Wednesday 27 February '08

Heat me up

Here's a weird famous Scottish Footballers garden

The weather forecast for the weekend was 6 below and 60 cms of snow, by rights we should have cancelled, but knowing the forecasters propensity for overstating in case they are critisised for understating, we pushed on regardless.

The crew of artists on the China project came and ‘enjoyed’ tree planting in a light snowfall and moderate temperatures - above freezing. They stayed at Parkamoor but did complain of cold. I guess contemporary clothing is just not geared up for cold, damp conditions. I usually suffer from being too hot, tweed and wool is just too much in the heated environment. There is no way people will ever be able to go back from the level of heating that is now the norm. I noticed this recently while staying with friends, their house was full of eco stuff, they had carbon offsetting coming out of all ends. Each year they were planting 6 tiny trees which the label proclaimed would offset an average family’s carbon output. That might have been true but it would be 10 years before they jointly offset more than an average families wind breaking. And all this stuff is as nothing if you have your entire house heated to 24 degrees as they did.
My recent experience with central heating (I have moved to a central heated house while Lawson Pk is under the builders) has helped me realise a lot about contemporary society. I realise that central heating is the cause of sloth, anger and dysfunctional behaviour. It is impossible to get the temperature right, the non directional nature of it causes the background temperature to inexorably rise, this terrible heat means that if you do anything more than just sit in your vest and pants you become bad tempered. The rise in the divorce rate is - I now realise closely linked to the development of central heating.

All that aside, the team managed 80 metres of excellent hedging (200 small trees) which should in time cover them all for a flight half way round the world.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 27/02/08 at 14:13 2 Comments

Thursday 21 February '08

It's a busy winter on Youtube

Children of Grizedale's new Youtube channel has been offering some technical challenges / professional development opportunities (delete as preferred) to Adam lately as he grapples with years of unlabelled tape and a tenuous grasp of iMovie, to bring you rarities from the Grizedale archive.

There's some fantastic stuff going up - witness the spine tingler from 2004's Romantic Detachment'....

Posted by Karen Guthrie on 21/02/08 at 22:55 0 Comments

Thursday 31 January '08

Watch us

Lawson Park's webcam

Live at
www.lawsonpark.org/webcam

Posted by Karen Guthrie on 31/01/08 at 12:07 0 Comments

Friday 18 January '08

Right That’s It

Kerry Stewart's Grieving Swan

We finally handed Lawson Park to the builders – Leck, a local firm who will be here for 9 months stripping and rebuilding the interiors of the house and barns. Day one coincided with torrential rain - combine rain and builders and you get knee deep mud , and the impression the building is just a pile of stones sliding down a muddy hill – which I guess it is - all its significance and meaning evaporated like it never was. It really brought a lot of memories back to me of people and dinners, events and extraordinary happenings, it was nice to be reminded and to think about how much had come from the house and the location.

Here’s a few moments that sprang to mind
6 wives of Henry the 8 reversing into the ravine
Colin Lowe and Roddy Thomson fighting and crying
Emily Wardill’s black dinner
Jesse Rae’s radio station
Olaf Breuning listening to a chainsaw artist singing a song about a cat
Damon Packard’s table manners
Juneaus burning a radio over a camp fire and the radio just kept going and going
Mark Wallinger repeatedly talking over a particularly boring dinner guest who kept mentioning Andy Goldsworthy
Karen in animated discussion flanked by Robert Woof and Ken Russell
The Japanese villagers of Toge changing into my giant checked clothes following a very wet mornings work
Gelitin partying in the meadow
Rose Lord, Adam Chodzko and Clio Barnard walking down the drive dressed as the 3 pigs
Kerry Stewart’s giant swan being mistaken for a real swan
Jon Ronson dancing hard, alone, to ELO in the barn after the Festival of Lying
Sarah Staton re-appearing in her car, hours after a dinner party ended, having been lost in the forest
Nina & Karen locked into the dining room for a week sewing elaborate Tudor costumes
Robert Woof (shortly before his death) walking slowly through the wild flower meadow to see the rare orchid

If you have any of your own please add them via the comments

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 18/01/08 at 14:41 1 Comment

Friday 18 January '08

Bad Weather - Good News

The Barn Stripped bare

Raise high the greasy pole

Pleased

Very pleased to say that Karen and Nina won the Northern Art Prize last night!

