May 31, 2017

Welcome to the third issue of Decals of Desire, a Modernist mix of art and poetry published online three times a year.

Arts Editor: Rupert Mallin Poetry Editor: Martin Stannard

Contents For Tom Raworth — p.3 Featured Artist: Rupert Loydell — p.20 Between Word and Image: An appreciation of John Berger (1926 to 2017) – Peter Gillies — p.24 The Gatekeepers of Taste – Emma Stokes — p.32 Mairéad Byrne – four poems — p. 38 Sheila E. Murphy – three poems — p.43 Featured Artist: Ben Bell — p.45 Ian Seed – translations from Max Jacob — p.50 Small is Beautiful – Bridget Heriz — p.53 Kathryn Levy – two poems — p.71 Jeremy Over – two poems — p.73 From the Bridge: two Spanish Artists – Helena Golanö — p.74 Graffiti: Logo, No Logo? – Rupert Mallin — p.84 Mike Ferguson – from The Monk — p.91 An Interview with Eric Eric – Martin Stannard — p. 93 Decals DIY – Entopic Graphomania — p.95 The Futurist Manifesto – Rupert Mallin — p.97 News and Updates — p.100 Notes on contributors — p.103

FOR TOM RAWORTH The poet Tom Raworth passed away on February 8th this year. As a token of our admiration, we sent out an open invitation for tributes and memoirs. They speak for themselves.

* I was so saddened to hear of Tom Raworth’s passing. Though I didn’t know him well, he seemed like an old friend on the rare occasions that we met, one of them being a time he gave an incredible reading at Bard College (where I was teaching at the time). I know he had a reputation for being Britain’s American poet, which may or may not be a compliment over there, but over here it makes for an ease and grace of reading him. I will miss him. - John Ashbery

I’ve known Tom since… Sorry: I can’t get used to using the past tense. I met Tom in 1961, when Anselm Hollo introduced me to a friend of his in London. The friend didn’t say much. Anselm said he opened up more on the phone. Anselm also said he printed hand-set books on his own press, had a night job, and wrote some poetry himself. That was Tom Raworth, who lived with his wife Val and their three children (two more would follow) in a basement apartment in Hackney. As time went on, little by little, Tom wrote a lot more than “some poetry,” as we all know. He also said more and more. I remember the pleasure — an occasionally drunken one, of visiting them around Christmastime in Colchester. We came on December 26 — Boxing Day. Tom had told us the whole country shut down on that day, but we had no idea that meant the trains wouldn't be running! So he ordered a taxi to come down to London, of all things, and meet us and drive us back to Colchester. That, and the single malt scotch he bought to celebrate, meant he was overdrawn at the bank; he was pleased he’d done it over the holiday so the money went through before the bank could deal with it — or something. I forget the details. But more on that later. Through the years, his stops in Northampton on his poetry junkets became an increasing delight, and one Paris visit, was it five years ago? could correctly be described as four people laughing their heads off for three whole days. That’s Tom and Val and Nicole and me. Val’s pretty funny herself, but on that visit, I think Tom was the one that made us laugh most. The taxi incident brings me to what I really want to say: Tom was a loyal, kind and generous friend. Extremely kind, extremely generous. It always surprised me a little because he was certainly not kind to everyone, as I well know. (Although I heard he was generous with his time to relative strangers.) He was helpful in every way he could be, from fixing a broken chair in the house to bringing the photos in a book I translated up to publishable quality when the editor insisted that’s the way the illustrations had to be before she would even consider them. It made Tom furious — can no one in that house of idiots (he hated Oxford) do this? — but he did it willingly, and without being asked. And so on. And on. I’ll leave it there, except to add that I’ve never known him to tell an untruth out of kindness: I treasure the very few times

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he said he really liked a poem of mine and succinctly told me why. Yet he made the beautiful front and back cover for my New Lulu and both show he knew who the author was and what kind of book it was, too. A beautiful gift. But of course the most beautiful gift was his friendship. - David Ball

THINKING OF TOM RAWORTH "...only intellect between you and the image..." ---- from “West Wind” by Tom Raworth "Tottering State — the title of one of Tom Raworth’s books — is a great image of our lives in the postmodern world. Raworth is also making a pun on, not only our tenuous and tottering state of being, but also his own physical state, as well as the wobbling of the political state, whether it be England, the U.S., or any other... I remember Tom telling me of his heart condition even as he lit a fag on the front porch...but he was always so mentally energetic and cognizant in a sparkling but somewhat quiet way, it seemed he would go on for very many years after that evening, 25 years ago. He stayed at my place for a few days when I invited him to give a reading at the University of New Mexico, and was the ultimate brilliant and gracious visitor. So became a friend. His poems extend outward in all directions at all times and encourage the reader (or listener) to brave the world in that way, and even create poems of their own, out of their own multitudinous chaotic personal and expansive world views... I’m so glad I sent Tom my recent book because that allowed me to reconnect with him more recently through email, and reminded me what a generous person and poet he was — and shall always remain, through his poems. "...time, i love you you are the way i see the same anew" — from “Mirror Mirror On The Wheel” by Tom Raworth - David Benedetti

The first time I saw Tom Raworth was in Trevor Joyce’s house at the start of SoundEye 2003, the first SoundEye I participated in. Trevor’s house is not small, you can fit seven hundred poets into it no problem, and I don’t know that Tom was big but he seemed huge (and tattooed) in Trevor’s kitchen though neither may have been the case. Tom gave me the impression of enormous gusto. I don’t think this was an illusion. He was a great celebrator — of life, of poetry, of music, of art, of friendship and generosity, and of course Christmas. He was also a great documenter, in his lavish, dynamic photographs of life as it happened; his Notes, from 2004 to his “So that’s it” in January, two weeks before

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he died; his Christmas cards, the last one not emailed as usual but posted on his site; and in his archive marking the passing of others, especially poets. Tom was full centre and off to the side at the same time. Huge as he seemed in Trevor’s kitchen, he was the nimble artist, unobtrusive, noticing, documenting. In 2004, Tom came to Providence and read at Rhode Island School of Design, where I teach. We had a great night at Robert and Penelope Creeley’s apartment. He came again in 2005, six months after Robert’s sudden death. We met again in the apartment. That was a great night too. The smoke alarm went off and for a few highly-charged moments Pen, Hannah and my daughter Clio zoomed upward with dishcloths and fans through the high-ceilinged kitchen, the rest of us laughing our heads off. Of course Tom documented that. I wrote to him later saying the evening was magic but must have been sad for him because Robert seemed still almost in the apartment. Tom wrote back, “I think the presence is what makes the fun possible.” It is fitting that Martin initiated this commemoration of Tom, whose thought in his own ‘small’ commemorative webpages was that they would be ‘a simple record’ for family, sometime in the future. Thinking about him for this tribute has done me a power of good. Some of his gusto transmits, and I step out more boldly, more friendly and more alive. - Mairéad Byrne

i don't feel worthy to add to the tributes & poems & essays on Tom but sleep softly see you soon telegram Sam boom! - Sean Carey

Difficult to ever know what to say, any more, about the few (ok, too many) things that still do matter. TR a lovely friend for a very long time, going well back into the deepest sixties, comes to mind as I say that the image of a roundabout in Welwyn Garden City, the interchange where I more than once stood and waited midhitchhiking junket to visit the Rs in Barnet, where they then resided with teeming brood... T still toiling as night operator on transatlantic phone line in those days as I recall... remaining despite all now among those who merely stand or attempt to stand/bend and wait, while and so wishing to remain well back in the line... let my death come from Spayn quoth Francis Bacon (the earlier one)... he meant by the slow route (post horses)... but doth not the swift also have summat to recommend it... I esk ya. - Tom Clark

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Tom was my friend for fifty years and he and Val I loved! Tom and I spoke across the ether for that long time. There are few like him left. I remember him and his dear voice well. - Jim Dine With Tom Raworth’s death, the world of poetry, and of human intelligence in general, has become lesser. I am not alone in thinking him the finest British poet of his lifetime. For over five decades Tom’s work was a blazing light across the often murky path of British poetry. He was a friend to so many, gregarious and kind, in his person as well as his work on the page. He was a mentor to even more, including myself and many of a new generation of contemporary poets, who will see his legacy as a link between a positively historical period of invention and the maelstrom of our present time. Along with his work, he will also pass on a profound inheritance to those who knew him – while being deeply intellectual as a man, as subtle and complex as his poetry, he was utterly unpretentious, humble, admirably without patience for fools and hypocrites, and viewed common human decency as more important than anything else, including poetry. (Read more here: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/tomraworth/) - SJ Fowler

For the greatest part of the time I was in Tom’s company we were drinking – generally gin and wine. It was simply in the nature of the occasions on which we met, and I’m not sorry to say it: they were great sessions. The gin was always of the highest quality – Tom was a connoisseur. I can’t vouch for the wine. Solitary drinking can have its uses, but it is almost always the case that drinking should be done in company. This is so because drinking that doesn’t provide an occasion for and inspire conversation is pretty senseless. Drinking games are a sin against Dionysus (and he has Pound’s endorsement). The nature of the conversation that went with drinking with Tom was unique. Tom rarely led (that was often Val’s role), but his voice was there throughout. He sometimes intervened – affirming this, adding a point of information, or with a judgement, moral or political – but rarely enough – Tom was usually running along parallel to the main conversation. Slightly in the background, in and out of the conversational line he went, picking up the terms, words, phrasings, epithets, turning them about, taking them apart, extrapolating from them, running with the results, returning, combining, his face a constantly changing screen of response. It meant that you had to listen simultaneously on two levels, and that the main strands of the conversation could never tighten in on themselves – they were being picked open and let loose continuously as they proceeded. It has occurred to me that I was witnessing something integral to the creative process. Generally I just found it marvellous – alive, inventive, highly entertaining. As one of Tom’s Moore ancestors might have said, we won’t see its like again. - Fergal Gaynor

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Was he angry to be reading in Milwaukee – to less than a packed house? He seemed on edge, as if he found something slightly off among these well-meaning faces, some of which had appeared to witness Hilda Morley in the midst of her glorious rediscovery earlier that year and, he read too fast, I thought, almost non-stop like Da Ramones at CBGB’s. They were linear breaths, I thought, blown into space like a sad jazz saxman’s, rushing into termination, then rushing again into wryness like absurd little toy trains of click & clack wound up and passing through tunnels of tin, little angled feints at something stupid he’d caught in his peripheral vision taking place in the angles of the gallery that night, then a sneer at something very much worth sneering about, when he closed his eyes, as if he were doing everyone the favor of taking time for private sneering. Or maybe a headache? Or missing someone? But he was not giving anything of himself at all to the well-meaning faces, all with the same appreciative look some had given to Amy Clampitt earlier that year when she’d read at the gallery, he wasn’t giving anything to them but was very much up and away as if in his own blue lunette he’d stipulated to be made expressly for him (broken right through the gallery wall & sealed up again after he was finished reading) before he’d agree to read in Milwaukee. But he was glad to give away his signature on a book someone bought, I think, but stared out poker-faced from his blue lunette up there near the ceiling of the gallery. I solicited his work & he scribbled the address of a farm he was living on with his family at the time. I couldn’t imagine Tom Raworth as a farmer but I imagined his wife & kids feeding the U.K. chickens, alright. Five years later, in a London Waterstones en route to Edinburgh, I found his Tottering State next to Conductors of Chaos, & both books now remain on the shelf next to the easy chair I sleep in five floors above a Tokyo suburb within easy reach of my crippled arm & hand., because I understood the revelation of what it was he was doing & I became a devoted reader & learned that his name was pronounced ‘Tom Ray-worth’ from Peter Riley instead of my American misprision of ‘Raw-Worth’, as in raw onions & the tears I shed that we mustn’t speak of won’t be spoken of upon news of his passing. R. I. P. Tom, from Jess. - Jesse Glass

I think I first came across Tom Raworth’s work in the early 1970s in Penguin Modern Poets 19 (1971), where he appeared alongside John Ashbery and Lee Harwood. I was struck, from the start, by the speed, wit and intelligence of the writing. A poem like ‘Claudette Colbert by Billy Wilde’, with its paratactical placing of different forms of public language and its collaging of language fragments within the frame of Arise My Love, spoke to my search for a poetry at least as good, if not ‘better than the movies’. Jeff Nuttall, in Poetry Information 9/10 (1974), provided a context for Tom’s sense dislocations, jump cuts, fluid syntax and disengagement from linear logic. I can’t remember when I first heard Tom’s unforgettable rapid delivery of his work, but I do remember seeing him in the audience for a lecture, where Jeremy Prynne discussed his poetry. He was asked what it felt like, and he said that he had pretended Prynne was talking about someone else. But there was nobody else like

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Tom. In later years, I appreciated the undimmed political intelligence, the Christmas collages summing up the year, and the warm support for other poets. - Robert Hampson

The first book of Tom Raworth’s poetry I bought was The Relation Ship; a second, 1969, edition of the book originally published by Goliard Press two years previously. Goliard, later Cape Goliard, being an important small press – vital, at the time – set up by Raworth himself and Barry Hall. I would have bought it almost certainly at Compendium in Camden Town, discovering Raworth round about the same time as I did Lee Harwood, Gary Snyder, Robert Creeley and Edward Dorn. It’s battered now with use and faded, but the poems still have freshness and delicacy and precision. The last time I saw Tom was in September, 2015, when, with others, we were reading at the Red Roaster Café in Brighton, as part of an evening celebrating Lee Harwood’s life and work – he had died that July. Tom may have needed a little help up onto the stage, but he read like a lion. - John Harvey

Tom was first and foremost a family man. He held on to his own. He never forgot to ask me about mine, and stayed at that level of homely connection through even the densest conversations we had while walking or driving through Boston, Cork, New York, San Diego, Los Angeles, and in between. He was very tidy and his square collages reflect the way he shaped his visions. I have two here on my wall and they remind me of his hands putting his pen in a line with his notebook, the book he was reading lined up with his napkin, the drink neatly set beyond spilling and a pair of glasses close at hand. He hated to lose things. Here on the wall these are many shades of blue, dashes of other colors, one like a California Hockney pool and another like aerial shots from WW2 gaily chopped cities. He told me about his father’s collection of theological books, and his mother delivering messages to the IRA in Dublin. So much human fancy to contain, so many signs on the byways, so many jokes to make, notes to take, addresses to keep, children to love, confidences to hear and comment upon, so much to tell Val, places to travel, and idiots to denounce in the news. When he liked someone, he’d just say, “He’s okay.” He didn’t like prideful people or poets who made a lot of it. He was a member of the international resistance, against bullies and bull-shitters, and no member of any institution. He had clean hands. - Fanny Howe

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A NOTE FOR A DEAD LINE Tom Raworth's obituaries and letters to The Independent (1993-2013) were a vital act of alerting readers to artists’ lives; shadowed by the next day's publication, bulletins in good prose. His pieces rebuffed the gazette's tendency - after editor James Fergusson left the paper in 2007 - to attempt indifference to poets’ obituaries or shoddily edit commissions for a third of the fee paid out 10 years before. Fergusson, (with Diana Gower) since 1986 pioneered a scrupulous yet intimate (good photographs accompanying) approach to obituaries at The Independent. Encouraging contributions from many writers Fergusson, previously and subsequently books/manuscripts dealer, advised on their listing in Removed for Further Study. Tom Raworth's blog (2004-2017) documented friendships arcing back to the 1950s, not just artists, but all equally judged, stark in how they defined the loss. An international assemblage (written and visual) recording the everyday - artists that Tom intimately knew, heard and observed. One encounter served his flawless memory. The blog is now taken down. Perhaps there wasn’t enough money to maintain it. Or it had, like conversation, to take the form of our memory. In it lay his scathing, hilarious (and sensible) riposte to The Independent who threatened legal action to Tom over copyright for his sharing an Independent obituary on his blog to Bill Griffiths in 2007. Aged 78 and a half, having endured fragile health and sustained a fighter's life through three decades, his knack for reporting death (not ducking his own) constitutes one of the many lives of Tom Raworth. Tom was London & Cambridge correspondent to Rolling Stock. His memoir '8 Avondale Road' (1986) of his father Thomas's final day, shows all his prose, like his speech, to be weighted and sure. 'When I got back to my father's bed, two nurses were listing his possessions - one of them, thinking he was asleep, and referring to the coloured stripes on his pyjamas said jokingly - "I wonder what football team he supports." A voice came from the skin and bones: I I I I

detest detest am a love

football television scholar Schubert.

