Robert Fitterman & Kim Rosenfield, poets-in-residence at Shandy Hall

Shandy Hall, Coxwold, August, 2010

information as material and the Laurence Sterne Trust proudly welcome poets Robert Fitterman and Kim Rosenfield as poets-in-residence at Shandy Hall during mid-August 2010. The Manhatten-based pair will stay on site at the Hall, which is the former residence of the famed 18th century English writer Laurence Sterne and now functions as a museum dedicated to exploring the legacy of his work in the arts generally and in the context of the artefacts of his estate.

During their residency the acclaimed conceptualists will generate work specifically for the up-coming ‘A Perverse Library’ exhibition at the museum, which has been curated by Simon Morris and opens on the first week end of September.

Fitterman and Rosenfield will also do two one-off readings: the first at ArtSpace Gallery, 8 Tower Street,  York on Monday 16th August, 7pm; the second at the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Birkbeck College, School of English and Humanities, Malet Street, WC1E 7HX, London on Monday 23rd August. Both events are free so please do come and enjoy this rare treat.

Postings on other residencies at Shandy Hall co-organised by iam can be found in the archive of this blog.

Artists & Books exhibition

Johan Deumens Gallery (Haarlem), April 23 – June 5 2010.

artists: Takako Hamano / Anouk Kruithof / Caroline Waltmans / Ton Zwerver / Christiane Fichtner /
Kasper Andreasen / Annesas Appel / Frans Baake / Information as Material / Martin Peulen / Piet Vloemans / herman de vries / Hans Waanders / Alicja Werbachowska / Luuk Wilmering

Johan Deumens Gallery

Donkere Spaarne, 32zw NL-2011, JH Haarlem

Phone: +31 (0) 622 451545

[Photograph: Pavel Büchler's You Don't Love Me (2007). Photograph: Leeds City Gallery.]

The subject of iam’s forthcoming documentary, making nothing happen (dir. Simon Morris; funded by Manchester Metropolitan University and York College; due September 2010), Pavel Büchler, has been awarded the 2010 Northern Art Prize.

Martin Wainwright’s report on the ceremony for The Guardian, Friday 22 January, 2010, follows:

”

Büchler scoops the North’s answer to the Turner Prize, declaring his love for Manchester’s buzzing art scene.

He claimed to have last won a competition when he was 13, but artist Pavel Büchler played it cool last night when a packed gallery in Leeds heard that he had taken the third Northern Art prize.

In a generous compliment to his four rivals on the shortlist, Büchler regretted that artists had to be pitted against one another to drum up interest in the arts, especially when they happen to be outside London. “I really don’t think that we should be put in a position where art is treated as a competitive sport,” he said. “It is good to see so many people here and so much interest, but perhaps equally a reason to despair.”

Everyone who took part deserved the prize, he said, after accepting his £16,500 winnings from sculptor Richard Deacon, one of this year’s five judges. Matt Stokes, Rachel Goodyear and the partnership of Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson will each receive £1,500 for being shortlisted for the north’s leading contemporary art award, which is attempting to become a northern version of the Turner prize, won by Deacon in 1987.

Büchler, 58, has been an influential figure in British art for many years since moving from Prague to establish a base in Manchester. His entry for the prize, an installation named Eclipse, takes up the largest of four rooms at Leeds City Art Gallery. Based partly on poetry and partly on science education, it uses nine projectors from the 1950s to cast interlocking shadows from a range of balls and other spherical objects. A second work, You Don’t Love Me, combines audio tape and a recorder with a bottle of whisky, making an analogy between bootleg alcohol and an illegal recording of a live gig.

The judges (alongside Deacon were Patricia Bickers, editor at Art Monthly; Paul Hobson, director of the Contemporary Art Society; Peter Murray, director of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park; and Tanja Pirsig-Marshall of Leeds City Art Gallery) said in their citation that “Büchler has been consistently influential to a huge amount of people throughout his career, both as a practitioner and teacher”.

Büchler acknowledged the influence on his work of having a base in the north – the one criterion for artists entering the prize. He said: “I’m an old man and London is far too busy for me; I love Manchester. Of all the regional cities I know, it has the least ‘regional’ attitude. Artists there are not chippy about the rest of the world.”

The popular vote, taken from visitors to the shortlist exhibition, went to Matt Stokes, who is based in Gateshead but exhibits all over the world. His film of punk-rock subculture in Austin, Texas, was originally commissioned for an exhibition there, but seems equally at home in Leeds.

Rachel Goodyear, 31, from Oldham and now based in Manchester, entered a portfolio of intensely realistic drawings of fantastical subjects. The partnership of Crowe and Rawlinson (from Barnsley and Macclesfield, respectively) offered a video work entitled The Four Horsemen, in which flowers morph into bug-like figures.