Photo's of the glittering event to follow

Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane's first public art work is opening in Egremont tomorrow

Photo's of the glittering event to follow

Lawson Park has been stripped to the bones

Photo's of the glitering event to follow

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 18/01/08 at 10:01 0 Comments

Saturday 3 November '07

Academy time

A weird night last night at the Royal Academy – a dinner for the sponsors club to generate interest in the ‘Contemporary Season’ – some discussion on a title for this with Sir Norman Rosenthal suggesting ‘Unique, Unique’ so unique they named it twice actually his suggestion was only the first bit, problem there is that contemporary art is very far from being unique and it sounds like a hairdresser in Kirby Stephen – I quite liked the ‘In Season’ suggestion - bitches on heat, an opportunity for hunting something and fashion. The complexity of the event was kind of interesting, there was a lots of congratulating each other for getting knighthoods, married to ideas about bohemian creatives rocking out. Several people were wearing medals, very cheap looking medals, looked like they bought them at a fair and were wearing them for a joke but I think they where in fact the officer bearers for the RA, like president and so on. At the beginning of the evening there was a standing toast to the Queen, then there was the use of the word fuck and then some standing toasts to the secretarial staff of the Sponsors Club. Tracy Emin appeared to be hosting the evening and as one toast master stated – ‘later on Tracy will be doing some very exciting things with David Thorp’ what like folding him into a swan. Or as it was in reality prompting him to mention money – which was what the dinner was about – actually Tracy was very responsible and seemed more like arts administrator than any of the professionals.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 03/11/07 at 23:44 0 Comments

Saturday 6 October '07

Lost G (Searching for the Spectator conference)

the empty vessel

Recently talked at a conference in Readin’ with juneaus and Nina Pope – Nina invited Mike Ostler, a member of a participatory audience from her Battaville project www.bata-ville.com Mike made this great speech saying almost the exact same thing that the village leader from the Toge Japan project had said to the Echigo Triennale director at the end of the Grizedale 7 Samurai project www.seven.samurai.jp which was basically ‘we don’t want any more of this art where artist make their work for us to appreciate, we want to be involved, to participate, for the work to help us express our ideas and feelings’. Mike was specific he specifically did’nt want any more Angel of the North type things – nudes of old Etonians in your face.

Mike also introduced himself as the only pure member of the public at the conference (although later in the pub he did expose a past with considerable art/theatre involvement so maybe not quite so pure). Anyway it was good to hear it said, hard to really assess the response, generally positive but a little in the line of that magic moment a few years ago when at a Lib Dem conference someone got up and berated them all for being a bunch of wishy-washy, Guardian reading, overly reasonable people, about as much use a wet wipe in a sewage works - she received a standing ovation, ‘oh quite, quite, you know she is so right, marvelous’.

The conference was a university thing and there were these research people ex artists whose names I half recalled from sometime in the dim art past and they talked about stuff that you just take for granted - just read as read, the autonomy of the art object got a good going over - like someone cares, all that exploring space balls – a planet controlled by an autonomous being able to inflict pain at will – Phil and Ben (juneaus) slept and giggled like a couple of dormice. I thought about how little actual art face activity supported this academic edifice. Phil and Ben twiddling away, scratching a bare living subsidised by endless children’s workshops. Phil and Ben, Nina and Karen with a great upside down pyramid of crapademics balancing on their shoulders, vastly well paid (40k and long holidays, pressing their own Olive oil in their Tuscan villas) with multiple eastern European research assistants in Bikinis, hanging off them like the army motorbike display team. All that money and education, all those students - 3 years of study each, now strung out to 6 years – 6 years - Jesus your life is practically over by then. I watched all the entirely female audience (well it was a conference on engaged practice, what do you expect) making notes about exploring the gallery, considering the corner of the space, dealing with the floor, the autonomy of the art object, the artist, autonomy or hectonomy, or is that a planet ruled by an ancient Greek deity called Hectonomy able to inflict pain at…..

