If the experience of playing a game is intended, for the most part, to be joyful, then consider that the experience of attempting to create a game – from scratch – involves much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Planning and brain-bashing for the Larkin' About and Library Theatre Company commission continues. How to estimate a duration and end point, to avoid fatigue or boredom? If I don’t want one winner and many losers, how do I gently console those who don’t complete the requirements, whilst still celebrating those who do? Are themes of memory, loss, mourning and the silent cry of purgatorial souls suitable material for a playful treatment involving balloons? What of unknown latex allergies? Ai-ai-ai. Still, the initial shape is done. The play test awaits. My craft box has a few more items I am unlikely ever to use again, but on the plus side I have some lovely Ladybird books purchased as ‘research’. Here is an image from a bison hunt, which may have something to do with the work in progress. Oh, and I have a name for it at last.

Prairieland.

Art Historian Collective Porter & Jenkinson are looking for artists and writers for their first exhibition, Curious Pursuits, at the Portico LIbrary and Gallery Manchester from February 2nd - 29th 2012. Artists are invited to respond to the idea and aesthetics of Victorian Dark Societies, the Curious and the Peculiar. Submissions are welcome from the following that wish to exhibit work fitting this theme: illustrators, printmakers, painters, zine makers, writers, book binders, photographers, sculptors and I imagine anyone working in any mediums not listed also! More information here. I've had a pop myself with some micro fiction but hurry as there are only 24 hours left before the end-of-year deadline!

I submitted two ideas, both of which they liked although I must now choose one to take forward, responding to a couple of obscure but fascinating lesser-known subjects relating to the city's past, as I wanted to avoid the usual suspects (industrialisation, sport, Engels, votes for women, the Baby computer etc. no disrespect to any of these areas intended!) The process will include a game mechanics workshop, one-to-one mentoring, play-testing and of course the delivery itself.

It's going to be a wonderful start to 2012!

The most chilling moment in the film for me is when Palin takes to the stage at a women's evangelical rally after another speaker has denounced gay and lesbian rights with the poisonous epithet, "We're judging you". That Palin should share the room, the bill and endeavour to pander to the same audience speaks volumes about her moral coda. In a recent interview with the G2 supplement of The Guardian, Nick Broomfield talks of his films as being 'portraits by omission'. Often it's what is not said, not done, not admitted (and indeed those who remain unspoken to, in the case of Palin, Thatcher, Courtney Love etc.), that can colour an impression. From this distance, Palin's heart appears to be a greenish-brown, sludgy shade of toxic.

Plastic Flowers In A Traditional Vase (2007 / detail) Rashid Rana. Image courtesy the artist, Gallery Chemould and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai

Rashid’s photo sculptures are responding to Minimalist ideals and intentions – reducing, simmering down to a base flavor like a soup stock, an essence, but also mocking this technique by taking a series of flat 2D photographs of the objects themselves and re-creating them as three-dimensional forms. To use food as a metaphor, this is like taking the contents of a tube of tomato puree, the distilled, ultra-flavoured essence of a specific taste, and moulding it back into the shape of a tomato… even re-attaching it to the vine. It’s absurd, but there is skill and a deliberate intention behind the act.

With the expert tutelage of the UK’s only Lego-certified freelance model builder, Ducan Titmarsh of Bright Bricks, we emulated this same process ourselves in our workshop by taking two objects, a Coke can and a stack of Wii cartridge games, and subjecting them to the same treatment. They will no longer look exactly like the originals, but still be recognizable as such. Think Picasso’s jumbled face-portraits, unblinking cyclopic eyes balanced upon triangular noses, or musical compositions that sound like a piano being dropped from a building. And then run over with a steamroller.

This is the bit where, in a traditional magazine layout, there would be a spiky bright yellow explosion accompanied by the subheading Did You Know…? Minimalism describes the practice and movement across multiple disciplines, but especially visual art and music, where the maker sets out to expose the essence or identity of a subject by stripping it back until only the bare bones remain. Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in the depiction of imagery; a courageous and still controversial approach when much of Western art right up until the mid 19th Century had been preoccupied by the illusion of reality and the orthodox logic of perspective.

