derek beaulieu – Enclave Review

Interview with Tony Trehy

Robin Foley — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 16:30:46 +0000

The 3rd bi-annual Text Festival opened April 29, 2011 in Bury, UK. The festival is an international exhibition of text-based art. derek beaulieu — who was a participant this year — had an opportunity to discuss the festival’s impetus and future with curator Tony Trehy.

beaulieu: Has the mandate of the festival changed since its first incarnation? What for you have been the highlights of the festival to date?

Trehy: There is something about the word mandate that suggests that its imperatives came from somewhere else, from outside. I think the reason why it has developed a unique status is that it generates its own context. I suppose no-one else can see the festival the way I do because I have seen all three of the festivals, but for me, the Text Festivals are in dialogue with each other. I have found it interesting this time round how a number of poets have written about how it has taken a direction or a position in relation to poetry. But the festival isn’t about poetry: it’s not a poetry festival. The festival is always to do with a question. So with the first exhibition of the first festival (also my first highlight), I asked myself: how do I curate a show that juxtaposes contemporary poetry with visual (language) art? By its aesthetic location, the festival often operates in fields in which recipients (to use Lawrence Weiner’s term) may not come equipped with the knowledges and histories of particular artforms. As Art Monthly magazine observed, I have an ‘intrepid resistance to interpretation’, and in exhibitions of text I don’t see how you can use interpretive texts without clunking over the works. So I am presented with the problem of how to come up with a curatorial strategy that can contextualise the question for a gallery visitor. This led me, in the first show, to create a large bookcase that blocked views into the gallery — you had to face it and go round it to get in. I called this ‘The Canon’ and featured all the books you would need to get all the messages in the show—ha! Audiences aren’t asked to work hard enough nowadays. And into the show itself: again, is there a curatorial conceit that can represent this coming together of forms? Taking a form from Concrete Poetry, I came up with a display constellation. This was working very nicely but there was still something missing. Although the festival has announced submission deadlines, if the curatorial concept demands it, I will keep accepting proposals and looking for works right up to the last minute. In this case, I didn’t know what was missing, just that it needed something. It came in the form of a performance artist, Hester Reeve (HRH.the) who proposed to spend the nine weeks of the first show sitting in the gallery reading and simultaneously writing Heidegger’s Being and Time.

Bob Cobbing Exhibition (Text Festival 2005), installation shot © Phil Davenport.

In the second Festival, although a lot of people rated the Bury Poems readings with Tony Lopez, Carol Watts and Phil Davenport, my highpoint was the headline gig with Ron Silliman. For this the question was, if you have Ron doing his first ever reading in the UK, who else do you put on the bill? There couldn’t be another poet, so I programmed Scottish student story-telling artist, Catriona Glover, German turntablist Claus van Bebber, and Hester Reeve. I was very pleased with that balance. It was a great night, but this year surpassed curatorially by the juxtaposition of sound art from Sarah Boothroyd and Bruno Bresani with Holly Pester, Eduard Escoffet, Christian Bök plus the surprise interventions of Geof Huth and you.

A couple of guest curators have produced magical moments to note: Phil Davenport’s Bob Cobbing show in 2005 and this year’s readings of Schwitters’ Ursonata at Warth Mill.

That’s a lot of highlights, but I’d like to add another: an element of all the festivals that forms an integral part of the dynamic is the festival party where a lot of the artists meet — that is very important.

beaulieu: So — if each festival is in dialogue with the previous, then what — after the 3rd incarnation — would you still like to address?

Trehy: Ah, the trick question — I wondered how you might approach this. As you know, I announced before this Festival that I wouldn’t be doing another. At various points during the 2011 event I did have ideas of what might be interesting next. But I am still resisting the tyranny of having to do what one is able to do. Through my links with Finland — visual art and poetry — we are talking about doing some sort of Text show/event in Tampere (the Manchester of Finland), so my textual inclinations may still be occupied; but either way, if there were to be another Text Festival, it couldn’t be until 2014 because I am working on another (non-text) international art project which will keep me occupied until then (starting in September, I’ll be setting it up in China).