I thought about how little the whole art thing is, how inconsequential, things described as important actually being about as important as renewing your lip gloss. An artist has often no more than one idea, executed every so often – I mean bear in mind how many times you could do most of these ideas if you had an audience, like hundreds of times a year - easily even if it was just you - BB King has played over 300 gigs a year for the past 50 years. But without demand you have to limit supply and build the edifice out of stratagems and platforms, chairs and CEO’s, consultants and marketing, development, research practice.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 06/10/07 at 13:44 1 Comment

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Monday 24 September '07

Potatoes

I recently gave a talk as part of a Tate consultation event; they were looking into the possibility of creating a mobile Tate, or rather doing something Tate led that would connect the regions to the Tate and to each other. What I read to be an interesting ambition to make some kind of sense of a host of cultural activity across the UK.

It was a slightly disturbing experience with lots of breakout groups and feed back, some how whatever energy was generate in the breakout groups was instantly quashed in the reporting back bit. I found myself saying the same thing in these groups over and over again but no one seemed to understand it – I was left thinking I was a terrible communicator, I think I assume everyone gets a lot of stuff they don’t. I never really consider galleries or collections, so I guess as a starting point I am already off the beat. I had dismissed the idea of touring a structure and programme before even arriving, these were all things that I think everyone else was focused on. Anyway I can say that a group discussion drawn from the massed directors and curators of regional UK sure is a wishy washy affair. Every discussion group would come back with these crazy statements where a idea would be suggested and then immediately countered with the opposite, so; ‘we thought that the programme should connect with communities or it could be stand alone, the projects could be spectacular, but there would also be room for an intimate scale, could be big or small, long or short, fat or furry’ and so on, so in the end what we are saying is everything is fine? Christ knows what the Tate got from it, multi confusionist seminology.

This one idea I kept plugging that seemed really obvious to me was - to use the existing network of organisations and their connections to communities, organisations etc as the structure of the project. The Tate would then intelligently select collaborators, like 2 organisations with a potentially interesting relationship – not to similar in approach - and initiate a stand alone programme focused on collaborative working between the organisations and their stake holders, thereby linking communities across central and regional locations. For example Grizedale would be part of a programme of work in collaboration with say First site. The projects would be directed/curated by an independent or Tate curator who would have a role to critique and analyse the 2 organisations. The programme would explore the culture of the UK, the prescient notions of identity and all that sort of stuff.
The entire project would be explained and meaning drawn from it through the web site, so a kind of online collection of works – a strong critical analysis of this ‘product’ online forum etc would be good. I didn't really think to much about how this would be come a national marketable spectacle, but that would be relatively easy, opening the projects in a domino effect or all at once or as broadcast series of TV or documentaries, anyway that was my idea, seemed to be workable either small or large scale.

So below is the talk I gave, more or less, I hate reading talks so I didn't really read so much of it, but this was the gist.

A Mobile Tate

Grizedale and Roadshow
This talk might be considered to be along the lines of a dire warning rather than a shining example – which is not to say that I am not proud of the Roadshow project and what it achieved. There are from my perspective some rather less ambiguous dire warnings out there - large scale siting of Big Art in the regions. There is rightly an increased interest in contemporary regional culture. For the first time in history there are more people moving out of cities than to them. The historical precedents with regard to how the regions have contributed to cultural development still apply – the possibility of working in relative isolation, the bringing together of intense groups, the arms length perspective.

