Smiles on Paper

On Saturday I presented a new work at the Stanley Picker gallery during the Writing Exhibitions symposium. Here’s an outline of my work, which I called Genuine Smiles:

A sheet of paper is attached to one wall of the gallery, and attached just below it is a long piece of string with a sharpened pencil fixed to the other end. Visitors are invited to hold a pencil and do whatever they need to do to muster a genuine smile.

Tamarin is talking very FAST

Rachel Lois Clapham and Alex Eisenberg documented today’s 10 Performances event with a live feed they updated throughout the day. By the time my performance What To Do begins they’re halfway down their third page. I love their occasional attempts to type out variations on everything I was saying. You can read what they’ve written here.

The text of What To Do is available to download as a pdf from the 10 Performances website, but I’m not sure I recommend you read it: the effect of reading the text on a page or a screen is very different from the effect of the performance itself.

Sneak Preview of DO SOMETHING

I hear my artist book DO SOMETHING is back from the printers. The good people at (un)limited store have put a couple pictures on their website, along with glimpses of the other five books in the series. The book launch is at ARTISTBOOKINTERNATIONAL at the Centre Pompidou in Paris from 4-6 December.

Word Play at the Whitechapel Gallery

Tomorrow evening from 7pm antepress are hosting an art writing event at the Whitechapel. Here’s a bit about us from their website.

Continuing the series of playful and participatory events exploring language and its parameters, writers collaborate with artists to produce games and scenarios that challenge the audiences’ relationship to language.

This Word Play event is hosted by imprint and project platform antepress. The audience is invited to create six unique ‘artist books’, each based on a famous work of art. The books will be published on the night and will be downloadable from the antepress website. antepress was set up in 2008 by Julia Calver, Patrick Coyle, Cressida Kocienski, Claire Nichols, Tamarin Norwood and Gemma Sharpe.

MAKING IT SOUND LIKE I AM MAKING ART FOR 15 MINUTES

Resonance fm is broadcasting a new audio work of mine this afternoon as part of Digestives, the ongoing art writing radio series from antepress. It’s going to be be aired on today at 4:30pm and repeated Friday 20 November at 7:30pm.

You can listen live by clicking the ‘Listen Now’ mp3 stream at www.resonancefm.com, or tune in to 104.4fm inside London. Afterwards it will be available to download as a podcast at www.antepress.co.uk/digestives.php.

The Real Experiment

Allan Kaprow again. One characteristic of the lifelike art that was emerging in the sixties:

“Various performative modes became the effective way to deal with this shift to the actual environment. Performing was doing something, not acting in theater – moving furniture, for example, just to do it, or because you were changing apartments.”

The Real Experiment (1983)

I’ll say the people holding it

DO SOMETHING

I found out this week that a book I’m making is going to be published by (un)limited store in December. The book will be launched in December at ArtistBook International at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and before that there’s lots of work to do. It’s a kind of instruction manual and I’m calling it DO SOMETHING. Here are some ideas about the book:

In Literature it is only necessary to outline the steps. Let the people dance!*

DO SOMETHING uses the generic diagrammatic form of the instruction manual to create a specific dance of objects and actions.

The objects in the manual are imaginary, and do not exist outside of their drawings on paper. Arranged about the page as if to accommodate a text which is missing, the images are left to speak on their own. Like a translation whose original has been lost, these floating instructions are a trace without a reference, telling a story that cannot be grasped.

THIS

Address labels you can stick to things. I made these a few years ago but stamping ’stamped’ on things reminded me of them. They’re like inside-out frames.

Nontheatrical Performance

Allan Kaprow wrote

“[...] here is the ball park I perceive: an artist can

1. work within recognizable art modes and present the work in recognizable art contexts (e.g., paintings in galleries; poetry in poetry books; music in concert halls, etc.)
2. work in unrecognizable, i.e., nonart, modes but present the work in regognizable art contexts (e.g., pizza parlour in a gallery; a telephone book sold as poetry, etc.)
3. work in recognizable art modes but present the work in nonart contexts (.eg., a “Rembrandt as an ironing board”; a fugue in an air-conditioning duct; a sonnet as a want ad, etc.)