Dickensian era throw backs in the weather. Laughing apprentices at some small steelworks bombard passers by from the rooftops down by the long closed down Niche all nighter venue. Beautiful how the three lads up there silhouette against the flat gray sky as they duck up from behind the low wall on the roof, pelting those that struggle unsteady in the deep snow on the pavements below. A trio of more or less amiable snipers. Snows good for yer one of them yells, shell suit hood pulled tight around grinning face, two gloved hands containing missiles at the ready. Just don't eat any that's yellow says the other and they launch the attack, laughing. Even those struck seem fine, resigned to their fate in sniper alley, somehow glad that the world does not work properly today and, partly mesmerised by their own irregular footsteps, the steady dampening of the city, its slow descent, now begun, into the silence and stillness that will bind it at night. Up near home it's much the same, traffic already at more or less a standstill, the pavements a mix of strugglers and impromptu fighters. At the Exhaust Fitters/Car Maintenance place right opposite my house the blokes have pretty much abandoned work in favour of more pressing business, and are all out on the forecourt, an army in blue overalls defending their territory against a small group of kids/teenagers that are dug in behind some parked cars on the opposite side of the street. Snowballs vault the road, pedestrians caught in the crossfire, the odd car taking its chances to pass thru, wheels grinding and slipping as the shots fire overhead. The kids – a mix of Asian lads and white boys, a few girls in their headscarves,  all bare hands, no gloves, are outnumbered in any case by the laconic blokes in blue, the music of the latter spilling from their workshop, their Radio One clanging out into the landscape from tinny forecourt speakers to fall on the foot churned snow. There is something of carnival in it, and a total joy in the ease and delight with which people abandon the regular day and let loose into this one.

*

And this from my friend Alan Read:

"As we waited 18 years for this modest correction I wondered if this might be a balance to the arguments about lost GDP and travel chaos:

'The city without the child’s particular motion is a malignant paradox. The child discovers its identity against all odds, damaged and damaging in perpetual danger and incidental sunshine. Edged towards the periphery of attention, the child survives, an emotional and unproductive quantum. When snow falls on cities, the child, taking over for a while, is all at once Lord of the city. Now, if the child thus assisted, rediscovers the city, the city may still rediscover its children. If childhood is a journey, let us see that the child does not travel by night. Where there is some room, something more permanent than snow can still be provided as a modest correction. Something, unlike snow, the city can absorb; and not altogether unlike the many incidental things already there the child adapts anyhow to its own needs at its own hazard.'

Aldo Van Eyck, quoted by Francis Strauven in ‘Aldo Van Eyck’, Amsterdam: Architectura and Natura, 1998, p. 169.

Later, after the teacher bloke has folded away his books, after the class announcements concerning births, evacuations, deaths and otherwise, two of the kids get in some kind of argument concerning the question of what are the tiny particles that the whole world is actually made of.

Argument starts off small and gets bigger, whether it is molecules as the first one claim or pixels according to the other. The talk goes back and forth in the way of these things, the two of them seated on desks, all mouthy and feet up on the chairs, even as voices get more heated. Or at least it stays that way until the point where the two ontologists rise for confrontation, kick back the furniture for the more or less inevitable violence to settle all this and the kid that says it's molecules grabs the other by the hair and then they are both pulling and kicking, a blurred and panting double head-locked beast in the form of a scuffle surrounded by a turning irregular circle and the ragged onlookers wheel this way and that, experts in the art of the semi-excited bystander, until, later, near the end, the whole thing grinds and judders to a halt as the taller of the two (molecules) gets the proponent of pixels down hard on the ground where he punches him repeatedly in the face, smashing his glasses in several places and somehow also breaking something in his victims nose at which point a thick dark red trail of fluid starts to flow from it and the fight is more or less done, the argument more or less settled and the sad trickle trail of the pixels that make up the losers blood is making its way down, slipping slowly down the pixel surface of the face to the ground where the thick red fluid coagulates, its pixels making dark running pools upon the chess board pattern of the pixelated mud-scuffed flooring tiles.

