Fitful Thing is a love song to the line that writes it.
A handwritten line of unbroken text runs along the foot of each page as the writer struggles to address the line of ink that issues from the pen. But as long as the writing continues the line cannot be still enough to listen. Fixated on the ever-changing moment of its inscription as the nib careers across the page, the fitful line remains oblivious to the words that shape it.
Fitful Thing is an anthropomorphized expression of the gaps between a text and its writer, its reader and its object, and the impossible hope of their reconciliation. I developed the book as the culmination of my live art residency with the Chisenhale Gallery in 2011, building on my recent research into ‘self apparent’ literature. Details of publication to follow.
Lines 44-45 of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem Le Bestiaire (1911) read: Belles journées, souris du temps, Vous rongez peu à peu ma vie. (Beautiful days, time’s mice, gnawing little by little my life away.)
The image above is the first of five shelf poems I’ve just installed today at TotalKunst, Edinburgh for THESE ARE NOT POEMS. The three-day exhibition is part of the I AM NOT A POET: a two-week festival exploring connections of language, writing and art practice. More shelf poems below, more about the festival at VerySmallKitchen. [click to continue…]
VerySmallKitchen and the Totalkunst Gallery, Edinburgh, present I AM NOT A POET, a 2 week festival exploring connections of language, writing and art practice. Beginning with conversations and lectures as part of AN EDINBURGH ZINE & SMALL PRESS FAIR on 7th August, I AM NOT A POET presents a series of three and one day exhibitions, alongside conversations, lectures, performances, publications, and screenings…
Artists include: Pete Cant, Magdalen Chua, Patrick Coyle, Alex Eisenberg, Jennie Guy, Colin Herd, Shandra Lamaute, Michelle Letowska, Marit Muenzberg, nick e-melville, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson, Gerry Smith, seekers of lice. Curated by David Berridge (VerySmallKitchen) and Mirja Koponen (Totalkunst Gallery).
TotalKunst Gallery, 3 Bristo Place, Edinburgh EH1 1EY
More about the festival here.
Herbarium is a web-based anthology of poems written by over 50 poets celebrating and exploring the contemporary resonances of medicinal plants and herbs. Join us for a live reading of poems from the anthology, edited by James Wilkes, and the launch of a zine which will give the anthology a printed afterlife.
Friday 22nd July 22 2011, 7:00 pm
The Urban Physic Garden
100 Union Street
London SE1 0NL
Copies of the anthology, with a CD featuring sound-poems and songs, are available for £5 plus p&p. To order please email herbariumanthology@gmail.com
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Readings by Chris Goode, Jonny Liron and Tamarin Norwood tonight at The Other Room.
The Other Room is a reading series presenting experimental writers at The Old Abbey Inn in Manchester. More about the readers here.
Wednesday 20th July 2011, 7.00 pm
The Old Abbey Inn
61 Pencroft Way
Manchester M15 6AY
The Other Room is always free, but you can book a ticket via Eventbrite.
The Chisenhale Gallery has published online a roundup of my work with the Guardian Angels RC School in Tower Hamlets last month – three documentary videos and further information here. The project responded to Janice Kerbel’s exhibition KILL THE WORKERS!, a play for stage lights.
Norwood took her lead from the tension between the material form of light in Kerbel’s work and its functional role as an illumination of other material forms: a tension which arises in her own research into the dual material and referential qualities of language.
Through experiments with torchlight, words, pictures and scribbles the children learned to differentiate between the material and referential forms of language and, following Kerbel’s spotlight protagonist, learned to use pens ‘as pens themselves’ rather than as pens ‘serving to illuminate form’. With their expanded graphic vocabulary of emotive gestures the children produced films enacting the dramatic escapes of playground chalks from their boxes to become protagonists in their own right. They learned to read their films as graphic musical scores and produced real-time soundtracks using instruments made from recycled materials. The school project closed with an afternoon premiere featuring the completed films together with outtakes and behind-the-scenes interviews with the actors (the chalks themselves) and the scriptwriters.
antepress are showing at Convergence: Literary Art Exhibitions, an exhibition opening this week at Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast.
16 June-6 August 2011 (opening 6pm-8pm, Thursday 16 June 2011)
Curated by Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes
From the gallery:
This exhibition will show how reading and interpreting literature is – in diverse ways – at the core of some of the most renowned contemporary artists’ practices: Allotrope, antepress, Julie Bacon, Ecke Bonk, Pavel Büchler, Davide Cascio, Tacita Dean, Cerith Wyn Evans, Maria Fusco, Kenneth Goldsmith, Rodney Graham, Joanna Karolini, Sean Lynch, Simon Morris, Brian O’Doherty, Michalis Pichler,Tim Rollins, Andrea Theis, Nick Thurston and Eric Zboya.
