In THE DARK WOULD - The Verb BBC Radio 3 at 10pm, 19 April

'THE SECRET' by Márton Koppány. Courtesy of the artist.

THE DARK WOULD language art anthology will feature on BBC Radio 3 literary discussion programme The Verb this evening Friday 19 April, 10pm.  The programme can be accessed as an online broadcast, or later as a podcast at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tnsf

Also featured on this edition of The Verb are Serafina Steer, Sheila Heti and Steven Hall.

THE DARK WOULD published by Apple Pie Editions can be purchased  from distributor Knives Forks & Spoons at http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/


Philip writes:

It's a strange, tumbling and delight-ish thing, a conversation with Ian McMillan. Ian is the presenter for BBC Radio 3 literary discussion programme The Verb. I first met him at a creative writing session in The Big Issue office, which was gleeful, haphazard and yet sharp-focussed; the second time was yesterday at the big Beeb studio in Mediacity, Salford for a discussion about THE DARK WOULD, the anthology of 'language art' I've been compiling over the last two years.

THE DARK WOULD brings together some of the many outpourings of contemporary text art and poetry practice that cross and eddy through the world right now. From 'outsidered' art (which of is one of the mainsprings of the work of arthur+martha) to Conceptual Poetries and Arts, Text Art, Vispo, Concrete Poetry et al, etc, it's a big rush of invitees. Trying to represent them all  adequately in galloping McMillan-style on a radio magazine programme would've been impossible - and risked severe oxygen deficiency. Instead, we talked through two pieces in greater detail, hoping that they might be ambassadors for the whole collection, which spans 300 pages in the paper volume and over 1000 pages in the virtual Volume 2.

The first to be considered was the cover of Volume 1, a piece titled 'THE SECRET' by Márton Koppány. This visual poem refers, very elusively, to Márton's childhood home in Budapest, and the presence of the holocaust (sometimes spoken, sometimes un-) within it. Márton's parents were both concentration camp survivors; others of his relatives didn't survive. This piece is extraordinarily elegant and spare, a poem comprised of brackets only. It says a great deal, it seems to me, about the limitations of language and of passing on experience, without employing words. 'THE SECRET' was exhibited in a railway goods wagon as part of the exhbition 'a map of you' which I curated at Bury Text Festival 2011. The piece employs the font style of old railway signage and that together with its historical context meant that it seemed best framed by the doorway of a rail truck - recalling people bullied and bundled into goods wagons and cattle trucks, sent to their deaths. Looking at the cover of the book, I'm reminded of the holocaust survivors Lois and I met and worked with in Manchester. On the front cover of this book, 'THE SECRET' suggests other things too - it is perhaps a path, an opening into a wood.

The second work we discussed was Richard Long's 'ONE HOUR, A SIXTY MINUTE CIRCLE WALK ON DARTMOOR 1984'. This is a circular text piece, sixty words, written while Long made the walk across Dartmoor: 'JUMP SHADOW GRASS ICE SCUFF SOFT BLUE BREATHE...' It is a clock made out of words. Like much of Long's work it combines beautiful starkness with an after-echoing complexity. The writer Steven Hall was also interviewed on the show and, when he saw the book, was delighted to discover Long's work. I invited him to read the piece on air. It's a wonderful reading, although of course it is NOT the piece Richard Long made; in some way it's a breaking of it. By recasting it as a reading, we lose the component that makes this work vital - the use of space - which connects it to the circles of the globe and time. But occasionally we have to break apart a mechanism in order to understand it; having heard it, I re-appreciated what a thing it is, back on the page. Richard called me to discuss his work in the anthology and suggested a companion piece for this one in Volume 2 (our virtual volume). This was also a circular work, made in 2011 in South Africa. Moving between the two is a movement from paper to virtual pages and through Richard's ageing process - 1984-2011. It speaks to the broader theme of the anthology which is mortality - having a body, then not having a body.

These notes are written before The Verb is broadcast this evening; I wanted to acknowledge the two 'ambassador' pieces, but also the limitations of such discussion for a large book. THE DARK WOULD contains a wealth of remarkable works, essays, interviews - people, in fact.

