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Saturday, 13 August 2022

Artlyst: In The Black Fantastic London’s Best Summer Exhibition

My latest review for Artlyst is of 'In The Black Fantastic' at the Hayward Gallery:

‘In his 2020 Aperture article on ‘The Black Fantastic’, Ekow Eshun used a definition of the fantastic created by the scholar Rosemary Jackson which, “has to do with inverting elements of this world, re-combining its constitutive features in new relations to produce something strange, unfamiliar, and apparently ‘new,’ absolutely ‘other’ and different.”

With ‘In The Black Fantastic’ Eshun has said, in a conversation with film critic Chrystel Oloukoï, he “is interested in how artists from a range of different mediums (visual art, film, music) deal with the idea of race in general, as a social construct that retains a determining presence in all of our lives, through myth and speculative fiction.” He’s interested in “the fantasy of race and the lived reality of race”, but also in “interrogating that condition and looking beyond it” “as a way to describe new encounters, new ways of being and seeing.”

Alongside this facet of the Black Fantastic, Eshun is also interested in “collective memories, cultural and spiritual practices that artists and cultural figures are drawing on in expansive and generative ways, reaching back in time, as well as into the future, reaching towards myth, spiritual belief.”’

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
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Wednesday, 10 August 2022

Walking Back Home and Short Stories Volume 2

Never one to shy from telling stories, Deacon Blue's Ricky Ross is now telling his own life story in a new book. But there's also more music too. He says: ‘For all these years I’ve told stories. Sometimes these days I also tell them on the radio. I’ve met some amazing people and their stories need told too."

His memoir, ‘Walking Back Home’, has recently been published. He writes: "In the book I write about growing up in Dundee, my first forays into music and my life with Deacon Blue. I also discuss my relationships with faith, politics, and the ever-changing challenges of being a musician."

His latest album Short Stories Vol2. is also out now: "I’ve always been interested in telling stories. Most of the stories have become songs but some stories take a little longer. A couple of years ago I started to write down some longer memories which didn’t fit as snugly into verses or choruses. I hope people might enjoy the stories as much as I have enjoyed writing them down."

Read his interview with Lorraine Wilson here.

I'm looking forward to seeing Ricky Ross at Emmanuel Billericay on the Short Stories Vol2 tour. Read a review of his performance at Emmanuel on the first Short Stories tour, a gig which I also saw.  

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Ricky Ross - Bethlehem's Gate.
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Stride Magazine review: Dawn Ravens and Some Other Shadows

My latest review is for Stride Magazine and is of two poetry collections, one by Mario Petrucci and the other by David Miller:

"In 'foetus' from the waltz in my blood, Petrucci ends the poem wanting to:

in
cense

each word

That is also his approach in minimalistic poems like 'Again', where individual words or split words bear the entire warp and weight of the poem line by line.

David Miller, under the influence of the sublime Robert Lax, is past and present master of just such a contemplative approach. Both combine close attention to each word chosen, the resonances of each word, and that word’s position on the page, with an equally close attention to the ordinary events of daily life and the depths that their words reveal of those events."

For more on paying attention click here, for more on Robert Lax click here, for more on Stride click here, and to read my poems published by Stride, click here, here, here, and here.

Stride magazine was founded in 1982. Since then it has had various incarnations, most recently in an online edition since the late 20th century. You can visit its earlier incarnation at http://stridemagazine.co.uk.

I have read the poetry featured in Stride and, in particular, the work of its editor Rupert Loydell over many years and was very pleased that Rupert gave a poetry reading when I was at St Stephen Walbrook.

Rupert Loydell is a poet, painter, editor and publisher, and senior lecturer in English with creative writing at Falmouth University. He is interested in the relationship of visual art and language, collaborative writing, sequences and series, as well as post-confessional narrative, experimental music and creative non-fiction.

He has edited Stride magazine for over 30 years, and was managing editor of Stride Books for 28 years. His poetry books include Wildlife and Ballads of the Alone (both published by Shearsman), and The Fantasy Kid (for children).

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Robert Lax - is was - was is.
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Sunday, 7 August 2022

Poets paying attention to prayer

I've written a lot on the theme of paying attention equating to prayer. See, for example, my series of posts entitled 'Seeing is Receiving: The art of contemplation' or my talk on 'Paying attention through art.'

I've recently come across W.H. Auden and David Miller saying essentially the same things:

W. H. Auden once said: “Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer.”

He also said, "I think what is important is to teach ... the technique of prayer. That is, the technique of paying attention and of forgetting oneself ..."

"To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention - on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God ..."

