In London all next week with Forced Entertainment at Artsadmin's Toynbee Studios in the East End, presenting two performances from the back-catalogue. Its pretty fascinating to be going back to these, and a rare chance to catch them again (or for the first time) if anyone's in London. Do come and see.

End of the week is First Night (2001) - a kind of vaudeville gone-wrong, all rigid smiles, failed magic and sequins. Its on the very dark side of funny I guess - a nice reminder of the place we were in before the relatively easy-going attitude of shows like Bloody Mess (2004) and The World In Pictures (2006). Start of the week goes even further back in time to Dirty Work (1998) which is very stripped-down minimal, almost virtual theatre or cinema even, at least in the sense that nothing happens as such, everything is described/summoned in language. I guess this piece has a close relation to some of the things that I've been working with in video - especially the piece Starfucker in which white text titles appear in sequence on a black screen, each line an image involving some Hollywood star in the midst of some unexpected or inexplicable event or scenario.

Tom Cruise on an operating table.
David Soul in drag.
Michelle Pffiefer with her foot raised, just about to place it on a step.

You can read the short programme note I wrote for the re-presentations of First Night and Dirty Work down here. More on the line-up for the Artsadmin season at Toynbee, booking info etc here. Oh yes. Forced Entertainment now has a myspace page. Don't forget to make the group your friend. Everything is apparently internet now.

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Best Tom Waits image of the week:

A violin case lying wide-open, broken-backed filthy and discarded on the pavement and half-filled with rain water, somewhere down the way here on Rheinsburger Strasse.

Late afternoon, once the obligatory downpour is done, we see the Thomas Hirschhorn at Arndt & Partner. A sign on the door says its not suitable for kids but on my quick inspection I miss the images that are *really* unsuitable (colour inkjets of internet pictures showing  grisly corpses, probably in Iraq - faces shot to pieces, entrails wrapped around sticks, limbs hacked off). We're in there already before I realise.

Its a good piece I think - long thick lengths of cardboard constructed 'tree trunk'/ intestine/pipeline making their way thru all the rooms, obstructing ones progress, a series of large fireplaces spew detritus of timber and other stuff all over the floor making progress even harder, books are piled here and there, whilst smashed phones and computer elements (screens, keyboards, mice) are all parcel-taped to the walls here and there and what clear space remains is scrawled all over with marker-pen graffiti in red black and blue. A huge density to the text itself. Slogans, out-of-context words, mad phrases, many repeated so often that they become scrawl or meaningless scribble. Much of it is ersatz-political press-release-ese; phrases that seem to float around the war in Iraq - 'containable situation', 'sustainable democracy scenario' and 'regional interests'.

The rest is less nice talk - more bitter rumour, rant, paranoia and accusation; "Can't get in. Can't get out. Can't get in. Can't get out. Can't get in. Can't get out" it repeats at one place. In another spot who-ever has been writing stuff has given up and simply tried to cross out a wall-mounted clock using spray paint, a big crude black X running right across its face. In yet another there's a scrawled version of the sign you often see in bijou antique shops - 'If You Break It You Pay For It'.

I guess that just about sums it up with Iraq.

M. came out saying 'bleak, bleak, bleak..' but he seemed to get something from it.

S. for his part took one look at the first set of extremely grisly images (taped at intervals along the twisting tree-truck/pipe-line structures) and looked back to me.

"Dad, these pictures are Horrid." he said.

I laughed (trying not to make it worse..). "Yes. They are.. Maybe don't spend too long looking at them.."

"OK" he said and with no sign of trouble, dismissing the pictures with the single word "Horrid" he went back to the game that he'd already invented, playing stepping-stones along the cardboard circles that Hirschhorn has taped at intervals on the floor. Amazing. I found something very resilient, very optimistic in that. Later we read some parts of the text together and talked about it. All fine.

What I liked about the piece is that its hard not to be in it - you are in it in fact, as soon as you step through the door. It surrounds you with itself, with the knots of the situation, with the horror of it, with the discourse around it, with the impossibility to escape and with the literal problem of navigating a space that is extremely barricaded, made difficult to pass through. I'd seen a related piece by Hirschhorn in New York some while ago (a year or more?) and hadn't liked it that much - I think because that one so dwelt (and relied) on the same kind of war-images from Iraq, screaming with a voice invoking their authority and authenticity, but also, in a troubling way, underscoring their redundancy. In this more recent piece (Stand Alone it's called) the reliance on the images is not so great, though they're there in the background, like a serious toothache.  Instead the experience; ugly, disconcerting, rather total and immersive, is as much about space and language, about ones physical presence as a body/thinker/witness through language as it is about some kind of confrontation with 'the truth' or 'the evidence'.

