MORE & MORE AT ARNOLFINI

Just heard that my animated text More & More has arrived on time and will be shown at the Arnolfini in Bristol for the Ian Hamilton Finlay Weekend Friday 30th August and Saturday 31 August 2013. The weekend is a special event for the Ian Hamilton Finlay Exhibition, that is currently showing at the Arnolfini, a really comprehensive show of Finlay's cards produced right through his career from 1963 to 2006. The weekend programme includes talks by Graham Rich, Stephen Bann, Harry Gilonis, OEI Magazine, film screenings of Beatrice Gibson, The Tiger's Mind, Ian Hamilton Finlay's Carrier Strike, films by Karl Holmqvist, and Kriwet, a concert by Amor de Dias, a DJ set by Christian Flamm, Sue Tomkins audio work, and a performance by Kasia Fudakowski. Works by Victoria Bean, Antonio Claudio Carvalho and my More & More are to be shown. There is a benefit auction Friday 30th August at 7.30pm to help to maintain Finlay's garden Little Sparta in Dunsyre Scotland. The auctioneer will be George Ferguson, Mayor of Bristol. I went on an exhibition tour and talk by Stephen Bann last Saturday with Graham Rich and Lesley Kerman. It was great to hear about Finlay's print projects and his various disputes and campaigns. I really enjoyed the visit to the Finlay garden at St George's church in Bristol.
    This photo of More and More was taken at the Sentences exhibition in Bury Art Museum, 2011 by Jari Kuusenaho; the animation is by ranfirefly, technical development by Tom Lopez of Microserve Bristol. The work was also shown at Poetry for the Eye, TR1 Gallery, Tampere, Finland 2012, and at Visual Poetics, South Bank Centre, London, 2013.

ORCOMBE.COM : A SMALL TREE

Working with friends and collaborators, I've just started a site for prints called Orcombe.com. The first publication is a print made in collaboration with my friend the photographer John S. Webb, who lives and works in Sweden. The print is a combination of four modes shown together: poem, image, commentary and memorial, and it makes connections between the works of the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, the economist Ernst Schumacher, and the peace campaigner Brian Haw, who lived on Parliament Square, London, for almost ten years to protest against UK and USA foreign policy. I have taken up the form of the one-word poem, invented by Finlay, and echoed several of his works in this new composition that incorporates commentary, rather like Finlay's Heroic Emblems (Calais, VT: Z Press, 1977) that incorporated commentaries by Professor Stephen Bann.
     The print is called A Small Tree. I had in mind Finlay's Small Is Quite Beautiful (stone, with Richard Grasby, 1976, collection Scottish Arts Council) because it picks up on Schumacher's most influential work and plays with that nice distinction between American and Scottish usage of the word 'quite'. My poem is in fact thirteen words including three colours and the important diminutive; the colours are conveyed only in language. It took many months before John Webb was able to get the right kind of flowering Hawthorn image, quite an unusual shot, on the coast at Ribbersborg, Malmo, near where he lives.
     The print is available only through the site Orcombe.com.

VISUAL POETICS AT THE POETRY LIBRARY

Visual Poetics is an exhibition currently on show at the Poetry Library in the Southbank Centre, curated by David Miller and Chris McCabe. It runs from 12th February to 14 April 2013. Poets and artists whose work is displayed include: John Furnival, Liliane Lijn, John Hall, Sarah Kelly, Hansjorg Mayer, Dom Sylvester Houedard, Thomas A. Clark, Laurie Clark, Paula Claire, Bob Cobbing, Karen Bleitz, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Sophie Herxheimer, Tony Lopez, Victoria Bean, Gavin Selerie, Caroline Bergvall, Alan Halsey, David Miller, Julie Johnstone, James Harvey, Simon Cutts, Giles Goodland, Sam Winston, Gad Hollander, John Gibbens, Edwin Morgan, Stephen Emmerson, Matt Martin, Rick Myers, Antonio Claudio Carvalho and Wayne Clements.
    The Saison Poetry Library is located on the fifth floor of the Royal Festival Hall and is open Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 8pm: FREE ENTRY.
    My text animation work 'More and More' is included, on loan from Bury Art Museum.
   

