A Perverse Library: a major exhibition of 'conceptual writing' comes to Yorkshire next month

“Writing is fifty years behind painting.” (Brion Gysin, 1959)

A major exhibition of ‘conceptual writing’ is coming to Yorkshire next month. A Perverse Library is the first exhibition of its kind in the UK and will - according to curator Simon Morris - “show work by a generation of artists who have sought a radical reconsideration of the relationship between literature and the visual arts”.

Image, Scott Myles: Full Stop 2006 © the artist. The last full stop in Tristram Shandy from the first edition, blown up using photomicography at the University of Glasgow

Appropriately, the exhibition will take place at Shandy Hall, Coxwold: the former home of the celebrated 18th-century English writer Laurence Sterne (author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman), whose experimental spirit has had an astounding and continuing influence on the arts.

A Perverse Library draws from collections of work by internationally renowned artists and writers including: Kathy Acker, Ed Ruscha, Jen Bervin, Christian Bök, Kenneth Goldsmith, James Joyce, On Kawara, Sherrie Levine and the recent Northern Art Prize winner, Pavel Büchler.

The exhibition starts on 04 September 2010, and will run right through to 31 October 2010. There are a number of free bus services running between York train station and Shandy Hall. Click here to find out more, and to book your place before they all go!

Étienne-Louis Boullée, Deuxieme projet pour la Bibliothèque du Roi (1785), used on the cover of Craig Dworkin's new book 'The Perverse Library'. Dworkin's collection of more than 2,000 volumes forms the centre piece of the exhibition in Coxwold.

Questions about what and where writing is have always cut through and across the fields of philosophy, literary criticism and the arts. Whilst these questions are not new, nor specific to any one place, they have emerged as an essential concern for the Western European and American avant-garde.

Driven by 200 years of radical social change, ‘writing’ in the arts has continued to nourish an extremely rich field of praxis. Its discourses are irreducibly complex and beyond simple definition or catagorisation.

In part this is due to the breadth of work being progressed by individuals with wide ranging imperatives, working in equally diverse ways: Gertrude Stein to William James to Ezra Pound to James Joyce to Berthold Brecht to Samuel Beckett to Allen Ginsberg to John Cage to Roland Barthes to Jacques Derrida to Christian Bok to Steve McCaffery to Joanna Drucker to David Mamet to Caroline Bergvall to Jerome Bell to Craig Dworkin to Tim Etchells to Gillian Wearing to Mark Manders to Kenneth Goldsmith and on and on, and to name but a fraction of those who’s ideas continue to feed this nebulous and intangible ecology of ideas.

The complexity is owed also to the depth of critical thinking that questions about writing have fostered, couched in vocabularies that are often challenging, and often deliberately so: demanding the reader to renegotiate their relationship to the ‘text’.

Terms like conceptual writing, performance writing, writing with art, text based art, language art, l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poetry, artists’ publishing etc… are only some of the terms used to describe only some of the outlets for these practices. Historically these terms have sat in opposition to traditional literary modes, as well to notions of new or creative writing, which have been favored by the mainstream.

In recent years the output of artists working in what the writer, Claire MacDonald has called “an expanded field of writing practice” have occupied public spaces, galleries, theatres, studios, libraries etc., and become manifest as books, pages, journals, multiples, paintings, scores, computer applications, sculptures, audio recordings, films, videos, performances, actions, events and ephemera etc. 

Image, architectural drawings of the 'invisible shelves' designed by Canadian architect Michael Farion,

In A Perverse Library the output occupies writing, or the idea of writing itself. By adopting strategies of appropriation and/or rip-off “we are seeing whole texts moved around from one location to another. It is not just sampling language but moving entire texts from space to another”, as Simon Morris puts it. “I think there's something quite exciting about making new meaning whilst using exactly the same words as an other.”

If you are interested in knowing more about this field of art / writing practice then A Perverse Library is definitely an exhibition, even the exhibition not to be missed. If you do miss it though, we will be sure to get lots and lots of photos and video from the grand opening, which organisers have in the spirit of Sterne put the night before the exhibition closes.

Update on Wednesday, August 18, 2010 at 10:16AM by Hebe Media

The Live Art Development Agency just launched (W)reading Performance Writing, a study guide addressing some of the territory outlined in the above blog post, and in which our own Simon Zimmerman was involved:

In (W)reading Performance Writing (2010), Rachel Lois Clapham has assembled twenty practitioners from diverse fields of poetry, theatre, visual art and performance on the topic of Performance Writing.

