During 2011 I was particularly inspired by:
Christian Marclay, The Clock
Opening Night, John Cassavetes
Lands End, Ruth Claxton
Luc Ferrari, Electronic Works
Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker
Breaking the Frame, Surgeon
Origami, Akira Yoshizawa
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Pulse Room
Ai Wei Wei, Sunflower Seeds
Thee Oh Sees, Block of Ice
On the Improvement of the Understanding, Spinoza
Radwan Moumneh: Colin Stetson, The Stars in His Head (Dark Lights Remix)
Thanks to everyone who collaborated with me and to anyone who exhibited, commissioned, published and/or in any way worked with me this year – I am very grateful to you all.
See you in 2012!
… then, I blew out the candle
With a beautifully circular piece of lucky timing, I got to celebrate the opening of Kindle (my solo exhibition at John Rylands Library) with a trip down electronic memory lane… I went to see Plastikman live and – what with the opening sample being so appropriate and all – I pretended he did the tune quoted above just for me.
Anyway, I’ve been working with Untitled Gallery and JRUL for over a year to create Kindle and I still can’t quite believe it’s all installed and the show has started. I’m now preparing for the artist’s tours – the first of which happens next Saturday – and whilst going over various scribbles in my notebook, I found this quote from Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” (a book which has provided much inspiration for the show):
[The library] was then the place of a long, centuries old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
Yet again, the usefulness of collaboration suggests itself – as a visual artist you spend years turning looking into seeing, but what about the importance of turning hearing into listening? No listening, no dialogue. No dialogue, no ideas. No ideas, no artwork… and no artist.