FESTIVALS 2012 & LITTLE SPARTA

I've been involved in a whole series of quite different festivals this year, all of them worth doing and each having their own focus.
 I read at the Runnymede Festival London (8th-17th March), on a bill with Carol Watts, at the Centre for Creative Collaboration, Acton Street, London. This was organised by Robert Hampson and is a project growing out of his work with colleagues involved in the Poetic Practice MA at Royal Holloway University London. Some of the literary events take place in Runnymede and some in central London.
     Sounds New Festival at Canterbury in Kent is a music festival in the town that has a thread of poetry events. It is particularly strong on new music with premiere performances at all kinds of venues. I saw a performance of Common Objects by the Rhodri Davies Ensemble including some collaborative work with poets Patricia Debney and Nancy Gaffield. This was not the sort of event you come across in East Devon. I saw a terrific high energy percussion group called Powerplant, like nothing else I've seen. We saw a talk on British Poetry since 1950 by Michael Schmidt. Actually this was about a report produced for the Royal Society of Literature about contemporary poetry and the line was that it was a narrow report. My reading with Stephen Collis entitled Found Text was on the Campus of the University of Kent at Canterbury, 9th May, well attended and a very good audience. I was booked by Professor David Herd and had a great time in Canterbury. I went to see St Martin's, the oldest functioning church in the country but it was locked and I couldn't get inside. The graveyard was worth the walk.
     In June I was at the Hay Poetry Jamboree, which turned out to be nothing to do with the big Hay Literature Festival going on at the same time in a field just on the edge of town. The Poetry Jamboree, known as the Jam, was two and a bit days of solid readings with JP Ward, Andrea Brady, Jeremy Hilton, Waterloo Press readers, Caroline Goodwin, Harry Gilonis, Laurie Duggan, Philip Terry, Andrew Duncan, Harriet Tarlo, Peter Larkin, Nerys Williams, Anthony Mellors, Sophie Robinson, Jeff Hilson, Ulli Freer and me and others. I absolutely loved it, saw all the readings, and felt that I'd got a very particular and well curated view of what is happening in poetry. Many of us were put up in a couple of Crickhowell houses and had communal meals good company there later in the evenings when each day's programme was finished. The town of Hay is very attractive on a sunny day, it's great to visit the poetry bookshop that Alan Halsey used to run years ago, now run with equal flair and a great stock. I wished I'd had more time to spend with my old friend the poet and artist Allen Fisher who also attended the whole programme. Allen is co-patron of the Jam with USA's best known poetry critic Marjorie Perloff. These events were organised by John Goodby and Lyndon and Penny Davies and the readings took place in a nearly tumble down Methodist chapel very central in Hay. What an amazing concentrated fix of the real thing: a wonderful lineup and run on a shoestring with barely seedcorn funding from Literature Wales.
    It seemed that I was working for the b-side Multimedia Arts Festival right through the spring and summer but the Weymouth events were launched on 29th July and went on till 12 August. I've put some photos up in a previous post of my work Weymouth Sands that was shown on the Esplanade through the Olympic period. It was good to visit Weymouth for research and get to know the town a little, quite similar in many ways to Exmouth where I live. 31st July I did an artist's talk in the Sea View Restaurant upstairs at the Pier Bandstand on the Esplanade; it was that building, and the idea of the vanished pier that was the focus for my work in Weymouth.
     The Edinburgh International Book Festival was different in kind from the other Festivals. I travelled with Sara and stayed in Edinburgh for a few days and we went to see what we could of the Edinburgh Festivals, all going on at the same time, it seemed taking over the whole city. I read with Alan Gillis and Fiona Sampson on the 23rd August, a very good event, I hadn't seen Alan Gillis read before, whereas I've seen Fiona Sampson at a couple of other events; we did a launch together at the London Review Bookshop in 2007. The director of Edinburgh International Book Festival is Nick Barley. They really know how to look after their authors. I did an interview with Jennifer Williams for the Scottish Poetry Library. Whilst we were in Edinburgh we went to see a couple of exhibitions and the Julliard Dance company of New York and some rather tired and dreary comedy by Sean Hughes on the fringe. The dance performance by the Julliard Dance company was one of the best things I've ever seen on the stage. Three pieces in the programme, all of them very different and all stunning. It was very good to visit Edinburgh and to see our friends Randall Stevenson and Sarah Carpenter.
     We also went on a bus trip to Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden Little Sparta, that I last visited in the early 1980s. We saw a Finlay exhibition at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh and then went from there in a minibus direct to Little Sparta. I don't think you could get there otherwise unless you hired a car, it's only a dozen miles or so to the south of Edinburgh, in the Pentland Hills, but you wouldn't get a bus to anywhere nearby. The garden is a converted hillside croft and has been developed to about three times the size it was when I was last there. It is a wonder of Scottish culture, one of the most ambitious artworks in Britain, a garden of poetry and philosophy. The works are mostly inscriptions located in devised garden settings, and the garden uses native plants to great effect. The various areas of the garden have very different characters, some opening out into lochans, moorland and hillside, others quite separately developed, with their own atmosphere: the Roman Garden, the Allotment, the Temple Pool Garden, the Woodland Garden, the Wild Garden, the Lochan Eck Garden, the English Parkland. Inscriptions and sculptures are everywhere, there are lots of works I hadn't seen before. The Little Sparta Trust website has lots of excellent photos gives a good sense of the garden. These two images of Ian Hamilton Finlay works (Man: A Passerby and 1942) were taken on that visit in July 2012 and are published here with the permission of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay.


 

CONCRETE POETRY AT THE ICA

On 17th June I went to the exhibition POOR. OLD. TIRED. HORSE. at the ICA in London. Named after the 1960s magazine run by Ian Hamilton Finlay, POOR. OLD. TIRED. HORSE. is 'an exhibition of art that verges on poetry', including 1960s Concrete Poetry and Text Art by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Dom Sylvester Houedard, Henri Chopin, Ferdinand Kriwet, Liliane Lijn, Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Christopher Knowles, and artists from that period who used text in some way such as Robert Smithson, Philippe Guston, Alasdair Gray, David Hockney, and some more recent artists who make text based art: Anna Barham, Janice Kerbel, Sue Tompkins, Karl Holmqvist, Matthew Brannon and Frances Stark.

     I was really delighted to see the 1960s concrete work, especially an installation of Ian Hamilton Finlay's Sea Poppy I as a large wall painting. It was also wonderful to see dsh typewriter art as framed originals rather than as reproductions in books. I have the Finlay in my copy of Keith Tuma's Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (New York: OUP, 2001), but it really is much more impressive as a large wall painting. Liliane Lijn's rotating text cones set on record-player turntables (photo above, from the V & A collection) are great, Ferdinand Kriwet's stamped circular aluminium signs playing on power and sex language, Carl Andre's excerpts from Shooting a Script, Christopher Knowles' 'typings' from the 1970s, patterns made with the typewriter matrix, that look like carpet designs incorporating text. All this work is really worth seeing and the material that extends the show is compelling at first, especially the Philippe Guston / Clark Coolidge collaboration 'I am the First' (1972). After that, there is a quite a bit of material that is interesting but doesn't really manage to take the Text Art concept anywhere. I don't think that contemporary Text Art is represented well in this show.