Sweden was wonderful, a fantastically beautiful country of little wooden house dotting tree covered landscapes formed by glaciers and also the most friendly and welcoming places I have ever visited, it was just a shame their beer was awful. They have strict laws about the sale of alcohol which mean that most shops are not allowed to sell drinks over 3.5% alc. except a few specialist off-licences. I could live with this if it weren’t that the beer was mostly imported Carlsberg and I hate Carlsberg which I suspect the Danes might have pissed in to let it down to the right alcohol content.

The Deviant Art Festival the The Pump House in Trollhatten was great. The art was very deviant, the gallery was full of outrageous statements, work made from old junk and depiction of death, nudity, and disgusting bodily fluids. Work in such bad taste is has been common in most major city for years, but the twist the curators gave was to set up camp with these artists in a quaint little Swedish town during tourist season.

The show also had a knowing awareness that you need to go to rural Sweden if you want to find people who can still be shocked by art. Much of the work makes jokes about the sensation art moments of the 1990s.

The show was perhaps best summed up by a performance by the Dribble Factory which was a guy from Newcastle who strapped himself to the ceiling and then dribbled on to the floor. The work was confrontational but maintained a playful knowing irony, punk rock spirit and a student sense of humour. As you can imagine it was just my bag and my performance went very down well.

I had intended to write some poetry in Swedish for the show. However my Swedish wasn’t very good and most Swedes were very happy to speak in English and much of the audience were artist over from London for the festival anyway. I did try to translate some lyrics but my pronunciation was a bit wrong and just scared and confused people. In the end I did a selection of favourites from recent show and a couple of new poems I’d written in English over the previous week, including Rose Tyler and Postcard the Campaign for Real Ale.


I was paired with Johan Lindeblom for the show who is a Swedish poet with some books and a CD to his name. Johan translated some of his poems into English for the show and also read in Swedish. Johan was a great guy and I would like to work with him again. His style was very different from mine, but we came from similar back ground as he had started writing lyrics with a band and we had similar tastes in music. Johan's poetry was subtle and gothic than my own and based on rhythm rather than silly rhymes.

Sweden was a great success and I was sad to leave, but there was talk about going back next year…



POETRY CAFÉ

Landed back in Stanstead on Monday afternoon and then raced across to Covent Garden for a show at The Poetry Café with John Hegley. It was the first performance at a proper poetry reading and John Hegley is quite well know. Nervous, exhausted from travelling and sweating like a pig in the current UK heat wave, my show was a little shaky but it seemed to go ok. Just did 5 minutes of favourites. One of the ladies in the audience described my show as an ‘onslaught ‘ which I was quite please with. My avoidance of such venues in the past had led me to develop a style that was perhaps different to what they were used to. I’m not sure what I did was entirely suitable for the venue but I was pleased I raised a few questions about what I should be doing.

FORTHCOMING

Rag and Bone closes this weekend and there will be some performances and the draw of Sam’s Art Lotto from 4pm. There will be a few drinks and a bit of a party. Was hoping that The Rust Buckets might perform but they are having some problem so it might just be Sam and me unless some else step up. There are now some picture from the show on the Rag and Bone Website www.ragaandbone.info


The word on the lanes of East Anglia is that there might be something called DITCHLICKER happening in Blo’ Norton on August 26th . Details are not confirmed, but rumour has it that Victor Mount, Skrewworm and The Blo Boys might be on the line up plus Alys in Wonderland and Opposite The Hotel are planning exclusive comeback shows.

I was very please with my interim show at Goldsmiths. Got heckled for more. I will would like to paste some video up as soon as I get time to edit it, but it was a bit rude and I don't know if the video will get through Google Video's adult content controls...

As soon as the show was done and I'd recovered from the Kareoke afterparty I had to start work on the Rag and Bone Show at Three Colts. Got is set up just in time. The show looks great and we had a great evening of performance last night at the Private View with myself, Theo, Victor Mount, Duncan Ward and The Alps. The show is up for two weeks, there is loads of good work in it so have a look. It looks more like a proper art show than I ever invisioned I could do.

This is a breif entry as I need to pack up my poems and fly to sweeden for the Deviant Art Festival. Should be fun!

I should hopefully land back in the UK in time to perform with John Hegley at the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden!

Rock and Roll!

I didn’t get the Rochford project. I was told it was close run thing but Haley Newman got it. Though I have not met Haley Newman, I have read about her performances in books and seen her work in some important places. It’s not so disappointing when you loose to someone who has books written about them when not so long ago I couldn’t get a parish newsletter written about me. I also like some of Haley Newman’s work and would have chosen her over me without even interviewing me, so I feel kind of pround I was a contender.

This week I have been working on my end of year show for Goldsmiths. Then last end of year show I did (back when I was an undergraduate) I had spent 6 months working on, this time I had to knock something together in week. I was left so short of time was because I had been out and about doing show and putting together proposals for art projects. Though this has distracted from some of my studies, I am studying so I can do show and submit proposals for art projects.

I considered doing an performance for the examiners but then remembered how unpleasant it is doing a performing to panel of stoney faced examiners making notes on clipboards the whole way through.

It was suggested that for my end of term show I could present some documentation of the various performances I had done. I didn’t really like this idea because I have become very weary of documentation of live art events. Performance is very fashionable at the moment and good cameras are affordable and easy to use and I have noted a compulsive urge amongst art students to document everything without thinking. I have succumbed to the urge myself. However I have become weary of it because I now have reams of video I’ll never have time edit and most of it is never quite satisfactory. No matter how many cameras you get you always miss something: a camera breaks down, the tape runs out before the grand finally, the camera man falls over half way though, somebody starts rustling in their bags next to the microphone, the camera is focused on the performer and misses the audience’s reactions. As a point response I had been refusing to document some of my shows at all.

