Shadowplay

12 July 2008

We ate in some pub. It was London but some part between one and another – a not-quite-zone, ambiguous, hard to definite in its mix of houses, businesses, retail units, construction work, cobbled alleys and nothingness. The light and the sky above was pure Magritte for a while, vivid blue and unreal, later fading with the street to become a shadowy De Chirco.  Just down the road Crow said was a house in which Verlaine and Rimbaud had stayed for a while, a house of ill repute, whose blue plaque was now removed for reasons that could only be guessed at. History was always flickering then, in and out of existence, a story told one day and not the next, a story still whispered.

Outside the window, in the darkness/dim orange of distant streetlamps and moon, men were waiting on the street to catch plastic bin-liners crammed with rubbish dropped from the windows of the flat upstairs, the bags then laid out on the street like lines of slumbering figures hunched foetal for collection. A strange furtive sport – this dropping and catching of the bags – played in the shadows, and meant apparently to be observed only as if by chance, through windows as conversation proceeded inside…

Someone said that as a child all her dreams were bad dreams (and hence she grew to fear sleep, telling herself stories to stay out of it, pinching herself… trying all sorts of remedies but always falling in the end to that place where dreams would come, unwanted.)

Another seated at the table, with clear deep eyes, said that once, way back as a child, she’d dreamed that she’d pressed the button to launch the bombs to start the nuclear war. Months of guilt, maybe longer, for something that did not even happen.

The Broken World Website

11 July 2008
Broken World Website Image

My friend Mary Agnes and her team at byHand have been working on a simple website for my novel The Broken World. It went live yesterday, or thereabouts after a fair amount of conversations on the move, with Mary and I sat or stood or walking in different parts of the country (or Europe in general) saying things like “Have you got it on the screen in front of you?” or “I can only look at it on my phone” and talking about navigations and interfaces and backgrounds and cells. I had flashbacks of working on Frozen Palaces and Nightwalks more than ten years ago, downloading ridiculos huge QT movie files over a dialup from Germany in the office of a theatre and calling Mary to discuss in the fifteen minutes before a show started.

They’ve done a great job on The Broken World site. Text is fragments from the book, or new fragments related to it. Images, collages and design are by Mary et al, plus maps, a few tweaks and a handful of additional images from me. The one above I was esp pleased with. Interested to see what kind of traffic the site might get.I liked the working-diagram below quite a bit too, produced along the way – a map of the site, with links and representations of all the pages and the routes between them. Something about the sketch, and the miniatuarisation, and the representation of choices, that I really like. (File under: representation of the structure of a website devoted to a novel about the structure of an imaginary computer game).

Broken World Website Map

Neon London

8 July 2008

Starting tonight my neon Wait Here is being shown at a new project space Butchers run by Ben Borthwick and Cylena Simonds. Ben is an Assistant Curator at Tate Modern. Cylena is an independent curator and writer based in London. From 2004-2008 she was the Exhibitions Curator at Iniva. Butchers looks like it is going to be an interesting adventure.

Wait Here at Butcher’s, 183 Royal College Street, NW1 0SG, 9 July – 25 August. Viewing hours: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (but best after dusk!). Opening reception: Tuesday, 8 July, 6-8pm. Transport:   Camden Town tube/ Camden Road rail/ Regent’s Canal. Press text:

“Shown for the first time in London, Tim Etchells’s artwork Wait Here (2008) launches the opening of new project space Butcher’s on 9 July.

In his display for Butcher’s shop front window, Etchells’ red neon sign reads in full Wait Here I Have Gone To Get Help, suggesting an ominous event has taken place, the gravity of which we do not know. Passersby may wonder if the sign refers to an individual event, something that happened recently on the street or to a general state of the neighbourhood/country/planet.

But there is a tension between the language and materials of this artwork. The urgent call to wait is at odds with the fixed state of the sign. How long should we hold on? And how long has the situation (whatever it is) been going on? Is it getting worst while we wait? Will help come in time? If we leave, are we forsaking the possibility of help, even hope, in the future?

The absurdity of this dilemma is particularly appropriate for the launch of an unfunded non-commercial art space. Butcher’s identifies with Etchells’ piece in terms of its relevance to our immediate financial and organisational capabilities, but also as an oblique comment on the role of art spaces in the community. Will Butcher’s reaffirm a sense of community, or is it just another stage of gentrification?”

