Issue 143 November-December 2011 

In Ramallah, Running due Feb. 28th 2012

Gertrude Stein didn’t think much of commas, you remember? I think a lot of Gertrude’s work and Gertrude herself, as Fruit Store regulars will know, but disagree with her about the comma.

Commas break-up, complicate, deepen, add dimension to statements and any prose that takes ‘sense’ for granted. They elucidate, make-difficult, render actual complexity. The comma in In Ramallah, Running does these and many other things for me…

Above is a graphic rendering of a tiny part of the cover-image of the book [actual cover image coming soon], in which the sticking-out comma sticks out!

Commas are inconvenient, never quite fit, force you to notice that which you might not, condense and disrupt [presumed, heh Adania?] sense, etc. They are abyss and peak, add crucial [a]rhythms and make for the elliptical.

Writing without these things is almost literally nothing…

Translated By – London 2011

Translated By, Shumon and Charles’ exhibition of audio recordings of writing about place by a range of writers including myself, with a short excerpt from In Ramallah, Running  in the form of cut-together running texts, is currently on show at CCA KITAKYUSHU Ogura Gallery December 12, 2011 – January 20, 2012.

Shumon writes that for logistical reasons [sharp intake of breath!] my contribution to the exhibition is one of those that are not part of this version [actually, the point of the show is to make a new mixtape with Japanese writers/context included] but will be restored when TB reaches SALT in Istanbul later in the spring where “visitors will be able to run in Ramallah through the Ottoman Bank HQ!” Visitors to Japan are advised to pick up a copy of the book itself, then, after enjoying the new mix of course! Visitors to Istanbul this coming Spring… may now include myself because that sounds irresistible! [IR,R emerged from a summer visit to Palestine that began a day or two after the killings on the Mavi Marmara.]

It puts me in mind of the period a decade and more ago when I was teaching at the AA in London -where TB originated earlier this year coincidentally. Weekly, I ruinously expanded youngish people’s lives by lecturing to them in a series called ‘If to city were a verb…’ I remember a particular 5th year student from Japan whom I helped translate Lacan’s Seminar on Ethics line by line, using taped-together sheets of faxes that she was sent week by week in bits and pieces from home -a Lacanian loop if ever- because she so much wanted to understand -and I wanted her to too. Bizarre and perhaps even more difficult than its author intended!

I suspect that the absence of my firey and difficult Ramallah text is generated by a reason like this, amongst wholly proper others [I know/trust this much, this Note would be a peculiar complaint if I had any reason to think otherwise! In contrast, it's a celebration of TB]. The book itself -In Ramallah, Running- is on the way to printers after the last commas were finessed during last Friday and will appear at the end of February/early March exactly as long intended/advertised. I had to re-read it twice last week and can at least brag this much; it’s success in conjuring the place that Palestine is not allowed to be in the English-speaking world, might earn me some respect from those I most respect and aspire to generate respect in, but is going to get me tagged or tasered in almost every other context. Ironically/ sickeningly, of course, it will be me that is called racist!

Sadly, and unrelated to the thought above [except in the way mind works; in fact these thoughts were generated by the ongoing scarcity of mainstream British critical responses to Arabic writing, esp. if it's Palestinian] I suspect that IR,R might be dropped, missing, selected out, ‘unavailable’, unreading-listed, ‘on order’, “too much”, unreviewed; absented in various ways for the foreseeable future. However, I also expect it to exceed such contexts and have a long slow burn. But or so, for one thing make sure you chase yourself down a copy and come along to any reading or other event advertised to get one that way!

Meanwhile, for the duration of the TB in Japan show, anyone who would like to hear the really beautiful rendering of my extract [truly! it's incredibly touching to hear the extent to which Geoffrey Streatfeild made it his own while retaining the singularity of my text too. Brilliant radio too but... of course, you know; BBC "impartiality"] can drop me an email and I’ll send it to you. Seems fair, no? -as well as being a[nother] form of collaboration…

I’ve been peculiarly detained with place this year, which takes on ever more crucial significance. Of course I mean ‘place’ in particular ways; actual, dusty, productive, bone-filled with time and held in common. I don’t mean its abstraction as space, when it is evacuated of substantive qualities/ wholly commodified and/ or fallen into the hands of fascists and those who would erase others/the other for a piece of the earth’s crust. As if! As if…

Herein lies the potency of the place I attempted and dare I say succeeded in partially capturing, conveying, bringing to your brow in my complete series of texts. A recovery of place as an act and/ or means of resistance, as resistance per se -in the context of this uniquely depraved Occupation which so fittingly received Newt Gingrich’s leaky-monkey-pants seal of approval this week!