*

I speak with P. at the Museum who explains that our plans will have to be framed in any case by the policies set down by the archiving department. According to these rules works on paper he says, can be shown for up to two years but then must be rested for the same period, in storage, away from the light. For some reason I like thinking about the drawings and photographs, kept in the darkness in this way, waiting until they're allowed to be back in public, remembering what eyes can do to them, enjoying the silence.

Random google image searching (for the Forced Entertainment project in progress Void Story) led me to this material on Dance Marathons.

“Fatigue brought them to a state resembling a coma, a state which seemed to offer relief from the soreness of the day’s travail. During these episodes, contestants hallucinated, became hysterical, had delusions of persecution … acted out daily rituals: they talked to an imaginary companion, grinned vacantly, and snatched objects from the air” (Calabria)

*

Looking down on switzerland as the plane lands you see all the villages laid out in the diagram form, the snow paper, the streets, houses and forests a charcoal sketch, the pencil marks equal measures of pitch black heavy, vivid and precise, the black roads long marks scratched across the snow white land, lines made (formed) of lives or lives made of (made in) lines, and, as the plane gets lower still you see the animated figures of the swiss – complete silhouettes set loose against the complex backdrop – inked figures walking white fields to the treeline, running the border of a frozen lake, stood motionless at the edge of a street like shadows newly possessed of life and uncertain what to do with it, raising a featureless hand to a featureless face… all shape. Best of all as you glide towards the runway, on a field below a dog runs a line parallel but reverse to your own trajectory, a bounding pulsing muscle darkness, the clenching, stretching legs a perfect Muybridge passing by.

*

Kate wrote:

it’s all on snow mode round here so it looks like Breugel out the window – bulky hunched figures in black on white.

*

*
Mark wrote:

The flu thing lingers but largely gone.
I told N. the farm cat milo was in fact a very small alien in a cat suit with a hidden zip. I also said I caught him once with his cat suit round his ankles having a wee. He was quite annoyed that I caught him. He also has a space ship somwhere on the farm that was in need of repairs, the location is something we re going to have to work on.
all the way thru this N. is saying are you true, but are you true and staring into my eyes from 1 inch away as if proximity would filter lies better.
he also asked me what I thought about god and what exactly does he do.
we are also going to find a wizard and bring all the people in a church yard back to life.
first tho, we are going to get the wizard to bring back king harold and get that pesky arrow out of his eye because it would be very sore

*

Triggered by this line: “For the presidential election, he wrote two speeches: one for a victory, one for defeat” (in the Guardian from a piece concerning Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau) I was thinking about alternative histories, esp in relation to speech-writing. Remembered this amazing text written by William Safire in 1969 as a speech for then US President Richard Nixon, a speech which would only have been delivered in the event that Apollo 13 astronauts were deemed unsaveable and destined to perish in space. The imagined future as a source for text. Rhetorical gearings-up for events which do not come to pass, textual rehearsals, shadows of futures that do not take place. A history of the world through what did not happen.

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace…”

“There is no known complete protection from the breakup event except to prevent its occurrence.”

True. From the NASA report, published yesterday, on the breakup of the Challenger Space Shuttle. More in the NYT.

In a conference call with reporters on Tuesday, N. Wayne Hale, Jr., a former head of the shuttle program, said, “I call on spacecraft designers from all the other nations of the world, as well as the commercial and personal spacecraft designers here at home, to read this report and apply these lessons which have been paid for so dearly.”

Looks like Ballard was right. It’s not the writers who get the best sentences these days. It’s the engineers. Beautiful.

*

See also.

*

In less apocalyptic mode Will Ashon invited me to do a “best books/art/dance etc of the year” which is now posted, along with contributions from a whole bunch of other people at his blog Vernaland.