So - after an hour I left him, until tomorrow morning, and came back to the house I grew up in - to this room that was mine.' - Nicholas Johnson

Tom Raworth was as unique and original a person as he was a poet. We first met in the late 1960s (if I remember correctly, no later than '71 anyway), and my first impression was my last: what a decent person he was.

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Just one small recent example. One of his last emails to me was after poet Ray DiPalma died. Ray had burned a lot of bridges including with poets, once friends, whose earliest work Ray championed and published in his little magazine DOONES. Tom emailed me to commiserate over Ray's passing but also to say he had posted on his web site NOTES his appreciation for Ray as a poet and artist, but first of all as someone who had supported Tom as a poet early on by publishing Tom's poems in DOONES. Tom suffered from a heart condition that folks in our poetry world (back then the outside-the-academy-approved scene) whispered about with the supposition that he would die young. Maybe it was that ever present possibility that gave him the calm I remember him most for (being the exact opposite myself, I envied him and wished I could be like him in that regard). Where I was always defending my right to even be a part of that world (having grown up in a very different one) which led to me overstating my importance in it, Tom seemed oblivious, or at least unconcerned, about status and recognition and other ego-related aspects of being a poet in the world. And he had the knack, or good fortune, to have the most innovative publishers making his books almost universally precious works of art in themselves (see LION LION or ACT among his early books). I wish I had seen him more on his visits to the states (I met him when I lived in DC and he came to read and stay at my place) or had traveled to England more myself, but even in his presence he seemed amused though accepting of my frantic energy and volubility in ways that left little room for me to fully appreciate his presence anyway. Fortunately I've settled down over the years in ways that have left me even more appreciative of the gift Tom had for living life at its fullest while appearing, from my perspective at least, to be not taking it too seriously if seriously at all. He had a good full life for someone so many of us expected not to be around even this long (he was 78, I believe) and summed it up best himself in his last entry on his site NOTES when he knew he had only days to live: "Bits of it all have been fun and it's been a decent run." My heart goes out to all his family, especially Val, his friends, and his fans. I feel like he’s still whispering calmly in my ear, advice I couldn’t hear from anyone else: THE TITLE : HEAR IT you are now inside my head better you were inside your own love tom - Michael Lally

Although I knew his work earlier, I didn’t meet Tom himself until around 1977. That’s when Ted Greenwald suggested that Tom and I connect. At the time, I was running a reading series at Folio Books in DC, and Ted thought Tom would make a good addition to the line-up. So I did invite Tom to come to DC to read at Folio, and he and

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I became friends almost immediately. We shared a lot—our upbringing in the UK, our lives as poets, and our love of music, for example. Over the next 40 years, Tom was a frequent visitor to Washington. He always stayed at my apartment when he was in town, giving us many opportunities to hang out together. The photo here, taken by my friend Sandra Rottmann, captures one such visit by Tom to my place in the late 1990s.

Tom Raworth and Doug Lang. Photo by Sandra Rottmann

I regard Tom Raworth as the most outstanding poet of my generation. He was an incredibly vivid, vigorous man, with tremendous amounts of charm, imagination, and intelligence. I love his writing for its great depth of knowledge, its immediacy, and its lack of pretentiousness. Tom was the best. I once remarked, half jokingly, to a friend that space is what we sit around in, waiting for the new Tom Raworth poems. That would make a good caption for Sandra’s wonderful photograph. - Doug Lang

ACROSTIC BULLETIN -- i.m. Tom Raworth (1938-2017) Tom Raworth Of Bexleyheath (UK) by birth, Middle name Moore -- who Resided in London, married Val, Attended the University of Essex, Wrote fourteen-line non-sonnets and Other poems, many, prose, too, Remarkable in quality, Truly transatlantic -Has shuffled off his mortal coil. - David Lehman

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When I took the biggest risk of my poetic life, hollering lyrics in my acoustic guitar duo with Mike, in Lowestoft Little Theatre in 1994, Tom was there reading for cris cheek and I've never felt so egged on by anyone in any audience ever. He looked straight at me, beaming full face, feeling the same risk and with me on the ride. As an audience member, I have always tried to show on my face if I ever empathised with the ride of the performer. That's entirely Tom's influence. He loved the risk in people, and that's one of many reasons we love him. - Ira Lightman

A MAN OF MANY i.m. Tom Raworth

'Lived a life without song, the sly alchemy of tradition and innovation'. Lived a life of only song, the melody of words detached from self. Lived a life of only song sung at breakneck speed, impossible to follow. Lived a life of only song: improvised moments, anchors aweigh. Lived a life of only song, asleep on the wing; camber, taper, droop & shift. Lived a life of only song walking through mirrors, silent future shut down. Lived a life without song, a man whose many syllables had a music of their own. - Rupert M Loydell Note: The first verse is a quote from Paul Youngquist's A Pure Solar World.

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For more than fifty years I treasured my friendship with Tom, a friendship that persisted despite our living across the Atlantic Ocean from each other. I always thought of him as a beacon whose light swept all the way across that ocean, for he was one of the few in Britain who kept abreast of contemporary American poetry, mainly through his friendships with poets across the US. It was reassuring simply to think that he was there, creating work that was a constant breath of fresh air. And so it was delightful for me to read with him, at the Royal Festival Hall in London in 2003. Known for his delivery that came at you like a blizzard of dictionaries, he began his set by reading a poem that took everyone by complete surprise, a hilarious piece of intentionally blatant doggerel about the hideousness of the George W. Bush administration. The audience roared with laughter. Then the blizzard. It was wonderful. - Ron Padgett

Trying to put into words what I learned from Tom. Not to be afraid. That loose ends are the point. Not to tidy up. Honesty. Work ethic. Fun. If it isn’t fun it’s not worth doing. - Kit Robinson I first came across Tom Raworth’s work in 1975 in Michael Horowitz’s Children of Albion anthology when I was in my last year at school. I was just starting to write poetry and was discovering that it could be all sorts of things beyond the material I had to study for my English ‘A’ level. One of Tom Raworth’s poems in particular struck me at the time and has remained in my consciousness ever since, ‘My Face is My Own, I Thought’. I loved the way it captured a dislocated reality, which I often experienced myself but couldn’t articulate, and I was astonished by the line with a question mark left hanging in the middle: ‘did you say ? echo in her ears’. Aha, so you can do that in poetry too, I thought. And who could forget the way the last lines take us somewhere different entirely, frightening and funny at the same time: ‘taking the scissors / began to trim off the baby’s fingers.’ Long may those scissors trim! - Ian Seed

I had just arrived at the Cork Soundeye Festival one year and was greeting people when I was suddenly enveloped in an enormous bear hug. It was Tom. In truth, there was something ursine about him, that physical presence. No doubt he had claws, as bears do, but I never knew them. It was his warmth and generosity and mischievous humour which made him such good company. For me also he represented someone who had stayed the course, kept the faith, a poet who had sustained himself and others over many years and despite manifold difficulties. At my age now I am getting used to looking round and finding people not there but Tom's absence, more than most, is difficult to bear. - Geoffrey Squires

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February 15th 2001. Edge Hill College of Higher Education (now University), Tom Raworth comes to the small market town of Ormskirk to read his poetry, at the invitation of Robert Sheppard. I’d been aware of Raworth’s name and work, since Sheppard and I, along with Cliff Yates had formed the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research Group. I was part of the support, reading my poems that night. Tom was so friendly and encouraging to me. He was a gentleman. Fast forward to the publication of my debut collection Radio Mast Horizon (Shearsman, 2013) and I sent Tom a copy of the book, as I’d dedicated a poem to him. He responded with a kind email and a photograph of him holding the book was posted on his website. Teaching undergraduate creative writing, Tom makes an annual appearance. I usually read an extract of ‘Ace’ with colleague, friend and fellow admirer of Tom’s work, Rory Waterman. This has become a highlight of the teaching calendar. Speaking to SJ Fowler about Tom’s passing, he mentioned that Tom’s legacy would be his poetry and the helping hand he gave poets. It’s up to us to continue to spread the word. - Andrew Taylor

I first encountered Tom’s work in Tottering State, which I bought in Waterstone’s in Kingston-upon-Thames in 1990, with no sense of his already considerable reputation. It wasn’t long before I got to see him read in Lavender Hill in South London (I recall Robert Sheppard telling me to brace myself before Tom began!) and I was hooked. What hasn’t Tom’s work taught me about the possibilities of writing, of conducting the poet’s life to the full, of poetry as a meaningful transaction between individuals? I invited Tom to read at the University of East Anglia in ‘93 when I was a student there and he was humble enough to accept staying in my filth-ridden digs. He gave an awesome reading and rose very early the next day suggesting we meet later in the city. We duly did and he gifted me with a collage which has sat on my desk ever since. When I asked him for a collage for the cover of my second book he generously responded – and, when the original went missing, sent me three more to take my pick! I show them to my students when I teach Tom’s work – at least once or twice a year. In my copy of his Collected Poems he wrote ‘hope the gap is shorter than 12 years’ – it had been a long time since we’d seen each other. Unfortunately, that gap is now never to be closed, although the ache of its absence slightly wears off every time I dip back into those thrilling breaks or in the rush as I read aloud ‘That More Simple Natural Time Tone Distortion’. Tom, wherever you are, you are so much missed. - Scott Thurston I tried to write something about Tom’s work on several occasions, and I think he forgave my assumptions and errors, as he did the criticism of others so long as it wasn’t full of itself or too stiffly academic. Typos or printing errors in his own books bothered him—he was given to correcting them as he signed copies. The correspondence I had with him mostly wasn’t about his writing, however. He’d rather talk about his latest discovery in hot sauces. I remember driving out to Jungle Jim’s, a supermarket in these parts, to see if Suka Pinakurat from the Philippines was

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stocked there; it’s good on boiled potatoes, Tom said. He liked good gin too. Most of my exchanges with him in the last few years were like that. Once he sent along his son Bruno’s dip recipe with a pdf of a Soviet anti-religious poster he used for the cover of As When; he’s switched titles on the books the Russian soldier is carrying, Lenin and Technology to More and Stuff, as Brighton’s beach becomes the background. Now and then he would volunteer something potentially helpful as I tried to keep up, though his work was ever ahead of its reception and not only in my case. So I learned that the odd phrase “pop hen” in his little book Got On—one of his many great titles—was cut out of Klaus Conrad’s “apophenia,” which describes the human tendency to find patterns in random data, a phenomenon that interested him. Like every poet he was interested in what readers made of his poems (I remember him asking me to photocopy a review he hadn’t seen because “Val likes to see them”) but he didn’t obsess. Once he inscribed a book for me by citing remarks his friend Jeremy Prynne made about it in corresponding with him. In my copy of Writing he’s transformed the “g” in “Writing” with a sketch that makes it a rabbit wearing a bow tie, adding a candle for the rabbit to read by. As Martin Corless-Smith wrote just the other day in his lovely memorial, in reading Tom Raworth’s poems one “gets what one sees.” Tom was a European, Ed Dorn wrote in Vort, many years ago now. Since then the Irish have been happy to claim him, with his Irish mother, and Americans too for his engagement with our poetries and his years living here and travels from city to city. Of course he’s famously the one English poet in a French rendering of experimental American writing, and he had and has many friends in France too, together with good friends in South Africa, Canada, Mexico and just about everywhere, I guess. I liked to hear his stories about Venice, a city I also love, and where he and Val had a lot of good times with friends who like the rest of us are missing him now. I’ve heard a few people describe his last words on his blog, “Bits of it all have been fun and it’s been a decent run,” as a “very English” sign-off. He didn’t always have the same readership in England that he had in other locations, but he had the readers he needed. It was a joy to meet Tom Raworth whenever and wherever that turned out to be possible, and ever a pleasure to hear from him. These are sorrowful days for his family and for all who knew him. His high spirits, his singular work in several art forms, his attention to detail in that work and in his friendships—we won’t forget. (Read more here: http://www.dispatchespoetry.com/articles/news/2017/03/1032) - Keith Tuma

Tom Raworth improvised inside our poem dream, always on, he interpreted a matrix of speed orature. And attention. “ to resist retrogression/faster than anything” Hermes couldn’t be that quick. He had our era. He had that ear. He crossed the international divide. “joined harmonizing the best” A true treasure of the lands. Repertoire in a swell of oracles…open the books. Erase the mundane…again. How you could meet at so many coasts? To be that peripatetic, open. Ready. The rucksack revolution. And inside metabolism’s pure sound. Around our aesthete hearts, he had ghosts of the greats. The moon out tonight for his constellations of cool Utopia and negate the pain, o fucked US of A. Will we meet again in Italy? A

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voice answering back and will as new shape reimagines the acoustics add “birds move in the dark” or in transit. Holiday greeting a revelation of plenitude. Dear Val. When I think consociational I get weepy. How many we share(d) and the intense doing of it all. How many commentaries in a kitchen, Ed Dorn? Anselm Hollo? “slipping past a window/on communal stairs” He had all edge. Art and efflorescence. Or out on the palazzo with Rita and Gian. Pick up the lyre snap it in a rage when poets die. It’s too sweet-tongued. Edge is like an Homeric hymn tonight, eating a last meal, watching a movie once (Saturday Night Fever, we really do that?) ”sifted particle of moonlight” grokking a moonrise, enter the temenos, “dissatisfied when the calm returns”. Quoted lines from the great Tom Raworth poem “Errory” - Anne Waldman

ELEGAIC FLARF FOR TOM RAWORTH His work has been translated NOTES/NEWS is updated almost daily an English/Irish poet in South London he attended the saddening news that Tom was a leading figure of sent waves of sadness across death, the world of poetry it bursts on the senses and one of our dearest witty, without push and plush providing creative spaces for young oldest living open heart surgery travelled and worked in the observing “I” in addition survivor to a career that only just yesterday one of some books a visual selection arrived the most American of British a beautiful crisp volume from a poet highly regarded on this scene of underground share to link to these words I’m sorry I can’t be if you’ve never heard of a great selection of similar work fits into no categories after a long illness - Steven Waling

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The first time I spoke to Tom Raworth it was 1999 and there was a snow storm in Chicago. I had written him a letter, asking permission to publish one of his poems in Jumpstart, the book I was writing for the Poetry Society, and asking if he would write something for the book, about his method. He took the trouble to call me from Chicago one night, from a public phone box in appalling weather, to say yes, he’d see to it. I first met him in Ormskirk in 2001, when he came to Edge Hill University to do a reading. As a member of Robert Sheppard’s Poetry and Poetics Research Group, I got to read along with him, with the rest of the group, as part of the support act. I took along my copies of his books and he signed them for me patiently, leant against a filing cabinet in Robert’s office, chatting. Lovely bloke. Later, I wrote about Tom’s work and Frank O’Hara’s as part of my PhD. I knew I’d never get bored, reading those two. - Cliff Yates

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in conclusion: I did not know Tom well, I just met him a couple of times, and enjoyed a simple yet wonderful lunch with him and Val at their home overlooking the sea in Hove three or four years ago: good company and good conversation – much of it to do with pleasure being a necessary part of the experience of poetry and the poem – and for me it’s a very happy memory. I reviewed Tom’s Collected Poems for The North magazine in 2003, and reprint the review below. - Martin Stannard

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YOU WERE WEARING BLUE

The first poem by Tom Raworth I ever read was “You Were Wearing Blue”. It’s in Michael Horovitz’s Children of Albion anthology: the explosions are nearer this evening the last train leaves for the south at six tomorrow the announcements will be in a different language At the time I’m not sure I knew why it appealed to me. Now, I’d say things like it’s really crisp, throws a light across what I carelessly call “life”, and it’s in a language that’s my language, which is not the language someone like Ted Hughes used, and the poem seems full of air and clarity and possibilities and listen you said i preferred to look at the sea

everything stops there at strange angles

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I had no idea what those line breaks and spaces were doing (although I managed to work out that you could read some of it in two ways because of the layout) and it wasn’t until I’d been to university (Raworth wasn’t on any course, I read him while I was there, but university taught me, in its own way, how to read), and wandered around in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, saw some life, and stumbled through a whole other mish-mash of reading that I – no, not “understood” how this stuff worked exactly but, rather, understood how it’s okay to intuit something from a poem rather than “get it”. And though you might “get” how a poem works and how form “works”, it’s not what you think about when reading. When writing, it’s a different matter. 2.

