Conceptual writing is "decidedly avant-garde" and the ICA is not, says the Independent. What do you think?
Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 12:15PM I know the Hebe Arts pages are getting top-heavy with information about the current exhibition of conceptual writing at Shandy Hall, and I promise to shift focus soon enough. But, whilst the air is filled with excitement about what is going on under Laurence Sterne's roof I thought I'd flag up an article in this week's Independent, which acknowledged The Perverse Library exhibition and recognised the immediacy of conceptual writing in art today.
The article, 'Trouble at Mall' was a critique of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London: an organisation founded in 1946 to provide a space for the artistic and intellectual avant-garde to meet, exchange and exhibit. In its heyday the ICA was a hot-bed for experimental, provocative and often controversial work. However, in recent years, the article suggests, contemporary art has lost the need for a gatekeeper and the ICA has been left struggling with it's identity and relevance. Kind of ironic, for an organisation whose outgoing leader, Ekow Eshun, said roughly the same about Live Art when he cut off the ICA's support for the artform?
Image from The Perverse Library at Shandy Hall: Carbonised book from The Black Library by Greville Worthington | Nick Hill © 2010"What is decidedly avant-garde is conceptualism in a quite different art form – literature. Visit Shandy Hall in Yorkshire, where Laurence Sterne wrote his experimental novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, and one will encounter the first exhibition in Britain of conceptual writing. Conceptual writers sometimes steal from other writers, reordering their text and jumbling it up. Bringing together conceptual art and language, this movement has led to fierce attacks from conventional authors. Influenced by Sterne himself (who plagiarised and rearranged passages) and writers like James Joyce, one leading figure in the movement says conceptual writing “seeks to ask what would a non-expressive poetry look like? A poetry of intellect rather than emotion.” Conceptual writing determinedly makes no claim on originality. It includes a transcription of a year’s weather reports and, in the case of one conceptual writer, the simple repetition of the sentence “I will not make anymore boring art.” It’s fitting that the house where one of the world’s most famous experimental novels was written is in the forefront of avant-garde literature." Read more...
Image from The Perverse Library at Shandy Hall: Bouvard et Pécuchet's Invented Desk for Copying by Gareth Long with Wilf Williams | Nick Hill © 2010