Local newspapers carried a typical story of a man who had been sending text messages out of a coma. How he had been in that coma a long long time in a hospital of the city and how all family and nurses and all that had by then got used to the slow rise and fall of his breathing, the ocassional twitching of fingers, shifting of toes, movement caused by evacuation of bowels etc. And then how the mother of the guy one day went by to visit, unexpected and alone one winter afternoon and noticed his thumb was moving, twitching, nervous, circling, stark against the white sheets. And how one thing led to another and a small crowd assembled to stare, and how when his uncle came by he remarked that with all that movement it looked like the man might be texting in his 'sleep'. And although laughing and incredulous, larking around almost they tried it with a old Nokia that belonged to his step-dad, just like the one he had before, and his mate Kev or Baz (according to different reports), bent his hand around it, the digits a strange combination of eager and inert. Also how the brother begged them not to do all this, saying that it was all too much disrespect, too much against nature, that "they should leave him coma in peace" (sic) but that reason prevailed and soon there was a near dead man lying horizontal, familly and a few stray nurses/night-porters gathered round and the phone in his hand. Of the thumbs continued movements, and the texts he started to send. Strange texts the paper said, very strange. As if maybe written in a texting slang of another era, or in the code-word argot of some unknown teenage tribe, or maybe perhaps gibberish. They called in a psychic, a texting expert, a poet etc to pass for a panel of opinion and still none the fucking wiser. Paper reprinted a few of them messages also. Dumb combinations of letters that did not make words, but chilling sounds and people of that town wrote in to claim that they could read messages printed there but no one really confirmed or believed. A few weeks running the papers featured the bloke, in many editions, with a few pictures and all speculations about what strange zone he was communicating from, between life and death they said, most likely. Local radio even used his texts as an introduction to songs each Saturday morning and invited listeners to call in or even send their own texts to interpret them. But then came the matter of his bill, and in the end, what with the familly skint and the general down-turn, there was no one that wanted to keep paying it and communications, 'such as they were' the paper added in a late attack of cynicism, ceased.

The Live Art Development Agency and Tate Research have just announced that artist Anne Bean and I are the two recipients of their joint Legacy: Thinker in Residence Awards. Very exciting. The awards have been set up in recognition of the breadth of influence of Live Art practice in the UK today, and to acknowledge its achievers and achievements over the last few decades. The awards – which follow a complex shortlisting and application process – are focused around ideas of legacy, documentation and archive in the broadest interpretation of these terms and give Anne and I, in our own distinct ways, a fantastic opportunity to research the legacies of performance in art historical contexts, examining the processes and challenges of archiving live work, and looking at our own performance practice in relation to these.

Press statement with all the details below.

Three fragments from my application here, the first of them reworking a short text I wrote a while ago in another context:

Years ago Forced Entertainment rented a couple of garages on the edge of Sheffield. It was in these dank, dark and insecure places that we stored for a long time the boxes of old objects and costumes, as well as the sets and other constructions made for previous performances, and the collected raw or nearly raw materials of one kind or another (timber, furniture, steel bars, scaffolding, random ‘interesting’ items) which we thought might be of use to us in some as yet unimagined project, at some time or another in the as yet unimagined future. To each we paid occasional visits, retrieving one thing or another, searching for lost items, or for things for which we’d newly imaged a use. At a certain point the lock on one garage became so rusted that it was impossible to enter, whilst the other developed leaks in its roof, an arson attack badly damaging its doors, thieves breaking the windows, stealing some sound equipment and so on. The garages were unstable, entropic. Mostly Richard would drive up the mud track to them alone, bringing things back in the van, along with reports on the troubled status of the buildings and their much-beleaguered contents. Some newly-mildewed curtains he might bring back, or a crate of shrunken costumes, a wind machine, an overhead projector lacking a plug – stuff that we could use, skip or salvage.  