It highlights that writers such as Joyce, Goethe, Beckett, Kafka, Sebald and Vonnegut have something to say to artists today – and that artists make a major contribution to how we can all think about literature and aspects of the canon today: as something relevant and liberating. Exhibiting literature has been the domain of literary museums and monuments. On an island from which most renowned writers have emigrated, alternative modes of marking their role have to be – and have been – found: by artists and through exhibitions. These are held in public spaces and in a variety of venues. This exhibition, in exploring the relationships between art, literature and exhibitions, provides an alternative “monument” to writers, their works, to well-read artists – and to innovative ways of bridging these realms through exhibition.
My article The Inscription of Art and Everyday Life: How Being Slips into Performance has just been published in the inaugural issue of activate. From the activate site:
activate is a peer-reviewed electronic journal in the field of performance and creative research. Based in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance at Roehampton University, London, it is run by postgraduates as a forum for postgraduate and postdoctoral scholars to publish their work. Each edition focuses on a specific theme and aims to include a range of new critical and performative practices in relation to it. In addition to these articles, submissions are invited that review contemporary books and performances.
The contributions to the innagural issue, On the paper floor: exploring writing practices, share a concern with language “not as a text, but, as an event”, as Tim Etchells, the artistic director of Forced Entertainment, has aptly noted (1999, p. 105). This publication’s aim is to explore the notion of writing as a way of performing as well as the ways that performance is being elaborated through linguistic and writing processes; and in this way, to expand the forms and ways that one can “make writing perform” (Pollock 1998, p. 75). [click to continue…]
The London Word Festival presents a night of performance exploring technology, robotics and automation.
Paul Granjon and his robotic support cast present Low Tech Songs and Servo Drive: a combination of video, home-made cardboard instruments, hard-wired disco and reflections on modern robotics. Author Nikesh Shukla dons his white coat and bionic arm to play a scientist with an obsession with comics who loses himself to circuitry and madness; Tamarin Norwood provides unspoken word with her choreographed piece Doing Words With Things in sculpture and British Sign Language; poet Ross Sutherland presents his new lecture and film on translation and robot poetry, Every Rendition on a Broken Machine, inspired by the work of JG Ballard (who died two years ago to the day). Scottish wonky indie collagists FOUND, whose autonomous emotional band Cybraphon is installed in Richmix Cafe, perform from their new album Factorycraft (Chemikal Underground). Hosted by poet, magician and gadget-phile Nathan Penlington.
Richmix | 7.30pm | £8 adv/£10 door
See the LWF site for tickets.
A new series of publications commissioned by LemonMelon:
‘Limonade es war alles so grenzenlos.’ was one of Franz Kafka’s last sentences in his Aus den Gesprächsblättern published in Briefe 1902–1924. Hélène Cixous, who repeatedly wrote about this sentence, translated it as ‘Limonade tout était si infini.’. This is translated in the english version of the Hélène Cixous Reader as ‘Lemonade everything was so infinite’.
Cixous’s translation of Kafka’s sentence ‘Lemonade everything was so infinite.’ forms the basis of a series of seven titles written by seven different writers / artists – David Berridge, Julia Calver, Emma Cocker, Rachel Lois Clapham, Marit Münzberg, Tamarin Norwood and Mary Paterson.
Each of us is treating one of the seven words of the sentence, and I’ve chosen ‘was’. Throughout Aus den Gesprächsblättern are references to cut flowers: tending to them, trimming them, moving them closer or into the light, stripping their leaves, letting them drink. At this stage Kafka is barely able to drink or eat, and writes: [click to continue…]
In response to Janice Kerbel’s exhibition Kill The Workers! I’m leading a workshop at the Chisenhale tomorrow afternoon as part of my ongoing live art residency with the gallery. There’s more about the show here.
Tomorrow we’ll be making short films with pen and pencils:
Drawing on practices of graphic music notation, action painting and concrete poetry, children are invited to rehearse, film and narrate their own ’play for felt tip toes’ inspired by the plight of the spotlight in Janice Kerbel’s ‘play for stage lights’.
Janice Kerbel, Kill the Workers!, 2011. Installation view at Chisenhale Gallery. Photo: Andy Keate
Family Workshop
Saturday 9 April, 2-5pm
Chisenhale
64 Chisenhale Road
London E3 5QZ
[map]
Tamarin Norwood, Musica Practica. Photo by Stefan Fuhrmann taken at Late at Tate: Diffusions, 4 February 2011.
This is the handsome site of the London Word Festival, where the 2011 programme has just gone live. It’s the fourth incarnation of the annual festival, with events running from 7 April to 5 May in venues across London.
Automated poetry machines, future libraries, the Fat Tail theory of economics, tobacco, insecure robots and ladies wrestling men.
LWF IV has arrived.
Everything seems mostly to be ready.
tails
emails
paint
bow tie x 3
cufflinks
plinth
stain removal panic
baton
printouts
ironing board
security pass
blog
porridge
safety pins
(this thing)
((more here))
