Reading Lists/// 'Men Gather, in Speech...' artists Emma Charles, Rose English & Abri de Swardt

To coincide with Men Gather, in Speech… at Cooper Gallery, January - February 2015, we asked exhibiting artists Emma Charles, Rose English and Abri de Swardt to share with us ‘suggested reading’ of essays or publications that expand upon ideas related to their practice.

Publication about Rose English in Cooper Gallery Information Area. Photo: Kathryn Rattray.

Below are the artists' suggested reading lists...

Emma Charles

'Slave to the Algorithm', Mute Volume 3 #4:, Spring 2013, Editor: Josephine Berry Slater

'Sci-Fi', Clog, 2013, Editor-in-chief: Julia van den Hout

Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia, Sylviane Agacinski, 2000

About the artist:
Emma Charles is a London based artist. She studied MA Photography at the Royal College of Art (2011-2013) and BA (Hons) in Editorial Photography from the University of Brighton (2006-2009).

Working with both photography and moving image, her work explores metropolitan spaces of productivity that are hidden from the public eye, primarily focusing on the more ethereal and abstract elements of industry and corporate environments.

Charles was recently commissioned for her solo show Surfaces of Exchange, Jerwood Visual Arts Project Space, London (2014). Recent Group exhibitions and screenings include Kassel Dokfest, Kassel; Marl Media Art Award, Marl Museum of Sculpture, Marl; Celeste Prize, ASSAB-ONE, Milan; Neither Here Nor There, FotoFocus Biennial, Cincinnati; Centralia, South Kiosk, London (2014); Aesthetica Short Film Festival, York;Night Contact, Contact Editions, London (2013); CAPITAL, George and Jorgen Gallery, London and London Calling: Tehran, 7Samar Gallery, Tehran (2012).

Her work has been discussed as part of the 2012 Brighton Photo Biennale symposium Visible Economies: Photography, Economic Conditions and Urban Experiences and published in collaboration with Photoworks and University of Brighton.

Charles was recently awarded a Jerwood Visual Arts Project Space commission, RCA Travel Bursary, Villiers David Bursary Award and Christopherson Foundation Grant.

www.emma-charles.com

Men Gather, in Speech... Cooper Gallery, 2015. Photo: Kathryn Rattray.

Rose English

Gates of Fear - great exploits in the world's bullrings, by Barnaby Conrad, Published by Michael Joseph, 1958

An International Vocabulary of Technical Theatre Terms in Eight Languages

Kenneth Rae and Richard Southern (eds), International Theatre Institute, Published by Editions Meddens, 1964

English Furniture Styles 1500 -1830, by Ralph Fastnedge, Published by Pelican, 1955

About the artist:
A uniquely interdisciplinary artist, Rose English emerged from the conceptual art, dance and feminist scenes of 1970s to become one of the most influential performance artists working today. She has been writing, directing and performing her own work for forty years, combining elements of theatre, circus, opera and poetry to explore themes of gender politics, the identity of the performer and the metaphysics of presence.

English has mounted performances in ice rinks; at the Royal Court Theatre and Tate Britain, London and Franklin Furnace, New York; and has collaborated with horses, magicians, musicians, dancers and acrobats. Her shows range from her site-specific performances and collaborations of the 1970s including Berlin, her acclaimed solos of the 1980s including Plato’s Chair to her large-scale spectaculars of the 1990s includingThe Double Wedding. Her internationally celebrated solo with a horse My Mathematics, 1992 was followed by a series of vignettes with horses presented by Banff Centre, Canada and Serpentine Gallery, London.

English’s performance works of the 1970’s featured in the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolutionat the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2007. Her installation STORYBOARD, featured in Interloqui – a group exhibition at Caterina Tognon Arte Contemporanea to coincide with the 54th Venice Biennale, 2011. She exhibited an installation composed of elements and documents relating to her 1975 performance,Quadrille at Richard Saltoun and Karsten Schubert (both galleries), London 2013. Quadrille was shown at Freize Masters 'Spotlight', London 2013 with Karsten Schubert.

The Eros of Understanding, a solo exhibition of her performance works with horses curated by Stine Hebert was presented at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen in 2014.