People who are often overlooked in such summings up are the outsiders. Which is where I came into this piece, meeting Ian at a poetry workshop for homeless people. I'm proud to say that the arthur+martha project 'the warm/&/the cold', a large communal textwork made by homeless people as a quilt, is featured in THE DARK WOULD; as is a piece from our Spaghetti Maze project with people who have a dementia diagnosis.

I'll end by giving a list of contributors' names. And even this feels incomplete...

Jerry Rothenberg, Rosmarie Waldrop, Marvin Sackner, Tom Phillips, Nja Mahdaoui, Tom Raworth, Ruth Sackner, Paula Claire, Susan Hiller, Robert Grenier, Ed Baker, Lawrence Weiner, John M Bennett, Kay Rosen, Allen Fisher, Richard Long, Ron Silliman, Richard Wentworth, Kevin Austin, Maria Chevska, Alan Halsey, Ken Edwards, Mike Basinski, Charles Bernstein, Jenny Holzer, Hainer Wörmann, Tony Lopez, Fiona Templeton, Maggie O’Sullivan, Geraldine Monk, Márton Koppány, David Annwn, John Plowman, Jesse Glass, Jurgen Olbrich, Liz Collini, Robert Sheppard, Patricia Farrell, Fernando Aguiar, Shirin Neshat, Penelope Umbrico, Gregory Vincent St Thomasino, Anne Charnock, Steve Waling, Robert Fitterman, Michalis Pichler, David Austen, Keiichi Nakamura, Shaun Pickard, Geof Huth, Tony Trehy, Wayne Clements, Peter Jaeger, Elena Rivera, Kenny Goldsmith, Harald Stoffers, Erica Baum, Nick Blinko, Philip Terry, Caroline Bergvall, Carol Watts, George Widener, Philip Davenport, Nico Vassilakis, Monica Biagioli, Tacita Dean, Jeff Hilson, Alec Finlay, Christian Bök, Fiona Banner , Nigel Wood, Satu Kaikkonen, Simon Patterson, Dave Griffiths, Nayda Collazo Llorens, Vanessa Place, Peter Manson, Andrew Nightingale, Matt Dalby, Steve Miller, Christoph Illing, Sean Burn, Doug Fishbone, arthur+martha, Hung Keung, the gingerbread tree, Brian Reed, Laurence Lane, Tomomo Adachi , Tom Jenks, David Oprava, Scott Thurston, Julian Montague, derek beaulieu, Wang Jun , Mike Chavez-Dawson, Alec Newman, Rick Myers, Andrea Brady, Eric Zboya, Linus Slug, Jeff Grant, Richard Barrett, Christopher Fox, Linus Raudsepp, Carolyn Thompson, Tsang Kin-Wah, Stephen Emmerson, andrew topel, Anatol Knotek, Ola Stahl, Roman Pyrih, Christine Wong Yap, Sarah Sanders, Ying Kwok, Catherine Street, Michael Leong, Sam Winston, angela rawlings, James Davies, Rachel Lois Clapham, Steve Giasson, Amelia Crouch, Aysegul Torzeren, Jeremy Balius, Emily Crichley, Amaranth Borsuk, Ben Gwilliam, Imri Sandström, Sam le Witt, Fakhri El Ghezal, Michael Nardone, Tamarin Norwood, Lucy Harvest Clarke, Jessica Pujol Duran, Holly Pester, Rebecca Cremin, Ryan Ormonde, Nick Thurston, j/j hastain, Bruno Neiva, SJ Fowler, Alex Davies, Helen Hajnoczky, Samantha Y Huang, Anna Frew, Nat Raha, Jo Langton, Ekaterina Samigulina, Emma King, Leanne Bridgewater, Quentin Lannes, and more.

'THE SECRET' by Márton Koppány, in situ at

Text Festival 2011. Photograph by Julia Grime.