A(C)(W)E

I’m in awe because it looks like what he does is write down just about anything, and it becomes “a poem”. Don’t try and write like him: it’ll end in tears. I think if you tried to identify a structure and/or tried to explain how these poems are constructed (correct word) you could end up sounding as unnecessary as Marjorie Perloff (Times Literary Supplement, 30 May 2003). And you wouldn’t want to do that. What a poem “Ace” is! And a lot of the time Tom Raworth’s poems are really funny. Or, they have funny things in them. Other times they knock you dead. Actually, they always knock me dead, but they’re not always funny. I’m writing down as I think this. Don’t try and write like him. You’re not him. 3.

I’M WRITING DOWN AS I THINK THIS

If you try to explain how these poems are constructed you’d at least be advised to refer to the letter Raworth wrote to me as his contribution to joe soap’s canoe #14, and to a poem he refers to there: (“I thought I’d pretty clearly stated my method in …”) “El Barco del Abismo” (“… over twenty years ago, and I don’t think it’s changed much.”) which is on page 42 of the Collected. This extraordinary little poem is followed by more words about where each line came from: “Title from Sr. Martinez Ruiz’ Latin American History lecture on Thursday, May 9 th, 1968 at noon. I was so impressed I stopped listening.” “Four lines from a Spanish Vocabulary, Sunday, May 12th, about 4.p.m. Something else Roy pointed out in the same book: in a list of words to do with crime, police, the law, etc. was the Spanish for ‘tapered trousers’.” And, of course, these “notes” are part of the poem. Probably. They are, at least, on the same page and under the same title and go towards making up the experience of reading the poem. (I’ve just realised how boring this statement is. The poems deserve better.) This stuff’s quick. It looks like what he does is write down just about anything, and it becomes “a poem”. But it’s also considered, and considered carefully. You’ve only got to try this method yourself and see what a mess you make. Re-reading and rerea-reading reveals (slowly) how carefully these poems are made. Someone has

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probably already written a thesis about it. I just spent this afternoon with “Ace”, and it strikes me how I feel very relaxed reading these poems: I’m not struggling to understand them, and I’m not trying to find a narrative line, or even a reason for any of it at all. What I’m doing is surrounding myself with the words. Enjoying being with them. Reading a few lines and getting one “meaning”, then reading them again and finding something else. And enjoying it. Okay, I might be missing loads, but there’s lots of time left to read it again. And again. I think Tom would rather we enjoy the process of reading poems than be able to explain it.

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This review © Martin Stannard, 2003, 2017. All other contributions to this memorial are © the individual contributors, 2017.

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Featured Artist – Rupert Loydell

Overunder East

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Overunder West

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Overunder North

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Overunder South

Images © Rupert Loydell, 2017

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Between Word and Image: an appreciation of John Berger (1926-2017) Peter Gillies

‘The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled’. John Berger’s words in Ways of Seeing have stayed ever-present in my thinking since I first encountered them over four decades ago.

I remember feeling completely astounded by the first of the four television programmes shown by the BBC in January 1972. As a viewer in my late teens, with little understanding of the politics at work behind the juxtaposition of words and images, it was difficult to classify what exactly was being put before me on the screen. The presentation was hypnotic: Berger’s compelling tone; his grasp of art history; his powers of observation; and most diverting of all, his originality of thought.

Intuitively I knew that this montage combining critical commentary with fine art and mass media imagery had serious implications for me, not only as a prospective art student and future teacher of art and literature, but most importantly, as an autonomous and questioning member of society. Berger’s closing remarks asked

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me to challenge the arguments put forward by him in the programme, that it was vital to distrust the words he had just said to accompany the stream of images that the television had thrown at me during the previous half an hour: ‘consider what I have arranged, but be sceptical of it’. By then I was already on his wavelength and I was hooked. I was equally mesmerised by the three further episodes of Ways of Seeing and have remained a devoted fan of Berger’s writing to this day.

For those of us in 1972, and for those in later generations too, lucky enough to experience Berger’s Ways of Seeing in our formative years, this imperative to constantly survey and question word-image relations was one of the greatest of gifts we could receive. Revisiting the material in 2017, a few months after Berger’s death (the series Ways of Seeing is available to see on YouTube, the book remains in print as a thin paperback Penguin Classic), one is struck how prescient it all seems: the mass-circulation and appropriation of images; acts of misrepresentation by the news media; the use of misinformation to distort public opinion; body image and the representation of women; the role of art in capitalism; the corporate practices of our cultural institutions. What is also surprising is how Berger, working with director Mike Dibb, managed to draw upon and make accessible the ideas of the Frankfurt School, in particular Walter Benjamin’s contention that the intrinsic meaning of an artwork can be manipulated by the possibility of its reproduction (see Benjamin’s 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’). Unfortunately, arts coverage in the mainstream media has never again reached these critical heights. One wonders how we have arrived at the current situation where celebrity profiles of artists (as in recent BBC Imagine and Arena programmes) have replaced any attempt at analysis, argument and critique.

As a model of arts broadcasting, Ways of Seeing contains many decisive passages of critique, all of which challenge us ‘to see more clearly’. There is an extraordinary polemical moment nearly a third of the way through the first programme when the commentary comes to a pause, and the screen fills with Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows (1890). Berger has encouraged us simply to view it as what it is: ‘a landscape, a cornfield with birds flying out of it’. Then, as we watch, the added narration kicks-in: ‘this is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself’. We have been

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given a context but in the process, our response to the painting is manipulated; the meaning of the image changes so that its melodramatic impact can be attained. In this wonderful bridge between the political and the aesthetic, Berger demonstrates how the words of this distorted narrative (in fact, this was not the artist’s final painting) confirm their verbal authority, while Van Gogh’s picture merely illustrates the sad story presented. The significance of the contextual statement then intensifies when a few bars of melancholic film music are played over the image. In 2017, whether one is walking around the galleries in Tate Modern, or scanning news media, or watching an ‘investigative’ documentary, we still need to be reminded that the meaning of an image or sequence of images is contingent on the words (and the ambience) put around it.

For Berger, not only are all paintings conjectural, they are also contemporary. In the book Ways of Seeing he talks about the process of viewing: how, when looking at Vermeer’s Woman Pouring Milk (1658), for example, ‘one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures’. No distance in time exists between the making of this image in the past and one’s engagement with it now, seeing it in the present moment. In the immediacy of Vermeer’s picture, history accumulates, it is ‘literally there before our eyes’.

The idea of a painting forming a kind of corridor between then and now, what Berger calls ‘our way of measuring time’, informs many of his best known essays: ‘if we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past’. The typically short and expansive essay ‘The Painter in His Studio’ (1966) again places us directly in front of works by Vermeer. As a sustained investigation into the meaning of Vermeer’s subject matter – usually a woman reading a letter or trying on jewellery or simply turning her head – the essay provides a series of wondrous revelations. For Berger, these are mysterious figures ‘whom the light discloses’. Using the simplest possible language, he gets us to critically participate by asking ‘why can we feel so near to them, our eyes taking in every intimate drop of light, and yet at the same time be so remote from them’.

The experience of looking at the work is enriched by the arguments that Berger offers: that Vermeer’s real concern was philosophical, reflecting a ‘calm scepticism’

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about his own ability, ‘with the evidence of the eye inadequate’, to faithfully record immediate appearances. Once again, the discussion is really about the inadequacy of looking and seeing, for Berger even manages to evoke Vermeer’s frustration with the camera obscura as a device that, although initially helpful, could take the painter only so far towards capturing reality. Significantly, Berger views Vermeer’s doubting attitude as affirmative, admiring the single-minded precision of ‘one of the most deliberate painters who ever lived’.

In Berger’s wonderful poem ‘A View of Delft’ (written in the 1980s, inspired by Vermeer’s painting of the same name, 1661), we are asked to consider the ways this picture encompasses time. As we are drawn slowly ‘across the water’ towards the town’s appearance, ‘where all has been seen / and the bricks are cherished’, the speaker in the poem insists upon the many assembled moments that have gone into the making of the image, ‘read again and again in a port, / in that town with its library of tiles’. Folding the past into the present, the poem makes us aware of the many glances at the subject that are involved, what amounts to the density of Vermeer’s looking:

in that town across the water where the dead take the census and there are no vacant rooms for his gaze occupies them all, where the sky is waiting to have news of a birth, in that town which pours from the eyes of those who left it In whatever genre or medium Berger chose to work in, whether in broadcasting, critical essays, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, dramatic writing, drawing and painting or making collaborative bookworks, there was always an understanding that the creation of art operates in one continuous present. The second and final time I saw Berger speak at a live event (in conversation with Simon McBurney at the South Bank Centre in London, May 2005) he ruminated a great deal on this compression of

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time, what he called the ‘duration’ contained inside a work of art. Discussing his visit to Chauvet to see some of the oldest cave paintings in the world, he identified ‘moments which were, which are, and which will be’, all of them standing simultaneously for the experience not only of the original Cro-Magnor painter, but also of the contemporary viewer seeing the work 32,000 years later.

In the extraordinary contours of horses, lions, reindeers and other animals depicted at Chauvet, Berger was faced with ‘an immediacy and sensitivity of being’ that he felt eradicated any linear or progressive sense of time. His description of the caves features in the seventh of eight storylines that constitute his most lyrical and selfreflexive novel Here is Where We Meet (2005). Berger’s ability to evoke what he found on the rock’s surface at Chauvet is second to none, while his wonder at the configuration of those drawn marks emanates from every phrase. Looking at a charcoal drawing of a male ibex, Berger writes:

How to describe the blackness of its traces? It is a blackness that makes the darkness reassuring, a blackness which is a lining for the immemorial. He is walking up a gentle incline, his steps delicate, his body rounded, his face flat. Each line is as tense as a well thrown rope, and the drawing has a double energy which is perfectly shared: the energy of the animal who has become present, and that of the man whose arm and eye are drawing the animal by torch light.

Central to Berger’s storytelling was the ability to dissolve frontiers and time zones. In Here Is Where We Meet, for example, the narrator moves effortlessly between different cities – Lisbon, Geneva, London, Madrid, Krakow – where he encounters not only his late mother, but also friends, ex-lovers and mentors whose influence at various stages of his long life has been decisive. The narrator reflects how ‘the number of lives that enter any one life is incalculable’. Encapsulated in a timeless ‘here’ which is the subliminal space ‘where we meet’, each rendezvous is animated by an afterlife character who occupies an eternal present:

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I’m not sure how long we stood there facing each other – perhaps for the fifteen years since her death. After the death of mothers, time often doubles or accelerates its speed. This shifting between different temporalities also informs most of Berger’s later nonfiction writing. Articulating a compassionate yet abrasive political viewpoint, books such as and our faces, my heart, brief as photos (1984), The Shape of a Pocket (2001) and Hold Everything Dear (2007) demonstrate just how radical and astute Berger’s thinking was on the speculative practice of western state capitalism and the consequential economic injustices that create the global experience of poverty, inequality and insecurity for so many people. He emphasized that in trying to understand history, we have to be alert to what Benjamin called the continuous ‘state of emergency in which we live’. In Hold Everything Dear Berger explains that within such an approach we come to see ‘that every simplification, every label, serves only the interests of those who wield power; the more extensive their power, the greater their need for simplifications’. For Berger, these ‘simplifications’ were the half-truths that disguise the global self-interests of huge corporations; the fallacies perpetually spun by lobbyists working on their behalf, as well as by their skilful media managers.

The longer I have been reading and re-reading Berger, the more I have found myself identifying with his principle that all visual images ‘oblige us to recognize how much is hidden’ and that within our daily lives there is an unceasing relationship between visual culture and centres of power, behind which are motives we need to be aware of. To break through the ‘system’s mythology’ which exists simply to exploit, Berger writes, ‘the secret was to get inside whatever I was looking at … making it more itself … more evidently unique’.

The richness, breadth and continuing relevance of his vast body of work (that includes well over 40 book publications alone) has already been seen by many commentators as Berger’s greatest strength. In my own case, I see his most profound and generous legacy as one that connects with the original premise of Ways of Seeing: to offer a model of art education that would encourage visual literacy to erode our political naivety and our socio-economic vulnerability. Such

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visual awareness might enable us to challenge the powerful vested interests of global advertising and corporate news media. Having the discernment to deal with the volatility of appearances that come with technological innovation would lead us to question the political ambitions of the multi-national organizations that provide them.

On issues of migration, it so happens that there could not be a better time to re-read or read for the first time A Seventh Man (1975), Berger’s prophetic exploration with Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, of the lives of Turkish migrant workers in Europe. Like so much of his work, the book is innovative in form, shifting between reportage, oral testimony, photojournalism, diagrams and excerpts of poetry and fiction. Through the interplay of stark monochrome images and text, migration is presented as an unequal exchange of exploitable labour that allows a poorer economy to subsidize a richer one. The book sets down how the experience of the migrant is constantly devalued; how each worker is seen by the host country as simply part of a disposable labour-force:

So far as the economy of the metropolitan country is concerned, migrant workers are immortal: immortal because continually interchangeable. They are not born: they are not brought up: they do not age: they do not get tired: they do not die. They have a single function – to work. All other functions of their lives are the responsibility of the country they come from.

When migration occurs anywhere, the same double-standards always seem to apply: a rich country summons migrant workers to rectify a shortfall in local labour whilst at the same time, treating them with hostility and indifference. Over forty years have passed since the publication of A Seventh Man, yet the resentment towards migrants and refugees persists, while the question of what constitutes ‘belonging’ has now even greater urgency.

In his uncompromising engagement with those he saw as unrecognised or discriminated against or dispossessed, Berger always stood apart from his British contemporaries, further emphasised by his move to France in the mid-sixties from which time he insisted upon defining himself as a European. At the outset of his

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writing life he argued that ‘far from my dragging politics into art, art has dragged me into politics’. Berger’s own practice of drawing was especially important to him as a means to fasten one’s gaze onto the ‘thereness’ of the world, for as he says in The Shape of a Pocket, trying to depict ‘the existent is an act of resistance instigating hope’. The qualities he designated important to the artist – of receptivity, of openness, of hospitality – were likewise vital for the outlook of a society: ‘such hospitality once offered, the collaboration may sometimes begin’.