English co-wrote and designed the feature film The Gold Diggers, 1983, directed by Sally Potter; digitally re-mastered and released on BFI DVD in 2009.

Her awards include the Time Out Performance Award, the Wingate Scholarship and the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists. Abstract Vaudeville: the work of Rose English - a comprehensive monograph documenting her 40-year career to date was published by Ridinghouse in 2014.

www.roseenglishperformance.net

Men Gather, in Speech... Cooper Gallery, 2015. Photo: Kathryn Ratrray.

Abri de Swardt

Still After, in After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory, Elizabeth Freeman, edited by Halley, J. & Parker, A.  Published by Durham & London: Duke UP, 2011

Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Published by Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957

Virgilio Piñera, The Fall, 1944, published in Cold Tales, New York,  Published by Rizzoli International Publications, 1988

Jalal Toufic, (Vampires) An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film. Published by New York: Station Hill, 1993

About the artist:
Abri de Swardt (born Johannesburg) is an artist based in London. He received a BA in Visual Arts (Fine Art) and a BA Hons in Visual Studies both cum laude at Stellenbosch University, where he taught part-time in Visual Studies between 2011-2012, and in 2014 an MFA in Fine Art with distinction at Goldsmiths, University of London, as a Skye Foundation Scholar.

Through various modes of collage, his work explores fantasies of digitization and forms of amnesia in relation to the figure of the ghost, the tumblrification of knowledge and erotohistiography in ways at once occult and baroque. Acts of citation and camouflage occur within a logic of the swarm, as an aesthetics of drowning.

In 2011 De Swardt held his debut solo exhibition To Walk on Water at blank projects in Cape Town, and in 2013 had a solo exhibition Catapult Screensaver at MOTInternational Projects, London. Group exhibitions include Man Magnet Melancholy at Ffrigidaire, London; Field Work, IV Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow (both 2014); Unseen Photo Fair with Cokkie Snoei Gallery, Westergasfabriek, Amsterdam; and An Experiment to Test the Destiny of the World, Ithuba Arts Centre, Johannesburg (both 2013). He has published reviews in Art South Africa and curated a performance evening Pick-me-ups & Pick-ups at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London. During January 2015 he will be artist-in-residence at the Sober and Lonely Institute of Contemporary Art.
www.abrideswardt.com

Reading Event, 19 February, 6.30-7.30pm Cooper Gallery

Amplifying this dialogue is a live Reading Event to mark the final week of the exhibition Men Gather, in Speech… on 19 February, 2015 in Cooper Gallery.

Prompted by Men Gather, in Speech…, seven Scotland-based art writers come together to present public readings responding to, reflecting on and annotating the ideas and concerns discussed in the works featured in the exhibition. This will extend the dialogue set in motion by the exhibition that explores the mode of address that underpins Western philosophy and importantly politics.

The exhibition draws upon Hannah Arendt’s often quoted phrase “men gather in speech...” which lucidly defines the human necessity of dialogue and its role as the quintessential medium of the political to re-enact and doubt the troubled relationships between “power and the space of appearance” in our present age. Touching upon the theatrical, the fictional and the digital, the exhibition offers a complex mediation upon speech, dialogue and the slow silencing of the political space that had once appeared between us.​​

The art writers presenting readings at the event are Frances Davis, Alex Hetherington, Helen Kellock, Valerie Norris, Penelope Matheson, Silas Parry and Gareth Vile.

For more information about the event please see: http://www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/exhibitions/events/mgis-reading-event/

The art writers contributing to this event are part of Group Critical Writing, which is a new initiative in the Cooper Gallery's programme advocating for art and critical writing in Scotland.

'The Process of Content' Readings/// Frances Davis' text 'Complexity and Multiplicity'

On Saturday 29 November 2014, Cooper Gallery presented the Roundtable Discussion The Process of Content: on a temporality in contemporary art. Drawn from the proposition that the work of Anna Oppermann acts as 'a practice of thinking', the roundtable discussion was a stimulating gathering of thoughts that elaborated and amplified the histories, politics and social reverberations of art practices in the 1970s and 80s, and the influence and impact they have on our thinking about art and culture today. ​The event included invited speakers Guy Brett (Curator and Critic, London), Lynda Morris (Curator and Art Historian, Norwich), Tobi Maier (Curator and Writer, São Paulo), Prof. Martin Warnke & Carmen Wedemeyer (Researchers, Leuphana University Lüneburg) and was chaired by Dr. Lisa Otty (Research Fellow, The University of Edinburgh). For more information please see here.