TB, the book, is worth getting hold of for all the contributions and you can get a copy here [without my benefitting in the way some such links work! Ethics, wink] and/ or save your pennies, cents, rupees and dirhams for a copy of In Ramallah, Running [for which I share credits with the artists and writers who responded so brilliantly and honourably to my texts and whose contributions make it irresistible alone, truly!] which will be available from all the usual places after February 28th 2012…

As for place itself, well watch this space for ongoing, upcoming projects closer to home and perhaps also a resumption, sometime next year, of another one in my home-from-home. Yes, you know…

CLICK on image for more at www.lannan.org

One use for a Gordon Matta-Clark is to help think through the question of whether art can be food or food art. The answer is obviously in the affirmative but I have something quite specific in mind. Food, itself. As such. The piece that was also a place which was also a community-borne restaurant called Food, that is.

It’s often said that it was during the process of labouring to turn an old bodega in SoHo [on Prince and Wooster] into a cafe/restaurant for friends and a like-minded milieu in 1971-72 that the living-breathing GM-C cut a section of wall and door frame out and cried “sandwich!” -a moment which supposedly spored his many brilliant incisions and savings thereafter -the pinnacle for me being Thresholes but also Splitting, Day’s End, Conical Intersect and Office Baroque [but it's almost all exceptionally good!]

According to Thomas Crow’s narration of GM-C’s early art-life [GM-C Phaidon 2003] the restaurant provided “reasonably cheap, fresh and healthy nourishment for the youthful contingent of loft-dwellers in a neighbourhood with next to no commercial infrastructure.” Crow writes that Food could not be considered art as such [despite GM-C's attempt to sell it to Castelli], but that food-centred performances were enacted in the completed restaurant after he ‘fell in love’ with his fabled ‘sandwich’… [as Caroline Yorke Goodden, partner in Food, also recalls in the same volume.]

It sounds like and resembles Charlotte Road circa 1992-4 [or Kensal Rise and Talbot Road some years before then; 'sushi', TB's all-night whatever-den and run of 'guest chefs'] or so to me, but that’s banal. More interesting is the way in which a restaurant or food with or without performative elements is or can be instrumentalised as art making. I don’t mean in the sense of acting-out Marinetti etc. [wonderful as that can be GP!] or in the sense of making highly finessed food, wonderful as that certainly is. I mean in the sense of perceiving it as making something-from-nothing; a restaging of life, everyday or otherwise, collectively or otherwise. Also as an interrogating/mining of those everyday structures and processes, etc., across time and place.

This is the inspiration and/or use of a Gordon Matta-Clark that I referred to. One distinct from the short road to pure, albeit funky, commerce pursued by the same Shoreditch and everywhere else too. I realise that any conceptualising of a ‘Folk’ food -the reference being Swedish- is woefully uncool, out of date etc. Or at least it has been during our recent 15 year long boom… But! Times they are a changin’, [soft] Anarchy in the UK, etc….

I’m thinking of a Forest near me and straddling the edge of Central London’s Zone 1, in the midst of which people have been growing food in the near abandoned ground, cooking some of it up and eating together, all year long -and against mid-year legal threats and much else from the Local Authority. Thinking of recent conversations around an open-air fire, food growing and being cooked all around, ‘midst hearty chatter -frivolous, happy, earnest and political- with people like those described, albeit loosely, above… People who only very superficially resemble ad-man notions of ‘outliers’/assorted commodifications [yuk!] while they’re living lives founded in the making of something-from-nothing…