^{The image is one of several of Stand Alone at Hllr's photoset on Flickr. Some rights reserved (see here for info).}

Best spam subject line of the week:

> I couldn't bear the thought of another woman having your child.

Torrential rain in Berlin, alternating brilliant sunshine. Corresponding dips and hikes in the temperature.

Yesterday at some pretty haphazard Wall Museum with the kids. Strange arrangement of random artefacts, photos, texts. At some point for no reason that I would grasp the focus shifts from 1945 and 1953 and 1989 to a room devoted to 'Religions Of The World'. Its a temporary glitch tho - before long you're back to the rooms featuring models of the East and and the West, photos of wall construction, bona-fide chunks of graffitied concrete and the hollowed-out Trabants and improvised aqualungs that people used in escapes.

What stayed with me was the whole genre of photos showing people just after escape - earth-covered men and women blinking in electric light on emerging from tunnels, two families stood next to the home-made hot air-balllon they flew over the border.

Best of all was the whole string of shots of people smuggled out in the trunks of cars, or people emerging from them or people stood proudly beside the cars in fields, driveways and garages - drivers and escapees, proud, pleased, dazed, numb. Adults playing hide and seek. Pictures taken to mark the moment, to prove that this happened, a certificate of some kind. In some cases the eyes in these images are blanked out - like in personal-ad sex pictures, or as if they were innocents caught by accident in pictures of criminals and whose identity must be protected.

More than anything else though all these pairs of people stood next to cars or clambering inexpertly from the trunks, look like they're in clumsy publicity shots for a set of strange deconstructed magic-acts. A series of drab magicians lacking glitzy costumes, all photographed in black and white, with their grinning but dazed-looking assistants stood next to them, gesturing prouldy to their dated, home-made automotive disappearing cabinets. A kind of old urban magic.

A beautiful combination of vagueness and super-concrete detail in Tony White's great new story at 1001 Nights Cast, Barbara Campbell's project which I wrote about already here with some thoughts about my own most recent contribution. In Tony's story Ahead in the Line men whose names you don't know are telling tales that the narrator can only half-remember as they wait in some kind of line for something that you don't really get to the bottom of but which you intuit is probably horrible.

 Most of the time you're filling in narrative blanks, running scenarios in your head about possible contexts/ relationships/contents. All the while you're addressed as if you were a visitor from far away, for whom common sayings or phrases need  gloss and explanation. Even the narrators voice might best be called enticingly unsteady; oscilating as it does between thick and thin, contemporary and slightly antique. But there's really more than enough in the constellation of details coming out of the fog, and the constant gaps  in information, for your brain to get to work with. 

"There was a funny story too – I can’t remember. Something about a woman and her daughter. I think the daughter was this guy’s niece. Who was telling the story. And this was when those wretches were going from door to door. And they had no respect at all."

This one reminded me, although it's very different, of M John Harrison's stories for the 1001 project, especially his first, from the prompt Cocking A Snook, in which the narrator seems to overflow with details about a situation, but on the other hand utterly neglects to give any kind of overview. He generalises a lot too, in description, which is beautifully disconcerting - "a man" arrives in his room in a "long house", "figures in authority" do certain things in the corridor just outside and a radio plays "the local music", where we can't possibly know what kind of music that means or what kind of authority these "figures" have over what. Very wonderful and funny and deadpan. Taken together its a picture that's totally in focus some places but murky and blurred in others. You're aware of vivid detail, but lack much solid framework to put it in. The world comes out of fog, or emerges through a constellation of points and shadows, or is discovered like a gift only half unwrapped, or an object wrapped hastily and inexpertly in rags - in some places you see precisely what's there, other places you can only make out forms, shapes and structures that must be guessed at.

"It was impossible to calculate how many rooms there were in the long house. This information was known only to the figures of authority who often squatted in a line along one side of the corridor eating a vegetarian meal."

Very funny. Also frightening.

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