Watching Kate McIntosh rehearse in Leuven day-before-yesterday. The piece is called Loose Promise and it's a project that I've contributed some text to via a series of triggers/frames that Kate sent to myself along with a number of other writers (Deborah Levy and Mike Harrison included). Green carpet was one of the triggers; there really had to be a green carpet somewhere. Great watching the rather disparate fragments accumulate in the space and through the time of the piece, and great watching Kate accumulate the traces of the stories too through the actions and images that she's slowly building up around them. At this point the text itself - strewn as pages on the floor, folded in clumps, shredded in piles - is a major presence in the performance. Very often its under duress - torn, soaked, falling to pieces in her hands.
Still reading Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts which is also dripping in text - at the level of structure you're navigating layers of stories, and texts nested inside each other etc but as you drop into the vivid madness of the story itself you soon find characters hiding out in vast labyrinths of books, carrying stolen letters as psychic decoys, or throwing bombs made of fireworks and typewriter keys. In a beautifully Burrough's move (with echoes of his essays in The Job) Hall's central character periodically hides his presence in a room by placing dictaphones in its corners playing back tapes in which other people have been recorded as they talk or go about their their daily lives - the result a kind of identity camouflage.
There's a great pleasure reading strange, intelligent, funny and compelling fiction that happens to come from, and is at times set in the north of England. Some perverse pleasure in seeing your own landsacpe mythologised. With Hall and Tony White Sheffield Hallam University starts to look like quite a little contemporary fiction-factory. Raw Shark is very smart. There's a nod to House of Leaves, to Philip K. Dick maybe, and something of a David Mitchell-ness to it but there's plenty of originality, invention and wit in how its put together. I'm liking how these ideas books (like Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Tom McCarthy's Remainder, Tibor Ficher's The Thought Gang...) are so full-on in embracing plot as a device - action and super-abstract ideas all tangled up with each other. It's an interesting moment.
Just now posted a new story to Barbara Campbell for tonights 1001 Nights Cast. Written on the move between Brussels and Graz, with a connection through Stuttgart. Pleased with the results, but not with the travel-sickness/nausea produced by trying to write in the van that picked us up from the airport. Ughhh. Barbara's live webcast performance of the story will be at around 7pm, thereafter it will be added to the archive at 1001.
In the Barbican's Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Yearsshow earlier this year M. and I saw this beautiful collage using postcards, made by John Stezaker. It's hard to find the right words for what it does to the space. Opens it, doubles and triples it, folds it on itself, makes one see it again. Makes visible some hidden aspect, makes it unreal, shows how unreal it already was in the first place. Makes it a sign for something, shows how it was already a sign for something. Makes geometry from it, shows the geometry that was already there. I love the patchwork sky, in different shade, cut and recut. The pointing shadows. The policeman. The lovers. The bisected pigeons. The crowd. The repetition of the vanishing point. The repeated spiral of the steps, the fountain base, the circle of the Cola sign. The words GOLD and COLA. The plane picture. The general sense of arrested whirlpool, a vortex. Red. Yellows. Blues. The colours from another time, colours which at the time of the works making were most likely already from another time.
Only just now Googling Stezaker I realised that I already knew his work via Vlatka, who'd pointed out these collages he made of faces. See also here.
I find it strange how potent these are. For some reason I think I should be immune to them, but instead of that I'm gripped.
My video show One Hundred and Three People at Sketch in London opened this last weekend and runs until 6 November. See here for all the details. Image above is from the new work 100 People.
Meanwhile Hugo has work in this show at Hansard Gallery in Southampton. Live Art on Camera shows the work of photographers who've documented seminal performance art events from the 1950s to the present in Europe, the United States and Japan, including (amongst others) Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Dona Ann McAdams, Stuart Brisley and Leslie Haslam, Hollis Frampton, Ana Mendieta, Peter Moore, Ohtsuji Kiyoji, Adrian Piper, Tony Ray-Jones and Carolee Schneeman. As part of Hugo's contribution you'll find two images from Forced Entertainment's And On The Thousandth Night... (they are previewed here on Hugo's site). The ongoing photography project he and I are doing together - Empty Stages - is also on view there at Hansard via DVD.
Tony White has a great new story at Barbarba Campbell's epic 1001 Nights Cast called Do you hear that? I'm doing another contribution to it myself this Friday 21st. Added to the usual writing-to-a-prompt-and-against-a-time-limit restrictions on this occasion comes the fact that I'm going to be at airports/on planes and trains en route between Brussels and Graz for most of the allotted writing-time. We'll see how that works.
Forced Entertainment's First Night is at Kaai Theatre in Brussels for one night only this Wednesday, 19th at 20.30 as part of Kaai's 30th Birthday celebrations. That Night Follows Day, my project with Victoria is back on the road again - in Graz from 21-23rd September, kicking off the Steirischer Herbst festival. Full tour list at the Victoria site linked above.
Mike Harrison wrote a nice response, here, to my piece last week about Julie Tolentino in which he floats the idea that my writing somehow remakes the performance itself. I'm pretty fascinated with this because it chimes with how I've been thinking about one strand of my writing on/around performance. I'm interested in the way that in writing one can set things down - the what happened, the structure, the time-frame, the relations made and developed in a performance - unfolding an annotated schematic of these things on the page in such a way that the working/dramaturgy of the event becomes not just clear but (via a kind of unpacking) somehow manifest again.
The above may be connected, somehow, to the fact that I've often made a kind of equivalence between the dramaturgy/unfolding of a live event in respect of the audience and the way in which writing works on a reader over time (word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page). I'm tempted to see each as a kind of process of unfolding, and I've always thought (at least since Certain Fragments) of any writing that uses the word 'I' as a kind 'staging oneself for the page'. In each case its the control and flow of information, the strategic deploying of signs and space that makes the work what it is; a machinery that makes a certain kind of encounter possible, and which structures it in a particular way.
Mike's also begun, here, a list of "phrases or short sentences of dialogue which, though appearing regularly in contemporary Western fiction, relate to no condition found in contemporary Western life". Early signs are that this can run and run.
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