Books 2 (2010-11 / detail) Rashid Rana. Image courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery, London

A coke can is one of the most recognizable items on the planet. It crosses cultures and continents and despite limited editions or redesigns or a change to the font and calligraphic text, it remains red and white and cylindrical. Cast your mind back to school art classes – were you ever asked to draw a crushed coke can? Without realising it, this might well have been your first exposure to the concept of abstraction – of moving away from a literal, clear representation of an object that still retains those core elements despite being jumbled and obscured. The curl of the letter C, the pillar box tint, a peeled ring pull. You don’t need to see all of it to recognise it for what it is.

Similarly, cast your thoughts back to early computer games, or what we know now to be early if you never actually played them. 8-bit, pixelated characters, Spectrum, Atari, Commodore. A limited number of pixels and no such thing as a graphics engine meant that characters and backgrounds were formed of little coloured blocks. Fast forward to the present and the likes of Mario and Sonic still survive in successful franchises, so the option of creating a stack of Wii games is a nod to their earlier incarnations. A thumbprint of red and white squares to represent a mushroom. Rectangles and triangles represent landscapes, bouncing brick-shaped bombs. We used our imagination in that situation, we can do the same now.

We are making, we are unmaking. We are simplifying, we are complicating. Hence the title of the overall exhibition – Everything Is Happening At Once. Thank you to all our participants, all of who commented upon how much fun it was to combine theoretical concepts with a playful make-it-yourself opportunity. Demands were made for further, weekly Lego workshops to tackle art history (a lone voice requested Duplo – we’ll say no more).  For those who wish to continue this journey into modern art via the joyful medium of children’s toys, may I recommend John Cake and Darren Neave, an artist duo who recreate seminal YBA installations using – you guessed it – Lego!

Thanks to Explore More blog for the lovely personal write-up of their experience as a participant.

The result is that within minutes of starting such a tour, most of those present have retreated to a safe space in their heads, the better to shut out the white noise that fills the gallery. A brave few might discreetly linger in mock-interest at a specific work, subsequently edging towards the exit, whilst the remainder dutifully file around making a mental note not to make the mistake of signing up to such a bore-fest again.

I’d had enough. While there is certainly still a place to hear direct from the artist or persons behind a show, especially for those able and willing to push past the veil of intimidation, it’s hardly suitable for encouraging a more personal response from those less familiar with the whizz-bang-snooze of verbal pyrotechnics. I wanted a tour guide for those who still needed stabilizers attaching to their cultural bike ride until they’d got the hang of sudden gusts of hot air.

Someone like a Mum, or a batty Aunt, who knew even less about the work on display than they did, but wasn’t afraid to speak their mind or submit an opinion.

Mrs Barbara Nice / image by Emma Case (copyright)

One specific person came to mind. I didn’t want to consider anyone else. I got in touch with Mrs Barbara Nice, the comic creation of Janice Connolly, star of Phoenix Nights, Coronation Street, Max and Paddy’s Road to Nowhere and tour support for Peter Kay. Barbara is a fictional Stockport housewife and mother of five, immune to false graces and after rearing her own brood, unshockable. I asked is she would lead a walkaround our current exhibition by artist Rashid Rana. She replied. She said she’d do it... but would it work? Or would we simply end up firing cheap shots at the usual modern art targets?

The tour was a sell-out (although free), raised to 45 people from the standard 30 due to demand, with repeat requests for a waiting list. On the afternoon itself Barbara set to work sweeping through the arrival area in full leopard-print and giant handbag, with a “Hiya, howya doin’?”, before grading the participants by coat colour. Purple was heavily evidenced. The more chatty individuals were quickly identified and gently prodded (Iris, the vegan who couldn’t stop touching the artwork, and Mickey, who wasn’t afraid to proffer an opinion), while others were gently encouraged to offer their own thoughts up and comments.

Despite a planned running-time of just 40 minutes, the tour went on for a record breaking 1 hour 40 minutes. As part of the experience we forbade anyone from reading the wall text or guides and simply shoot from the hip. We talked of colour and shade, of a geographic sense of place, the representation of flesh and violence, power dynamics, role of women, stereotypes, false knowledge and honest response, pictography, pixellation and porn. All while Barbara fussed, cajoled and supported even the quietest members of the group to have confidence in their own thoughts.

The tour culminated in Gallery 3: An Idea of Abstract, and the mammoth pay-off that is the giant, sculptural mirage of Desperately Seeking Paradise II. But instead of trying to shape a cursory summary to our humble journey, talk leaned toward cleaning solutions for this mammoth dust magnet. Feather dusters were duly distributed, and everyone pitched in with a light sweep and flick to ensure the work stayed looking tip-top. Afterwards everyone was encouraged to write postcards to the artist himself, with all those present unanimous in urging future tours that avoid belittling participants and encourage discussion.

