PW12 is happening this weekend at the Arnolfini: three days of performance writing events, discussion and exhibition. I’m contributing one interpretation of ‘performance writing’ in a single-screen adaptation of my Modern Art Oxford work Keeping Time, playing throughout the weekend in the exhibition space.

From the Arnolfini website:

The weekend comprises performances, readings, a workshop on Writing & Mapping, ‘events on the plinth’, an exhibition and discussions about multi- and inter-medial writing. We will be considering how, as the printed book comes under threat, new writing will be made, displayed and talked about. Click here for full details.

Friday 4 – Sunday 6 May 2012
Arnolfini
16 Narrow Quay
Bristol BS1 4QA

The next chapter, ENDNOTES by Tamarin Norwood, appears in ARTLICKS issue 7, out April 2012.

Seven Chapters, A Contents Page, Parenthesis and Endnotes is a new publication featuring works by: Davide Balliano, Ami Clarke, Emma Hart, Andrew Lanyon, Rebecca Lennon, Louisa Martin, Jenny Moore, Tamarin Norwood, Francesco Pedraglio, and Mónica Rivas.

The individual chapters, pages, arrive though myriad and disparate events; performances, films, drawings, text, sculpture, and insertions, printed materials – each suggesting the nature of the book which itself continually escapes full comprehension.

Conceived and organised by Louisa Martin

Above is a new version of Keeping Time I’ve adapted to show on a single screen at the Arnolfini next month for the Performance Writing weekend PW12 (more here). The original version was a two-screen installation shown at Modern Art Oxford in February following my art writing residency there.

On a single screen the two points are more clearly in dialogue with one another, and the relationship between them is more readily anthropomorphized than before. It’s all in the timing isn’t it.

Our readings at Richmix last week, part of this event:

A celebration of sound poetry performance, installations and presentations by:

Marton Koppany
David Berridge & Nick-E Melville
Gabriele Labanauskaite
Mark Jackson
Hannah Silva & HollyPester
Ben Morris & Fiona Kennedy & Jon Marshall
Tamarin Norwood & Julia Calver & Patrick Coyle
Ollie Evans & Lucy Beynon & Lisa Jeschke

A free visual poetry fair and exchange will run throughout the night. Poets contributing to the fair include Tim Atkins, Richard Barrett, Sarah Chapman, Wayne Clements, Becky Cremin, Sarah Cewe, Amy Cutler, James Davies, Stephen Emmerson, Irum Fazal, Amy Evans, Kelina Gotman, Jeff Hilson, Mark Jackson, Peter Jaeger, Tom Jenks, Holly Pester, Nat Raha, Linus Slug, Marcus Slease, Philip Terry, James Wilkes and Michael Zand.

Richmix, Bethnal Green Road, E1 6LA
Saturday March 31st 2012
6.45pm till late, performances from 7:30pm

Here is the thing I did at Tenderpixel Gallery in January. I’m describing a few otherwise unrelated things that happened during the making of My House and Other Inventions, a piece I made last year for AUX Performance Space in Philadelphia. My description is from memory and ‘from scratch’, following a brief from Patrick Coyle who was exhibiting at Tenderpixel at the time.

More about Patrick’s exhibition and January’s antepress event is here.
More about My House and Other Inventions is here.
More about AUX Performance Space is here.

Tomorrow evening at Spike Island I’m leading the next in a series of Extra Curricular Art and Cultural Theory Reading Groups. We’re going to discuss Between Theater and Anthropology by Richard Schechner, a book I’ve found useful in my own thinking about performance, live art, the performance of art-making, and the blurring of art and life. From the Spike Island website:

This monthly reading group is a platform for discovering and debating current topics in art, cultural theory and experimental fiction. Sessions are hosted by invited guests who have suggested texts that have been influential on their practice or form part of their research.

Artist and writer Tamarin Norwood has chosen for the March Extra Curricular reading group a selection of essays by American academic Richard Schechner. Between Theater and Anthropology, published in 1985, primarily considers live events which fall outside common Western definitions of dramatic performance and theatre. Norwood proposes to use his survey for a discussion around live art and performance making today.