With regard to Roadshow the project came from a discussion with other sculpture parks in the UK and a desire expressed by them to do something jointly – The original proposal came from Grizedale and aimed to bring a newish approach to the sculpture park concept. Eventually all of the once interested parties withdrew, the project going against their principle ambitions to get on the map, this project deliberately tried to get off the map. This experience in itself was quite interesting in relation to being critical of the context in which you engage. There is I would say a somewhat uncritical approach in the regions and an awful lot of half-truths about audiences and the success of projects.

A theme that has engaged artists at Grizedale - in particular illustrated by Jordan Baseman’s films from 2000/01 ‘Sun always shine son the Righteous’ and ‘The one about the camel’ I could tell you the one about the camel but it would use up my whole time, the punch line is ‘What are we doing in Chester Zoo?’ you can work out the rest or just bear that in mind as a useful phrase. The films poignantly illustrated the lives and ambitions of people working outside of the mainstream, the complexity and growing dysfuncionality of their lives.

From the cultural high ground of the lake District - think Wordsworth, Ruskin, Schwitters and most importantly Beatrix Potter we found artists were more engaged by the periphery, a local underclass, what could be described as a directly oppositional position to the ubiquitous high culture – this has of course been a powerful theme that artists have long explored and represented.

Road show aimed to place artists in the romantic territory they sought to emulate and engage with, through the culture of being on the road, the references being principally rock and roll touring culture – of the Tom Saxondale variety - the circus and its romantic draw, religious, temperance and evangelical meetings, and all of that sort of outsider material.

The tour aimed to visit venues outside of cultural centres, periphery marginalised places and each venue the touring caravan linked to a local culture/activity often mediated by the host or instigated by the project itself. For example in the Lake District Grizedale linked the programme to a Country Goth and Magic fair and set up a battle of the bands event dedicated to Death Metal. Other venues were rather less confrontational with the Welsh leg linking to a local artist and community education project – that project ultimately was the most confrontational with the children of education burning their work and the marquee that housed it.

The project included around 30 artists in various capacities – the main tent housed a running programme of events, films and performances while a number of satellite projects extended the encampment across approximately 3 acres. Satellite installations were all live and included a 24-hour key and heel bar, a hermitage, a recording studio, a newspaper/fanzine press and a general hangout space. Artists included a broad cross section those interested in working with people and others less so: including Paul Rooney, Olaf Breuning, Colin Lowe and Roddy Thomson, Minerva Cuevas, Juneau/projects, Kevin Reid and Graeme Roger, Nathaniel Mellors, Dan Fox, Flatpak001, Mark Titchner, Guy Bar a Moz, Bedwyr Williams to name a few. Roadshow toured for a month, in an actually on the road way, each weekend a different venue – this was extremely hard on the crew.

The original idea was to forge a team that would work as one, the majority of the artists toured with the programme, erecting the show at the venues, and managing the programme. The principle problem with this approach was the use of alcohol - the project didn't exactly take up any of my temperance ideas. I well remember seeing various artists rooted to the spot apparently forming one half of ‘Bonjour Monsieur Corbett’ hand raised but unable to remember where they were or what they should be doing. The in fighting was a bonus and built factions within the group, gave the content a bit of edge. This hothouse environment is one of the special qualities of touring and rural residency programmes hard to replicate in urban centres.