I hope to bring Barbara back and team up again, I enjoyed playing the straight man in my prop ‘clever glasses’ to her kitchen sink wisdom. As for Barbara’s own postcard to Rashid, it read as follows:

“Dear Rashid, I’d be happy to do this tour for you in Pakistan. P.S. My passport is up to date!”

Thanks to Cornerhouse Digital Reporter Ben Williams who wrote up his experience of the event here. Thanks also to photographer Emma Case for the use of her wonderful shot of Barbara with the purple balloons above!

You the public are invited to sit inside the booth as if for a photograph and make a donation to an artist through an anonymous slot in return for a self-portrait. Wait five minutes (give or take) and the image will appear in the side wall, accompanied by the warm blast of a travel hairdryer. If you hanker for that still-wet sensation, they may even lick it for you. It could be a pencil drawing, doodle, cartoon, collage or even word-poem. Take it, frame it, consider it. Now you are both patron and muse!

Launching for Art Night on Thursday 24th November until Sunday 4th December 2011. News of additional activity including film screening and Cornerhouse Projects exhibition to follow. Please see booth for timings.

ARTISTS WANTED!

North-West and Manchester based artists are required to join our Sketch-O-Matic rota in one-hour slots. Lunchtime slots (1 - 2pm) and evening slots (6pm - 10pm). We're looking for pencil drawings, pastels, watercolours, illustrators, cartoonists, cubists, doodlers, poets (for word portraits), collage, ink-blot, dried pasta decoupage and just about any zany or straight-laced style you can imagine... as long as it can be dashed off in approximately 5 minutes. There is, I'm afraid, one exception. No caricaturists. We don't want anyone to walk away feeling crappy about themselves because you've managed to exaggerate a slight mole into a volcanic eruption on the scale of Eyjafjallajökull. Please contact bren@cornerhouse.org or via this website if you'd like to take part!

Presented in conjunction with The Queer Theory of the Avant-Garde conference, ‘Gifts of the Spirit: Automated Writing’ is a performance installation conceived, scored and directed by Ron Athey with automatic composition and music performance by Othon Mataragas. Accompanied by 16 automatic writers, organ, piano, 6 typists, 4 editors, 1 reader and a glossolalia chorus, a curious audience poured into the historic chamber unsure of what to expect. What followed was a direct challenge to the Manchester International Festival in the form of a memorable lifetime moment.

Athey himself was seated upon a raised platform and took the role of reader, conducting the event via a protocol of stop-start initiations for those engaged in production and interpretation. He was placed alongside the chorus, an eclectic mix of types with the distinct appearance of a council or representative body of tribes; the mourning mother, the money lender, the darkling prince, the eunuch, the woman of titled means… these are my interpretations, certainly unintended but no less valid than any other of the wild imaginings that bubbled to the surface during the course of the event.

The parquet floor was papered in a giant ‘X’ made of multiple layers, crawling across and upon which were the writers themselves. At a signal the scrawling began as Athey read from his unpublished memoirs, providing prompt and raw source material for transcription and unravelling. The chorus, for the moment largely silent, were hunched across planchettes that slid and jerked beneath their fingers, eyes closed in readiness as open conduits to the spirit realm.

As the writers edged forward across their own text which grew at a prodigious rate, assistants farmed the words as birds follow a plough to pluck at pink worms unearthed in the soil, tearing or cutting with scissors and carrying across to typists seated at the edge of the walls. These blank-faced sentries transcribed and elaborated using ribbon and carbon sheets, occasionally pausing to lean forward and rip the now drained pages from the facing wall to squeeze further psychic pulp from a new scrap.

Greek composer and pianist Othon Matarangas sat in the organ gallery overlooking proceedings, thundering a dark, pounding fugue from the resonant pipes that floated atop the clattery tap-tap of the typewriters. Now editors leapt up to perform their task, taking the typed sheets and scoring, censoring, highlighting and re-ordering words, sentences and phrases which were then cast back upon the table for the glossolalia chorus to use for their rendition in earnest.

Singing, screaming, yelping and weeping, the atmosphere grew tense and heavy as the speaking in tongues began. One man sat and wept, some edged closer as others inched toward the exit, a female writer stretched and writhed across her patch of paper in what seemed very much like an ecstasy. Speaking for myself, I felt relaxed and comforted, as if the air was filling with a marshmallow viscosity that dulled the shrieks and at times terrifying sounds of the singers.