With Berger’s passing in January of this year, it is appropriate to consider his own wry reflection on what is necessary for the storyteller. Staring at Velazquez’s painting of Aesop (1641) Berger notes how he begins to share something of the subject’s disposition, what he calls a ‘curious composure’ that:

coexists with hurt, with pain and with compassion. The last, essential for storytelling, is the complement of the original scepticism: a tenderness for experience, because it is human … Both states fix the attention upon experience and thus on the need to redeem it from oblivion, to hold it tight in the dark.

John Berger eloquently expressed both compassion and scepticism in equal abundance. He will be sadly missed.

© Peter Gillies 2017

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The Gatekeepers of Taste Emma Stokes Students of art history are often directed to a model for interpreting a work of art - its greatness, its poverty. These consist of seven criteria.

1. Imitation of life or the almighty (both of which test the artist’s skills). This is mimesis. At the centre of mimesis are the artist’s skills, too often viewed as separable from the history out of which great paintings and sculptures have been created, in the European tradition particularly. God, the Virgin Mary and God’s Son required no perspective because they were central to any picture. True’ perspective, with its vanishing point, gave spatial illusion to the flat surface of a painting – a window on the world owned by the king, a member of the court, a merchant, a landowner. This mirrored the development of capitalism as surely as the proscenium arch framed the theatre stage from the 18th Century.

In 1839 the first commercial photography began, a product of the industrial revolution, offering the ultimate imitation of life. However, the ‘imitation of life’ has not entirely escaped from painting into photography. Politicians, businessmen and celebrities still crave their portraits rendered in paint; and Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud stand as giants of Modern Art for their physical-psychological portraits, though the ‘likeness’ is less a copy of reality and more a means to explore the psychological relationship between sitter and artist.

2. Its beauty. Beauty is possibly too abstract a concept, so a modern day equivalent is the harmony of a work.

Beauty cannot be scientifically defined because it is a concept. Also, in the history of art it can be used ambiguously to both define the subject of the painting and the form, colour and composition of the painting. Its general use may be less ambiguous:

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She was a beauty in her youth

He had a blonde beauty on his arm

He landed a 14lb beauty of a fish

Beauty is a construct, often a male construct, to define the very best of something. Like harmony, it tends towards the symmetrical (musical harmony). While broken teeth and a lazy eye may not be beautiful, it is this broken symmetry that draws us into a narrative with the painting.

Photography can tell us a lot about beauty as symmetrical form - as many a student of the darkroom can testify:-

Take a photo of a beautiful face and print it. Reverse the negative and print the face again. Now, cut each photo in half, carefully down the nose and put the left half of the first print together with the right half of the second print (essentially, the left hand side has been replicated on the right hand side and vice versa). There is now a symmetrical face which should be beautiful but is of a disturbing and unattractive alien! ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ Yet, to elevate an appreciation of art above what we mere mortals can see with our own eyes, beauty is used to define a religious, moral or social aspiration.

3. The awe of the painting or sculpture. Is it sublime?

It is nearly impossible for me to contemplate the awe of great works of art, when the shock of bombs on Baghdad is the image of “awe” I carry from childhood. Of course, awe brings us wonderment, shock and fear in the same moment in huge religious frescos. Depictions of heaven and hell are specifically historic and geographic. But today? What art is sublime now, when once paintings were a window on God? We can marvel at Anthony Gormley’s enormous Angel of the North but surely we are

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moved by the engineering rather than its awe? For myself, his life size figures of Another Place standing in the waves summon a sense of the sublime.

Angel of the North by Anthony Gormley 1998

So, awe tends to be an historic term, rather than a contemporary tool to help us look at art.

4. The emotional power of the work. Expressionism.

The emotional power of a work of art is perhaps key to an appreciation and understanding of it. We see first and then put words to our visceral responses. Whether historic or modern, whether in the National Portrait Gallery or Tate Modern, the emotional power comes to us through the colours, form, line, mass, pattern, materials and subject matter. From Gwen Johns’ Girl with Bare Shoulders to Picasso’s Guernica, from Jackson Pollock’s Convergence to Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII, each work has emotional power and invokes an emotional response in us which we can then rationalise with words. How and why we respond is due to the work itself and the associations we bring to the work.

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5. The perception of its social and psychological reality. Realism.

Realism, like Expressionism, generally outlines a movement or tendency in art. Here it is used, perhaps, as a bridge between the art work and ourselves, our lives in the here and now. How empathetic are we with the work and its subject? Goya’s the Third of May (1808) depicts the horrors of war and even the conservative art historian Kenneth Clark had to admit that this is "the first great picture which can be called revolutionary in every sense of the word, in style, in subject, and in intention.” On the other hand, Mark Rothko’s Blue, Green and Brown – which is essentially blocks of colour on canvas – is charged with psychological potency. Thus, “perceptions of social and psychological reality” can open up works of different times and types.

6. How original is this piece of art? Is it innovative?

Originality is a term in art which capitalism has dusted with gold. The separation of the artist from the church, and the court and its patronage, was undoubtedly an advance – an advance towards the auction houses and another form of patronage (the rich collector supported by the state).

However, in this context we refer to the originality of the art work, rather than the signature. There is no Dragon’s Den of successful and failing new ideas, though this may be the expectation of some of today’s curators. Conceptual Art may still occasionally make the headlines, but in terms of practice across the land, genre painting and sculpture are more popular and flourish – portraiture, landscape, social realism and formal abstraction. What is clear is that the innovations beloved of the market, are on the retreat. The 1990s wave of popular Brit Art appears like a fad now, so I am not sure innovation is a doorway into appreciating art at this present time. Or is it that time tells us if it was once innovative?

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7. A critique of the work from artistic, social, political and historic perspectives.

Artistic.

There is a language of art and it is true that art should be judged through that language first. Yet, that language is constantly changing. Vogue in art schools in the 1980s was “truth to materials,” for example. That is not a mantra you will hear so much today.

Social and political

Though some may perceive that artists can operate outside the social and political forces of the day, they will be entirely reliant on a fixed language of art as a result. While art historians may wish to nail down art, this ultimately limits its practice and appreciation.

Historic perspectives

It seems absurd to say but history is the most important aspect of art history. Also, through history, we can ask pertinent questions of the gatekeepers of art.

History itself raises the most important point in considering art. Would Hieronymous Bosch (15-16th Century) be considered such a great painter today without Modernism and specifically Surrealism re-interpreting his work (though art historians are now contesting his ‘greatness’ again)? Without the Suffragettes and the 20th Century rise in the fight for women’s liberation, would time have pulled Gwen Johns’ work away from her brother’s shadow to reveal her as the far more worthy artist?

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From relatively humble origins, Thomas Gainsborough became the portrait painter of choice, among squires and the new merchant class in the mid-1700s. What appealed to the rich was the artist’s ability to render a cleaned-up likeness of the sitter in a pose that reflected the wealth and ownership of the client. Today, Gainsborough’s portraits appear wooden, overly posed, with a hint of caricature. Has history intervened to send Gainsborough into the basement? Of course not and this is due to Lionel de Rothschild, who began collecting Gainsborough’s paintings in the 1850s so that today his paintings fetch millions.

Mr and Mrs Andrews by Thomas Gainsborough, 1750 (detail)

While Gainsborough’s portraits tell us about social class in the 18th Century and the artist’s relationship to wealth, how many of the art historian’s criteria can one tick against his work? Few indeed. Yet Gainsborough persists. The art historian’s criteria show how art has been considered. Perhaps this framework can appear too narrow and overly dominated by a rather masculine set of criteria, with a more patriarchal and Eurocentric view of art?

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MAIRÉAD BYRNE

PATRONAGE AND CITIZENSHIP

Some people are paid to kill and some people are paid to paint. The patron who pays them enjoys both war and painting. You could even say needs both. Which does he need more? Love more? Cherish better? Now that is a question for after dinner. Which would he kill? The bodyguard or the court painter? Surely the bodyguard — before the bodyguard kills him. Which would he paint? Neither. The patron is unable to paint. Another reason to keep the painter who would never kill. And painters are somewhat rarer than soldiers, and tamer. As well as being such funny little things.

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STEVENS IN THE CHAPEL

Wallace Stevens is speaking in the chapel. It is as if no-one were there. Not that I cannot hear a half-suppressed cough or the scraping of a prie-dieu but his demeanor is such that no listener can be admitted. Stevens sadly and brilliantly intones. He reads beautifully, performing an unlikely sleight of voice, doing the impossible, as if expertly hanging wallpaper where there are no walls. Parents depart in high dudgeon, taking the high road like so many Christophers, perfectly proportioned children like small chairs upright in their arms. Others sleep an indescribably luxurious sleep, scooped out in the pews, Stevens’ voice mantling over them like an adamant snowy comforter, or a mother whose tucking in is a kind of gif. One or two people look sage, nodding to a degree which is within a scintilla of indiscernibility. Some think they are in a big bellied boat, moving slowly down the green-brown river with Wallace Stevens at the helm. If viruses descended and plagues of locusts, the viruses and locusts would quail before the avuncular Wallace Stevens, huge as the figure of Columbus in San Juan. Only broader, more clothy, more broadclothy I suppose. Another Christopher. But still, if given a choice, people might choose the virus or the plagues of locusts over Stevens who has an uncanny nightmarish quality, and the capacity to never end, while viruses and locusts might. 1 And with a virus, you can sip a lemon drink, and turn over, pressing your cold nose into damp sheets, and sleep for a while in the bright day. Stevens calls his numbers like an umpire. Survivors in the congregation are aghast. Transfixed, like pegs or the few teeth left in the outflung crucifix of the church or finalists in a Thirties danceathon, targets inscribed on their brows and the line sunk home, they lurch like sea-sick surfers into his great pauses, unable to guess whether they will ever emerge. He stops. They fall. He starts. They rise. He, the magnificent distant kite, feeds them another syllable. They, the last bow on the tail, play on.

1

Even if I can say little about locusts, knowing them as I do principally as a figure of speech, I will take a gamble on their clouds diminishing and thinning rather than secondguessing the near certainty that Wallace Stevens will continue forever speaking in measured tones about poetry, crawling under people’s skins like a thick insect or with the unstoppable determination of narcotic snow.

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BOAR CONSTITUENT QUOTIENT

ID

G

A

C

E

BCQ

ADF James McM? Me: NM:

? M? F F

? ? M M

? ? M M

? W W O

8.2 8.2 3.0 8.8

JH: MM: BO: BD: KW: KK: DT: HC:

M M M ? M F M F

M M M ? YM Y O O

? C W ? W C M W

W G B ? B W W W

7.9 6.0 5.0 7.0 4.0 5.0 10.0 9.3

The person endlessly urinating next door: ?

?

?

?

8.9

Research Questions   

Is this list a disservice to boars? How identifiable should the subjects be? Is it enough?

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ON NOT MAKING THE MISTAKE OF ÍTH1

I will not make the mistake of Íth, scabrous and degenerate land. I have no appetite for your upheavals of rock and arcing bay loaded with godly waves peppered and spiced with foaming lace and the wash that rushes to shore like flung pailfuls of the whitest milk. Nor for your vertical and horizontal skies that can be described as reality only if the thin strip of land where we walk upon upright just about is unreality. Nor the ridiculous colours sewn into every ridge and ditch and laneway with no purpose on earth save to draw and bathe and sate the eye. Nor the way your winds happen always to be soft as they are powerful, keeping every tall thing in motion no matter how tethered. Vivid grasses with their lidfuls of rain, January wildflowers, robust gorse, molten gold that the sun pours on the sea in the morning, starry chickweed and the shock of the actual stars lowered almost into our hands, slender-beaked partnered choughs, rainbows like berries in the sky, no, you won’t find me hankering for any or every one of these things, nor feeling fellow feeling for the sheep laying her weary head close to the ground. So there is no need to pursue me with your ship nor for my people to assemble thirty ships nor for any of my sons to break an oar and fall back in the boat nor climb the mast and fall into the cold Atlantic nor any of my daughters to be stowed and known only for her burial place as with my children on the Saddle of Skellig Michael or Cill Rialaig Stone Row near Bolus Head or the Stone Row at Íochtar Cua. There is no need to run me through and through as if I were not already run through and through after only one sidelong look at the curves and folds of this your land without attribute. So you did not see me crying as I walked along the road as if my crying were the closest articulation of what I do not know the name for, something between a song that cannot be written yet and a kind of wound left by the harpoon you sunk into my heart and the awful pain of the inexorable tug of it so desirous I am of you.

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And neither did any one of your mangy children see me crying nor any one of the mangy children of your mangy children, if ever any was despicable enough to mate with your scabrous kind.

1

In Irish folklore, Íth, first of the Milesians to come to Kerry, praised the place so much that the Tuatha Dé Danaan became suspicious of his motives and killed him. Barbara Mary O’Shea, “Ballinskelligs: A Century of Change,” dissertation for Centre for Adult and Continuing Education, University College Cork, 2006.

© Mairéad Byrne, 2017

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SHEILA E. MURPHY

FEBRUARY GHAZAL

Synecdoche enlists a mural to mean whole tones cross the tenderloin with off-white steam. Archbishop so-and-so removes the trimmings from the frock until new listeners seem attuned.

Roan indifference refracts the stems. A line drive splits the flock above land mass. The renaissance malignancy defers the call to arms we hear and show respect as faulty pockets fill. Time series design bleeds sordid pomp, perspires lust that dwindles its veracity.

GALLERY GHAZAL Ecce docents in repeated prime revoking village art, a nubile frost to warm again.

Petoskey streams across the elder plants, each outline palpable near water. Rivulets of sunlight sleep species-free. Tumbleweeds visible from the roadway, Trace permitted vowel sounds define stones by flexing their position amid lapping. Dowagers desire a probable return on “I.” A new clairvoyance obviates blue spills.

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FOUR HAY(NA)KU all there is, is one thought # glasses are here someplace but where # convivial décollage yields one-minus occupation

# contrition, an act difficult to follow

© Sheila E. Murphy, 2017

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Featured Artist – Ben Bell

All your eyes open to the oceans

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Magic Puppet

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Diamond Heart

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Freed from the tyranny of narrative time

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Ben Bell is a young artist living in Norwich. This is what he says about his work and life. I am an abstract painter, interested in colour, form, contrast, and the visual pleasure gained from such primal and instinctive expression. I am inspired by artists such as Jean Michel Basquiat, Fiona Rae, Jane Lewis and Jonathan Meese. A growing interest has emerged of late in the use of text and mixed-media alongside my paintings. Using text, I am able to present a critical, poetic or humorous edge to my work that extends its aesthetic beyond pure abstraction. Outside of my artistic practice, I have interests in Eastern Philosophy, with its focus on being present in the moment. This translates into my practice via the immediacy of the brushstroke, the instinctual grabbing of different paints to create a visual language. I also have an interest in the poetry and playfulness of language that accompanies my work. © Ben Bell 2017

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IAN SEED

from The Dice Cup by MAX JACOB translated from the French

TO THE MEMORY OF DOSTOIEVSKI When the tram had gone over the Saint-Cloud bridge, someone, pointing out a shop whose windows were decorated with paintings on the glass, said, ‘It’s there that certain things go on!’ I found out what went on there. There was an ancient actor, a little old ancient actor all shrivelled up and threadbare, who, because of reading paperback novels, had ended up confusing them with reality. He had seen that a person could procure children of a very young age to sell on to old men. He believed this and did it. When I got to his place, a small blonde was on the seat as if she were at school. She was trustfully admiring a dreadful cheap doll. There was a certain old woman, fat Melanie – one would never have believed that an ancient actor could have a grandmother younger than himself – a certain old woman who, in spite of the child’s tears, insisted on undressing the doll. So far it was nothing more than a doll being undressed, that is to say the chief attraction of the show. The ancient actor procured children for himself or bought them directly for others, though he made use of them himself, too. All this is horrible, and what is worse is that I found fat Melanie at one of my closest friend’s. She was sorting out the accounts for him. They didn’t want to let me in because sir was working, but I had seen fat Melanie.