For the artists the successes of the project were probably mostly in the myth making department, the artists largely shuddered at the close proximity to a ‘real’ audience, they recognised perhaps what they were keen to escape from, the dreaded ‘what’s that supposed to be’ question. Most quickly turned the experience into a series of pub stories and utilised the concept into art world versions bringing the ‘real’ into play with a celebratory amateurism/artist performance. Flatpak001 and Mark Beasley, juneaus, Bedwyr Williams and Gang Hut all having kept the spirit sort of alive. I think the project spawned a whole body of collective activities both locally and within the art/theatre related performance world. For the communities the projects touched it would be well to remember one quote printed in the Roadshow fanzine ‘a fun day out for the all the family ruined’ not sure if this was for real or ironic. It would be hard to see exactly how it could have been a day ruined unless you found the anticlimactic particularly distressing – I would have thought it was a given in a family day out. The hit and run nature of the project has not afforded any tracking of the impact of the project in regard to the communities but if the Grizedale engagement is anything to go by – and it almost certainly isn’t – there are a multitude of happy life changing stories, a lot of this though is generated by the continuing work of Grizedale that supports and offers further opportunities.

One aspect that I note on reading my catalogue text that I had envisaged but that I immediately after the event felt hadn’t worked, was the evolution of the programme whilst on the road, I imagined we would change and develop work, draw new people into the tour extend the life of it. In retrospect this did actually happen to a reasonable level, nothing entirely new emerged but many of the works changed and either got better or worse. Many of the relationships established continued and certainly very many new works came out and are still emerging from those relationships.

I think in terms of the notion of a mobile Tate the question of audience is of course paramount, playing to the home crowd or pushing the boat out for a mixed audience. At Grizedale we have long abandoned the home crowd. Being located in a remote location makes the drawing of a sophisticated art audience almost impossible and catering for a small local art audience relatively pointless – there are lots of contemporary art opportunities that fulfil the local art audience requirements.

The challenge is to connect with existing interests and maybe expand on them – this doesn’t always make for a comfortable relationship, existing niche audiences are not necessarily that open minded about their special areas of interest being explored and as Roadshow discovered there can be quite a proactive response.

The way that Grizedale has most successfully worked has been in initiating activity, establishing an approach and nurturing a participatory audience that will sustain and re work the activity. A good example would be the Consiton Water festival – not a hugely well attended event in the ‘art version’ year but now well established, reinterpreted and thriving without Grizedale management. Similarly it is possible to make an argument for a flowering of arts activity in Cumbria provoked by Grizedale activity – possibly many of the proponents of this activity would not acknowledge the source of inspiration and in many cases may have been provoked by a ‘I can to do better than that’ attitude rather than a desire to emulate. Equally it could be said that much of this activity perhaps plays too much to a small home crowd audience and fails to extend or reinterpret what art making is for, has not critical distance.

A core component of all the Grizedale projects is an analytical approach to contemporary culture – it may not look like it but there is an underlying seriousness that attempts to address change, the omnipresent themes of identity and value. A lot of the work is confrontational and can be seen as quite harsh in its critique, a lot is nurturing, supportive and critical and to me that is all as it should be - the job of an arts organisation.

I suspect that a Tate led programme would work very differently being of a level of professionalism that would place the content and spectacle more into the realm of alien visitation – potentially inspiring/accessible but possibly only to the home crowd. The questions that arise are to do with who this mobile Tate would be aimed at, who and what it would be for – would it visit the provinces and show us how to do International level art (like A levels) - that would be good. It could discover Britain through the spectacular siting of exceptional works - that could be fine.

It could engage with the complexities of UK regional culture, the relationship between centralised and decentralised, the learning/exchange process, the development of emerging identity and cultural relationship. Of course this is where the Tate must have its sights. This would be the difficult route, expensive, probably rather tumultuous and thankless. However the Tate has the brand that can move mountains, the ability to draw down the resources of the multitude of regional agencies, in particular the regeneration agencies and the expertise to engage with the complexities of the agenda. I hope it has the grit to take it on. I am not just being nice here for a change, I want to see the focus on the real agendas, the UK as a whole has the content and the need, I would like to see an engagement with what I have always thought art was here to do.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 24/09/07 at 18:40 0 Comments

