The other week I gave a lecture (the subject of which is not the subject of this blog) at the Universettee. As its name suggests, the Universettee is interested in shifting the seat of learning from the academy to the home – university to universettee. It’s a university of the comfy chair, and takes place in various people’s houses and flats around London. Lecturers are not paid, and neither are those who host the lectures.
Later on in the same week, I attended a concert. We arrived at a house in Hackney, deposited our coats on top of the bed as we would at a party, and were serenaded with Dvorak, Brahms and Schuman in a downstairs room. Interval drinks and nibbles were informal. Again, the event was free. Both evenings had the feel of a party, and involved the free and easy exchange of thoughts and culture in a homely setting.
It seems to me that these groups, events and projects are forming a new kind of public space – or, perhaps, are drawing our attention to the potential of the public space. For the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas the ‘public sphere’ could be a space for the radical renewing of democracy. Free from the atmosphere of oppression and coercion or the pressures of the bourgeois market, the ‘public sphere’ might be an exciting clamour of voices and ideas.
Perhaps – and only perhaps, because I teach in a university and see their essential value – the removing of the pressured culture of the academy can renew a practical and impassioned curiosity. Perhaps the ability to see a concert outside of its normal context – a context that to some extent is historically conditioned and not absolute – allows listeners to truly grapple with the music.
In other words, there may sometimes be a weight of expectation and rarification that hangs in the air of university halls, concert auditoriums, art galleries and the like. This isn’t a call for dumbing down, nor for a kind of hideous mercantilising of all cultural activity, as Peter Mandelson seems intent on pursuing. His proposals to tie university funding to some sort of basic economic performance indicator will kill scholarship, which thrives on the obscure.
What I am saying is that grand spaces – big institutional public spaces – sometimes terrify or oppress. We don’t want to and shouldn’t get rid of these spaces. But sometimes, just sometimes, shifting the centre of gravity can re-energise our engagement with ‘culture’. Bringing the ‘public sphere’ into the private space once in a while may just enable us to re-evaluate the place and role of ‘culture’ in contemporary Britain.
This year we have created a new show called ‘Chip Shop’, featuring a fully functioning mobile screenprinting workshop. “Built from chip-board and replicating a full-size chippy, The Chip Shop is a fully functioning temporary screen printing workshop, serving up words printed on wooden board.”
Come and add your favourite word to our catch of the day menu!
A silkscreen print, on chipboard - yours for the price of a bag of chips! Is it really possible? Yes! The Chip Shop will be appearing at least 3 times in March as part of the London Word Festival:
March 7th Toynbee Arts Bar & Cafe, a FREE event where we’ll be frying solo.
March 20th ‘Keep Printing and Carry On’, Stoke Newington International Airport - an eclectic night of music, mini-lectures, cake, featuring Murray Macaulay doing a Universette reprise on Sister Corita (the screenprinting nun), Darren Hayman, and more from our good friends the Universettee.
March 31st, “The Art of Storytelling”, St. Leonard’s Church, we’ll be tying up all the loose words printed throughout the festival into another live print with the help of a very special guest poet.
More details to follow in our March Newsletter, but meanwhile we point you to the festival website and coverage at Amelia’s Magazine.
On Saturday February 27th, from 11am to 4pm, we’ll be at the Finsbury Art Festival. Our little contribution to this positive cornucopia of fun things to do in the Art Zone will be showing off the pamphlet stitch. This simple little stitch, used for centuries by anyone from teeth-grinding political radicals to quaint little crafts-people, only takes seconds to learn yet will hold your bits of paper together in the form of a pamphlet for hundreds of years! And for those of you who like reading as much as fiddling with bits of paper and string, we’ll be binding some of the contributions from our guest bloggers, David Barnes, Eddie Farrell and Julie Rafalski. Plus one of the stories by David Henningham from Erroneous Disposition of the People. All this and much more, absolutely free! Can it be true?
Come and find out! I gather it will be a very child-friendly, as well as adult-friendly event. What better way to spend a lazy Saturday afternoon?
St Luke’s Centre
90 Central Street EC1V 8AJ
020 7549 8181
On Friday I finished an 8 week block of German Language learning and with that my head for the first time in two months has begun to clear a little to formulate a few thoughts.
Last year when I began to try and learn the German language I looked at a few course introductions on the internet. Only one has remained in my mind. The name of the course, I have forgotten but the essential question it proffered I have not; first and foremost, ask yourself seriously why you want to learn this language.