ANOTHER PAPERBACK NOVEL Robert gets lost in the park. He meets the lords of the manor. He would accept their friendly invitation, but he is expected elsewhere. Elsewhere, in reality, they are not waiting for him. He is surprised to find his father among the inhabitants of Chartres. Robert’s name was in fact Hippolyte. He would have been dressed in the latest fashion, if there was a latest fashion, but there isn’t a latest fashion, so he was dressed like everyone else, that is to say badly. Robert was capable of doing eight hundred kilometres by car to go and say to the friend of one of his friends: ‘Mr Soand-So sends his greetings to you,’ for Robert was good, but he didn’t have any friends. Robert sat down at the table and ate as if he hadn’t eaten for a long time, that is to say, he ate little, for he always ate a lot. Have I said that he ate well? Well, he ate averagely most of the time, but it was all the same to him. Robert did nothing in order not to waste time working. He wasted time perhaps in other ways. If he had some stains on him, he wouldn’t have known how to remove them, and he wouldn’t have lifted a finger to do so. Robert did nothing, which is better than doing evil, and this did not stop him from doing evil. But let’s leave Robert in Chartres.

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LABOR IMPROBUS* The gulf’s beach – I cannot see the end of it. The sea’s sands – I cannot see any trace of my footprints there. And this house at the foot of the cliff (ah, the most beautiful of the century) alas! I cannot see either its torchlights of granite, nor the ledges of fitted stone. I see nothing but one floor more each time I turn my head. * From the Latin: diligent study or work.

DAWN OR DUSK The light coming from the turning in the passageway is so white. The light comes from the other side. The staircase comes down from opposite the light but one cannot see it. No! One will not see it! One will only see me from behind on the edge of a step, from behind on the edge of a landing. One will not see the walls that are still here in the night. One will only see the hollows that are still here in the night, the men who are still here in the hollows. The first is cloaked in shadow; he is cloaked in night. The second I haven’t seen; I only sense he’s there. The third has descended; he has come right up to me. No-one else has moved. The one who descended is wearing checked trousers; he has his hair over his eyebrows and his hair is black. He has put his hand on his cheek because his cheeks are overripe. He has the air of a man of nothing and he has climbed back into his night, back into his hollow. The light coming from the turning in the passageway is so white, opposite me, opposite me. And I realise that these men were those of my books to come.

TRUE POEM My older brothers and me split up near the moats. ‘Come on, take the knife!’ We were under the pine trees. Everything was grass and flowers. ‘Ah, watch out for the water!’ Sometimes we approached a plant with our hands. ‘It’s a poisonous rose!’ But when we had to look for a pot to hold the harvest in, that was quite something. The naval officer slept in his bed, back to the door. Our cousin was doing the housework, the sheets were on the chairs. My sisters were singing under the roofs, and as for me, I remained a small child, my flowers in my hands, on the steps of the staircase fading away.

*

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A Note Max Jacob was born in Quimper in Brittany in 1876. After a religious vision in 1909, he eventually converted from being an ‘atheist Jew’ (Jacob’s own description) to Catholicism in 1916. This did not prevent him from being arrested and transported to Drancy, a transit camp for Jewish deportees, in February 1944, where he died three weeks later. Max Jacob’s father was a tailor and the owner of an antique shop. Max had five brothers and sisters. His large family, including uncles, aunts and cousins, often make an appearance in his poems. In 1894 Jacob left Quimper to study law in Paris, but abandoned his studies two years later to become an art critic. In 1899 he decided to become a painter, supporting himself through a series of menial clerical jobs. When he met Picasso in 1901, the two became friends immediately. Picasso expressed his admiration for some poems Jacob showed him. From this time on, Jacob regarded poetry as his true vocation. He became a central figure in the Cubist movement of poets and painters. From 1910 he was mentor to Pierre Reverdy, ten years his junior and newly-arrived in Paris. However, the two were also fierce rivals and had a complex relationship, mirrored in an impressionistic way in Reverdy’s ‘novel’, Le Voleur de Talan (see my translation, The Thief of Talant, Wakefield, 2016). When Reverdy published Poèmes en prose in 1915, Jacob realised with a degree of envy and despair that he had published very few of the hundreds of his own prose poems. Finally, Le Cornet à dés (The Dice Cup) was published in 1917. It remains to this day an innovative and important work: a mixture of poignant confession, dreamlike narrative, Cubist reality, absurdist comedy, literary parody, and the sheer desire to bewilder, disturb, delight and entertain. Astonishingly, much of Le Cornet à dés remains untranslated, although several of its prose poems have become familiar in the English language, for example ‘The Beggar Woman of Naples’, thanks in the main to very fine versions by William Kulik and John Ashbery.

© Ian Seed, 2017

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Small is Beautiful Bridget Heriz

What is small?

‘Fork-eyed’ Mask, c1400-1600, Alabama, USA, marine shell h 14.3 cm by 12 cm by 3.5 cm, Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts

An ant is very, very small: a perfect little miracle of busy life, easily squashed between the fingers. But the ant lives in a colony, a cohesion of the many that forms a large entity. A human is larger, constituting the numerous parts and microscopic particles of his or her body. A sole human being upon the Earth is minuscule, so very squashable! But human beings live in huge colonies spread across the surface of the whole planet. Within the cosmos, the earth is, however, very small.

I can never get hold of words, I feel I am trying to catch eels which slip from my grasp and slither away downstream. If I look in the dictionary to get a proper hold on the word small it offers me a surprising number of negatives: less than normal, immature, not great, lacking in strength, limited, minor in power, trivial, mean or petty, reduced to a humiliating position. It's not at all what I have in mind.

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In The Art of Small Things, John Mack examines small artefacts from many interesting angles. For me his discussion of macrocosm and microcosm is the most pertinent. "If small is beautiful, the corollary, as Burke1 observed, holds, but in a different way. The gigantic may be sublime, but it is - very often - repulsive: at once 'awe-full' and awful. In terms of objects, the colossal may be at once heroic and threatening, inspiring or gross, awesome or a force of nature. Gulliver in that guise has trouble in concealing his bodily functions from the inhabitants of Lilliput. In a sense, all is revealed; try as he might to find privacy, Gulliver is visible, warts, bristles and all. Yet because nothing is hidden, the colossal is also the dimension of untrammelled self-regarding greatness. There is no need to imagine that anything is concealed by the vicissitudes of scale and visibility, because through its imposing size the massive is rendered unchallengeable. It exceeds human measures and thus threatens to dominate the human imagination - and the human spirit. By definition its habitat is found in public spaces, the open air, the infinitudes of the stars and the universe. Our approaches to the gigantic are those of fear, awe, prostration, submission.

As macrocosm, such conceptions of the world threaten to escape human dimensions and intelligibility; as microcosm, they are contained, but may yet retain a still impenetrable centre. The diminutive has things to hide. Indeed, it challenges the very sense that we live in a world all of which we can potentially see." In other words, as representation of a world view,

the small object communicates altogether differently to the large. Mack continues, As objects, small things also constitute a realm of vulnerability. Even if made from hard materials, the miniature has all the potential of fragility when juxtaposed with something infinitely larger, which may be ourselves. ....

Putting ourselves imaginatively in the place of small things, we are at the mercy of forces much more powerful and imposing than ourselves"

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What is Beautiful?

Venos and Adonis, 1787-8, Antonio Canova small terracotta, V&A Museum

It is relevant, I think, to consider the word 'miniature', as it comes up so much when talking about small art. It is defined as 'something small of its kind', the underlying suggestion being a digression from normal scale. John Mack quotes Claude LeviStrauss as commenting "all miniatures seem to have an intrinsic aesthetic quality," and suggests that "small is, indeed, very often, and by common consent, beautiful".

Thinking about Mack's suggestion, I can't help wondering on what grounds is an object considered 'beautiful', what does beautiful mean? Robert Dixon in The Baumgarten Corruption: From Sense to Nonsense in Art and Philosophy is interesting to read on this subject. He writes that the German philosopher, Alexander Baumgarten, in a discourse published in 1750 corrupted the meaning of 'aesthetic' when he defined it as a reference to 'beauty', implying by that his 'taste' for classical art offering a 'rational' clarity of contour. Taste is a preference, and any evaluation of art derived from taste is, in Dixon's view, a philosophical error. Or, as we say now, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Yet, strangely, we have retained Baumgarten's presumption that art's significance is to be conceptually or philosophically defined. In response to this, Dixon returns to

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'aesthetic' in its original Greek meaning: "that which is perceivable, as opposed to conceivable; of the senses, as opposed to reason." As Dixon points out, aesthetic is the opposite of anaesthetic. In other words, it infers being alive to the world through perception, through the senses, as opposed to being insensible to the world.

Aestheticism is defined in my dictionary as 'the doctrine that the principles of beauty are of greater importance than moral and other principles or devotion to or emphasis on beauty or the cultivation of the arts.' This is Baumgarten's corruption. I suggest instead that aestheticism should be defined as an evaluative appreciation of or alertness to any potency embodied within an artefact by means of the perceivable. At least, this is how I intend to apply the term in this article.

To return to the small, we feel a sense of awe when we touch the tiny but perfectly formed hand of a baby, and are overcome with gratitude for the miracle of life. We are amazed by the exquisite artisanship of the perfectly formed miniature, often crafted using rare and valuable materials. Small and precious things need protecting from harm. We might describe such responses as apprehending beauty, but I do not think that corresponds neatly to the activities of artistic expression and appreciation. I would argue that artistic expression is a process of decision-making, both as interpretation within material form and communication by means of sensory stimuli. An evaluation of the resulting artefact as beautiful or not is a matter of taste. If, however, we substitute the word beauty with that of aesthetic, in its Greek sense of being alert in and sensible to actual presence, then that allows for value embodied within an artefact by means of the perceivable, tactile making process.

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Why small?

Chirk Viaduct, watercolour, 31.5 cm by 23.1 cm 1806-7, John Sell Cotman

I would like to suggest now that the small art object is capable of achieving a different potency than the large. I must emphasise that the images are provided for reference only. They are scans of photographs and can in no way communicate the tangible spatial affect evoked when engaged face to face with the original. This is particularly true with Cotman but also, I find, with the work of Cezanne, where the effect is so much diminished in photographic reproduction that, in the context of sensory affect, it is hardly a replication.

There is a movement to display small scale art: the Flowers Gallery annual 'Small is Beautiful' exhibition is a good example. But the impression one has when scanning online is that the artists engaged have made small works specially for the exhibition, rather than having developed a practice or expression based on small scale making. In other words, many of the items appear to be merely miniaturised versions of large scale work and the overall assumption of relationship to the viewer remains the same. (There are distinguished exceptions, Nicola Hicks's Bison II, bronze, 7x11x3cm, included in the 2016 exhibition, is a wonderful example of a small work true to its scale in terms of handling but expressing vast scale in perception. There are always exceptions and ambiguities: art defies boundaries and I have no wish to

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erect them, but merely direct attention to some qualities which could perhaps be valued more than I think they generally are.)

I suggest the work of John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) as evidence of the power of the small. The best of his intimately scaled watercolours draw you in through patches of colour and sensitive mark making to a vastness that I receive as a sublime experience, far more impressively and believably than the grandiose romantic landscapes that attempted fearful gigantism to impress ideas of the sublime upon the viewer.

Cotman understood the tangible reality of the painted surface decades in advance of the modernist avant-garde: he did not attempt perfect mimicry, or the illusion of a transparent picture plane within the frame, as if viewing a scene through a window. He communicated his perceiving experience through the manual application of materials on the picture surface. His acute sensitivity to how the wash is laid and absorbed by the paper, the pressure and speed with which the brush is applied, the hand movement with which a mark is made was an immediate tactile response to what he observed 'out there' in the real world. Thus, the resulting works don't present miniaturisation of the 'real', but communicate what it is to be acutely alive to that moment in space. You are aware that he, like the artefact, is small in scale in relation to the scene depicted, and you, as a viewer, are equally small, because the sensory impression inherent in the patches of colour opens out as you explore their relationship to each other within the frame. You stay with the qualities of the picture surface even whilst simultaneously being transported to the dizzying expanded scale evoked. Surely, this is an act of homage towards both the power of what is viewed and that of the materials with which it is portrayed. I feel more alive for having lived within a Cotman.

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Durham Cathedral, pencil and Watercolour 43.6 cm by 33 cm, 1806, John Sell Cotman

Equally as evidence, I suggest the wonderful Zaraysk Bison, displayed in the Ice Age Art exhibition at the British Museum, in 2013. This stunningly expressive artefact was made 22,000 years ago. It is carved in mammoth ivory and is only 10.4cm high. But it is so vital in its expression that one senses the awe of the bison's powerful presence. The sensitivity with which the natural qualities of the ivory are incorporated, its natural grooves and marks, releases scale and the tender attentiveness to the bison's form, wonderfully subtle curvilinear modulations of contour, breathe life into it.

Bison Cow, from Zaraysk, Russia, mammoth ivory Zaraysk, Ice Age, Museum of Art and History

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Equally marvellous is the horse found in Les Espelugues Cave in the Pyrenees, also carved in mammoth ivory and a masterpiece of expression.

Horse from Les Espeliugues Caves, Pyrenees, mammoth ivory, 7.2cm in length, Ice Age, Musee d'Archaeologie, Saint-Germaine-en-Laye, Paris

Both these diminutive artefacts, (and many, many more from the ice age) conjure up a living presence that reaches across distant time to communicate the respect these magnificent animals inspired. If the expression of the artefacts described was less tangible, more 'perfect' in terms of surface or perceived mimicry or imitative realism, the artefacts would just be a miniature bison or horse, doll-like objects. If the scale was huge, the mass of the animal would be fearsomely evident but the living presence lost - it would be impossible to maintain the permeability of those tactile surfaces which release identification with the life within.

The surface is a membrane linking the actuality of the object perceived, the making process by which the artist records and the viewing process by which the artefact is received. It is a three-way dimensionality through the perceived tangible. The viewer has his or her own experience of seeing, feeling, touching, squeezing, stroking, pushing, of pressure applied, of apprehension of the world through the senses. This gives the viewer reciprocity in 'reading' back through the visual making process to appreciate the decision-making and expression of the maker, to match it and evaluate it against his or her own experience. Most importantly, in this exchange the significance of the artefact is subject as much to the viewer as its maker's sensibility. In the viewer's evaluation, the expression embodied in the artefact may not engage as 'believable', there may be no match or empathy. The small art object is humble, it must exist purely on the terms of its reception by the viewer. Unlike the large work, it is easily put away.

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Mary Magdalene, wood,, h.184cm 1454-55, by Donatello Opera del Duomo Museum, Florence

The tangible immediacy of the small object is hard to achieve on a large scale (with remarkable exceptions, of course, Donatello's The Prophet Habakkuk being, for me, a prime example). To meet

the challenge of working successfully on a large scale demands a degree of technical pre-conception and preparation. Even the gestural and textural tends to be at a self-conscious remove from the initial eye to hand alertness of hand-scaled making. The monumental might gain a considered gravity not achievable in the small object, but it is a very special artist who can maintain the permeability of surface which the small object is so capable of.