David Miller expands on this in the notes of his Introduction to 'The Alchemist's Mind':

'“Attentiveness is the rarest and purest form of generosity” (Simone Weil, quoted in Jacques Cabaud, Simone Weil: A Fellowship in Love, NY: Channel Press, 1964, p 251). (The phrase occurs in a letter to the poet Joë Bousquet.) If the philosopher Nicholas Malebranche said that attention “is the natural prayer of the soul”, Weil echoed this, consciously or not, when she wrote that “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love”. (Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr, London/NY: Routledge, 2002, p 117. The Malebranche quotation is known to many of us, and certainly to me, from Paul Celan’s famous speech “The Meridian” (1960), in: Celan, Collected Prose, tr Rosmarie Waldrop, NY: Routledge, 2003, p 50.) (No space here for going into Weil’s fierce critique of the imagination in relation to her espousal of attention.) See my essay “Robert Lax’s 21 pages”, op cit, where I speak of attention or attentiveness in relation to a contemplative or meditative approach. Attention is what persists, obdurately, and penetrates and uncovers... disinterestedly, and by staying with its subject, rather than by some act of force. Attention is faithful to what it attends to. It aspires to a form of lucidity, no matter how complex (and without ignoring this complexity or trying to falsely simplify it). It is an absorption into things, but a thoughtful one.'

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Arvo Pärt - Annum Per Annum.
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Saturday, 6 August 2022

The Small House and more ...




The Small House - Art Installation by Richard Woods

Southwark Cathedral has commissioned a major art installation, entitled The Small House, by the artist Richard Woods. Richard’s work appears across the UK and at various sites globally.

“The Small House is a simplified facsimile of a normal terraced house. It is a 2D cartoon depiction of a terraced house, the architecture of everyday. Standing at 7.5 metres tall and positioned directly in front of the magnificent Great Screen of Southwark Cathedral, The Small House aims to spark up a conversation with the transcendental architecture of the Cathedral. I see it as a meeting of the architecture of the everyday and the grandeur of the Gothic architecture that is something beyond the everyday,” said Richard.

The Dean of Southwark, the Very Revd Andrew Nunn, said, “Ask a child to draw a house and they will probably draw something that is similar to the house that all of us have drawn. Our images of a house are iconic. But whilst we will draw such a house few of us live as comfortably, with a smoking chimney, a picket fence, outside space and roses round the door. ‘The Small House’ invites us to think about our concept and fantasy of house and home and to ask the serious questions about why so many live in sub-standard housing or on the street. Richard Woods’ ‘The Small House’ sits in the big house, the house of God, iconic in its own right – the abiding with us God, who opens the door of the divine house and invites us in to find a home.”

Opening times are 9am – 5pm daily and The Small House is on display from Saturday 6 August through to Wednesday 31 August. Admission is free.

Summer at Bankside Gallery has original artworks by contemporary painters and printmakers of the Royal Watercolour Society and Royal Society of Painter Printmakers. Check out Anne Marlow with Two by Two and Arks and Rainbows, Raphael Appignanesi with Babel (with Thunderword from Finnegans Wake, and Peter S. Smith with St Bride's from Bankside.


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Ricky Ross - Bethlehem's Gate.
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Windows on the world (389)


 London, 2022

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Carleen Anderson - Don't Look Back In Anger.

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Monday, 1 August 2022

Artlyst - Art Search: August 2022 Diary

My August diary for Artlyst includes Claes Oldenburg and Judson Memorial Church, Peter Schumann and Bread and Puppet Theater, Cornelia Parker, Richard Woods at Southwark Cathedral, and Gift to the City, a PassionArt Art Trail featuring Micah Purnell and Rachel Ho:

‘Oldenburg commemorated the period in 1990 with a poster printed to benefit the Judson Memorial Church on its 100th Anniversary. He wrote: “I wanted to make a symbol of the active Church, a walking or ‘rockin’ cross, which also happens to be a ‘J,’ a birthday candle and a newspaper collage of the world around the church. Selected activities of the Judson over the years are typed on my 1926 typewriter and scattered like street signs over the ‘newspaper cross.’ There’s also a personal reference to the work in outlined newspaper collage I was doing when I showed and performed at the Judson Gallery in 1959-60.” Given Judson’s artistic innovations and political engagement, Bonhams suggest that “Oldenburg’s image of Judson as a powder keg as it celebrated its 100th birthday, was very apt.”

Peter Schumann was another who got his first break at Judson. His first production in the United States, Totentanz, The Dance of Death, was staged there on May 15, 1962. Erik Wallenberg writes that Schumann saw the dance as “the new execution of the old rite” being a resurrection of dances performed throughout the Middle Ages in European churches. Schumann later formed Bread and Puppet Theater as a performing group for his works with their first play being “The Puppet Christ,” and with the group providing “a kind of communion — its signature sourdough bread — to its audience.”’

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
Articles -
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Ladysmith Black Mambazo - Knockin' On Heaven's Door (featuring Dolly Parton).
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