Simon Wallis, director of the Hepworth gallery, which opens next year in Wakefield, said: “The prize is galvanising attention on a region that really is becoming very exciting in terms of the quality of artists working here.” Christoph Grunenberg, director of Tate Liverpool, agreed: “We are fighting against the London centre of gravity,” he said. “And so we should be: there is incredible work going on here.”

Before leaving, Büchler recounted his first art-prize victory as a teenager – a competition to write a history essay that won him a 40-minute flight over Prague. He recalled initially being angry that the pilot didn’t land to drop off the runners-up, who were supposed to have only 20 and 10 minutes respectively, but soon reconsidered. “I first of all thought it was unfair, but in the end we all flew around for at least two hours,” he said. “That’s how it should be.”

”

Büchler also authored the pocketbook, The Answer to the Question, published by iam in 2005.

THE IDEOLOGY OF DAVID CAMERON’S CONSERVATIVE PARTY

Nick Thurston

Price £1 (including postage)
Format Postcard poem; one-colour print on 250gsm card
Year 2009
Edition unlimited
Dimensions 155 x 105 mm

“For this simple postcard poem Thurston has set one term within three equally-spaced pairs of inverted/floating commas. As an extension of the contemporary reduction of main-stream type standards in English, which conflates the straight quotation mark with the inverted/floating comma and confuses the American commitment to double quotes with the British flittering between single and double quotes, Thurston releases the spatial compression used by typographers to distinguish double quotation marks from two adjacent apostrophes and he refuses the false spacing used by typographers to separate a quotation mark from an adjacent apostrophe. Here, one term becomes pressured: is it a direct or indirect quotation?; is the term used ironically, cynically, doubtfully, or in a nontraditional or nonliteral sense?; is it claimed as a title or used as a nickname? Simultaneously, the tiering of three pairs presses the question ‘what usage or intention is set or sub-set within which?’. The composition suggests that the one floating term could have been extracted from within any number of additional layers of use or intent; or even taken from any one or many, real or unreal, spoken or written instantiation(s).

Catalysed by one simple typological move, contextualised by the poem’s title, in tension with the apostrophe as rhetorical device, and reflexively formalised in a traditionalistic print, these linguistic questions disclose some of the many unresolved questions about the ideological and political complexion of modern conservatism. What the British Conservative party mean by and as ‘conservative’ is sharply focussed as the question of this poem.”

—Simon Morris, poet & Founding Editor of information as material

Freud and the Gift of Flowers

Forbes Morlock & Sharon Kivland

Simon Morris

night divides the day, in ‘The Black Page’ exhibition from Simon Morris on Vimeo.

The music is Lillibullero whistled by Patrick Wildgust, the curator of the Laurence Sterne Museum. In Sterne’s most famous book, Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Tristram’s uncle, Captain Toby Shandy, a British Army veteran of the fighting in Ireland and the Low Countries during King William’s reign, whistles the tune to Lillibullero when he is offered any opinion or argument which would require passionate rebuttal or which he considers particularly silly. The action in night divides the day takes inspiration from the work of Lucio Fontana, Gustav Metzger and Saburo Murakami.

‘The Black Page’ exhibition at Shandy Hall celebrates the 250th anniversary of Vols I & II of Tristram Shandy. The exhibition was curated by Patrick Wildgust.

Page 73 of Volume I is a black page, which marks the death in the novel of Parson Yorick.

73 artists/writers were asked to create a ‘Black Page’ for exhibition and sale by auction, to celebrate the anniversary and help raise much needed funds for the museum.

Other black constructions can be viewed here: http://blackpage73.blogspot.com/

This film is in the private collection of William Sherman and Claire MacDonald. Any requests to exhibit the film or present it in public should be referred to them directly.

Marie-Josée Jean & Klaus Scherübel, artists-in-residence at Shandy Hall

Shandy Hall, Coxwold, October, 2009

information as material and the Laurence Sterne Trust were proud to welcome the artist Klaus Scherübel and curator Marie-Josée Jean as artists-in-residence at Shandy Hall in 2009. The Montreal-based pair stayed on site at the Hall, which is the former residence of the famed 18th century English writer Laurence Sterne and now functions as a museum dedicated to exploring the legacy of his work in the arts generally and in the context of the artefacts of his estate.

Postings on other residencies at Shandy Hall co-organised by iam can be found in the archive of this blog.

iam at the inaugural London Art Book Fair

Whitechapel Gallery, London, 25-27 September, 2009

information as material accepted the kind invitation of the organising team to take part in the inaugural London Art Book Fair, hosted by the Whitechapel Gallery in association with Marcus Campbell Books. Details about the annual event can be found here.