*

Barbara Campbell pointed me to Ivan Grubanov’s website. She had just come across his paintings of empty stages. Apart from the connection to the Empty Stages photo-series Hugo and I are working on, I like the combination of the paintings with the rest of the work you can see there on Grubanov’s site, esp the images of a performance in which he speaks from a crane in front of the parliament building in Belgrade. I guess what’s effective to me is the contrast in the work between a political reality – charged, real – and the (perhaps equally dangerous) idea of something transcendent, other, outside.

Movie Collider

6 July 2008

# In situations like the Vietnam war, and violent inner city neighborhoods, the person with the most plans, prospects, and hopes will die.
# A dying person’s last words will always be coherent and significant.
# A good person will always die in the presence of friends.
# If a good person dies with his eyes open, a friend will close them, and they will remain closed. If a villain dies with his eyes open, no one will close them, and the camera will linger on his face.

The above from a long long list of movie cliches that Graham Parker pointed me to. Quite a nice text.

*

Reeling, we cross to a similar chamber called the Compact Muon Solenoid. It is here that the famous “God Particle” may emerge. And it is here that they really mug me with concepts. They try to soften the blow by claiming that physicists find it difficult to visualise extra dimensions too. That’s easy to say when you’re packing 26 of them. They’ve got the maths. They can pull down extra dimensions whenever they want their equations to balance. You just have to accept them. That makes you vulnerable. Your rationality dissolves.

Also liked this account from Chris Morris about visiting the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland.

Launched

5 July 2008

So. The Broken World is launched. We had some very nice drinks to celebrate.
Mike Harrison (M. John) blogged about it – I only recently noticed that Mike started blogging again, at a new address. So Uncle Zip’s Window is gone, but Ambiente Hotel is just as good a place to be.

Reviews of The Broken World are slowly starting to appear – I will update as and when more come in. The best of the bunch so far is from Stuart Kelly writing in Scotland on Sunday:

“..an exhilarating and poignant tale of love, loss and computer games that ought to make the leap from “cult classic” to”popular success”… The Broken World is ultimately a humane and heartfelt book, with a proper emotional core wrapped up in a giddyingfantasia. It manages to be desperately sad and desperately funny at the same time. It is a book of big ideas, cunningly delivered through a slacker’s shrug.”

So-so from the TLS, but it’s not online. And an interesting, positive one from Matt Thorn writing in the July edition of the Literary Review, also not online.

Great blog responses so far from Big Dumb Object and Marcus Gipps.

I’ve also been doing some online interviews etc. Here you can see the one from Metro, and the one for Big Dumb Object. More of these to come… will post links.. and try not repeat myself too much

 

Berlin

1 July 2008

The alarm does not even go off but I stir anyway at 6.10 and realise I have 15 minutes to get out of the room and downstairs into the taxi. Time stretches.

In the taxi I’m barely functional – still too close to the sleep world – but as we wait at some traffic lights some way into the journey to Tegel ask about a building we are stopped near.

Is it a prison?

Yes. But for economic crime.. not murders and such.. I don’t know what you call it. White collar crime?

White collar crime.

It’s the place they kept Erich Honecker and the last politicians of the GDR.

I nod. Yeah. OK.

Then a minute later, a way along the road, I ask:

Are they all dead now, those guys?

Yes. I think so. He died in Chile, he asked for asylum there and died there.

OK. Yeah.

The next light we stop at the driver reaches for a card index box on the dashboard. Flips through it. I’m thinking that she probably checks her next job, or consults some personal info about a doctor’s appointment of something, thinking that this is a very bureaucratic taxi driver.

She looks up, slides the box back. 1994 she says. He died in 94.

I’m pretty puzzled. I wait a moment and then I ask – What’s the card index?

Thinking that it’s very weird to have a card index in your taxi that contains this kind of information.

I write things down, she says. From the newspaper. Just facts and things. Things you dont find in the guide books. Sometimes I do guided tours. So I write down interesting things. Things people might want to know.

We drive in silence for a while. But the rest of the journey I’m thinking about this card index. The kinds of things it might or might not contain.