The Prophet Mabakkuk, marble h.196cm, 1434-36 , Donatello Opera del Duomo Museum, Florence

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Why emphasise the representational?

Artists have rescued the aesthetic from Baumgarten's classicism, enthusiastically rediscovering the articulation of sensory communication, the affects created by arrangement of colour, tone, line, shape, texture, space, volume, composition, scale etc. Through abstraction, we now appreciate this aesthetic 'language' for its own sake, without external reference.

Nevertheless, Baumgarten's emphasis on rationality lingers on in the theoretical interpretation and justification of the visual arts. Art objects of any significance are not considered to speak adequately for themselves: to be assigned 'status' they must be accompanied by manifestos, statements, critical analysis and explanation. Academic critique (and acclaim) has encouraged a growing preference for the conceptual over the aesthetic. We have university degrees instead of art school diplomas. Rather than acquiring hand/eye skills, such as were developed in observational drawing, students learn correct practice conforming to our present hierarchy of the arts, which means, for one thing, proceeding through conceptual or verbal proposition. Ironically, to some extent it harks back to the old C19th Academie des Beaux-Arts, where a rigid regime of academic history painting was prioritised within the hierarchy of the visual arts. One significant difference being that if verisimilitude is required, photography or film is now expedient.

Nowadays we drown in verisimilitude - television, internet, phones, advertising hoardings - the replication of life perhaps impinges upon our consciousness to a greater proportion than any actual awareness of the manifest moment in time and space within which we breathe. I have been watching the news on television. It has shown me consecutive scenes in the USA, Africa, China and England, all supporting the narrative of the news items. They are flashing by too fast to evaluate them as constructed images. I am everywhere but nowhere, I am outside time and place, outside touch. I can see what the cameraman has exposed his lens to, but I am not in that space, that time, cannot observe or choose where and how to look for myself. So there we are, a simulation delivered to us. Then a gentleman is being interviewed about transhumanism: "We experience dissatisfaction that we live in these fleshy bodies that die. .... We are already understood as machines, and we have to become

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more sophisticated machines. We will learn to upload our minds to machines, become disembodied beings." Better to be anaesthetised, to be machine-like, rather than be sensible to this world that we

will one day have to leave? If we are only aware of the world we live in as this manufactured simulation presented to us technologically, then what is lost by losing the sensible body?

But it is the comedic narcissism of transhumanism that astonishes me, as if all that is significant in this world is held within our minds. Descartes' proposition "I think, therefore I am" is perhaps to blame. From what I understand about 'being', it is that I exist whilst I breath. The air I breathe is substance, one that encompasses everything that surrounds me. I could go on a rant, but won't. The point is merely that we are drowning, I think, in airless verisimilitude, a replication of life that suffocates our ability to apprehend and negotiate actuality.

So what can representation signify if not this? We are habitually minimally aware of our environment as we generally only see what we look for. Even with deliberate effort to settle down and contemplate a scene, Cezanne questioned whether we are ever capable of perceiving it as it 'really' is. His paintings give us a record of exploration, the moving eye, rather than the finality of "this is how it is". The Cubists jettisoned the very idea of pictorial realism - only the material artefact, the picture surface, the paint, etc. is real, everything else is illusion: more honest to play with the reconfiguration of signifiers in the mind - glass, bottle of wine, table, guitar - and reconstruct such signs on the flat surface of the picture plane as a reflection of a fragmented man-made world. In the end it is the compositional will of the artist that is the object of depiction. The cubist restructures rather than represents. The constructivists extended this as an ideology, they would restructure society itself.

But as with Cezanne, where representation in art is really a process of recording the experience of observing, the artist is in a state of receptivity, or alertness towards the observed. I used to say when I was delivering life-drawing classes that every mark is a thought. I know we tend to understand the idea of thought as purely verbal and this is not at all what I was trying to communicate. In my dictionary, thought is indeed

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defined as 'reasoning or conceptual power'. So I don't know what word to use to communicate the nature of 'thought' engaged whilst preoccupied in the multi-layered challenge of drawing a figure, when the verbal mind is actually dormant. You are aware that your mind is strenuously active because afterwards you are mentally exhausted.

All the time you are looking and trying to make marks that refer to what you see, you are making multiple decisions. In a single drawing you can't record everything you are sensible to: you prioritise, you assess cohesion and emphasis, you delete, you add, all the time returning to the figure, looking harder, looking differently, searching more, understanding more, responding more, whilst simultaneously evaluating progress. Your approach to the task reflects your disposition, an on-going learning and assessment process. Everything you feel, all that you have learnt about anatomy, about the technique of recording three-dimensionality on to the flat picture plain, about different approaches to artistic expression and what they signify, all these things play in the background of your decision-making journey from first to last mark. Although you are in a non-verbal state, your mind is alert on many levels, and all these levels come together in the work. All this is accessible to a viewer prepared to engage with and evaluate the making of the drawing. I regret that we do not rate sensibility or the aesthetic as highly as literacy and numeracy as a form of 'intelligence' in our interpretation of and realignment to the actuality of the world we live in.

The painters Freud and Bacon earned respect for taking the figurative forward into contemporary art practice, but I receive the richly tangible physicality of their expression as a sort of egotistical immaturity, an impetuous violence towards the 'other', the represented, that accentuates the dominant self. Life does indeed disappoint the ego and art may well be a valid pathway for expressing that frustration! We want to feel more alive when we attend to a work of art, and Freud and Bacon may make tangible the potential (or actual) violence in our hearts and in so doing reflect or alert us more fully to what lies within. Viewing such work, one is certainly impressed by the force of the artist, but the portrayed is humiliated,

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objectified, not revealed, and it is engagement with and revelation of the represented that I am interested in here.

It is apposite to note that a large proportion of Freud and Bacon's body of work is painted on the large scale. Indeed, surely necessarily large to function upon the viewer as intended.

Study for the etching "The Great Jewish Bride" pen and brown ink wash, 24.1x19.3cm c 1635 Rembrandt

Art and Power

High status in the Fine Arts is very often conveyed in terms of scale, i.e. art that is itself monumental in scale or in output, capable of filling the enormous exhibition spaces provided for its display. Bigger is better. If the work is in itself minimal, the imposing dimensions of its all important display environment nevertheless affirms grandeur of statement. On such a large scale, both production and promotion demand massive financial investment and I think it is reasonable to assume that, however sincere the aspiration to deliver 'art to the people', patronage is primarily about promoting the status and agenda of the investors, whether state or corporate. Although the art establishment is frequently criticised by the conservative 'right' as

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being too socialist in outlook, I suggest that when it comes to high status art the position may be more ambiguous.

As an art student myself in the 70s, I, along with all third-year students, was asked to write a text on the theme "What is Art?" In hindsight, I think it might have been more honest to ask us to consider "Who is Art for and what do they want from it?" because it may be that the trajectory of contemporary art has as much to do with the nature and influence of patronage as with necessities of art itself.

If one takes patronage as a starting point, Damien Hirst can be considered to have grasped the ideology of his time succinctly: money is everything and the mood and presentation of his art reflects that of our cutting edge, witty marketing industry. Nothing since has quite caught the perfect, ironic panache he achieved, nor its global impact as soft power. He surely deserves his place in art history books as presenting the era in which he practiced!

An emphasis on innovation has long been a primary factor in the granting of official critical acclaim within all categories of art. For some time now, significance in the visual arts has been largely assigned on the basis of a body of work that is radical or challenging in intent, unsettling any assumptions or complacencies the viewer might be supposed to bring to the viewing space. Assimilation of the 'new' is to be 'progressive' in outlook, though inventing this 'new' is no longer really symptomatic of rebellion against a stifling or out of date world view: it is itself the new conformity, reflecting a competitive commercial scenario with its inbuilt redundancy.

Promoting such production of the 'new' on the international arena is to impress upon the world the cutting edge competitiveness of national or corporate enterprise. Throughout time art on a grand

scale has been used to convey messages of power. The Italian Renaissance could be said to have been fuelled by rival states and princedoms projecting potency through their patronage of the arts. This is soft power. Soft power is not restricted to the monumental, traditionally the exchange of small but precious gifts has played a major role. Exquisitely crafted in rare or valuable materials, or displaying some

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amazing technological inventiveness, these prestigious artefacts were often portable. But generally speaking, size matters, the bigger the better.

I am not utopian in my thinking. I consider all cultural activity as participating in a desirably all - encompassing dialogue about how we are to 'be' in the world. My point is only that power projected in or through art is not synonymous with the power of art. A work of art may well embody both, but the two qualities do not necessarily apply together.

'Small is Beautiful'

The phrase "Small is Beautiful" is best known and frequently quoted in reference to the British economist, E.F. Schumacher's book Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, published in 1973. Schumacher's philosophy "faults conventional economic thinking for failing to consider the most appropriate scale for an activity, blasts notions that "growth is good", and that "bigger is better", and questions the appropriateness of using mass production in developing countries, promoting instead 'production by the masses'. He emphasizes the need for the "philosophy of materialism" to take second place to ideals such as justice, harmony, beauty and health." (Wikipedia)

Madeleine Bunting wrote in a 2007 Guardian article on Schumacher, "What is most striking about the book now is its bold idealism. No one writes like that now; reading Schumacher's bracing prescriptions for our future, it is chilling to realise how so many thinkers, politicians, academics have all signed up to a deadening pragmatic consensus and our thinking has been boxed into a dead end of technocratic managerialism."

How things have changed since then! Schumacher's ideas are back in debate as others consider how the march of globalised capitalism has left so many behind: 'small is beautiful' is an idea very much alive again in certain quarters, though perhaps not those where most power lies.

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We associate the culture of humanism with the incipient capitalism of the Italian Renaissance. In a recent article for the Guardian, Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian and author of the enthusiastically received book, Sapiens, was questioned by Andrew Anthony: "You argue that humanism is a product of capitalism. Is it inseparable from capitalism?" He responded "There are close connections between them but I don’t think they are inseparable. They can certainly go along different ways in the 21st century. One of the big dangers we face is exactly the separation of capitalism from humanism, especially from liberal humanism. In the last decades the main reason why governments all over the world liberalised their politics and economics is not because they were convinced of the ethical arguments of humanism, but rather because they thought it will be good for the capitalist economy. Now the fear is that in the 21st century capitalism and humanism will be separated, and you could have very sophisticated and advanced economies without any need to liberalise your political system or to give freedom to invest in the education and welfare of the masses."

A sense of dislocation often hinted at these days is perhaps a premonition as Harari posits: that the humanism which has underwritten cultural endeavour as a continuity over so many centuries is largely undermined, if not yet redundant, and with it the ethical aspiration and validation of 'high art' as we have understood it. I think this process possibly began decades ago. At secondary school in the mid-60s, our new art teacher, freshly graduated with her degree in Fine Art, casually informed us in our first lesson with her that "Art is Dead". Might this have been advance warning?

Conclusion

I wish to propose that small scale work is capable of valuable qualities that, though possible, are less powerfully achieved on a large scale. The viewer's attention to and interpretation of the small object

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is not cowed by dimension or authority, but instead contributes his or her own sense of meaning. Such art might not be high status or even valuable in monetary terms, it won't reflect greatness upon the nation or offer prestige to the powerful, but it can perhaps direct attention towards the potency of reciprocity as opposed to that of authority. And when it also shares a respectful, searching attention, homage even, to the 'other' out there in the world, it may inspire an alert cultural sensibility to the wonder of actuality within our environment.

Mack provides a quote from William Blake that is very often in my mind when considering the power of the small:

To see the World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your Hand And Eternity in an Hour.

Auguries of Innocence, c 1803

References Burke, Edmund; 'A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful' 1826 Mack, John; The Art of Small Things; British Museum Press, 2007, ISBN-13: 978-0674-02693-3 Dixon, Robert; The Baumgarten Corruption: From Sense to Nonsense in Art and Philosophy; Pluto Press, 1995, ISBN 0 7453 0993 3 Schumacher, E. F.; Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered : 25 Years Later...With Commentaries (1999). Hartley & Marks Publishers, 1999, ISBN 0-88179-169-5 Harari, Yuval Noah; Sapiens; Harvill Secker, 2014, ISBN 9781846558238 "Yval Noah Harari: 'Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so'." Andrew Anthony, Observer, 19th March, 2017.

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https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/mar/19/yuval-harari-sapiens-readersquestions-lucy-prebble-arianna-huffington-future-of-humanity Small is beautiful – an economic idea that has sadly been forgotten Madeline Bunting, The Guardian, 10.11.2011 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/10/small-is-beautifuleconomic-idea Flowers Gallery, Annual Small is Beautiful exhibition https://www.flowersgallery.com/exhibitions/view/small-is-beautiful-2016

(c) Bridget Heriz 2017

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KATHRYN LEVY

THE BANKER

She hands him five dollars as he blows up the moon. She tries to pick up the pieces as he sends her a bill: For fifteen more dollars I can make it like new. She needs to believe him, so she signs all the checks and waits in the garden. She waits and waits in the blinded garden. He is laughing at a bar, telling that joke about moons. So she digs deeper in her pocket: Okay, I’ll nibble some bread tonight. — But even that is gone.

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PASSING

A woman who is longing to get off the boat: I’ve seen too many islands passing and passing. — No, says the Captain, it is we who are passing. A woman who is plotting to kidnap the Captain, take over the ship and chart her own course. Where is that? says the Captain, who resides in her pocket, chuckling a little. A woman who’s a child, she plays games with the sailors — hugging them sometimes, then making sailors for dinner: I love how their muscles turn golden and salty. A woman who fears she is losing her focus, so she studies the guidebooks: Ithaca, Samos, is that where we’re headed? —The Captain has answers he refuses to offer: We’re headed where we’re headed, just shut up your eyes, hand over your tickets. A woman who obeys each of the orders, like the other women who stand at the railings. It hurts to stand there, but what are the choices? A woman who needs travel — there are so many buried worlds to discover. Though the rumor is she still isn’t ready. But a woman who is stamped and packed and prepared. For what? she keeps begging. For that answer in the distance. — And the waiting.

© Kathryn Levy, 2017

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JEREMY OVER

CUMBERLAND Summers in the mountains and tundra are short And so some summers the fist unfolds and some summers not In Cumberland the fist unfolds in bracken fronds and foxgloves Illumination pink

TURNING HOGS INTO THE WOODS In glandage, the season of turning hogs into the woods, I impart, I pronounce, I communicate as tidings I deliver, bestow and utter I also use in the manufacture of glass You, on the other hand, bear acorns or other nuts While he or she shoots or darts a ray of light or splendour And we all fly off in an oblique direction And you (pl.) allude And they twinkle

© Jeremy Over, 2017

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FROM THE BRIDGE Two Spanish artists in the second half of the 20th century

An approach

When we speak of Spanish painting of the 20th century Picasso, Miró or Dalí come to mind, but if we want to look towards the second half of the century, other names emerge - Antoni Tàpies, perhaps Eduardo Chillida and Antonio Saura, and in the later decades, Antonio López and Miguel Barceló.

These artists are more or less overshadowed by the triad of the first half of the century; and though they lived and worked for many decades, we tend to consider them in relation to the historic avant-gardes. On the other hand, international recognition - and national recognition, let's not forget - of some important artists has had to wait for them to leap over several barriers. The tragic circumstances of Spanish fascism and the years of the Franco dictatorship obscured and made it difficult to define clearly the work of many, and some of the great artists made their most important work in exile.