I’m thinking of a conversation with someone -a dirty-utopian food grower even in this cold season- who described a “dream” he has of something rather like Food, which I’m going to call Forest Food. A dream that is eminently realiseable in the Forest we were standing in, under trees still bearing leaves which only the first days of December have finally dispelled. A dream of continuing to grow food in the ground marked out and protected by trees half a century old in a zone at the heart of a massive regeneration project still in early stages [pre conceptual master plan submission] which is now drawn out as a public park of significant size stretching from Cuddington Copse and nearby Peace Garden in the east via Chearsely Copse and the Great Silver Maple to the Six Old Men and Sweet Chestnut Slopes that I myself named in the summer [yes! very Arthur Ransome, but don't forget that he witnessed actual Revolution in Russia and made more than one borrowing from Trotsky!]. A park made by or resulting from an inspired pursuit of strategic effect, alongwith communal effort and conviction, which focused on existing trees and all that they represent to defend them from a threatened, laboriously modelled and officially agreed, grid of new roads, uniform podia with private green space, wrapped in equally uniform shops which would otherwise have been dropped on a unique 450-tree Forest straddling Zone 1…

I rehearse this latter briefly because if it’s possible to turn round a global developer on such a scale using watertight if iconoclastically merged argument; ecological, public welfare, health, emerging urban policy [all of which lacked but now have a substantial precedent as a result], but most importantly by a vivid evocation of place in voice and writing, as well as massive amounts of sheer insistence, then it’s also possible to realise the “dream” of growing a cafe/canteen/restaurant, a communal restaurant much as described above, from the ground in the middle of that same Forest, no?

Forest Food would grow some/much/all its own food in the ground [and on its roof?] within metres of its ovens and tables, be owned and run collectively for a community that exists/is emerging and be a beacon of a modest sort [low light, ambitious food!] at the centre of what is intended to be a retail-led development on a massive scale complete with the joyous [I'm not been only ironic] freedom to sit in a chain cafe or its terrace.

Reconfigured as art making, understood as a process of making something-from-nothing, incorporating ongoing two-way research/relays and self-generating actors in which the consumption of the food is of equal value as the cooking of it which is of equal value as the growing of it, then you have something. You have art, in fact. The place itself, as it stands pre-demolition, seems ripe for the kind of interventions that GM-C actually made elsewhere, but what would be the point of that now? Where would the art of that reside? [As fabulous as Conical Intersect was; cutting gorgeous forms and visions through a building to be demolished right alongside the brand new Beauborg centre. Check the film online]. The potential art lies in as yet unrealised forms of making surely? The potency of it lies in exactly the same times and places, no?

One of the points of this for me is or would be the self generation it requires and embodies. As of today, apparently, this is not a remote possibility. To begin to think of making this Forest Food exist through a period of attempted sealing-up of a 23 acre Zone 1 site, large scale demolitions, compete with an obstructive LA in Southwark and perhaps a similarly minded developer in Lend Lease, nervous of the new as ever, requires all the individual and collective energies of an art making.

This form of practice seems wholly in rhythm with our times, including the incorporation of a politics of peoples’ assemblies [village panchayat's, hedge schools through the Urban Forest School generated by these examples in my mind, Summer 2011] and dirty-utopian occupations. Something made from nothing -a nothing which surely includes the vacuous/revolting excesses of the City?

A regen./redev. on the scale envisaged at the Elephant and Castle will require more than the drivers of a new retail ‘offer’ -to soil myself with the jargon. Of course it you pump enough of it in, especially in this place where 9 out of every 10 pounds spent by residents are spent outside the Borough, for example, then it will ‘work’ in part and parlance. At best it would be a deadened/deadening zone though, no?! It would surround a sizeable forested park and entrain commercial creep all over and through it. I’m also not fond of the extant use of art or culture in these contexts either, simply because it’s entirely market-defined, banal at best, a box ticked by a series of charlatans.

A Food for this Forest -Forest Food- would or could be a very different thing. I’d advocate that it could and should be conceived as the making of art, nothing less nor more. Everyone involved in it is then an artist-maker with the liberations and responsibilities that entails. This is at the same time a making of politics, and nothing more nor less, with the variant liberations and responsibilities that that entails. If I don’t at this point sound infected by some form or quality of utopian ‘delusion’ [drive] then I haven’t been making myself clear. Why tarry with anything else or less?

So, I invite you now to join as artist-makers or political-actors in this making in the Forest; Forest Food. Bring a Gordon Matta-Clark if you like but don’t fail to bring an appetite for something actually new and a determination to snatch it out of or carve it in to the ground of what is or will otherwise be the same-old same-old…

There are some months ahead [almost three seasons] to demonstrate what it can and will mean, followed by fierce and real wrangling to preserve that and actualise it fully as a central pivot in a coming green economic zone [more on that to come] and eventually for it to take the form of a building. I suggest the ground should not be ceded. That, you might say, was and is one of my “dreams” here…

Interested?