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Monday 24 September '07

Parreno time

What is thing called? crowd

I was much entertained by the ridiculous quote that seemed to headline the press coverage of the Manchester Il Tempo de Postino theatre performance, it runs;
‘It is like being on an aeroplane in 1978, the whole audience is watching the same screen’
I can’t really imagine what happened here, did the editor think wow Philippe has said something really stupid lets put it on the cover.
It is a kind of possible to make this into an interesting statement, leaving aside the obvious response that surely it’s more like being in a theatre, etc - this fracturing of the audience is not such a common place thing as yet. I did see a news piece on home entertainment the other day which showed a family sitting room, full of kids, each of them was watching or using a separate piece of equipment, their wide screen TV was split into 4 parts and each viewer watched a separate entertainment. The proscenium arch is not really so reflective of a contemporary consumption of culture, that’s not to say contrary to Ill Tempo’s notion it’s not still the primary form of entertainment and you don’t need to go back in time and 30,000 feet up to experience this ‘weird’ phenomena. The other slightly incomprehensible cross reference re the title of the whole thing, this idea of the time of the post, an idea of expectation that seems to hark back to an old age where the arrival of the post was an event to savour, does anyone do that now? I thought postmen were just a bad tempered and sporadic supplier of junk mail and rubber bands.

This valuing of the live experience (theatre) has always seemed odd to me, I would far rather hear or see the recorded presented version every time, live is normally uncomfortable and often painful and that covers everything from sex to skiing. There is I think an idea about authenticity and the historical precedent that we haven’t entirely shaken - where you did have to see the ‘live’ version, the only other option being a ham fisted wood block print of it. Maybe I need to start to value the discomfort and pain of live experience as the product.
Which brings me to my most recent live experience where 10,000 people miraculously (like being in a submarine in 1944) looked at the same thing and collectively found that it was good, sadly for me I was not one of those 10,000 Maniacs.

Prince of Thieves
I somewhat reluctantly agreed to attend a night of Prince – I thought it might be interesting in relation to the Il Tempo Del Postino art theatre, attending something genuinely popular. Prince will play 21 nights at the Dome – so like 200,000 people, that’s popular.
My expectations were high, with a nagging hint that I might be disappointed. I heard the tales of the purple ones hay days of flying beds, smoke and bikes and cars and knob shaped guitars and high heels and light and video shows of extraordinary sophistication and slickness.
I haven’t been to a live concert of this scale before indeed I have never been to any event of this scale and let me tell you people it was a brutal experience. The venue, the transport, the ticket price, the merchandise, the drink etc - all brutal. Karen’s camera was confiscated (the worst thing there being the queue to get it back) and evidently even if you are paying £50 for a ticket the wine although costing the same as a vintage Meursault is about as drinkable as a hedgehog (arse first) and comes in the inevitable plastic glass. The facilities included sitting on a dirty concrete floor followed by a deeply uncomfortable plastic chair with massive drink holders instead of armrests (what will a future archaeologist make of our body shape from these things – we all had massive cup shaped elbows). But ok so the trappings of rock haven’t changed much. The audience was big, white and middle England aged – actually I think we may have been there on roadie night; we were surrounded by Tom Saxondales. I think Karen was disappointed by the mainstreamness of it. For her Prince was a revolutionary experimental cultural innovator/musician who rocked her world – she was extremely cross when I said he reminded me of Jools Holland – it’s easy to forget that for each generation their music is very much more than the light entertainment that it is for the rest of us - it’s a radical revolutionary force. Music is this rather fragile territory, we all know it’s basically light weight inconsequential faff, but it is somehow vital to our identities, our ‘growth’ and when someone points out what you clearly already know it makes for a deadly assault on your very existence - hence people get murdered for asking for Queen’s ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ to be turned down a tad.

