Working hard now on the last stages of the pieces for ART SHEFFIELD 08: Yes, No & Other Options. The opening is Friday and the show runs from 16 February - 30 March 2008 in venues across the city including Bloc, End Gallery,  S1 Artspace, Site Gallery, Yorkshire ArtSpace, Sylvester Space, The Winter Garden and the Millennium Galleries where my stuff will be. I'm showing three new neon pieces alongside two works made with Vlatka - our existing video Insults & Praises (2003) and what began as a kind of mutant follow-up to it titled Threats & Promises. Sneak preview of one of the neons below, meanwhile late night video shooting to complete the Threats & Promises piece got abandoned sometime around midnight tonight when all the lights in the studio tripped out. Desultory end to the long work day which was just starting to clarify (and not before time!). Will help make tomorrow nice and pressurised.

Press release goes like this: "Taking as its foundation a specially commissioned text by art critic Jan Verwoert, this city-wide exhibition addresses the fact that in a post-industrial condition... we have entered into a service culture where we no longer just work, we perform in a perpetual mode of ‘I Can’. (Even advertising tells us that ‘Life gets more exciting when you say yes’).Verwoert asks, “What would it mean to put up resistance against a social order in which high performance and performance-related evaluation has become a growing demand, if not a norm? What would it mean to resist the need to perform?” He suggests that certain means of resisting are in themselves creative - that as well as embracing exuberant performativity, art has also used the ‘ I Can’t’, by creating moments where the flow of action is interrupted, established meanings are suspended and alternative ways to act become imaginable. He suggests that as well as yes and no, there may be other options."

The mix of both emerging and established Sheffield-based, nationally and internationally-based artists includes Tomma Abts, Michal Budny, Phil Collins, Andrew Cooke, Kerstin Kartscher, Silke Otto Knapp, Július Koller, Jiri Kovanda, Ruth Legg, Hilary Lloyd, Deimantas Narkevicius, Ines Schaber, Sean Snyder, Frances Stark, Mladen Stilinovic, Esther Stocker, Nasrin Tabatabai, Wolfgang Tillmans, Tsui Kuang-Yu, Gitte Villesen, Eveline Van Den Berg, Ryszard Wasko, Nicole Wermers and Xu Tan. As well as from Vlatka and I there are new commissions from Katie Davies, Annika Eriksson, Host Artist's Group, Janice Kerbel, George Henry Longly, Roman Ondak, Kirsten Pieroth, Paul Rooney, Dexter Sinister, Esther Stocker, Neil Webb, Katy Woods and Kan Xuan.

Vlatka wrote me about a performance Una cosa es una cosa (“a thing is a thing”) by Columbian artist María Teresa Hincapié. She saw documentation of the work in a big show Arte ≠ Vida: Actions By Artists Of The Americas, 1960-2000 at El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, New York. All the details of the show, location etc are on the website here. The show, which from reports sounds amazing runs until May so I will get to see it before too long. For Una cosa es una cosa Hincapié took all of the objects from her home, except the furniture, and then spent a two week period arranging and rearranging them, according to a set of shifting criteria and principles.

There's some material about Maria Teresa, who died very recently after a long illness, in the book Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas by Coco Fusco. I really love the text below which Hincapié wrote connected to the Una cosa es una cosa performance.

“...movement here. then. in the corner. in the center. on one side. near him. very far. further. very far. very, very far. here are the handbags. here, the pocket. here the bag. here, the box and over it, the pocket. at one side, the box. in the corner, the pocket and the bag; in the center the paper bags and very near, the box. leakage. dispersion. everything getting empty. everything disappears. everything scatter. disseminate. blend. stop. organize themselves in a cue in a random way. they mark a space. they separate in groups, one beside the other. common groups. where they are similar. because they are white. because they are made up of fabric. because they are dresses. because they are made up of plastic. because they are large. because they are covered. because they are ceramics. because they are jars. because they need one another as the toothbrush and toothpaste. but also because the paste is by itself and the toothbrush is with other toothbrushes or by itself. all the flowers here. the dresses are extended. the black ones are near me. the pink ones here. the towels by themselves. the coverlet by itself. the blankets by themselves. the bags by themselves. the pencils by themselves. the dresses by themselves. the colors by themselves. the broom by itself. the onions by themselves. the carrots by themselves. the corn by itself. the sugar by itself. the wheat by itself. the plastic by itself. the handbag by itself. the rubber bag by itself. the box by itself and empty. the mirror by itself. the shoes by themselves. the socks by themselves. the herbs by themselves. I, alone. she, alone. we, alone. they, alone. a space alone. a place alone. a line alone. one sock only. one shoe only. everything is alone. all of us are alone. a mass of rice. a mass of sugar. a mass of salt. a mass of wheat. a mass of coffee. a mass of different things”.

Reading about the piece also made connections to me with the first Jérôme Bel show Nom donne par l'auteur (1994) in which Jérôme and Frédéric Seguette systematically construct arrangements and imply temporary relations between a small group of objects culled from Bels' apartment. At Bel's the show must go on last night, seeing the piece for the 5th or 6th time in as many years, I was still completely sucked into its space, drawn in by its great blankness, by the sheer time it gives you to think. It's a pretty devastating work, even now, when somehow it seems so much easier for audiences to deal with than it did back in 2001. Great to see it in such a big epic space as Saddlers Wells too - the kind of space (all potential) that it really needs to stage the decisions of its vivid starkness. The programme note I wrote about Jérôme's work recently is here.

Strange thing about the early slot in the huge city pool is that they seem to test the fire alarms at a set time each day, when there's not so many customers around. So as you make your way through the water in the great emptiness of the competition pool, not quite yet awake, you often get this voice booming from the PA:

This is an announcement for all staff and customers. We are about to test the fire alarms. No action is to be taken. We are about to test the fire alarms. No action is to be taken.

Then a short pause, and the fire alarm itself comes on as promised, which in this case is just a short bell sound followed by another announcement:

There is an emergency. Would all staff and customers please exit the building by the nearest possible route. Please evacuate the building.

I've liked starting the day with this strange contradiction, living between the denial and the assertion of an emergency.

Later at the cafe down the road to get coffee, three days running I came in through the door to find the same song greeted me - 10cc's 1975 art pop I'm Not In Love. It wasn't the childhood song or the words I thought about so much, as the fact that my routine was colliding me with yet another sonic repetition. I had to imagine the cafe owner coming in at the same time each day, switching stuff on and hitting play on the only compilation CD, the same tracks playing through over an hour or so before 10cc came around with its pre-sampler loops and whispering voices, just in time for me to come in through the door.