No. 1 Emperor

(From China journal Jan 2010)

If you happen to find yourself in the walled city of old Xian you might think of visiting Lao Sun Jia. Climb some wooden steps between janglingly bright neoned shop fronts, part a polythene draught screen and you'll find yourself in a restaurant that's a venerable 100 years old. It looks like a Brit burger bar from the 1970s, all beige and formica, but the food is fit for picky kings. Julia and I stumble in, late evening, and within minutes the table is a mini-banquet of Yangrou Pao Mo, a lamb broth with bread crumbled into it, stir-fried pepper and beef, and - most spectacular of all - roast lamb and wolfberry. The sauce is a dark chocolatey sheen dotted with red flecks of the fruit. With our meal, come ale glasses of local tea. Within each glass are berries and flowers. It's like drinking the taste of a summer garden.

Xian sits on the Silk Road and part of this legacy is Muslim-influenced cookery. The city has a Muslim quarter near our hotel. The other legacy is the abiding principle of fear as a key to power. The city walls are 12 metres high, 14 km long and wide enough to accomodate a major road if you wanted to run one along it. A further outer wall, now gone, was seven times the length of this. Streets are a grid, typical for a military-friendly city - it's easier to crush rebellion.

Outside Xian, below ground level, is the city's most famous heirloom - the terracotta army. They are the death guardians of the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang, a man who both united and terrorised his subjects. He particularly liked burying people alive and it seems appropriate that those terracotta companions of his were not only buried, but are themselves made of clay. All returns to the earth, the lesson of Ozymandius. Although his army has been disinterred, the First Emperor's personal tomb has not been excavated. It is reputedly full of traps, mazes, underground rivers of mercury.

We walk around these hordes of clay people. The scale of the enterprise has a kind of wild triumphalism, as if Qin Shi Huang was going head-to-head with death. Or as a canny powerbroker, that's perhaps what he wanted people to think. It's a strange, dazing place - an archaeological dig the size of a battlefield roofed over aircraft hanger style. The army are in battle array, readied in columns. A few are separate from the main horde for close inspection, among them a ringer for Joe Stalin. I photograph some of them and text the picture to Trehy for his birthday message; he has a collector's fondness for autocrats.

Private view/punch up

Two students - Shu Jing and Yuan chao - have volunteered to help install the exhibition in Jiao Tong teahouse. At 10 am we meet in the studio, collect the long list of 12 or so pieces that I've selected from the original 50, plus string (always essential), pegs, nails, extension leads, lights, pencils. We set up camp on one of the trestle tables in the teahouse.

Hanging work is in itself one of the arts - to speak to the surrounds and yet have the works in dialogue with one another, to choreograph still space, to state simply, but keep ambiguity. My works spark alive when there is sunlight pouring through them and the world's colours. The teahouse is a dark space and the pieces look alright only in the windows and near light sources, which are dim. We set up some discreet lamps and peg the pieces into position so that they frame the fanatic card players but don't bug people.



Wang Jun's piece is an installation of overpainted magazines - it's a work that I've loved since he first took me round his studio and it' a pleasure to see it here, abutting onto the real. He lights the shelves he's used with bright fluorescents so that they glow like a shrine in a cliche. The mugs of the regulars here in the teahouse feature as part of the work, anchoring it in Jiao Tong.

Yao Bo meanwhile has placed pots on nine tables on the raised area in the middle of the space. Underneath each is a piece of off white paper with a black rectangle screenprinted onto it. From inside two of the pots can be heard her voice, reading aloud from her response to Beckett. The tiny electric voices crackle and whisper; people put their ears to the lips of the pots to hear. It's a show-stealer.

By 2 o'clock Wang Jun has installed his piece and lit it, Yao Bo is still tweaking her lights. Mine hang in the wondows opposite the entrance with card players sitting under them. One man loses his cash and holds his head in his hands. Julia snaps a portrait. Behind him, the poem says: Protect Me.

The guys who frequent the teashop stroll between the pieces and we chat it through. Someone offers to do some calligraphy for me - showing me the steadiness of his hands.

A journalist asks me why I bother putting my peculiar poems in places where no one will understand them. I take a deep breath at all the suppositions in that statement. I explain that if the work is placed among the world's bustle, it has the chance to be more alive than in the pages of a book. The room suddenly is unusually noisy. Yan Yan taps me on the shoulder: "For example, look over there. Real life."
There is a punch up taking place between two card players and people join the scrum. Yan Yan glances at me and grins: "It's real," he says again.