The venue was brutal to the music as well, terrible sound, the supporting act, a London African rap group sounded absolutely dreadful, brutally the audience of 10,000 Mexican wavers actually booed them off. During the extended wait for Prince we were entertained by a tiny video screen showing a series of appallingly made promotional videos for tacky merchandise available in the foyer, interspersed by the Prince logo rotating against a cloudscape – cheapo cheeseo.
Finally after 3 brutal hours of hanging around while the audience whistled, waved and were broadly irritating - a short Hall of Fame documentary puff film was shown, a multitude of people saying that Prince was the greatest thing on earth and all without any qualification. Prince finally appeared through some dry ice and worked through his multitude of MOR hits. It was like seeing a good R&B band, I was most reminded of Ike and Tina Turner complete with ghastly whirling dancers in skin tight britches, looking a lot like a couple of frogs undergoing electric shock therapy. The band was made up of some legendary figures, legendary because they can play their instruments well, a skill that for me doesn’t really deserve legendary status, I mean if you’re a musician surely it’s not asking to much that you should be able to play other peoples music well - however that’s another subject. Maceo Parker took his traditional sidekick role getting the James Brown treatment from Prince, i.e. being wheeled out to fill out songs when it just would be unbearable to hear yet another hard rock guitar solo (the bit about Prince I have never liked). The live versions of the songs were massively inferior to the recorded versions and additionally ruined by the audience singing along. I was placed it would seem in the centre of a choir assembled bit by bit by the legendary Dr Frankenstein, another key, another planet, ‘whern dubs kurwhy’ it did make me laugh but Jesus after a while I was keen to punch something and the those tiered seats do offer a tempting target at just the right height to really get behind the punch and I am guessing that might have helped the Stigs make those high notes that Prince does so well. As you can imagine by this point my partner Karen was livid with me, furious that I couldn’t just join in and be lost in the mass event instead of standing up there with my fingers in my ears stroking my pseudo intellectual beard and pontificating on ‘ the interesting phenomena’, as Karen pointed out maybe if anything that I was involved in was even a micro fraction as popular. Of course this is right, the Grizedale performances, all the work I’ve ever been involved, added together would not touch this single performance for numbers and mass enjoyment. In fact I wonder if anyone has ever enjoyed anything I have ever been involved in. I could say that enjoyment is not exactly the ambition but would I in reality like to generate this stomping appreciation?

Leaving the gig entailed a lot of queuing furiously. With Karen now not on speaking terms I listened to the conversations around me, most were not about the gig, those that were tended to deal with practicalities of how Prince got under the stage (he rose on a lift through the stage) apparently he was brought through the crowd in a black box. There wasn’t really anything to say, it was, this event like a football match, an endless repetition of the same thing, same physical actions, like when footballers do that weird physical theatre, pointing and shouting, ritualistically adjusting their waistbands, theatrical spitting etc, Prince made all the traditional rock language moves, offering the mic to the audience, cupping his ear, endlessly introducing the band, it was church for Neds. But this is a reality of humanness, the capacity/requirement for repetitive ritual, all sport, most arts. I finally realise after 48 years that most people don’t want something different every time. Il Tempo did something a bit different from either the normal art or theatre experience and it wasn’t entertaining but it was more interesting than Prince, I remember it better, I have thought more about it and I have reacted to it. It was disappointing because it seemed it should and could have been better, Prince on the other hand did not disappoint his fans, but he didn’t add anything either, even minutes after the experience they had nothing to say about it.

As we left the stadium the audience football chanted ‘Nothing compares, nothing compares to you, apart from some of the things Adam compared you to’.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 24/09/07 at 18:13 0 Comments

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Tuesday 4 September '07

Folk Floating

Karen Guthrie and Grizedale Arts have curated the Folk Float for the West Cumbria-based Creative Egremont programme.

public works - the artists (also doing stuff for Agrifashionista)- have made this fantastic customized milk float which tours about showing memorabilia and collecting new stuff over the next 6 weeks. Here's a pic of Outreach Office george impressing the local kids with it.

Our next big event is the Silloth Beer festival then the seminal Crab Fair in Egremont - maybe see you there?

Posted by Karen Guthrie on 04/09/07 at 19:15 1 Comment

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