I can’t hide the fact that somewhere in my imagination I had fancied myself sometime in the future at an elegant dinner table flitting effortlessly between English and Deutsch with a suave cosmopolitan air. This fantasy I imagine came from watching films and also from having observed in awe certain friends doing this. One year on however, I am still formulating my answer to the question and this may be playing a part in the slowness of my Learning. Before going any further I must state that I would dearly love to be able to speak German in order to communicate on a day to day level with people in Berlin. Apart from anything else this shows good manners while being a guest in another country. Indeed this may be as good a reason as any and the only one necessary to focus all my energies toward blinkered learning of German. But for another inescapable factor; I am an artist with an inbuilt sense to question.
So sitting in my class 5 days a week other thoughts and observations have been coming to the fore taking equal precedence to sentence structure and to determining the correct case of speech. Having my attentions divided in this way can on occasions make the subject of German language secondary; as a mature student, the classroom set up is of equal interest. For here I am being given a mini-re-run of my school days; you know the ones that hit you like a herd of stampeding cattle and spew you out badly trampled somewhere in your late teens. From my perspective with a 27 year gap, although learning in classroom has got no easier, I am occasionally able to stand back from what is going on and consider things that I hadn’t had the space or words for the first time around. This may have been typified the other day when the teacher (meine Lehrerin) noticed me struggling through yet another exercise and in a gentle conciliatorily tone said, you know this is not about the substance and interest of what you are trying to say, this is about getting the Grammar correct. What came first, the chicken or the egg?
I would like at some stage to broaden this out a little more and not just be me, me, me , but too many of the thoughts I have on this subject are based on personal experience so for now and with apology, here is more about me.
I have been both cursed and perhaps blessed throughout my life with being dyslexic; even as I write this blog I know that I will have to check and re-check it a thousand times, before then handing it over to a grammatically competent friend to make a final check. All this in order to make it readable, acceptable….. Normal. To me, it is not just about recognising the necessity of taking such steps but it is also important to stop and consider how much of the original thought one had in the head is shaped and compromised to achieve this…. normality.
So what does a dyslexic have in their head? The official response to what I had in my head whilst at Primary school was to remove me from the normal class and place me in a remedial class. ( although the term dyslexia appears to existed since the 1880s, in Britain in the late 60s, it seems, certainly in the state school sector to have been unknown.) The removal from my class came about from being found by the teaching staff to be a slow learner. The irony of this is that due to my slowness of grasping the foundations of accepted learning, this dyslexic learnt very quickly a multitude of ways to protect himself from being humiliated every day at school. I used a combination of fading into the background and going on the offensive. From this hostile and chaotic foundation my schooling continued; the commitment to self preservation used up most of my energy and left only a fraction of time to vaguely note there were other things called subjects that I should be paying some attention to. Learning through this makeshift filter forced me to develop a system of discovery which occasionally touched on the official syllabus but very often went off at a complete tangent. As a result I wonder if I use any other parts of the brain that that normal learning doesn’t require or if I am just hopping frantically around within the regular channels, which I am told represents a depressingly low percentage of the brains capacity. Whatever that may be, I would say that the effects of a rigidly enforced system of education that presented itself to me as completely illogical, pushed me into finding alternative ways of gathering information from the world.
A while ago, I spoke to a good friend, a retired University lecturer, who had for several years been helping invigilate exams at Edinburgh university. He told me that dyslexic students were now allowed half an hour extra to read through the paper. This I told him was missing the point; all they would get from these students is an average attempt at being normal and answering the questions in the way that was required, when if throughout their time at University they were allowed to expand in their own way they may come up with something truly unique and complimentary to the overall subject. He was very interested in these comments and said that at no time in all the academic planning meetings he’d attended had he ever heard this point muted. And such is the academic world, in which education is now a massive ever expanding industry funnelled through an ever narrowing gate, rigidly governed by statistics and percentages that in my opinion continue to ignore the potential for real learning and instead target the fool’s gold pinnacle of the well paid job.
It is little wonder then with these thoughts igniting in my head that my regurgitation of the endless tables of German prepositions are taking their time to spew forth. To try and make room for both I had to expand my waking day to fit around the class which ran from 9.30am till 1pm, five days a week. This would not only mean staring at and fiddling with incomprehensible homework exercises in the afternoon, evening and into the early hours, but also falling out of bed at 6am every morning to stare and fiddle some more before the next class. Around the 4th week I began to seek refuge from this cyclical madness and found some from the writing of A S Neill in his book Schoolhill and perhaps more surprisingly the electric and Chicago blues of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker. Both sources were well known to me; the chapters of A S Neill tolled an obviously comforting chime connecting directly to my difficulties with formal teaching, the solace found in the sound scape generated by the blues musicians was a little less obvious though.