But thinking about the question, I have been reflecting on the Festival just ending and have an increasing sense of disappointment with the responses of the poetry community — so I’d probably start thinking about how to address the problems I perceive: namely, it struck me that, despite my aspiration to locate poetry in dialogue with other language-using artforms, writings coming out of the festival have tended only to engage with poetry. I found it really telling that no-one commented on the location of George Widener and Steve Miller in Wonder Rooms, for instance — both visual artists not visual poets, both using language in gripping ways. I’m not saying that there weren’t great visual poems in the show; I’m saying it seems odd to me that the visual artists’ contribution drew so little attention from the poets. Similarly, the poets have tended to focus on Ron Silliman’s neon text and Tony Lopez’s digital text in the Sentences exhibition; but the poets don’t seem to have anything to say about the Marcel Broodthaers, for instance. I think I would address this. Maybe there would be fewer poets; maybe supporting a notion of ‘poetry community’ itself is counter-productive in shifting poetry into a more critically rigorous relationship with art.

I think that Ron also asked a question that interests me: he observed that a lot of the work on display can’t be ‘called new in any way that is meaningful within poetry’ (note again that this locates the Festival agenda as poetic). He proceeded to raise the question ‘Is the work any good?’ Some of it is more than good. Some of it isn’t. I have a pretty good idea which is which. But again, I am not sure that I am comfortable with the claim for the festival that quality of work is its aim. I set out to investigate the implications of certain actions, certain juxtapositions. It’s my hope that testing ideas is what participating artists will use the festival for – the space to fail, and learn things from that. Some of the criticisms of Ron’s neon are legitimate but much of it misses the point of what that work does in the gallery and how it will function as a piece of site-specific public art. Christian Bök’s Protein 13 is still a work in progress; he would acknowledge that he developed his thinking about how the model and text function as objects on display as the installation progressed; and I think that that is an important contribution to the development of the work.

More information on the Text Festival can be found at www.textfestival.com.

It Quacks Like a Duck: Conceptual Writing

Robin Foley — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 11:05:20 +0000

The classical inspiration for writing poetry is the humanist moment — the urge to communicate a classical ‘truth’ about the human experience — love, memory, heartbreak — through now familiar poetic diction. Poetry, now, has become an indicator for ‘what looks like poetry’ — if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be confessional humanism. The poem as finely wrought epiphanic moment of personal reflection (the poetry norm) underlines mass-culture and political sameness; it does little to question or confront how language itself defines the limitations of expression — both personal and critical. Writers that emphasize the classical and humanist definitions of poetry without considering the work being done in alternative forms of writing do little to further the writing of poetry: they offer only what is most palatable to the most conservative of audiences.

The accommodationist ‘official verse culture’ of personal confession and reflection has been flattened into a sameness of subject, form and structure. In striving for universality it instead degenerates into an implicit support of sloganeering, advertising and suburban consumerism. Neo-Conservative writing continuously underlines the relationship between power and language. But a number of contemporary writers distance themselves from the humanist trope by finding inspiration in found and manipulated texts. These texts allow the author to move writing out of its confines of the confessional, and into areas of language which are not typically seen as ‘literature.’

Marc Lowenthal, in discussion of the work of Francis Picabia, refers to writing in a way which is quite apt for conceptual writing as well — he suggests that Picabia’s writing deals less with language than it does with experience:

[…t]his is not language ‘transformed’ into art or literature […] or even a language that is experienced […] but rather, experience as simply experience—something that is private, amusing, serious, abstract, unpoetic. […] Language does not have to communicate to affect, to be ‘touching’ (14).

