The Writer’s House at AWAY DAY

Below is an update on The Writer’s House, a three-day series of writing residencies this weekend at Wandle Park as part of the POST event AWAY DAY. The event is open to all and runs 29-31 May, 12-6pm daily.

The Writer’s House is curated by VerySmallKitchen. From the VSK site:

“The Writer’s House invited five practitioners to devise day long projects that utilised the house/ tent as a studio for a writer in residence, yet  also took account of the public and interactive nature of the AWAY DAY event. What happens to the writing when it takes place in the social and natural environments of Wandle Park? What – where – who- when – how-  if – then – was/is/will be writing?

Projects – by Bram Thomas Arnold, Rachel Lois Clapham (in collaboration with Antje Hildebrandt), Marianne Holm Hansen, Tamarin Norwood and Mary Paterson, each begin as a score with varying relations to what might happen in the park itself.

One thing leads to another

This evening is the launch of a new series of artworks commissioned for the Jubilee line from Stanmore to Stratford. It will be the first exhibition by Art on the Underground presented at City Hall.

For One thing leads to another – Everything is connected, Goldsmiths MFA Art Writing have joined Nadia Bettega, John Gerrard, Dryden Goodwin, Richard Long, Daria Martin and Matt Stokes to “respond to ideas around the concept of time from a number of perspectives: looking back at the history of the Tube, the way that it has expanded to respond to the changing shape of the city and population growth; and to think about passengers’ experience of travel, with a Tube journey giving them time to drift into imaginary worlds and take a mental break from their daily commute.”

Texts from our booklet Timepieces will be exhibited at City Hall throughout the exhibition (14 May to 10 June), and you can pick up a free copy at Jubilee Line stations.

Art on the Underground

This month the six of us at antepress are compiling the outcomes of our art writing residency with Art on the Underground, as part of their 2010-2011 Jubilee Line projects.

Now that all the writing’s complete, we’re working with designers to settle the order and layout of the publication (my sketch above is one muddled attempt), and with AotU curators to write an introduction contextualizing the project.

Copies of our booklet Timepieces will be available at Jubilee line stations in the spring, with additional material online.

LISTEN TO: The Known Unknowns

Just uploaded here is an audio recording from The Known Unknowns, a cycle of readings curated by Francesco Pedraglio in November 2009. The event was part of the Volatile Dispersal Festival of Art Writing at the Whitechapel  Gallery.

I read a short text along with the rest of antepress, and our reading is in the segment linked above. The other two segments are online here and here.

Text as Toolkit

Yesterday VerySmallKitchen announced my new publication:

Tamarin Norwood’s TEXT AS TOOLKIT: A Practical Handbook is the first in a series of e-chapbooks developed from the Art Writing Field Station.

Tamarin’s text was first devised as a presentation for the field station event at Five Years Gallery on 7th February 2009.  As Tamarin observes in her introduction:

TEXT AS TOOLKIT proposes a methodology for reading and hence for writing. The purpose of this methodology is to identify and extract from texts certain metatextual tools that might be used to examine the practices and products of writing. Mining texts for their tools is a consciously interventional strategy that considers texts as provisional and active material participants in a cumulative art writing field.

The Copyist Stares

I was the Copyist again at The Sirens’ Stage yesterday. The rules of engagement for the Copyist include no invention, no interpretation, no metaphor, so that the writing sticks as closely as possible to what’s going on in the room. But of course there can be no objective writing: it’s never without invention or interpretation, and in the transliteration of action to text every word is a metaphor.

There’s a curious balancing of authority going on: I’m the one writing, but I can only write from what’s there, and for the most part what’s there are the people. People speak and then come over to see if I’ve written it down. Who’s making the text? It falls among us somewhere between competition and symbiosis.

The Sirens’ Stage

A new exhibition at the David Roberts Art Foundation opened this week. The Sirens’ Stage is an exhibition by Etienne Chambaud in collaboration with critic Vincent Normand, and it runs from 19 March to 24 April.

The show is described as “a multi-layered conceptual exhibition by Etienne Chambaud in the framework of Vincent Normand’s project Permanent Exhibition, Temporary Collections. The Sirens’ Stage is developed with Kadist Art Foundation in Paris and Nomas Foundation in Rome. The exhibition, interpreted in a different language almost simultaneously in each foundation, is based on mechanisms of writings and transcriptions. Translation should be considered both the medium and the shared language of the whole project.”

I’m working as a Copyist for the duration of the exhibition along with two other writers. Our job is to transcribe whatever happens in the space, following certain instructions from the artist and curator.

How to wait for time on the Jubilee Line

At the moment I’m doing a writing residency with Art on the Underground, as part of their 2010 programme of Jubilee Line projects. The text I’m writing is going to be called something like “28 Ways to Wait for Time on the Jubilee Line”.

So far I’ve been noting down some ways people pass the time on their journeys. I want to see what happens when specific momentary descriptions are generalized into instructions or advice anyone can follow.

Glasgow International 2010

CONTENT
Curated by Caroline Stevenson, Volume Projects.

Content presents text and image contributions from seven contemporary artists and curators: Shama Khanna, Rashanna Rashied-Walker, Tamarin Norwood, Ross Birrell, Criodhna Costello, Larys Fogies, Claire Nichols.

antepress Ekphrasis lecture

On January 20 antepress performed an experimental lecture on ekphrasis at the David Roberts Art Foundation, as part of Damien Roach’s exhibition Shiiin, Jet Stream, White Earphones.

An audio recording of the lecture has now been posted on the exhibition blog, From a Darkened Sunroof. My contribution to the lecture drew on my ongoing research into the instructional form of address, and particularly the potential for frustrated instructions to work as ekphrastic figures.

By issuing instructions to the other speakers – instructions that weren’t followed – I tried to create an alternative potential version of the lecture, which in turn caused the actual version of the lecture to appear as just one possible version of it. It was an attempt to make the lecture a reflexively ekphrastic event: an event that describes itself, using just itself as a description.