Straying onto you tube one night from the online language translator I sometime use I found myself spellbound by a particular recording of Muddy Waters’ Hoochie Coochie man. From the early 1980’s when I first discovered this music I quickly moved on from condemning the songs as sexist crap; the lyrics soon become nothing, one must take in the whole abstraction of sound and performance to discover an uncompromising struggle for humility and dignity. The film of Muddy Waters does exactly this, encasing it in a muffled, bleeding; an inexplicable audio beauty of his Chicago electric Blues from that period.
Both of the Howlin’ Wolf performances are incredibly raw documents of an uneducated man who knows everything and nothing and whose vulnerability allows you to see it all. Why was I drawn to these performances? I would find that difficult to say exactly, but in the context of my current thoughts they illustrate how a human being without a recognised and accepted useful ability can find their own form to directly communicate and articulate something incredibly rich and complex about the world. I would strongly recommend you take a look at them yourself.
Man has always been quick to exploit the world of its resources and to a certain extent this may have become his be all and end all. I would ask (and I know I am far from being the first) why can man not take advantage of huge technological advances to begin to seriously look more closely at himself? The perpetuation of this destructive cycle stands little chance of being broken when the main generator of innovation and insight is inextricably linked with behaving correctly within a strict formal education. And I would venture to suggest that the so called, outsiders, misfits, freaks (not my terms but ones widely used) collectively present a natural resource through personal experience for our civilisation to consider other ways of being. Not to be just creamed off, colonised, enslaved, exploited and wasted within an already failing system, but to be learned from and to help to develop a wider all encompassing mind-rich civilisation with unheard of and un thought of possibilities.
Now where was I……
brechen (to break) – hat/ist gebrochen
fahren (to drive) – hat/ist gefahren
fliegen ( to fly) – hat/ist geflogen………………….
The function of the child is to live his own life – not the life his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows what is best. All this interference and guidance on the part of adults only produces a generation of robots.
You cannot make children learn music or anything else without to some degree converting them into will-less adults. You fashion them into accepters of the status quo – a good thing for a society that needs obedient sitters at dreary desks, standers in shops, mechanical catchers of the 8:30 suburban train – a society, in short, that is carried on the shabby shoulders of the scared little man – the scared-to-death conformist.
Extract from A.S.Neill Summerhill ( a pelican book) 1962
Laurence fondles the leather-effect binding of his complete works of Shakespeare, ‘a part of our heritage’, simultaneously using the volumes to display his refinement and his guest’s lack of taste. If the book goes digital, perhaps it makes this act of snobbery performed in Mike Leigh’s ‘Abigail’s Party’ less likely.
A couple of new technical advances have made the newspapers recently. Amazon can turn your i-Phone into an e-book for free with their Kindle software. 300,000 books are available. A swipe of your finger re-enacts the turning of paper pages digitally. The Nintendo DS also now has a ‘game’ that allows you to read hundreds of classic novels, while the speakers emit the crackle of a mimetic fireplace. The irony is that this sound-effect will actually consume energy created by the burning of coal many miles away. Sound, but no heat. Do paperbacks store more CO2 than online books constantly consume - backed up in several locations at once and always open? But the wastefulness of paper books wasn’t the only assumption in the print and radio discussions prompted by these announcements.
Panels, such as on Radio 4’s Open Book, could have explored the properties of these inventions logically; their benefits and defecits compared to paper books. Instead we witness a sort of ‘conversation re-enactment society’, general assumptions uncritically repeated in programmes dominated by nostalgia. It occurs to me that what is lacking in these commentaries is a precise analysis of the properties of each kind of reading platform.
The most obvious misconception is that paperback books such as Penguins perform an archival role. In fact they strip out many parts of the book-machine to make them competitive in price. This was the Penguin revolution; quality texts at an affordable price. An archival book has hard covers, lifting the pages above the acidic shelf. The paper is acid free. The pages are folded and stitched. There are endpapers that act like a doormat for the fingers. Bands support the book block itself. The spine may be arched to support a thicker book as it hangs above the shelf. The edges may even be gilded with stainless gold leaf. All these processes are removed in the paperback. But this is not a complaint. One might even argue that most paperbacks last too long. Will a Dan Brown be read and re-read? Will it have notes scribbled in the margin? Possibly by conspiracy theorists, but they probably use pile upon pile of notebooks instead. Many American journals and academic books continue to make use of the more enduring features; we should not imagine that a paperback and an academic tome are the same machine because they both use paper. They don’t even use the same paper.