Private Views are posh showbiz and this one's no different. After the fighting has died away and the sore heads have been rubbed better, the art people arrive. The official opening is at 7pm, although the teahouse remains open all day for usual business. Julia and I are invited to join a long table of the local great and good, sipping flower tea. I end up swapping lines of poems with a DJ who wants to showboat her English and quotes lines of John Donne. In reply, I try her with a line from Tony Trehy. We struggle with the translation and she passes the line "Never to have compromised with transcendence" over to Yan Yan who shoots me a pained look.

We are flames not flowers: Bhopal survivors film

Philip writes:

Last weekend I was lucky enough to meet the artist Daniel Gosling who uses walking as part of the making of his art. He sent me a link to a film he shot in 2006, accompanying survivors of the infamous Bhopal disaster on a 34 day protest walk across India. We're very proud to link to the film on our blog, it manages both to be beautiful and have a social conscience.

"In 2006 survivors of the Bhopal gas disaster (1984) walked 800km from Bhopal to Delhi. Their aim was to publicise and protest their continuing neglect by the government of India and Union Carbide/Dow Chemical's toxic legacy in Bhopal. The walk lasted 34 days. I walked with them every day of it." (Daniel Gosling)

Watching the film, I'm struck by the power of witnessing incidental details. Conversation snippets, jokes, glances - in a tiny space of time the film manages to catch a massive event by showing the small moments, rather than the grand. People walking with their backs to us, shared laughter, someone's foot twitching while they're asleep, an umberella painted with the slogan We are flames not flowers. It sidesteps the stale cliches of news reporting and also the documentary trap of unearned catharsis. Enough to see these people's faces and to acknowledge them, not as victims but as fellow folk, as you and I.

To view the 10 minute film on youtube, click on the orange title at the top of this blog: We are flames not flowers, or go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdTL9BJOum4

Daniel has put the film on youtube under the title: Bhopal Survivors Fighters Walkers (short version)













Photos by Daniel Gosling:
1. Left to right: Shehzadi Bee, Champa Devi Shukla, Rashida Bee, Nafisa Bee
2. Leela Bi asleep among the other walkers

Note: Rashida Bee and Champa Devi Shukla were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and together won the Goldman Environmental Prize. Arundhati Roy can be glimpsed in one scene...

Working in the Great Outdoors

The sessions today were lively and enjoyable. I'm just really glad it wasn't raining so we could be outside as planned. I invited the young people to work with whatever materials there were to hand in the environment. No paper, no pens, no paint, just leaves, flowers, car tires, logs and litter. The imagination was stretched and they rose to this creative challenge fantastically.

They were enthusiastic and continued to work with themes from last of "what matters to me". Friendship and family were a recurring issues, as was music. They used their bodies again to work with, to find ways of leaving their mark, stating their own identity.

A personal scupture trail was created and left for others to see or the wind to scatter.

Christine

more images at www.flickr.com/photos/arthur-and-martha/

Football, crisps, friends and family

Friday 6th June

I worked alongside Rebecca Guest inviting the group to think about making their own piece of art using the topic of "what matters to me". Giving them limited materials of pen, paper, masking tape and their own bodies they set too with great enthusiam. Topics ranged from football to crisps, friendship to family.

We then took the budding artists outside to the sculture trail where I asked them to consider how they could use their enviornment to place their work. They showed tremendous creativity by coming up with repeated options and displaying their pieces, both using thier bodies and the locality as additions to their expression.

Christine Evans

more images www.flickr.com/photos/arthur-and-martha/

a walk 18th February 2008

A gathering walk

This is an open invitation: to explore the New Mills area, gathering impressions with photography, text and sound recordings for an installation in St James Church.

Artists Lois Blackburn and Philip Davenport (in collaboration with High Peak Community Arts) will lead a series of winter walks and follow-up workshops, creating a poem/image installation with the material. The words, photographs and sounds will trace the imprints of both a winter walk and the people who went on it.

If you come on one of our 'gatherings' you also have an open invite to add to this blog. What were your thoughts and feelings, your impressions (or depressions) as you came with us? Would you like to send a photograph to add to the blog? The more material, the richer the mix. All and everything is welcome. And that means you.