HAZARD MMX: REACTION

Joanna Loveday and Charlotte Morgan of Critical Writing Collective are calling out for participants for their writing project at the Hazard micro-festival, in collaboration with Hub and Greenroom.

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Hazard MMX: Reaction, will explore how text can react and respond to Hazard MMX,Manchester’s micro-festival of incidental intervention and sited performance, presented by hÅb and greenroom. The festival will take place this year on Saturday 17 July 12-5pm offering strange occurrences in unexpected places around Manchester city centre.

Critical Writing Collective would like to invite four writers to participate in Hazard MMX and create written responses to the festival to be published online.

As part of a small community of writers, you will respond to Hazard MMX in a written text, which could include any of the following; approaching the entire festival as a concept/programme of work, creating a critical response to one artists work, documenting the festival as a single audience member and your experience of it, interviewing artists and audience members, documenting audience response and reaction across the city or approaching the city with no programme or time table to see Hazard working at its best (exploring the unknowing of what is performance and what is ‘reality’ in the city).

Unfortunately we cannot offer any writers a fee for taking part in the project this year, but train fares to and from Manchester will be covered. Each participating writer will be supported in writing, publishing and editing their work if required. This is a great opportunity to be involved in the first writing project to run alongside Hazard and gain a unique insight into how the festival works within the vast city centre in the form of intervention and sited performance and installation.

We are looking for regional and northern writers in particular to participate. You will need to have a strong interest in site specific, live art and contemporary performance and be willing to write accessibly for both art and non-art audiences.

Writers must be able to commit to attend the full day in Manchester 17 July 12-5pm, and a meeting at 5.30pm (in a local café) for a de-brief and open discussion with the other writers involved.

If you are interested in taking part, please email your CV to Joanna Loveday:joannaloveday@hotmail.com by no later than Monday 5 July.

Information on the festival can be found at:

www.hazardmcr.org

http://www.greenroomarts.org/archive/events/hazard-2010/

TALK: Art Writing Field Station at Lecture.Free School

How do memories create the future? When does fiction become imaginary? What do you remember?

A small part of Mary Paterson's talk, a small part of ART WRITING FIELD STATION at LECTURE.FREE SCHOOL, at Bethnal Green Library on Thursday 24th June, 10am - 12pm.

ART WRITING FIELD STATION is curated by VerySmallKitchen, and includes contributions from David Berridge, Tamarin Norwood and Marit Muenzennberg with live broadcast by Karen di Franco and Concrete Radio.

LECTURE.FREE SCHOOL is curated by Edward Dorrian/ Five Years Gallery
More information on both is here.

(Henry) Moore Please

written by Mary Paterson

Henry Moore’s scultpures used to cause a stir. ‘A monstrosity,’ said one reviewer from the Daily Mirror, about the Leeds Reclining Figure in 1931. The general public disliked his work – sculptures were vandalised and protested against; one in the Ruhr was even tarred and feathred. And the establishment didn’t rally behind him either. Two former presidents of the Royal Academy, Alfred Munnings and Charles Wheeler, were still throwing insults at Moore by the late sixties, even though he’d been known as a major artist for over thirty years.

Yes, that Henry Moore. The artist who’s large, bronze shapes you have walked past, sat under, used as landmarks, or ignored. What happened? Did we become inured to Moore – familiarity breeds contempt. Did we stop seeing scultpure as a site for radical experimentation? Or did we just stop seeing at all? The question asked by the organisers of Moore Outside is: how can we make Henry Moore interesting to a 21st century audience?

Moore Outside is an interactive game produced by Coney in conjunction with the Moore collector John Deedham. Participants are invited to visit one of 8 Henry Moore sculptures on public display in London, listen to an mp3 downloaded from the project website (http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/henrymoore/grandexperiment.shtm) and submit their personal responses. For every sculpture you visit, you receive a discount on the ticket price for the retrospective at Tate Britain.

Moore said, ‘Everyone thinks that he or she looks, but they don’t really you know.’ So here is a stimulus to keep looking – and to look in a certain way. But the aspect that makes Moore Outside most interesting to a contemporary audience, has nothing to do with education; or even the twin carrots of technical adventure and financial incentive. Instead, it is about space and mutuality. By provoking people into looking and listening to other interpretations (the mp3 I listened to made my hair stand on end in disagreement), Moore Outside blasts open a space to concentrate on the sculpture. And by inviting audience responses, it constructs that concentration as a reciprocal gesture.

Audience responses will be fed into the game itself, which means that it is a system built over time and out of collaboration. The net result is a shared, growing body of knowledge inspired by Henry Moore. Coney, which describes itself as an 'agency of adventure' is known for creating work that places the audience at the centre of an engaging world. I suspect that this is also what Moore meant when he talked about looking – not just a way of seeing what is in front of you, but of approaching the whole world anew. Sometimes, a work of art makes you recalibrate the world. Moore Outside begins by recalibrating public sculpture - let’s see where it takes us.

Moore Oustide runs until 8th August, as does the Henry Moore show at Tate Britain. For more information:
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/henrymoore/grandexperiment.shtm

For more information on Coney: www.youhavefoundconey.net