In academic research the electronic book brings many advantages, especially in note-taking, cutting and pasting, live-searches of the text better than any index. Hyperlinks to other texts and information… However, this brings to light other possibilities routinely overlooked in the media. Our regard for texts as concrete and unchangable and our definitions of authorship are shaped by the fact that a book is printed and then that is that. If another edition is made, minor changes occur, but with the text remaining live, what stops the reader intervening? Why shouldn’t I re-write one of my own books one morning, even after publication? A physical restraint has become a matter of etiquette. Is this the constant positive refinement of the evolutionary process or the constant revisionism of the Totalitarian view of History? All history adopts the needs of the Party. But I suppose for a panel talking for twenty minutes about the joy of sniffing pages, the territory of the ‘exploded book’ would have caused seizures.
The problem with the e-book is that it is not going far enough. It does not threaten the book, be it the archival machine, the disposable paperback or something inbetween. Obsolescence merely frees these formats up for new purposes. This is also the formative time for the form of the e-book, but it is nostalgia for the paper reading experience that is threatening to make e-reading inadequate. Manufacturers should stop trying to make e-readers look like books, with corny page-turning animations. If they are convenient we will use them. But book design is a phenomenological tradition that takes careful evaluation. Traditionally the central margin of the left page is set and then the top, outside, and foot margins increase in size as you go round by 20%. The opposite is the case for the facing page. This double spread has been around since Medieval times and forms part of the reading experience. It gives room for your thumbs. Yet electronic readers are often single column affairs. What does this imply? Design is not just a matter of paper vs. screen glare.
The reality is that the possibilities for publishing, text composition, and authorship are so radically different that we can’t even see them. We’re even doing some of them already without realising. This period is a massive opportunity for small presses. Without the confusion of the paperback as primary text-delivery platform, people are grasping that there is a particular place for a well made paper book with original content; they are actually seeing what a book is for the first time. This is the opposite of nostalgia, it is the grasping of the relevant place for a technology in our time. In the same vein we should jettison the nostalgia for paperbacks and ask ourselves which features do we not want to lose in the next generation of electronic reading technology, making it a superior format to the paperback for the quick read. If we continue to encourage the crude approximations of page turning and dog-earing instead of platforms equipped for a transfigured compositional and reading industry, we are losing the essence of traditional book technology. It is like saying you will buy a car, but only if it looks like a horse and is limited to four miles an hour. And it’s not like we shot all the horses.
Laurence returns the complete works of Shakespeare to the shelf saying, ‘Of course, not the kind of thing you can actually read…’ I suspect he is the intended audience for the Nintendo DS Classics Library. It probably won’t be long before someone is showing me theirs and demonstrating how it re-creates the sound of an actual log-fire. Or is it the gentle crackle of a book-burning?
Dreams often allow us to do things that are impossible in waking life: hovering in mid air, walking across Antarctica, becoming a character in a film, sipping tea with a famous actor, sharing jokes with a relative who has been dead for years, speaking unknown languages flawlessly, travelling to places not found on any map… But perhaps the most interesting dreams are those that include our everyday surroundings and then transmute these places to varying degrees, changing their geography and sometimes even their identity.
A while ago I dreamt of a neighbourhood in which I had previously lived. Graham Street (which connects City Road to Regent’s Canal and is lined with apartment buildings) was transformed into a fair ground with shops, a giant Ferris wheel and crowds of visitors. I remember looking up at the sky at the storm clouds that were gathering on the horizon. I walked under the Ferris wheel with its white box-like cars towards the high rise where I had formerly lived, which was now about twenty stories taller and its dull concrete exterior was much brighter. After I entered the building and looked out a window facing City Road, I saw a sea extending northwards from the spot where there had formerly been a seedy café and through to the horizon. The shoreline ran parallel to City Road and waves crashed into the road with such force that it seemed not long before they would submerge it.
When I then drove by this high rise in real life a few weeks later, it seemed as if this grey building was hiding its former self, as if the tall and bright building from the dream belonged to a previous era which I had glimpsed in my dream. I began to look for traces of the fair ground and to search out the location of the missing Ferris wheel. But the gleaming new apartment blocks now disguised this site. It was like looking for an ancient battle site lying hidden under a forest or a city street. The missing sea also seemed belong to distant past that was now obscured.
In another dream, I was on a train speeding through some wheat fields spotted with poppies outside Warsaw when the train stopped suddenly. Looking out the window, I saw mountains covered in snow and far in the distance, a coastline. The loudspeaker announced that we had reached the Danish/Polish border. All the passengers were told to get off and passports were screened by a border guard sitting behind a wooden table half covered in snow. The situation was very convenient since I happened to be heading to Denmark. In the dream a realisation struck me: despite the fact that Denmark doesn’t share any borders with Poland, it can sometimes be found on the outskirts of Warsaw, if approached from the right direction. This thought seemed like a practical observation to note for the future; since all countries sometimes temporarily drifted to other locations, I should find out where the schedule for these shifts can be found and if I’m lucky, I might catch some convenient connections.
