one, summoned here with this arrangement of marks/code, ink/pixels, letters and words.

Read more...

Ages back Mark mailed me this beautiful text that he'd written for the birthday of an old friend, Chris. I asked if I could post it here and Mark said yes but somehow I delayed and the file got buried on my desktop. Just found it again, sifting the docs and the folders around.

* 

Back in the day when summer months and weeks meant nowt an there was no judge o time, wa’ed be fishin. Back of Ivans place, bottom of th’ garden overt fence, thru the beans and veg down thru the yards a land theyd all took since builders had gone on elseweir.
Nettles abart yay high, enough to sting yas chin anyroad. Waed beaten some track thru t’brookside with willer sticks. Make good swiping and nettle choppers arm telling yu now.
Anyhow, us had cut a swathe an hafe that dee. Musta bin bugger, yard wide.

An ode willer all ovver angin she was, used to climb her land side, laves t’watter, ode flies and such driftin off it an under it.
Bostin pleece fer a fish t lie.
Alsorts were theer. Them Blue Circle trout, an ode chub, sometime a roach a two. Dace an all. An odd time a bloody sheep, dead mind, floatin.
Them bloody trout, thems the ones, free eatin and bloody currency to them as can fettle em out.
6 casts a chub, mouth lark a rabbit hole, lovely fish, ate em since, not so lovely. Scales and bones and a hint of shit n compost.
Had line on a cork, abart 12 foot, sea hook an’al. Winfield line mind, 22lb strain, quality product.
A gobbet of compressed Slimcea from me mothers, too dry and fuckall too it  on me hook, a perfect nettle free cast of abart 6 foot fuckin Bingo, her drops nicely abart 4ft t goo and shes in Troutland.
Bread drops deeper an deeper. Ar can feel the stones as er roles over em, me line feels just nice thru the fingers, this time, this time, summat picks it up me line disappears off top, theres that tension on er and I yank me hand back to get the bloody hook set and nowt. Time and time again the bugger has me slimcea.

A chap called Chris comes down, Ives Uncle. He’d managed to get overt fence so he wanna that ode. Anyhow, he’s a bit of a fish man I gathered off Ives.
Loud shirt and flares, ar thought fuckin nay chance.
Lent im me line anyroad.
So the flared one takes the mantle in t’ nettle highway and compresses said Slimcea with an air of a fuckin boulanger, I ask you. Impressed, me.
Shaky cast mind you, but passable Id say under the high pressure circumstances.
Anyhow, the shite cast took the Slimcea abart 3 foot from the bank under the willer.
Nay fuckin chance youth thal a got a bite from daddy fuckin weed and stick fish theer thinks I.

Tell tale vvvvvvs as is hook gets took up appeared on the watter and the Winfield hawser was getting dragged under an yonder.
Bah Christ the bloody buggers got a bloody bugger on.

A wrestle ensued, tho brief it was.
A Blue Circle Brownie to you Sir.
A memorable hour
First time we met
Some time ago
Happy birthday youth.