A_ Impossible Reader

A_ Impossible Reader is incomplete, unbound, personal and portable. It is (not) a record, (not) a document, (not) a marker of absence, (not) a work of art.

Open Dialogues will be exhibiting A_ Impossible Reader in After Live, Norwich Arts Centre.

A_ Impossible Reader is a specially designed and made series of publications containing texts from SPILL: Overspill, an Open Dialogues project exploring the event of criticism in relation to performance and the SPILL Festival 2009.

Each reader is displayed in the gallery at intervals throughout After Live and contains a randomly curated variety of texts from SPILL: Overspill. If a text exceeds one page, it remains incomplete. A_ Impossible Reader is a partial document of Overspill, or a partial document of SPILL, or a work of art in its own right.

A_Impossible Reader also comes with its own assembly instructions for the curators of the Afterlive exhibition:

To be printed and assembled inhouse by Norwich Arts Centre, print 3xA4 sheets, cut according to cutting lines, fold once parallel to the long side, slot into each other as on sample provided, cut A4 printed sheet with cover in half, wrap one cover/bellyband around folded assembled booklet aligned with the open edge of booklet, seal with sticker.

Comment from Overspill writer David Berridge ‘It’s a startling transformation of the generally straight reviews on the SPILL: OVERSPILL blog, opening them out both into a new found materiality of their textual existence, and into a new autonomy of presence separate – and/ or differently related – to the performances from which they originated. A_IMPOSSIBLE READER is also a subtle and agonistic answer to some of the complexities of the SPILL: OVERSPILL project and the problems and possibilities of writing in (contractual) proximity within a performance festival. Curiously, if A_IMPOSSIBLE READER opens into the full possibility of a writing practice in proximity to performance, it also does so through illegibility and anonymity.

A_Impossible Reader is usefully viewed alongside SPILL: ON AGENCY. Here, alongside a spread for each of the performers, there is a gathering of essays by SPILL_OVERSPILL writers. Many of these are engaged with the same questions: what is the residue of a performance (and a performance festival)?’

Credits:

SPILL: Overspill is a writing project created by Open Dialogues and produced in association with Pacitti Company and SPILL Festival 2009. See also SPILL Festival of Performance: On Agency

Overspill writers: David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Mary Kate Connolly, Alex Eisenberg, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, Mary Paterson and Theron Schmidt. Participating SPILL artists: Rajni Shah, Grace Ellen Barkey.

A_ Impossible Reader is commissioned by Norwich Arts Centre, and designed by Marit Münzberg in association with Open Dialogues.

Open Dialogues
A UK collaboration producing writing on and as performance.

Pacitti Company
Touring award-winning, radical new performance works worldwide since 1990, Pacitti Company also produces the SPILL Festival Of Performance, the UK's premiere artist-led biennale of experimental theatre and live art.

A Perverse Library

Written by Rachel Lois

I currently work with In a Word supporting radical writing in and from Yorkshire, and I would like to point Open Dialogues’ readers to this great exhibition presented by Information as Material, The Laurence Sterne Trust and In a Word.

A Perverse Library

Saturday, 4 September to Sunday, 31 October 2010

Shandy Hall

A major exhibition of conceptual writing drawn from collections of work by internationally renowned artists and writers that includes Kathy Acker, Ed Ruscha, Jen Bervin, Christian Bök, Pavel Büchler, Craig Dworkin, Kenneth Goldsmith, James Joyce, On Kawara, Sherrie Levine, Klaus Scherübel. The exhibition will be the first of its kind in the UK, and will show works by a generation of artists who have sought a radical reconsideration of the relationship between literature and the visual arts.Unfolding around Craig Dworkin’s book collection of 2,427 titles, many of them pricelessly rare objects, displayed on Invisible Bookshelves designed by Canadian architect Michael Farion, the exhibition will include:

-‘A Bibliography of Ugly Cousins’, for which Simon Morris has drawn together critical examples of appropriated writing, or ‘rip-offs’, that expose the parasitic relationship between conceptual writing / writers and their histories;

-A collection of carbonised books contributed by artist and collector Greville Worthington, entitled ‘The Black Library’, from the remains of which vegetables are to be grown for consumption in the Shandy Hall Library;

- ‘A Sonic Library’ curated by poet Kenneth Goldsmith, founder of UbuWeb, the world’s largest online archive of visual, concrete and sound poetry. UbuWeb Radio will be streamed live for the duration of the show;