And then it was over – the link broken. As an example of a group collaborative effort, whether it be for theatrical effect or with a determined if mostly theoretical intention, the result was truly unnerving. Ron Athey is not mocking but celebrating and re-appropriating a personal belief system often dismissed as nonsense, and in doing so I found myself complicit; no longer an observer but an active participant. A wish is a form of summons, after all. Goosebumps were most definitely raised, while as for the sprits of the netherworld itself, who can say. It wasn't for want of trying.

Miss Suzy P at the NUDE stall

It was a well-attended affair in Victoria Baths, Manchester at the weekend, held within a handsome Victorian swimming palace, now ongoing restoration project and community hub. Both the Victoria Baths Fanzine Convention and FutureEverything Handmade maker fair set up shop to provide a double-whammy, with associated art installations, live performance, screenings and workshops. It’s been a while since I was last in the building and the continuing repairs are looking spectacular.

Zine and print booty

I made the classic mistake of failing to do a full perambulation of the zine stalls, the primary purpose of my trip, before deciding upon what to buy. This meant that I ran out of money by the half-way point, but I still bagged a rich haul of booty in the process. I’m especially pleased with a series of geometric hand-pulled prints from artist Catherine Chialton, the work of local collectives OWT Creative and Ultimate Holding Company, plus the discovery of the waspish and well-written queer zine Pink Mince.

Antony Hall: Physical Oscillators

I sat and chatted with my oldest pal Suzy P (we went to University in Newcastle together, back when Jesus was a lad), who was there to represent her print baby NUDE; an independent magazine she edits with her partner Ian Lowey, covering alt-culture, indie, retro, design, music, comics and a whole lot more besides. I wrote a feature on Lomography for their very first issue. I’m pleased to say she had a great day – check out their exclusive Rachel Ortas Ai Ai creature prints, only a few remaining!

Antony Hall: Physical Oscillators

Over in the Gala Pool, VB Arts hosted an installation by local resident and artist Antony Hall, Physical Oscillators, continuing his research into oscillators to generate sound and visible patterns in a new kinetic artwork. Using the gyroscopic action of motors and fans to create a sensory walkthrough environment reflecting the behavior of small swimming or flying insects, visitors could descend the steps into the dry pool and walk amongst fan assisted blue-blurred pendulums.

Antony Hall: Wave Pendulum

In the antechamber to the café, Wave Pendulum consisted of a series of simple kitchen jars filled with water, lids firmly attached and strung from the ceiling at equal spacing. An invigilator used a plank of wood to push them off in a generous sideswing, following which a morphing waveform emerged that at first appeared ordered, snakelike even, but then increasingly abstracted. It put me in mind of the forthcoming group show Constellations at my new employment, Cornerhouse, which responds to movement, ephemerality and chance, but more on that in another post…

]]> http://www.brenocallaghan.co.uk/2011/05/victoria-baths-fanzine-convention/feed/ 0 http://www.brenocallaghan.co.uk/2011/05/the-lady-appears/ http://www.brenocallaghan.co.uk/2011/05/the-lady-appears/#comments Sun, 08 May 2011 09:08:03 +0000 bren http://www.brenocallaghan.co.uk/?p=2495 Mandy is now pulling together the calico book cover for the final finish of The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington; completing the stitching and applying beaded pomegranate seeds. I’ve talked about my own experience on this project in some depth so far, but at this stage I'm going to hand over to my co-author to get her valuable opinion on our shared working process:

“Because we'd talked through all our ideas quite thoroughly, getting to this point was fairly simple. I feel that visiting The Icon Collection at Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery together helped us aesthetically to stay on the same track. I hadn't appreciated how helpful it would be to have Bren working with me at the studio as we went through the general layout, the choosing fabrics and colours, even deciding what type of stitches to use when generating each design.

“Having collaborated with other artists in different ways, I’m used to discussing work together before heading off to the studio off to work on certain elements of a project by myself. However working with Bren at the studio meant we were able to sketch, visualise and realise all the different aspects of the piece together, which made problem solving and decision making much quicker and simpler.'

“As it lays at the moment, a piece of textile art on a calico background, I have reservations about covering the block of wood with it as the untouched space around the illustrations stop the piece from looking too busy or overworked.'

Re-Covering opens at Untitled Gallery, Manchester in June. Follow the process and thinking behind our joint submission in the instalments listed below.

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4