The session will be specifically structured around Chapter 2: Restoration of Behavior, and Norwood proposes the following questions: Do reconstructions restore past events, create new ones, or restore versions of the past that never happened? Are all performances restorations? Where is the line between performance, rehearsal, workshop and everyday life?

The event runs from 6-8pm on Thursday 15 March.
Tickets £3, booking recommended.

Here’s the slideshow and audio recording of the artist talk I gave at Modern Art Oxford on 19 February 2012. I introduce the ideas and contexts informing the text-based elements of my practice and show some of the workings behind my Project Space residency and exhibition Keeping Time.

Musica Practica is back. This time round, conductor Anthony Weeden will perform the work in the Sheldonian quad of the Bodleian Library, Oxford from 1:30-4:30pm. The event concludes my artist writer residency at Modern Art Oxford. From the MAO website:

A lone orchestra conductor performs in public, translating the sounds and everyday movements surrounding him into real-time orchestral choreography. Conflating instruction and response, conductor and audience simultaneously direct one another’s actions. Artist and writer Tamarin Norwood identifies a single thread of enquiry running through John Gerrard’sLegacy Fellowship commission and its associated programme: the translation of physical movements into choreographed instructions. Performed by Anthony Weeden.

The event is free to attend, just stop by any time. The performance takes place every half hour from 1:30-4:30pm. Each performance lasts twenty minutes followed by a ten-minute break.

Above: Anthony Weeden performs Musica Practica at Tate Britain during Late At Tate February 2011. Photo Stefan Fuhrmann. More about Musica Practica is here.

Tonight we’re celebrating the launch of two new titles in a seven-part series ‘Lemonade everything was so infinite’. We’ll be reading extracts from the two new books, ‘everything’ by Marit Münzberg and ‘was’ by myself, and from the two existing volumes ‘Lemonade’ by David Berridge and ‘_’ by Julia Calver.

The series is entitled ‘Lemonade everything was so infinite’. ‘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’.

The seven writers and artists involved in the project are David Berridge, Julia Calver, Emma Cocker, Rachel Lois Clapham, Marit Münzberg, Tamarin Norwood and Mary Paterson.

My volume takes the form of a series of interviews with local florists and is subtitled “Advice on the palliative care of cut flowers”. Here’s an extract:

The nursery people will cut the flowers when they feel they’re the right ripeness. After the flowers have been picked in the nursery and packed, some are given gases for their journey.

And if you don’t it is really a waste.

You must strip all the foliage that’s going to be in the water.

If you don’t you get bacteria, the botulism form —

After you’ve stripped your leaves you must then cut the stem. In a flower shop we quite often use knives. You need to use sharp knives or a sharp pair of scissors.

If you cut them with a blunt cut, quite often that will cause it to rest on the bottom of the vase and then it will take up less water.

No, no that’s quite separate.

Yes, no.

After you’ve done that you need to put them straight into water within a very short space of time, because it’s like the reverse of us. When you cut your skin you want it to heal and scab over. When you cut a flower stem you want to expose it so it continues to take in nutrients.

See the publisher’s website for further information or to buy copies of ‘Lemonade’, ‘_’, ‘everything’ or ‘was’.

This afternoon I’m speaking about the ideas and practices informing my recent Project Space residency at Modern Art Oxford. My talk marks the final day of my Project Space exhibition ‘Keeping Time’, and will begin with a screening of the work.

Sunday 19 February, 3pm. Free, booking essential.
To book a place, please visit the Modern Art Oxford website.

I love this. Bokship. More of them here.

At last here’s a clip from the final pair of videos. Compared to the draft videos in my earlier posts, here you can see the saturation and contrast are pulled low: I found it shows greater tonality in the ink, and it acknowledges the moving surface of the paper quite evenly without a shadow that distracts. The main thing is that it means the video looks much more similar to the real paper and the original marks of the pen.

My exhibition of this work at Modern Art Oxford is on until the end of the week, and I’m giving a talk about the work on the closing day: 19 February 3pm. To find out more or book a place for the talk, see the Modern Art Oxford website.

My Keeping Time blog on a-n tracks the making of this work in detail over a couple of months, several camera angles, two hopeless cameras and numerous pens.