Death Is Certain

27 June 2008
Death Is Certain - Eva Meyer-Keller

Death Is Certain - Eva Meyer-Keller

A chunk from a long piece I wrote a while back about Eva Meyer Keller’s brilliant performance Death Is Certain:

Deaths are enacted on cherries, one by one. When the last cherry is killed, the performance is over. The execution of the performance (small pun intended) is as perfectly simple, as lacking in frills or ornamentation as the structure. Meyer Keller moves between the tables in her deadly kitchen, moving from one killing to the next, in a mode that might be described as neutral or functional, but which in any case declines to signal comment on her task. She makes no drama of her decisions, no comedy or tragedy of her actions and no melodrama of her reactions. Slightly brusque, with a faint hint of the laboratory or cook’s assistant in her demeanour, her manner might best be described as that of someone simply doing a job. She does what’s needed, not more and not less. After an initial acknowledgement of those watching, she does not bother much with the informally grouped audience; does not seek eye contact or look for reactions to what she is doing. She is self-contained, to all extents and purposes too busy with her job to have time for social niceties and in any case, clearly convinced that what’s she’s doing – demonstration of death on her thirty-five cherries – both speaks for and is clear enough in itself not to warrant further mediation or explanation from her.

What I’d forgotten, watching the piece again last week in Toulouse was how much Eva’s performance tunes you to see detail. The difference (visually, emotionally, physically, performatively, metaphorically) between a cherry skinned with a razor blade and a cherry stripped with the abrasive edge of a nail file, the particular crackle and fizz of bare electrical wires pushed into the cherry on the plate, the way the smoke from a cigarette curls and shifts when trapped inside a plastic cup (gas chamber to some other unfortunate cherry). For something so small – a performance that takes place for the most part on two table-tops – it’s extraordinarily vivid. Made me think a lot about the way that any work creates an economy of expectation – a set of parameters  – which it then exploits. It’s great how sometimes the strictest of these restrictions create the most  beautiful resonant things.

Disturbances

25 June 2008

With Vlatka Horvat. 2008.

From a position seated at a table in the space a lone performer makes a series of occasional deadpan 'public announcements' into a microphone relayed, over a loudspeaker system. The announcements puncture the social set up of an event or location, and momentarily suspend conversation and other interactions.

Comprising statements such as: ‘Please return to your houses and stay inside’,
‘Put down the weapons. Put down the weapons’, and ‘Clear the area. Clear the area. Go back to your houses’, the announcements come from another context – that of riot or civil disturbance – and sit in a comical and unsettling relation to the environment of gallery, art-space or public building.

The Frequently Asked

Eight-hour performance/discussion event. 2007. Curated by Tim Etchells and Adrian Heathfield. Videography by Hugo Glendinning.

An invited international group of 16 artists, writers, curators and thinkers ask each other questions relating to contemporary art, to their own practice and its place in the wider cultural, philosophical and social landscape. The questions range from the experiential to the metaphysical, from the practical to the hypothetical, from the mundane to the absurd. This is no normal talk-session, but instead a rolling marathon lasting eight hours in total, taking the form of a playful and exhausting relay interview, in which participants first ask and then answer a series of questions during a specified time-slot ‘on stage’.

The Frequently Asked aims to accumulate through an evolving sequence of relations and questions, a dynamic picture of the current stakes and states of thinking around aspects of art, performance and cultural practice.

The audience for The Frequently Asked are free to arrive, depart and return at any point.

First presented 24th November 2007. Commissioned by Tanzquartier Vienna.

Participants: Rebecca Schneider, William Pope.L, Bojana Kunst, Alan Read, Alastair MacLennan, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Boyan Manchev, Jonathan Burrows, Joe Kelleher, Irit Rogoff, La Ribot, Emil Hrvatin, Matthew Goulish, Lin Hixson, Tim Etchells, Adrian Heathfield.

Please Come Back

Neon Sign. 2008.

The text spelt out in the sign suggests both an intimate relationship with its author and a situation of our past conflict and consequent departure from some place, none of which can be fully inferred or understood from the information supplied. A further tension exists between the personal topic and supposed urgency of the text on the one hand and the overly elaborate means of its display. A message most suitable or likely for a private communication is here turned into a public plea, producing a host of confusions and amplifications in respect of its status and significance.