This Guide comprises of syllabuses, manifestos, scores, personal testimonies and practical exercises, drawn from resources available in the Study Room. It also includes a detailed subject area index. This publication is highly speculative and encourages an active read. A note on its reading can be found in the section Invitation to (W)read.

Authors included are Charles Bernstein, Caroline Bergvall, David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker, Mark Caffrey, Alex Eisenberg, John Hall, Claire Hind, Richard Kostelanetz, Johanna Linsley, Claire MacDonald, Rebecca May Marston, Marit Münzberg, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson, Joshua Sofaer, Danae Theodoridou, Peter Walsh and Simon Zimmerman. Design by Marit Munzberg. 

Here is the link to the online PDF version: 

http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/resources/Study_Room/guides/rachel_lois_clapham_guide.html 

"All technology is neutral", a reflection on Sir Ken Robinson's speech for #shifthappens 2010

“All technology is neutral”. This was the essence of a keynote speech given by Sir Ken Robinson (@SirKenRobinson), via Skype from his home in California, to a packed out auditorium at York Theatre Royal.

Sir Ken Robinson addresses the audience at Shift Happens 2010

The speech came at the end of the opening day of the third annual Shift_Happens event, the brainchild of Pilot Theatre’s Artistic Director, Marcus Romer (@MarcusRomer). Inspired by Romer’s experiences at TED, Shift_Happens draws people together from across the cultural and creative industries (the arts, media and film, museums and libraries, and so on) to talk about how they can take part in, and drive the digital landscape. The event includes a series of speeches, covering areas of both digital practice and policy, as well as performances, user testing of new digital and interactive media works, and surgeries giving new arrivals to the conversation insight into the digital landscape.

We were very pleased to attend Shift_Happens on behalf of Hyper Island, who we work with lots, and who are working with Skillset and Screen Yorkshire on a new leadership programme for Yorkshire’s digital and creative workforce. Our mission was to find out what is making people in the arts tick when it comes to digital.

The keynote will be available to view online in the coming weeks, so I won’t summarise here (we will provide a link once available). To be honest, I’m not sure where I’d begin anyway: it moved back and forth between the earliest developments of technology, and predictions about where we might be heading. What I can summarise, though, is the thesis: that technology, historically, has shaped the condition of society and its cultures. In that process, technology has promoted ways of living (urbanisation, for example) that push us away from nature, and each other. However, the truth of the matter is that technology is not actively working towards these ends: it is not looking to drive the wedge. Indeed, technology is only ever passive – “all technology is neutral”. What matters, then, is how we use technology. If we use it responsibly then it will promote creativity and spiritual wellbeing. If we don’t then we could be in trouble.

Sir Ken’s keynote followed another presentation (part speech, part crowd-souring performance lecture) by Andy Field, Artistic Director of Forrest Fringe Festival (a free festival phenomenon that landed at the Edinburgh Fringe a few years ago).

Andy Field, of Forrest Fringe Festival, talks to Director of National Theatre Wales, John E McGrath

By accident or design, Field’s speech set a clear context for Ken Robinson’s keynote, and made it’s own call for a reconsideration of how technology is used by artists, to affect change: paraphrasing… “digital is a field that we are all, as artists and creative people, right at the forefront of: even if we were, in many ways, the last to arrive at the party. Rather than using technology to re-use existing ideas and content, we should be using our art to rip the heart from technology. We should bring art and technology together to dream stupid, impossibly grand visions of what the future might look like… It is true that no one can break the Internet, but we should all be trying.

So, to end where I began (or, rather, where Sir Ken began), all technology is neutral. It is passive, non-political, non-destructive. What activates technology is us, and it is up to us to determine its uses and by extension the shape of tomorrow’s society. That all seems simple, doesn’t it? Well, not if you skip back to the middle of Sir Robinson’s presentation when he shared a prediction: that by 2050 the average personal computer will have the same processing power as all of human consciousness. Machines that think, and learn, and re-write their operating systems based on their experiences. Will technology still be neutral then?

While you ponder that one the team at Hyper Island are heading off to buy copies of the Sarah Connor Chronicles, and here at Hebe we're getting started on the bunker.