Just out of the opening throes of Manifesta 7 here in Italy. Thursday morning we were in Manifattura Tabacchi and ex-Peterlini in Rovereto, then moved on to Trento in the post office, then Friday to Fortezza and to the old Aluminium Factory in Bolzano. Pretty much an art overload on a daily basis, but lots of good work (and lots of bad).
The dust carpet piece (pictured above and below) by Croatian artist Igor Eškinja must be one of my favourite things in the whole show - transient, delicate, fragile, funny, beautiful in some way, and prompting strange performances of 'taking care' as people pass by it in the corridor where it is installed - a vulnerable object that really intervenes in space and changes action. At once a literalistation of a phrase (like much of Vlatka's work) Eškinja's piece also summons a thing from its own negative/residue (rugs collect dust, here is no rug, but the trace of one in dust), a pattern marked out in detritus.
We ate in some pub. It was London but some part between one and another – a not-quite-zone, ambiguous, hard to definite in its mix of houses, businesses, retail units, construction work, cobbled alleys and nothingness. The light and the sky above was pure Magritte for a while, vivid blue and unreal, later fading with the street to become a shadowy De Chirco. Just down the road Crow said was a house in which Verlaine and Rimbaud had stayed for a while, a house of ill repute, whose blue plaque was now removed for reasons that could only be guessed at. History was always flickering then, in and out of existence, a story told one day and not the next, a story still whispered.
Outside the window, in the darkness/dim orange of distant streetlamps and moon, men were waiting on the street to catch plastic bin-liners crammed with rubbish dropped from the windows of the flat upstairs, the bags then laid out on the street like lines of slumbering figures hunched foetal for collection. A strange furtive sport – this dropping and catching of the bags – played in the shadows, and meant apparently to be observed only as if by chance, through windows as conversation proceeded inside…
Someone said that as a child all her dreams were bad dreams (and hence she grew to fear sleep, telling herself stories to stay out of it, pinching herself… trying all sorts of remedies but always falling in the end to that place where dreams would come, unwanted.)
Another seated at the table, with clear deep eyes, said that once, way back as a child, she’d dreamed that she’d pressed the button to launch the bombs to start the nuclear war. Months of guilt, maybe longer, for something that did not even happen.
My friend Mary Agnes and her team at byHand have been working on a simple website for my novel The Broken World. It went live yesterday, or thereabouts after a fair amount of conversations on the move, with Mary and I sat or stood or walking in different parts of the country (or Europe in general) saying things like "Have you got it on the screen in front of you?" or "I can only look at it on my phone" and talking about navigations and interfaces and backgrounds and cells. I had flashbacks of working on Frozen Palaces and Nightwalks more than ten years ago, downloading ridiculos huge QT movie files over a dialup from Germany in the office of a theatre and calling Mary to discuss in the fifteen minutes before a show started.
They've done a great job on The Broken World site. Text is fragments from the book, or new fragments related to it. Images, collages and design are by Mary et al, plus maps, a few tweaks and a handful of additional images from me. The one above I was esp pleased with. Interested to see what kind of traffic the site might get.I liked the working-diagram below quite a bit too, produced along the way - a map of the site, with links and representations of all the pages and the routes between them. Something about the sketch, and the miniatuarisation, and the representation of choices, that I really like. (File under: representation of the structure of a website devoted to a novel about the structure of an imaginary computer game).
Starting tonight my neon Wait Here is being shown at a new project space Butchers run by Ben Borthwick and Cylena Simonds. Ben is an Assistant Curator at Tate Modern. Cylena is an independent curator and writer based in London. From 2004-2008 she was the Exhibitions Curator at Iniva. Butchers looks like it is going to be an interesting adventure.
Wait Here at Butcher’s, 183 Royal College Street, NW1 0SG, 9 July – 25 August. Viewing hours: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (but best after dusk!). Opening reception: Tuesday, 8 July, 6-8pm. Transport: Camden Town tube/ Camden Road rail/ Regent’s Canal. Press text:
"Shown for the first time in London, Tim Etchells’s artwork Wait Here (2008) launches the opening of new project space Butcher’s on 9 July.
In his display for Butcher’s shop front window, Etchells’ red neon sign reads in full Wait Here I Have Gone To Get Help, suggesting an ominous event has taken place, the gravity of which we do not know. Passersby may wonder if the sign refers to an individual event, something that happened recently on the street or to a general state of the neighbourhood/country/planet.
But there is a tension between the language and materials of this artwork. The urgent call to wait is at odds with the fixed state of the sign. How long should we hold on? And how long has the situation (whatever it is) been going on? Is it getting worst while we wait? Will help come in time? If we leave, are we forsaking the possibility of help, even hope, in the future?
The absurdity of this dilemma is particularly appropriate for the launch of an unfunded non-commercial art space. Butcher’s identifies with Etchells’ piece in terms of its relevance to our immediate financial and organisational capabilities, but also as an oblique comment on the role of art spaces in the community. Will Butcher’s reaffirm a sense of community, or is it just another stage of gentrification?"
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Barbara Campbell pointed me to Ivan Grubanov's website. She had just come across his paintings of empty stages which you can see here. Apart from the connection to the photo-series Hugo and I are working on (here) I like the combination of the paintings with the rest of the work you can see there on Grubanov's site esp the images of this performance in which he speaks from a crane in front of the parliament building in Belgrade. I guess what's effective to me is the contrast in the work between a political reality - charged, real - and the (perhaps equally dangerous) idea of something transcendent, other, outside.
# In situations like the Vietnam war, and violent inner city neighborhoods, the person with the most plans, prospects, and hopes will die.
# A dying person's last words will always be coherent and significant.
# A good person will always die in the presence of friends.
# If a good person dies with his eyes open, a friend will close them, and they will remain closed. If a villain dies with his eyes open, no one will close them, and the camera will linger on his face.
The above from a long long list of movie cliches that Graham Parker pointed me to here. Quite a nice text.
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Reeling, we cross to a similar chamber called the Compact Muon Solenoid. It is here that the famous "God Particle" may emerge. And it is here that they really mug me with concepts. They try to soften the blow by claiming that physicists find it difficult to visualise extra dimensions too. That's easy to say when you're packing 26 of them. They've got the maths. They can pull down extra dimensions whenever they want their equations to balance. You just have to accept them. That makes you vulnerable. Your rationality dissolves.
Also liked this account, full text here, from Chris Morris about visiting the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland.
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