I am interested here in dealing with two artists who are not so well known outside their Hispanic context and who, from different places, also battled among the political avatars of the country: the Canarian Manuel Millares and the Catalan Antoni Clavé. These artists are on the periphery. That is to say, they are not directly related to the centralist culture prevailing during the Francoist period. However, this peripheral vision, this certain detachment away from the customs and practices of the capital city was used in their lives and their works as an indispensable nourishment to conform to their own aesthetics. Like so many others - one inside the country and the other outside – their country was still drenched in the pain of war and defeat. A political system that embraced all spheres of life, and of course, the culture, which could not at any time be admitted as an element of political substance, only as an object of enjoyment and propaganda.

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Millares was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 1926. His life and artistic mentality are marked by the two places that formed him: the Canary Islands and Madrid. His best works are all done in a short period of about fifteen years, since he died very young at 46. Marked like many of his generation's colleagues with surrealist inspirations, he began his informalist work in the fifties after settling in Madrid. This move to the capital brought the painter into the cultural and aesthetic world that ended up defining the development of his work from then on. The winds of surrealism progressively slipped away from his work, as well as elements of his practice related to Canary archeology. Only in a certain way though, because his interest in the Guanche culture of the islands, and its physical and spiritual universe, fused in the coming years with the new aesthetic components booming in different parts of the peninsula, starting with the newly created Barcelona group " Dau al Set “. The informalism of Millares always retains the physical geography of Gran Canaria through woods, soils and minerals. An arid reality, poor, almost desert, which is transformed into gestures upon the canvas. A distinctive reality but far from any folk dye (1).

With this, Millares, the artist of modernity in the European and American line of those years, shows up. His work begins to relate to Italian informalism on the one hand and American abstract expressionism on the other, without abandoning the Hispanic elements that he synthesized, such as is major influences: Miró, Goya and Castile. In this way, we find in his painting has echoes of post-war American gesturalism while at the same time penetrates the desolate and critical vision of Franco's Spain, a greyness that marks the work of many artists of his generation, such as Saura, Tàpies or Guinovart.

In in his early work "Mosaico" of 1953, soils, stones and burlap already appear in a clear and ordered composition that remind us of the Torres García’s constructivist schemes. It is his arrival in Madrid from where he takes the path into European and American modern art, first through the creation of the group El Paso in 1957. He was a founding member of the group, along with Antonio Saura, Rafael Canogar and Juana Francés and others. El Paso, together with the Barcelona group Dau al Set, were the first two important groups of artists in Spain of the period; both looked to the French avant-gardes and felt they were in many aspects heirs to Surrealism, as

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well as to the radical Dada, which was very strong in Dau al Set, while adopting the new experiments of American Abstract Expressionism.

It is from the years following the founding of the group El Paso that Millares began to paint his most outstanding pieces, placing him at the centre of Spanish art of the time. It is at this moment of his burlap sacks - torn, pierced, painted, accompanied by fabric, ropes and graphics; when the Pollock-style drip paint and the black backgrounds appear. These may be viewed as close to the tradition of XVII Century Spanish Art, though Millares was closer to Castilian austerity than to its severity, to its expressive tidiness than to its moral rigidity. He employed a dark palette close to the blacks of Velázquez and Goya. Especially Goya who Millares spoke and wrote about and his interest in the former artist of the Finca del Sordo; sharing existential anguish of the Aragonese and his desolate outlook on Spanish reality. In other pieces we can trace the breath of the still life paintings of Zurbarán and the somber paintings of Solana. Characteristic of Millares's work is the scarce chromatic of blacks, reds and whites following a marked symbology: "black/death, white/lime, red/blood, ochre/soil”. (2).

From the folder ‘Antropofauna’ Manolo Miralles. 1969-1970. Etching on Arches paper. 57,5 x 77 cm. Fundación Museo Salvador Victoria.

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Later, fabrics were imbued with calligraphy, like in "Sarcophagus for a feudal personage" and "Dream of prince". The Israel Museum of Jerusalem keeps some of these pieces.

The black covers the whole surface of the painting as an echo of a country scourged by dictatorship and other social dictatorships that reached all the spaces of Spanish life. The political criticism that hid in these pictures was not as veiled as it was thought to be. Certainly, a new country was slowly being born - the dictator died in 1975 - but Millares would not live to see this.

On the dark canvas of "Sarcophagus" different types of calligraphy are drawn with no comprehensible vocabulary, broken lines and scribbles. From one of them emerges the yoke and arrows of La Falange, the fascist party. Among these acrylics on burlap from the early 70's are pieces of maximum frugality. In 1971 he produced "Untitled.” The wood of the frame, the burlap and the small calligraphic blotting, annotated in white and accompanied by a cross, leave the spectator almost facing a penitent asceticism. In pieces like this, Millares is closer to Sánchez Cotán and to the still life paintings with vegetables of the Baroque than to his contemporaries, who in those years also opted for palettes of whites and blacks, almost in the line of tremendism.

Oils on canvas then gave way to works of mixed techniques - etchings, aquatints and serigraphs. The presence of calligraphy continued in Chinese ink on paper in his last months and are undoubtedly in the last two series of paintings on which he worked: "Anthropofaunas" and "Neanderthalios.” These works place Millares in an important place in 20th century Spanish art. Here the white radiates from the canvas and battles with and between black and red, sacks and calligraphy. Is the white he uses a door to a more optimistic outlook? The curator and daughter of the artist, Eva Millares, tells us a story which counters the usual critical reading:

"Many theories assert that it is a victory of light and optimism. I have a completely different reading: white is mourning, the atomic bomb, calcination, white is even

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more tremendous than the black of black Spain. A stage that also coincides with his illness. " (3)

‘Neanderthalio’ Manolo Millares. 1970. Oil and cloth. 162.6 x 162.6. Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection. Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection. Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts.

Here we read of the opposition to a black Spain, as a construction against the destruction. Or, does his daughter’s response summarize the beauty that underlies his work, the careful aesthetic attention and coherence of a vision and of a climate that of a country, an epoch - but also of the temper maintained by Millares in those later years?

For him and his companions in El Paso, like Antonio Saura, painting was about being and participation in life, never about an object, still less a decorative object. Hence, the redundancy in the physical and the material. His was the rough and the immediate. Certainly we can find in these works a reflection on a desolate world

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within the almost monochromatic abruptness. However, these works undoubtedly end up taking the contemporary spectator into a reflection on the nature of beauty. ……………………

In Catalonia, poster art in the first decades of the Twentieth Century were produced in a period of splendor and was a medium used with great creativity, in different fields. Many posterists were at the same time artists and the medium led them to practice new forms of expression linked to the avant-gardes. During the Art Nouveau movement a new group emerged and the artists participated in the medium which offered them freshness, daring, immediacy and novelty.

Antoni Clavé was born in Barcelona in 1913 and he spent his childhood, youth and upbringing in the city. It is in the city of marvels (4) and anarchist struggles, strikes and barricades, where artists experimented with the proposals of the avant-garde. The “Rose of Fire“, as the city was known, because of its constant social uprisings, lived a real political and cultural turmoil in the first decades of the twentieth century. During the 20’s and 30’s Clavé decorates facades for the cinemas, making film posters, and created illustrations and advertising designs until the outbreak of the Civil War. He was mobilized and sent to the front with the Spanish Republican Army. Later, in 1938 he created the sets for the Army Theater, but like so many Spanish republicans marched into exile until the strife ended.

He left Spain as an illustrator and posterist and it was in Paris where his life as a painter really began. Once installed, after an encounter with Picasso, he fell under his influence. Many post-war and later pieces are examples of this, such as "L'enfant au coq" in the Goodmann collection.

It has sometimes been said that the avant-garde tendencies of his early years were cornered by his encounter with and knowledge of Picasso, then focused on figuration. To a certain extent, for a time, this was so. Clavé whisked up influences and ways of using these throughout his career - not only from Picasso but also

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Vuillard and Bonnard, and from El Greco in the 60's,which helped him form a very personal style. The French love to describe and understand him as a painter of intense Hispanic ways, for his themes and vigorous colours.

However, before those forms of the "Hispanic" were evident on his canvases, Clavé had experimented with the first European avant-garde artists and later with abstract American expressionism, like so many artists of his generation. We find in him a fascination for the materiality of the work - the fire, cardboard, cloths and the crumpled papers - and the huge stains and the embossed marks. A taste for the artisan concept of art was always present too.

He worked on different series of paintings, such as the kings, queens and warriors that occupied him for many years. There were homages to El Greco, Zurbarán and García Lorca. These names give us clues to understand not only influences upon him and his tastes but also the places from which he worked through his experiments.

Clavé said himself he was an artist who walked within the French inheritances. His sculptures and his small cabinets of objects, like the assemblages that form a collage of pieces of newspaper, wood and painting, are works less known than his paintings and graphic works. After trips to New York and Japan, he became very impressed by the Japanese pictorial uses, their collages integrated into a pictorial paste in compositions with tapestry and fabrics. Later, his "papiers collés", like the Millares’ burlaps, one of the elements of his work that defined him.

With collages Clavé began to walk towards abstract forms, after a long journey. They are pieces that show security and forcefulness, with few colours, in a harmony that we can almost define as classic, like the carborundum engravings of the Boisserée Gallery, with embossed letters and inlaid gloves.

We also find echoes of the "objet trouvé", of graffiti seen on New York walls and a taste for oriental simplicity. Although his fame was consolidated towards the 70's with pieces in museums and private collections - the work of his last years is less well-known.

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And it is possibly the most brilliant of all: a period of abstract pieces, some of them large formats, predominantly blue, black and white. The robust gravity of their colours his intention to rid the canvas of everything that hinders a pure abstraction is indicated in these works, almost in the manner of a code.

‘King with fish’ Antoni Clavé. 1958. Ink and gouache on paper laid on canvas. 1958. 31 x 49 cm. The Opera Gallery.

In 1996, the Joan Gaspar Gallery of Barcelona showed an exhibition with the new paintings and collages of the artist, close to 80 years old. The gallerist Joan Gaspar was an old friend of Clavé and displayed a dazzling display of large triptych and diptychs markedly abstract and the material was bordering on the monochrome with blues and blacks. Between oils and mixed media, are his characteristic papier froissé, crumpled paper, and his majestic and beautiful use of the blue.

This emblematic color added Clavé definitively in the list of Catalan artists who in the 20th century have used and marked much of his work with this characteristic blue: Joan Mirò, Ráfols-Casamada or Albert Guinovart (6).

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Clavé’s writer and friend, Lluís Permanyer, knew his work well and the painter's intimate affinity with Barcelona, and clearly perceived in the exhibition at the Joan Prats Gallery the sense of global and emotional universe of the pieces shown there, in his city, after eight years of silence:

"And when it comes to materializing these world, he realizes that the urge inexorably but naturally leads him to go beyond the limits of a canvas which he finds small and must resort to taking on a new frame next to it and, then, still another canvas. In saying this I am trying to evoke the Clavé attracted to large formats, but also the painter who today must use more and more space precisely because in this exhibition he offers us not paintings and entire universe.” (7)

‘In blue and black’. Antoni Clavé. 2002. Oil and collage on cardboard. 200x200cm. http://www.antoniclave.org/en/art/en-bleu-et-noir

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With democracy restored in Spain after the death of Franco, Clavé travelled a lot to Catalonia, returned to his city, where he did not stop exhibiting and where he also made great murals for the Socialist City Council. But he did not leave his French residence and died there in 2005 (5), in the land that had been his exile for many years.

Notes (1) Marzo, J.L; Mayayo, P.: Arte en España 1939-2015. Ideas, Prácticas, Políticas. Madrid: 2015. p.189. (2) Bonet, J.M; “Para un retrato de Manolo Millares” in Millares. Exhbition catalogue. Museo de Arte Reina Sofía. Madrid: 1992, p. 26. (3) Piquer, I: “La obra dramática y rabiosa de Millares llega a Nueva York” http://elpais.com/diario/2003/09/10/cultura/1063144803_850215.html (4) Title of a successful novel by the writer Eduardo Mendoza that tells a story centered on the Barcelona of the early twentieth century. (5) Antoni Clavé. Un mundo de arte, SEACEX, 2009 (See also: https://albertmercade.wordpress.com/catalog-articles-·-articles-per-a-catalegs/antoni-claveun-cartelista-comprometido). (6) About the importance of these shades in contemporary Catalan painting, see Barral, X; Retallar el blau. Assaig sobre l’art català del segle XX. Barcelona: 2001. (7) Text for the exhibition catalogue: "Antoni Clavé. Pintures, triptychs, collages”, p. 43. Joan Prats Gallery. Barcelona 1996.

© HELENA GOLANÓ Norwich. May 2017.

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GRAFFITI ART: LOGO, NO LOGO? “Graffiti is not art, it is a crime” Tony Blair and 123 MPs back a Keep Britain Tidy Campaign to rid the country of graffiti, 2003.

Looking on. Boarded up graffiti, Norwich 2014

Built through the spray can Graffiti per se has a very long history, perhaps going back to when the first wall was built. So for this short exploration I will restrict myself to the use of modern aerosol spray can paint – modern graffiti’s main tool. The spray can was invented in 1949 but became popular in the US, and then Britain, when such cans were sold to do up and customize cars at home, an activity which flourished in the 1970s. The paint cans became relatively cheap and, most importantly, can be applied to any surface at speed. Graffiti art has been viewed both as a criminal act and as a social sticking plaster to direct youth away from more serious crimes. From this mix a profitable commercial side of the art has emerged, though anonymity and socio-political subject matter is still the norm.

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Of course, the biggest influence on graffiti artists came from the USA – from New York subways to underground trains. If we follow the development of the spray can and its falling price, we can follow the trail of its influence. Also, the development of graffiti art is entwined with music – punk in the late 1970s and then hip-hop in the 1980s. In Britain, anarchic bands like Crass were using graffiti and street messages to point fans to their gigs and CDs in the mid-1980s. Another important aspect of graffiti art is a tendency for small groups to work together in crews. With a look out, the crew gives the graffiti artists confidence on the streets and beneath them. My first encounter with graffiti art was in 1987 in the sleepy Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds. I was engaged to set up and help run a graffiti workshop, complete with a prize ceremony at The Rendezvous Youth Centre. To help me there were two youth workers and a graffiti artist from Cambridge. He arrived on time with two of his crew. They were dressed in black with black scarves round their faces, hoods pulled up and over their heads, with just the glint of an eye showing. Me, Mr Anonymous and his crew were placed in a small room with our materials – boards and spray cans (the Cambridge Crew had brought along their own special cans). On arrival, they huddled together furtively examining a can that seemed to have a cerise coloured top. It was a much sort after colour, I was told, and was only obtainable through mail order so the others wouldn’t be getting to use it. The young people tried out different techniques and enjoyed the experience. At that time, everyone smoked – the youths and the youth workers. Fed up with the shouting and verbal exclamations from our room, a senior youth worker took umbrage and locked us in – with inflammable aerosols and lighted cigarettes! We made our escape via a small window. The prize ceremony justified the event for the club. They had done their bit. The following week, the graffiti workshop made it onto the front page of the Bury Free Press and further such events quickly fell off the agenda.

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Detail of 1987 graffiti workshop

Back in 1987 in East Anglia images seemed as important as tags (the logo signatures of the graffiti artists). Slogans and statements were rare in the countryside, and invariably, where they appeared, painted on railway bridges with a single brush in a single colour - black. I expect our local councils were hoping such workshops would direct young people into painting sanctioned murals and many did go on to pursue such projects. So, alienated youths could be diverted from activities that their elders considered illegal. Events were about to impinge on even my sleepy backwater, again sending young artists back to the walls.