-Bouvard et Pécuchet’s Invented Desk for Copying by the young Canadian artist Gareth Long who, working with furniture maker and designer Wilf

- Williams, will present the copying desk as the latest in his series of sculptures developed from the unfinished pages of Gustave Flaubert’s last novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet; and

-The launch of six new works, including print editions, publication and a newdocumentary film

You are invited to join for the Grand Vernissage to celebrate the opening of the exhibition (at the end, of course) on Saturday, 30 October 2010. Please RSVP to info@writingencounters.org. A free bus service will run from York train station to the Shandy Hall site on 27 and 28 October 2010. Places on the service can be booked today by visiting Writing Encounters

Information as Material

Laurence Sterne Trust

Writing Encounters

Funded by Arts Council England, The Henry Moore Foundation and York College

AFTERLIVE

Live art, by its very nature, is ephemeral. After it has happened it takes on another life: in audience anecdotes, reviews, video clips, and photographs. However, a number of artists are actively engaged in this process: they make decisions about the afterlife of their work, and mould the shape of these anecdotes.

Documentation is fallible: it can never fully represent a live work. The artists in this exhibition embrace this separation between primary and secondary forms, this room for manoeuvre; their documentation doesn’t necessarily favour authenticity and evidence over memory and imagination in the creation of a legacy for a live piece.

Alongside the exhibition Norwich Arts Centre will be holding a launch event, including a free daytime event by Norwich-based collective other/other/other, a panel discussion, and an evening programme of live art.

Curated by Holly Rumble, an Escalator Performing Arts artist, and co-founder of other/other/other.

WRITING/EXHIBITION/PUBLICATION

by Rachel Lois.

The programme for WRITING/EXHIBITION/PUBLICATION at The Pigeon Wing, curated by Very Small Kitchen, is now confirmed and Mary and I are both in the line up. Maybe see you there?

WRITING/EXHIBITION/PUBLICATION

explores how language moves between locations of voice, page, book, screen and gallery. Weekends include a unique installation of assembly zines and fluxus publications 1970-2010 as well as a programme of conversations and performances.

Fri 3rd September

6:30- 9:30pm, Opening: WRITING/EXHIBITION/PUBLICATION

Performances by Julia Calver, Press Free Press, Helen Kaplinsky, Tamarin Norwood

Fri 17th September

Film screening evening,

Matthew MacKisack: Initial and Reprise.

Sun 18^th September

Aphorism as Art Practice Study Afternoon, with Mary Paterson

Sat 25^th September

2pm, LemonMelon Publishing Seminar with Marit Muenzberg and James Davies, including Phil Baber’s performance DISASSEMBLING CANNON

Sat 2nd October Live Writing

Artists in residence in the space throughout the weekend include Matt Dalby, Rachel Lois Clapham, Marianne Holm Hansen, and Press Free Press.

Sun 3rd October Live Writing

Artists in residence in the space throughout the weekend include Matt Dalby, Rachel Lois Clapham, Marianne Holm Hansen, and Press Free Press.

7pm, Closing meal / Performance event

Performances include Julia Calver, Matt Dalby, James Davies, Marianne Holm Hansen, Press Free Press, and Helen Kaplinksy.

THE FESTIVAL OF NEARLY INVISIBLE PUBLISHING meal by Magda Fabianczyk.

WORK IN PROGRESS

VerySmallKitchen publishes WORK IN PROGRESS by Mary Paterson - the third chapbook to emerge from ART WRITING FIELD STATION.

WORK IN PROGRESS is available for online consumption and PDF download here.

Open publication - Free publishing - More open dialogues

'Mary’s text reveals what can be at stake in the notion of WORK IN PROGRESS: the texts, books, writings such WORK-PROGRESS is constituted by, and the libraries, book cases, and archives that they become part of; the relation of material objects to memory; written and oral; private thought and event; transformations wrought when one process, person, media makes space for and invites another into its own WORK-unfolding. Other PROGRESS-ions, too, for the reader to decide. ' Read more about the Chapbook and ART WRITING FIELD STATION here. See Rachel Lois Clapham's Chapbook 'Notes', for the same series, here.

WORK IN PROGRESS is the result of research carried out for ART WRITING FIELD STATION and Mary's residency at the Live Art Development Agency - see 'Notes towards a navigation through Unbound: from U for Unbound to A for Authority.'