Click on images to enlarge

See my earlier post on the subject with some contextualising thoughts -esp. on Leighton House for example- here.

Beyond that, one of the real joys of visiting ex-British colonies in the Persian Gulf during 2011, resided in the Iranian traces and presence [as well as the Bidoun party on the Creek!]. Given that the ‘Democratic’/Bombing World is again stepping up its war-mongering -in an effort to retain its noble record of being the only people/nation to have actually mass-murdered another people by dropping nuclear bombs on them- I have to again dissociate myself from the reflex violence of a decadent and deflating Imperium. I say so, from the comfort of London with its relatively easy view, with no affection for the present Iranian regime but able to, you know, separate these things out a bit… And I say that with no affection for the present British regime, able as it is to separate out Universal jurisdiction and International law from its favoured war criminals when it suits.

I think I’ll stop there…

Returning for a longer look at Paul Noble’s current exhibition, I realise that Nobson is more prominent in the show than I’d understood. Also, that my sense that deserts had bloomed is probably more revealing of my baseline bounce into every morning as a blind optimist than the actuality! That is; yes there are trees, plants and they emerge from the desert but that doesn’t quite conjugate the verb ‘to bloom’. Plus, my eyes lied to me in identifying clusters of rocks -which I know peculiarly well, given their relationship to images in In Ramallah, Running- as bushes, trees, verdancy!

Again, that sickening/delusional optimism/positivity; it’s rather nice to be wrong!

A more exact survey opens on a series of small drawings spelling out Welcome to Nobson, which lead on to Gallery 1 with its entrance half blocked by a ‘curtain’ of heavy ‘beads’ in a nice almost subliminal touch. ‘Ouch’, they say; ‘fool!’ This room is dominated by huge drawings and those fabulous embracing poops [one is called 'Couple'] which are modelled on gate-plinths in one corner of the multi-panelled Welcome to Nobson drawing that reaches to the ceiling in this tall room, details well beyond my eye sight.

Welcome… itself, is a stunning alt. universe with layer after layer of suggestion and manipulation of view. There is extraordinary detail beyond the pencilled precision of it all, with hints, sketches at and rehearsals of other drawings in the same room. Of course, it also works the other way around. In the mural-drawing there is a muted version of Cathedral which comes into sharp focus on the opposite wall; a really great piece of Paul’s work. Other single drawings elaborate or experiment with elements in this take on Nobson; each of which is startling in its sheer beauty, a quality that the mural plays with, subverts, disdains, and yet also, as it were, does…

A+B+C is an elaboration in this way; a pair of starkly lit ladders and slides, one Carsten Holleresque in its potential thrill, the other a Dignitas-like form of suicide. For me the strongest drawings here are This is the Way and Family is Infinity [or, Hard Labour], stand-alones which are continuous with the Nobson mural or in some way part of it. The former is the one I know well but misidentified on opening night, looking awry while someone stood transfixed before it -seeing flora where only stones stack. But it’s a very strong image, a ['circular'] path worn in a stony desert, like those Peruvian markings that were once ascribed to Martians, discovered on Mars itself!

Family… is a very sober piece of work, an exquisite wrestle with enigmatic and competing demands upon the self. Paul’s drawing resonates with ambivalence both intellectual and visual in perhaps the single most generative piece here -albeit abysmally so. Cathedral is a lovely Nobelesque touch, in which a drawing is executed with extraordinary precision, while undertaking a debunking that reminds you, or me at least- of positive human gestures.

Stacks of stones are still made as wishes, totems, memorials -I immediately think of stones stacked precariously, near Koteshwar on the Kori Creek at India and Hinduism’s most western extent or of Walter Benjamin’s ‘memorial’ at Port Bou [the boulder not the sculpture], and so on- to this day across the globe and cultures. At their best they are simple gestures, embodied thoughts, no more nor less. Human culture has turned those urges into the bureaucratic absurdities of formal religions with all their sanctimony and human faults beginning with vulgarity and vanity…  Is Noble simply critiquing or celebrating? What and what?

Font, the drawing I stole a picture of on opening night but only shared a slither of, was nowhere to be seen/found in the galleries today. Perhaps it was the cause of my memory greening more drawings than existed, because it certainly bore plant life!