The garages, I used to joke, were not so much real places as they were a state of mind – a mental space pitched perfectly between an exhausted past and an intense future set of possibilities – a psychic store of both memory and potential, the discarded and the yet to be imagined.

*

Archive to me is a dispersed accumulation of traces. Primary materials – performance objects, constructions, notebooks, papers, drawings and computer files are here and there in Sheffield. Secondary materials are here, there and everywhere. Some of it (as video recordings of performances and rehearsals) is in the British Library Live Art Collection, some of it (as photography) resides in any number of neg files and on any number of hard drives at the studio of Hugo Glendinning, yet more of it is in publications (texts, essays, more photographs) or in other people’s and institutions collections of texts, photographs and videos. None of these accumulations is remotely definitive, nor would I especially wish them to be. All bear some relation to the garages I mentioned above, where a degree of disorganization of the materials distorts and transforms the possibility of their use or comprehension. Again, so be it. Archive to me is by its nature provisional, off-centre. Remaindered from live practice it is emphatically not the thing. It is a residue, sometimes an almost accidental left-over of the work, sometimes a deliberate record, but in any case always a material that waits to be transformed as a kind of work in and of itself.

*

Perhaps two things lie at the core of my diverse artistic practice, especially regarding performance. The first is an interest in the unfolding of events in time – structuring experience and processes over time, manipulating (sculpting) time and building chains or sequences of events that work with and through time itself as a medium. I’m thinking both of dramaturgy, in the theatrical sense and in the expanded sense that comes to us via performance studies. I’m also thinking of the rather different kinds of unfolding temporal structures that backbone the durational works that I have made, witnessed or written about. The second core to performance for me are the various ways in which the form constructs presence – ‘actors’, viewers and the relations between them – and in the economies through which presence in this sense is negotiated, deployed and manipulated; a playful and always live triangulation between all those who are present, in space, and of course through time.

What I’ve begun to work with intuitively, and what I would like to explore very much further through the opportunity of Legacy: Thinker In Residence, is a set of correlations between these fundamental properties of performance and the qualities of quite different forms like the page, the photograph, and text. Through my numerous text-based projects in visual arts, through my work in fiction and through my critical writing on contemporary performance I’ve been exploring for some time the ways that text always conjures (stages) presence, and the ways that its progress on and over pages is (or parallels) a kind of temporal performative process. The page, for me at least, has something that might be considered a dramaturgical now – a moment in the process of narrative or argument, a moment, or set of moments in which the presence of reader/viewer and writer or staged subject find themselves together, in different realities but joined across space and time. This now of the page is what grips me – the present moment, this one, summoned here with this arrangement of marks/code, ink/pixels, letters and words.

**
The Live Art Development Agency and Tate Research are delighted to announce that Anne Bean and Tim Etchells are the recipients of Legacy: Thinker in Residence Awards.

The Legacy awards have been set up in recognition of the breadth of influence of Live Art practice in the UK today, and to acknowledge its achievers and achievements over the last few decades. The awards celebrate artists whose outstanding bodies of work have tested the nature and possibilities of live practices and had a demonstrable influence on the development of the Live Art field.

Live Art is often an ephemeral and fleeting experience and raises many questions about what it might leave behind.  The processes of archiving Live Art and its positioning within an art historical context, pose countless challenges to the artist, the archivist, the art historian, the scholar and the audience alike. Legacy: Thinker in Residence Awards will provide Anne Bean and Tim Etchells with £30,000 each and the opportunity to undertake in-depth research periods throughout 2009 addressing the legacies of performance in art historical contexts, examining the processes and challenges of archiving live work, and looking at their own performance practice in relation to these. From this, they will translate their findings into the creation of their own legacies,that may take the form of new artworks or publications.

Following a national nomination process begun in August 2008 and involving over 50 key UK curators, writers, and thinkers, 49 artists were nominated for consideration for Legacy awards. From these, twelve of the UK’s most influential and inspiring artists were invited to submit proposals on how they would approach the idea of legacy.