My initial idea for the end of term show was to build a small theatre in one of the studios and just leave the stage empty except for a few discarded props and empty beer bottles. I wanted the examiner and the few other people who see the installation to feel disappointed because they had missed the show. However, I noted from the course handbook we had to present something that represented our practice over the year. The empty theatre was a bit of a one-off one-liner that wouldn’t represent all the other stuff I had done and had been writing about in this blog.

However, by the time I realised this, my proposal had already been accepted and I had been allocated a large black space that was perfect for converting into a theatre. I spent most of this week trying to work out what the fuck else I could do in this black room. I also need to work out how to present a lot of documentation which was inevitably going to look like second rate left-overs from shows I’d done elsewhere.

I came up with the idea to build a museum to myself. It would be full relic from performances. I liked the idea that reconstructions of historical events in museum would never be the same as experiencing something for real. This would also mean I could build an installation and wouldn’t have to perform in front of the examiners.

By Wednesday my museum looked was a pile of junk some shoddy leftover from much better shows I’d done elsewhere accompanied by some rather lame museum plaques. It didn’t look much like a museum. I’d forgotten how much work it was actually making objects. After a word with one of my tutors I abandoned the idea.

I had two and a half days left. The only thing I knew I could put together in that time was a performance. As much as I hated the idea I was going to have to perform for the examiners.

I rummaged through material from my recent shows in the hope I could adapt something I already had (You may note I have pasted up some more vids from previous shows I found while I was rummaging). I messed about trying to rewrite ‘Judith Butler’ or ‘Democracy of Mediocracy’ or ‘The Pig Semen Delivery Man’, as they had been my favourite recent works, but they were written for other situations and just didn’t work quite right. I was going to have to write something new for the space, but what? What the hell was I going to do with that black space anyway? Would I pull it off and pass the course?

Find out Wednesday, 7.30pm, Studio B, Goldsmiths College, New Cross.

Been trying to write poetry on a more site specific basis. This is a little poem I wrote this week as a site specific work for sitting in the sunshine.



I have also got around to editing and sorting a pile of video tapes and images and added some extra stuff to some of the previous posts on this blog, including some clips from Outcider Art and my performance of Democracy of Mediocracy in the VIP area at Glimpse Art, which Cherie Blair didn't turn up for.

Enjoy!

This week I was invited to Rochford in Essex. As part of a major program of regeneration of the Thames Gateway artists are being commissioned to produce new public artworks in a series of sites in the area. My name was put forward and I somehow got short listed to make a public artwork for Rochford Reservoir. I was asked to look at the site and present an initial response to an interview panel of artists, curators and members of the local community.

The reservoir has duck and a few fish and a miniture railway runs by the reservoir. It is in a sleepy little Essex town, maybe it is not the most exciting place but it is quite a pleasant place.

I think my name was suggested because Bob & Roberta Smith who is curating the project wanted me to do something like Frogstock on the site, except rather than involving local musicians, he wanted me to involve the local fishermen and miniature steam railway enthusiasts. He wanted Frogsteam

I don’t have any firm ideas about what I want to do. I don’t want to just impose some great monolith on the place anyway, I would rather work with the local community to create something they actually want that will improve the place for them.

The reservoir is not a bad place, there are some things that need a little sorting out such as the gated entrances and getting the miniature railway in more use, but the place already has some appeal that should not be spoilt.

The park is regularly used by dog walkers, fishermen and parents who take the kids down to see the ducks. I spoke to a few of them to see what they might want some one to do and the main suggestion I was asked to put forward on behalf of the fishermen was more fish! It was also suggested that I could involve the ducks in the art project somehow. I tried to charm some of the duck into talking to me by singing some duck themed songs from the bank, but they didn’t seem interested.

People I spoke to who do not have dogs, or children or a fishing rod are not so bothered about the place – it’s nice but they don’t use it. But some of those people didn’t really seem to like going out anywhere very much.

However, in conversation with the Tea Ladies from the Beehive Café I discovered Rochford had a serious social problem created by gangs who wreak fear in the local community. There a lot of bored children in Rochford aged 10 –13 hanging around the town. Their boredom is not only a problem for them but also for everyone else in the town because they have nothing to do apart from hanging around the town square making a nuisance of themselves.

As you can see from the video I didn’t deal with very well with the 12 year old self-proclaimed ganstas of Rochford. I also made the mistake of giving them my business card to prove I was an artist and not child molester. Since then I have since been receiving nuisance telephone messages of swearing.

The kids do have interests that could be cultivated using the reservoir, be that fishing, bicycles, miniature railways, gangster rap or swearing.

Rounding up all the kids in the reservoir (I mean the reservoir area I wasn’t suggesting we just drown them all) could also be a problem because hordes of kids in tracksuits could be quite threatening to all the fishermen and dog walkers.

I am quite threatened by kids in tracksuits as 2 of them put me in hospital a when I was mugged week and a half ago. Though the kids in tracksuit in Rochford are younger and I could much more easily beat them in a fight, if they are not put on the straight and narrow they could become a bigger problem later.

The kids do need to be dealt with sensitively, you can’t just go in there and tell them what to do, they won’t listen and they will think you are a teacher and want nothing to do with it. My total lack of authority over children could perhaps even be an advantage.

The kids could somehow be put in a position where they become a valued part of the local community rather than being alienated from it.

They need to feel responsible involvement in the project. If they feel responsible they will also perhaps be less likely to vandalise the whole thing later on.

At the interview I was asked to present my initial response to the site, here it is, incorporating the local interest in both Gangsta Rap and fishing :