So to Gallery 2 where AH resides, alongwith a ceramic sculpture and a little Wooden Bell made from Ziricote wood [tough, Ebony-like, resonant] and hazelnuts which have been carved with faces… The latter’s presence is curious and a more natural-seeming move into sculptural form than the larger piece.

AH, like many of the drawings here, is something you need to stand before to see properly and understand. In this instance [as with the spelling out of the show's title] the letters stand before a drawn brick wall which is made up of a whole world of cartoonery… While I love the work and play in evidence here, I am not yet sure what I think of it as art, simply because the the two elements work in markedly different ways, complex, precise and visually sophisticated, and then ‘simple’, busy, and more or less quoting from another visual world or context. Nothing wrong with that in theory, but in practice, as I say, I’m unsure…

AH by Paul Noble 2010 [with apologies for poor quality of snatched images. Click on close up to expand]

So though ambivalence is an obvious hope or expectation generated by the work, for myself the work itself is so extraordinary that ambivalence is only one of its very minor chords. Whatever the intention, this exhibition contains human exception in works that possess manifest preciousness which, taken together, generate wonderment. It is the only proper response even if the ‘bead’ curtain guarantees a nice smirk on the way in and the way out. Ever felt like you’ve been cheated? Yes! -but not today!

Paul Noble at Gagosian has a page with further links here.

There is a now full page of work in the show -including AH and Cathedral- here.

UPDATE: Gagosian keep updating their pages, so if my renewed links don’t won’t go to the artist’s page here.

Masterplan Response Pt 2 – next six steps… [Ph. G Mannes-Abbott]

NB: reposted from original ECUF site [now defunct] 17 November 2011 with permission of its author.

There are a number of further responses with a series of steps which will roll out in the weeks, month, even years ahead.

Font by Paul Noble [close up] [Ph. Guy Mannes-Abbott]

I want to flag up Paul Noble’s new show at Gagosian Gallery which opened last night, Thursday, and is on until December 17th. I approached it with an unusual degree of pleasurable anticipation to see both artist and art works which in Paul come together in very particular ways. The show was buzzing, the work a triumph. I’ll write something more exact in time, but for now I urge you to go. There is an ‘old’ PN from the ’90s I think but many of these new drawings -ranging from big to absolutely huge, not least Welcome to Nobson itself which is 4 or 5 metres square- have a transformative verdancy to them. Bleak and funny dystopian cityscapes and stone strewn deserts are made to bloom here alongside monumental pink marble poops! No-one can or does do what Paul achieves to such mesmerising effect.

Reading Adam Curtis’ blog on Occupy London Stock Exchange and the broader protest, with its clips and pics of Pauline and gang dancing in the mid-Sixties, made the thought of coming across images of Charles Fourier and gang [or just Charles!] dancing at any time peculiarly enticing!

Everyone seems to adore Adam Curtis and while what I’ve seen of his work is solid and unusual for mainstream media I find myself half a step behind, dancing to another tune -or rhythm. Essentially, I don’t look for redemption or revolution in programmes made for tv, hardly ever watched or watch it, excepting when there is a very urgent need to witness a distant event live -and before media gets their mouths and words on the actuality… [Saying so obviously entrains a double bind, to which I say; Pah!]

Anyway, here I will soon go again, grooving my way through Curtis’ oeuvre to really try to nail it! It’s not that there aren’t lots of positives about the work I know or have seen of course, lots to intrigue but just that I’m after concision, exactitude, blades and bone as opposed to good television [really not convinced about what that might be, strictly speaking]. Much better to spend more time again with Charles Fourier, as Curtis advocates himself at the end of his generous blog post on Occupy and its age-old demand for the Impossible in all its proper open-endedness…

Occupy and all that has generated it are a reminder of underlying actuality. Human time is slow with beautiful jags of change. When all the fizz of apparent economic success [when change simply equates with purchase] fades, there is the elemental actuality of putting one and one together, trying to eat two, transforming one and a half [sentences? breathes?] into something to believe in… whatever. A slower, ‘realer’ and more potent experience of things in which even the arguably satisfying fast food of tv ought to languish in preference to actually stepping over or out to welcoming, embattled shelves, picking up some Charles Fourier and sitting down to read…

Now that IS a radical thought!