In Britain, campaigns and riots against the Poll Tax (1989-90) brought specific slogans to the urban landscape and in 1989 graffiti was beamed through TV screens worldwide as the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. The words on the wall called for its demolition and, almost overnight, the people tore it down. Graffiti had won. Over the last 30 years graffiti art has developed almost globally – from the Americas (particularly Brazil) via Europe to Australia, Asia and the Middle East. In each nation it is viewed both as a crime and as an art. Graffiti can enhance street gangs and at the same time brighten and enliven a decaying urban environment. It is both counterculture and a rich source for high culture and even big business.

As can be seen from a New York Experience, graffiti art and artists can be accommodated within the mainstream, where paying tours are now viewed as part of artists’ revenue stream.

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Many elements make up graffiti art: aesthetic daring, intense colours, dislocated imagery, craft skill, provocative text, unusual venues, pattern and clever design. Humour has been an essential. One artist pastes paper electric plugs and leads to ATMs machines, public phones, air conditioning vents, etc., where it appears an area of the city is entirely unplugged.

Stencil graffiti, Norwich 2013

Identity and Branding

There is a real split between artists who use graffiti to break out of the white cube gallery and those who view graffiti art as an underground activity, a counter-culture with a radical intent. Whichever side of the track they’re on, one thing graffiti artists do seem to share is identity – realised in their ‘tag’ and in their style Using aerosol paint cans is “like playing music,” a local artist told me recently: “and it can create forms – a bit like sculpting - from hard line to a thin mist of paint in one movement of the arm.”

An innovation was the use of stencils, not just for words but images too. These could be cut from old cardboard boxes, folded up and carried to a location, increasing the

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speed a work could be completed. This enabled graffiti artists to plan out an evening of graffiti at home. Today, designs are often worked out digitally and taken with them on phones to the site.

In Britain, political organisations and groups would fly-post propaganda posters across towns and cities, particularly around the Great Miners Strike 1984-5. However, by the mid-1990s councils were able to impose huge fines on organisations and individuals who could be held responsible for fly-posting and, as a result, fly-posting is not so popular. However, graffiti posters and pasted cut outs are increasingly used, alongside spray paint and stencil work. These are an excellent device to replicate images and tags over an area. Of course, anonymity makes this possible where councils flex their muscles.

In most cities and large towns, there are areas which are lawfully used by graffiti artists. Some cities, like Barcelona, have used graffiti to promote its own cultural importance. Yet, nearly everywhere graffiti is undertaken, there is a divide between the criminal and the legal.

Memorial tag graffiti, Norwich

“The tags are the cracks in a non-perfect world which allow the space for the cities to breath.” This slogan – and similar slogans – encapsulate how many young graffiti artists view graffiti: it gives them a sense of identity, of their place within a “non-perfect” world.

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The idea that the tag – their tag - is most important and is now the dominant street motif, rather than slogans and representational imagery, has its origins in the world after the Berlin Wall came down.

Neoliberalism has spread globally at an increasingly rapid pace and no place on earth can escape its hold. Though anti-capitalist protests spread out of Seattle from 1999, not even a great recession of 2008-10 could halt its advance. Back in the early 1970s, John Berger illustrated how advertising is the propaganda of capitalism, yet neoliberalism has since turned the brand and its logo to imperial masters, where the product or service the brand is said to represent, seems to be an aside to the name.

Nike was once a small athletics trainer company. Now, it sells a way of life with its logo on everything from clothing to bags. As Naomi Klein in her ground breaking book No Logo points out, is that these global brands not only view us all as consumers but to be consumed. Any subversion is assimilated and adopted into the brand’s vision and we sing along to all those ear-worm jingles against our rational selves.

The anti-capitalist movement, of which Klein was part, threw up a counter-culture against this all pervasive neoliberal branding – Adbusters, culture-jammers and graffiti artists among them.

Unfortunately in my view, the tag has been viewed as the ultimate opposition to the brand’s logo. It is not a subject for the artist as such but the signature as decor of the street, identifying the artist, the real “me.” So, over the last twenty years graffiti works have increasingly emerged which centre on the tag, a sign, a symbol or a single word. And in order to embellish this tag, sign, symbol or word, design and pattern have become increasingly popular. Tags are no longer the “cracks.” They confirm the city’s wellbeing and have become formal aspects of their aesthetics – so that the anonymous is not so anonymous after all. Ironically, here is a wall art that councils, galleries and business can not only live with but use: an art form on the edge, which once posed consciousness raising

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slogans and brought startling and exciting images to the streets, is in danger of becoming decorative street wallpaper.

The tags dominate, Norwich 2017

However, I wish to finish on a more optimistic note. A rising surplus of art school graduates means that some young artists are still prepared to risk extending their studio work into the subways.

Subway art, Norwich 2017

Photos taken by the author © Rupert Mallin 2017

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MIKE FERGUSON

from The Monk – Matthew Lewis

DEVOTION Some came with no better means of an idea than curiosity, true devotion to a fruitless attempt. Some came to be assembled; some came because it was piety, but the ostensible motive was to show themselves, to find employment as devotees, to hear the preacher with auditors.

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AH! Abandoned in the Cavern of Love, He Ah! Eye, He Ah! he pants to his solitude. No comfort, propped upon the fragment of his passions, He Ah! Eye, He Ah! he inflames the setting sun become his companion. He looks round, feels the monotony of only to pass the day, resolves to become an Hermit in the Cavern of the Love’s tumbling ennui, feels wholly forgotten – no one is there, He Ah! Eye, He Ah! No

Mike Ferguson, 2017

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AN INTERVIEW WITH ERIC ERIC by Martin Stannard This interview was conducted by email on March 22nd, 2017. Suggestions that it be conducted in person, or by phone, or via Skype, were dismissed as “verging on the intimate, and we wouldn’t want that, would we?”

* Martin Stannard: Can I begin by telling you that your poems in Decals of Desire have received many appreciative comments. Eric Eric: Your email has been received. I am currently in the bath, so there will be some delay before I am able to reply. MS: OK. I’ll wait until later. But we did say 1 o’clock. EE: Your email has been received. I am currently in the bath, so there will be some delay before I am able to reply. [Time passes] MS: I’m wondering if you’ve finished your bath. EE: Yes, I have. MS: Have you written any poems lately? EE: Yes, I have. MS: Could you perhaps be a little more expansive – for the benefit of our readers, you know? EE: I wrote one yesterday about oven chips. MS: Would you care to share it here? EE:

Oven chips are not as good as real chips But they will do in the event of a potato famine

MS: Thank you. But surely if there was a potato famine then oven chips might also be in short supply, so —

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EE: That’s beside the point. It’s a poem. Shall we move on? MS: Okay. I’d like to ask you about your composition process. You’ve told me before that you write quickly. EE: Yes. MS: So how do you go about writing a poem? Is there a process you always adopt? EE: Yes. [A pause] MS: Um, okay. Can you tell me what it is? EE: I make them up. MS: Oh, OK. EE: I have to go now. MS: Really? We’ve only just begun. EE: I have a tatting class. MS: Oh, you’re still attending tatting classes? EE: Yes. That’s why I had a bath. There’s a class at 2. MS: But it’s only 1.30 now. EE: Yes, so I have to go. It’s a 25 minute bike ride. MS: Can we continue this later? EE: Surely we’re done, aren’t we? MS: I was hoping for a bit more, to be honest. EE: Your email has been received. I am currently tatting, so there will be some delay before I am able to reply.

It hardly seems worth it, but © Eric Eric and Martin Stannard, 2017

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DECALS D.I.Y.

ENTOPIC GRAPHOMANIA

I haven’t followed this technique to the letter. However, Entopic Graphomania is simple to follow and to do, as it is essentially dot-to-dot drawing dressed up! In the wake of Pointillism and its careful positioning of coloured dabs of paint to create a literally vibrant land or cityscape painting, the Surrealists’ Entopic Graphomania provided the antidote. It also took a flame thrower to the children’s puzzle game where the picture is revealed if the dots are joined in specific sequence – A to Z, 1 to 100. Paint by numbers is actually a later development with Craft Master producing kits from 1951. Dot-to-dot and paint by numbers are very boring pursuits and no child should ever suffer them! Dolfi Trost claims to have invented the Entopic Graphomania technique in the 1940s. Dolfi was a bit of a character and developed mathematical and scientific theories in an attempt to make art a science. Don’t worry, this is not science. So, for the adults, here is my take on Entopic Graphomania (you will never get bored repeating its name). Take a felt pen and a sheet of A3 paper. Make random dots across the paper. Now join the dots using a pen or pencil. Begin anywhere and end anywhere. Notice anything? You’ve joined the dots with straight lines!

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For a variation: randomly dot your A3 paper with a felt pen but this time join the dots with curved lines.

For a further variation: at speed dot your A3 paper as if drawing a face. Pass your dotted page to another to draw lines from dot-to-dot. Once you have several dot-to-dot pictures, perhaps colour in sections and cut along some of the lines. If you are working in a group, cut out shapes and build a structure. Tools and materials you will require: A3 sheets of paper, pens or pencils, scissors and a large waste paper bin.

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Manifesto 2 Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto

Marinetti’s manifesto was widely published in Europe in 1909. It is optimistic, conservative, nationalistic and deeply reactionary all at once. It was written on the back of concerns in Italy about the projection of literature in a modern and fast changing world. However, artists were attracted to it because of its central adoration of the new beauty, “the beauty of speed,” which sums up capitalism’s dynamism in the machine age. It opened out art to embrace a new invention, the car, with its “great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath.” “We want to hymn the man at the wheel,” wrote Marinetti. There was a central contradiction: raptures about the machine age and, at the same time, a desire to “swell the enthusiastic fervour of the primordial elements.” Futurism cloaked itself in ambiguities. Marinetti called on poetry to be a violent fighter but he couldn’t name the opposing forces ranged against poets and their poetry. However, the idea that “Time and Space died yesterday” opened up the possibility of an entirely new canvas for many young artists and poets.

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Yet, at the heart of Futurism was a wholly reactionary monster: “we will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedombringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.” The Futurist Manifesto seemed to be written at the zenith of capitalist imperialism but there were huge cracks in its edifice which took us to devastating world war just six years later. Marinetti’s Manifesto was a culturally fascist document and a strong influence on the development of the doctrine of Fascism, which the author was active in building. Of course, the sexism, nationalism and reaction against art and culture per se, wasn’t plucked out of nowhere. These ideas were current in European societies at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Marinetti turned his back on the past to create myths for the future.

The bullet point demands of Futurism

We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.

Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.

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The poet must spend himself with ardour, splendour, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervour of the primordial elements.

Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!… Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multi-coloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deepchested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

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News, information and updates Censorship and Freedom

In February the LD50 Gallery in Dalston was closed down after a demonstration of more than 300 people demanded its closure. The gallery had invited prominent altright/Neo-Nazis participants. Graffiti was daubed on the shutters describing it as a “fascist front” outlet in the heart of the East End, one of the most culturally diverse places on Earth.

After the demonstration, the gallery organisers put out a statement that this had been an ‘attack on the freedom of expression.’ Rushing to defend the gallery was Guardian art critic

Jonathan Jones

The liberal Mr. Jones has increasingly made himself unpopular among artists like Grayson Perry and has got himself into hot water over his failure to refer to historic facts when he reviewed (or failed to review) the recent Art of the Russian Revolution Exhibition at the Royal Academy. Jones failed to mention that the imperial armies of Britain, USA, Japan et al sent 200,000 troops to join the White Army attempting to crush the Red Army of the Bolsheviks in 1918. Thus Jones charged the Bolsheviks with the carnage of the war - begun by the White Army - and cast aside all revolutionary art on the premise that it leads to bloodshed. Will he now cast aside all Christian art on the same basis?

Then we come to the LD50 Gallery debacle: Jones defended the Neo-Nazi art at LD50 and the curator’s plans to invite further key Neo-Nazi speakers to the gallery on the basis of “freedom from censorship.” As an article in Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century points out, LD50 was a front to launch race hatred in London. What price ‘freedom of expression’ then?

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John Berger 1926 to 2017 – exhibition and further reading Mandell’s Gallery, Elm Hill, Norwich is staging an exhibition to celebrate the artist’s drawings and his life-long collaboration with John Christie – 8th July to 26th August. Details here. There will also be a programme of talks and discussions to accompany the exhibition. Tom Overton, John Berger’s biographer, gave an informative talk to the Norfolk Contemporary Art Society recently. Tom’s writings on Berger and other artists can be found here.

Among appreciations of John Berger is this short article outlining the context of Berger’s writings by Mike Gonzalez International Socialism Journal 154

Gustav Metzger 1927 to 2017 Adrian Searle’s Guardian obituary is here . Metzger was the pioneer of “autodestructive art” and had connections with the Luxus group of artists. He is known for his 1960s liquid slide shows for Cream and the Who. Influential in embracing politics and environmental campaigning in his work, he championed ephemera as source material for his art.

A welcome turn for the 2017 Turner Prize

A very welcome change to the Turner Prize rules this year means that it no longer has a 50 year age limit. This will give Lubaina Himid’s work more exposure. She is 62 and an African painter who is celebrated for promoting Black Women’s Art.

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Art online

Here are a few online art magazines, projects and outlets. Pop My Mind is an innovative collaborative online artists’ project. Artists, writers, musicians and dancers respond to work online. Some interesting avenues to pursue here. Based in the UK.

Unurth Website of well organised street art, Positive Propaganda projects, in Munich, Miami and London

50 Watts is a truly global art website. Tend to be more illustrative forms of Art but a huge range. The site can be navigated by country or by genre (e.g. – paper theatre, comics) Empty Kingdom is run by a group of artists who say they’re tearing up all the rules. Beautiful Decay features artists’ work. Presently features Josh Kline’s “Smoothies” that are dispensed in New York and contain hideous things you wouldn’t want to drink!

Booooooom a recommended website/blog of art and photography. Has a photo of Donald Trump sporting a very long tie with a guy standing on it! Artists can submit their work here too.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS MAIRÉAD BYRNE’s most recent book is Famosa na sua cabeça (Famous in Your Head), selected and translated by Brazilian poet Dirceu Villa (São Paulo: Dobra Editorial 2015). She is also the author of two plays, five collaborative books with visual artists, and five poetry collections, published in Ireland, the United States, and on the Internet. She's Professor of Poetry+Poetics at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. ERIC ERIC is probably tatting at the moment. MIKE FERGUSON’s most recent poetry collection is Precarious Real [Maquette Press, 2016]. He taught experimental writing to generally willing students for 30 years and co-authored Writing Workshops (Cambridge University Press. 2015). KATHRYN LEVY is the author of the poetry collections, Losing the Moon and Reports, a finalist for the 2014 Midwest Book Award, as well as The Nutcracker Teacher Resource Guide, a guide to poetry instruction. She was founding director of The Poetry Exchange and New York City Ballet Poetry Project, two poets-in-theschools organizations. She lives in Sag Harbor, NY. SHEILA E. MURPHY has been publishing actively for more than 30 years. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Murphy) In addition to poetry, she is an artist and serves as CEO of Work Transformed, LLC. (www.worktransformed.com.) Her home is in Phoenix, Arizona. JEREMY OVER is a creative writing PhD student at the University of Birmingham looking (happily) at the work of Kenneth Koch and Ron Padgett. His first two books of poetry were A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese (Carcanet 2001) and Deceiving Wild Creatures (Carcanet 2009). IAN SEED’s recent publications include Italian Lessons (LikeThisPress, 2017), Identity Papers (Shearsman, 2016) and The Thief of Talant (Wakefield, 2016), the first translation into English of Pierre Reverdy’s Le Voleur de Talan. He is currently translating Le Cornet à dés with a view to eventual publication of the complete book.

EMMA STOKES is studying in London.

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© 2017 copyright remains with the artists, poets and other contributors

Decals of Desire is a non-profit making online magazine

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