The final decisions on the awards were made by a selection panel comprising: Lois Keidan and Daniel Brine (Live Art Development Agency); Nigel Llewellyn (Head of Tate Research); Lizzie Carey-Thomas (Curator Tate Britain); Vanessa Desclaux (Curator Tate Modern); Michael Morris (Director, Artangel); Stella Hall (Creative Director, Newcastle Gateshead Initiative), Claire MacDonald (Centre Director, International Centre for Fine Art Research, University of the Arts London); David A Bailey (senior curator, Autograph); and Mark Waugh (Director, A Foundation).

Legacy is a one-off initiative developed in collaboration between the Live Art Development Agency and Tate Research.

Legacy is financially assisted by Arts Council England and the Live Art Development Agency.

Anne Bean (Born 1950, Zambia. Resident in London) has undertaken numerous solo and collaborative projects worldwide, for nearly 40 years, in diverse media including performance, installation, drawing, photography, video and sound, using materials that range from fire, wind, steam and honey to laughter and breath. In early 2008 she was commissioned by the National Archives to create a permanent installation for their museum at Kew. In summer 2008 she went to Croatia, Iraq-Kurdistan and Spain where she worked with local people to develop and produce performances and installations referencing local history. In autumn 2008 she presented 4 installations for Power Plant, a part of a Liverpool City of Culture programme commissioned by the Contemporary Music Network as well as a performance for Liverpool Biennial Made-Up Weekend.  In November she completed a video inspired by Darwin, commissioned by Artsadmin and DVDance supported by the Wellcome Trust and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. In 2007, she was the International Fellow at Franklin Furnace Archives, New York.
www.annebean.net/

Tim Etchells (Born 1962 in UK. Resident in Sheffield) is an artist and a writer. He has worked in a wide variety of contexts, notably as the leader of the world renowned performance group Forced Entertainment and in collaboration with a range of visual artists, choreographers, and photographers including Meg Stuart, Elmgreen & Dragset, Hugo Glendinning, Vlatka Horvat and many others. His work ranges from performance to video, photography, text projects, installation and fiction. He has also developed a unique voice in writing for and about performance – his monograph Certain Fragments (Forced Entertainment and Contemporary Performance), (Routledge 1999) is widely acclaimed. Etchells has also published fiction; Endland Stories (Pulp Books 1998) and The Dream Dictionary (for the Modern Dreamer) (Duck Editions, 2000) are now followed by his first novel – The Broken World – which takes the form of a guide to an imaginary computer game and was published by Heinemann in July 2008. In recent years he has exhibited work at Sketch and Butchers (both London), Netherlands Media Art Institute (Amsterdam), Sparwasser HQ (Berlin), Art Sheffield 2008, ArtFutures (Bloomberg SPACE, London), The Centre for Book Arts, Canada and Exit Art (all New York), Kunsthaus Graz and Manifesta 7 in Italy.

Ages back Mark mailed me this beautiful text that he'd written for the birthday of an old friend, Chris. I asked if I could post it here and Mark said yes but somehow I delayed and the file got buried on my desktop. Just found it again, sifting the docs and the folders around.

* 

Back in the day when summer months and weeks meant nowt an there was no judge o time, wa’ed be fishin. Back of Ivans place, bottom of th’ garden overt fence, thru the beans and veg down thru the yards a land theyd all took since builders had gone on elseweir.
Nettles abart yay high, enough to sting yas chin anyroad. Waed beaten some track thru t’brookside with willer sticks. Make good swiping and nettle choppers arm telling yu now.
Anyhow, us had cut a swathe an hafe that dee. Musta bin bugger, yard wide.

A wrestle ensued, tho brief it was.
A Blue Circle Brownie to you Sir.
A memorable hour
First time we met
Some time ago
Happy birthday youth.