Emma Kay’s Worldview, successfully negotiates the schism between the humanist drive and the conceptual compositional strategy where language is assembled, not written. Worldview is nothing less than Kay’s exhaustive history of the world from the Big Bang to the year 2000 written entirely from memory. Worldview is highly personal, but rather than dwell on experience, and the inherent ability of language to represent meaning, Kay writes in the flattened, infallible tone of a high school textbook, Kay’s history of the world is created not through import, or sociological subject matter but purely on the idiosyncrasies of her own (faulty) memory:

A scientific breakthrough resulted in the discovery of the basic structure of human existence, Dino Nucleic Acid or dna, often known as the double helix. Scientists had been searching for years for the basic building blocks of life, and in 1953 a team of scientists in Cambridge University, with the help of Scandinavian research, isolated dna and saw that it consisted of two intertwined helical chains of genetic material. (107)

Worldview, spends only the first 75 (of 230) pages of the history of the world until the 20th Century, focusing on the encyclopedic reiteration of history primarily from the artist’s lifetime. Worldview works as the non-site documenting the site of Kay’s memory— while appropriating the flawless tone of cultural authority. A sample section of the index to Worldview reveals Kay’s own selective sense of history:

HIV, 156, 181
Holland, 45, 57
Holliday, Billy, 113
Hollywood, 86, 99, 145, 190, 195 Holocaust, 92, 95
holograms, 129
Holyfield, Evander, 197
(220).

Worldview is a maddening text, as it testifies that a contemporary artist could actually conceive of a world where ‘Aerosmith’ (p. 132) and ‘Archimedes’ (p. 16) have the same historical credibility. Kay presents a text which is both encyclopaedic in purview, but also centered on the fallibility of personal recollection.

Worldview’s non-interventionalist practice is typical of much conceptual writing, as the filter between the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary’ becomes a theoretical one. Kay accumulates language and representation in a way that foregrounds the materiality of text, but even more so the documentation of experience. Materiality here is not one of humanist poetic — ‘the stuff of poetry’ — but rather one that is developed through the sheer mass of the extraordinary ordinary. It is typical of Conceptual writing that the author should work with extant material to re-contextualize and refocus an already existing genre (typified by what Kenneth Goldsmith refers to as ‘uncreative writing’) with a focus on materiality, collection and accumulation. It is the documentation of processual writing, as exemplified by Kenneth Goldsmith’s No.111, Craig Dworkin’s Parse, Rob Fitterman’s The Sun Also Also Rises and Darren Wershler and Bill Kennedy’s apostrophe.

Sol LeWitt, in his ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ — thirty-five sentences published in 1969 which operate both as a manifesto and as a piece of conceptual art in their own right—postulates that

28.Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist’s mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly.[…]
29.The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course. (222)

This shared processual base for conceptual art and conceptual writing is not to suggest that conceptual writing is a temporally-displaced adjunct to conceptual art, but instead that the two share æsthetic values, and that conceptual art can be understood as a moment of Oulipian ‘anticipatory plagiary.’

LeWitt wrote in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but a generation of writers later, these statements have taken on new weight. His statements on mechanical procedurality in visual art are also vital for conceptual writing, as ‘[t]o work with a plan which is pre-set is one way of avoiding subjectivity’ (LeWitt ‘Paragraphs’ 214), while his resistance to humanist subjectivity seems even more relevant. A comparable stance, referring directly to literary work, can be found in Robert Smithson’s 1968 statement ‘Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’: ‘poetry being forever lost must submit to its own vacuity; it is somehow a product of exhaustion rather than creation’ (107).

In his famous defence of Joyce’s Work in Progress, Samuel Beckett argued that ‘[h]ere is direct expression—pages and pages of it’ and chides the reader that ‘[y]ou are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other.’

Beckett’s defence of Work in Progress is temporally adaptable to become a slogan for conceptual work in general: ‘[h]ere form is content, content is form [.…] this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. [… this] writing is not about something; it is that something itself’ (502–503).