Geographical rearrangements in dreams have also altered my perception of places. One place about which I repeatedly dream throughout the years is the small town of Langhorne on the outskirts of Philadelphia where I grew up. With each dream the geography of the place changes: Roads end where they have never ended before and a dense thicket covers the hills where houses once stood. A nearby hospital progressively diminishes in size and moves slightly further from the main road. A forest has replaced the main shopping area and a creek has turned into a waterfall, almost as if nature were reclaiming any developed areas. Perhaps because I haven’t been to the town for many years, these dreams seem now to be the most current experience I have of the place. If I travelled to Langhorne now I would expect to see some of these thickets, forests and waterfalls.
In W.G. Sebald’s novel, Austerlitz, the protagonist describes a view of the Rhine valley from a train window as strangely familiar. This image of the river had haunted him in his dreams throughout his life, although he could never identify the location. He realises that he must have had seen this landscape only once before, as a child making the same train journey. Although he had forgotten the original image, it served as a blueprint for haunting dreams of an unidentified place. Perhaps in looking at the place he had seen more often in his dreams then in actuality, the Rhine valley seemed to him to be more closely related to them than to the long forgotten memory. Perhaps for him too, dreams had left their traces on the “blueprint”, just as drifting Denmarks and sea waves crashing into City Road have left a mark, even if only a fleeting one.
Sometimes you look at a name and you just know there is an anagram in there.
‘Tiger Woods’ also helps us ponder the danger of hubris with ‘I god’s tower’ and the inevitability of decay with ‘grows to die’, much like many celebrity careers.
We are very pleased to announce the publication of the second book by ‘The nth Convention’ testing, among other things, just how different a second edition can be from the first.
This book is another manifestation of the work ‘The nth Convention’ have been undertaking since a collaboration in Leipzig in 2005. Conversations held at the time that encompassed science, literature, conspiracy theories, the Cold War, and architecture led to sculpture making, photo taking, film making, psychic drawing experiments… The latter became a metaphor for making work ‘as one mind’, making a truly shared body of work. This time the focus is on unravelling the CMYK printing process. Operating like the distinct dots that merge optically to form a full colour picture, the artists have worked together on this test-card-like volume of screenprint experiments and transcripts to create a truly confusing architecture.
Not every page is accessible without the use of a knife.
The book is covered with thin card, wrapped in a poster-print, and comes in a hard blue cloth covered slipcase with ribbon. The silkscreen CMYK prints are divided into three sections with transparent architect’s mylar paper.
We will hear more from The nth Convention in 2010.
David Helbich (second from left) recently gave an email interview here with Eirik from Oslo’s Ultima Festival about our plans and the shared interests that drive the InterInterInter collaboration.
Hearing David Cameron’s speech at the Conservative Party conference, I felt the urge to liberate the avant-garde, existentialist poem that lay behind the surface, a hidden subtext:
I want to get straight
To the point.
We all know
What I want to talk about.
Don’t get me wrong,
I’m ready for that
But I tell you this.
I know that.
I know about
Liam Fox.
We need a strategy.
We need to be clear.
Frankly, time is short.
And I have something
Else to say.
We could have played it safe.
When I stood on that stage
It was to lead Eric Pickles.
I am not a complicated person.
I have some simple beliefs.
I want everyone
To understand
That’s twice as big.
Right now.
We have three choices.
I know there are some who say:
PENSIONERS.
I got an email.
But it never happens.
Well.
Let’s be clear.
I always put the same questions
To attractive Ken Clarke.
It is a plan to boost.
This is what it means.
There’s nothing to stop me.
In Britain today
We must be the people
Who release Gordon Brown.
We’ll start with what is most important.
I believe that a stable cannot be neutral.
I don’t live in some fantasy land.
It’s about what we all do.
It’s about the way we live.
It’s about our crazy signals.
But no -
It’s not funny.
We have got to turn it around
We’re going to make it clear
So we have to reform
So we will never change
But that doesn’t mean
But it’s not a machine
It has got to stop
That’s why we can look the British people in the eye and say…
the progressive thing to do in a way that brings the country together showing
leadership at the top we’re all in this together which is why we’ll have made
some tough choices in British politics is out of date and it has to
meet challenges head on and show tough country and
together leadership and community tough and
challenges meet we’ll make some British
progressive politics head challenge
family tough challenge country
challenge challenge challenge
More on the experimental modernism of David Cameron later.