Accompanying the Roundtable Discussion was a series of readings from art writers in Scotland: Frances Davis, Kirsty Hendry, Alex Hetherington, Catherine Street & JL Williams, and Richard Taylor. This is the final post in our series of blog posts on Cooper Gallery Notes to publish the texts from each of the writers who presented their readings at the event.

Photo: Frances Davis reading Complexity and Multiplicity. Photo: Kathryn Rattray

Notes on the reading during the Roundtable Discussion on Saturday 29 November 2014.

Frances Davis read her text aloud to the audience.

"Somewhere in this world, complexity must still be valued"

This is a phrase attributed to Anna Opperman that I came across in reading around her work and practice in preparation for the event today and the following short reading takes Opperman’s conception and enactment of complexity as it's starting point and situates it in proximity to Italo Calvino’s writing on multiplicity from his Six Memos for the New Millenium.

In our contemporary era, characterised by a continuous and seemingly instantaneous flow and exchange of information through dense networks, a consideration of complexity is apt. If, as Opperman implores, “complexity must (still) be valued” then first we must ask both what its value is and how might we value it?

Written within a few years of Opperman making Cotoneaster Horizontalis, Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the New Millennium outlines six values of literature which Calvino felt would be important for the coming millennium, the millennium we now find ourselves in. In his fifth text, and the final text to be completed before his death, Calvino addresses multiplicity.

Calvino suggests that we can no longer think in terms of a totality that is not potential, conjectural, and manifold and posits the idea of an open encyclopaedia, a method of knowledge and a network of connections between, in his words, "the events, the people, and the things of the world". While traditionally, and etymologically, the encyclopaedia attempts to enclose all knowledge, Calvino’s open encyclopaedia offers a new model, a complex and continuous whole that disrupts the ideas of truth and fact, instead positing an understanding of knowledge as a mutable and non-linear concept.

In concluding he offers up the potential he perceives in this form, and in embracing multiplicity as method:

“Someone might object that the more the work tends toward the multiplication of possibilities, the further it departs from that unicum which is the self of the writer, his inner sincerity and the discovery of his own truth. But I would answer: Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopaedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.

But perhaps the answer that stands closest to my heart is something else: Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic...”

Or to return to Opperman: Perhaps here, in Opperman’s ensembles, as in Calvino’s open encyclopaedia, we find both the value of complexity and a method through which it might be valued; a way of thinking, and of making, that reflects the multiplicity and complexity of the contemporary moment, and moves beyond the singular perspective to something larger than its whole.

--

You can watch a showreel of the readings by Frances Davis, Kirsty Hendry, Alex Hetherington, Catherine Street & JL Williams, and Richard Taylor via the video below:

Interested in critical art writing? Check out our developing collection of work by writers based in Scotland on the Studio Jamming Critical Writing Residency website. Group Critical Writing Residency, edited by Maria Fusco, was part of Studio Jamming: Artists’ Collaborations in Scotland curated by Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in June-August 2014.

'The Process of Content' Readings/// Catherine Street & JL Williams' text 'The Practice of Being'

On Saturday 29 November 2014, Cooper Gallery presented the Roundtable Discussion The Process of Content: on a temporality in contemporary art. Drawn from the proposition that the work of Anna Oppermann acts as 'a practice of thinking', the roundtable discussion was a stimulating gathering of thoughts that elaborated and amplified the histories, politics and social reverberations of art practices in the 1970s and 80s, and the influence and impact they have on our thinking about art and culture today. ​The event included invited speakers Guy Brett (Curator and Critic, London), Lynda Morris (Curator and Art Historian, Norwich), Tobi Maier (Curator and Writer, São Paulo), Prof. Martin Warnke & Carmen Wedemeyer (Researchers, Leuphana University Lüneburg) and was chaired by Dr. Lisa Otty (Research Fellow, The University of Edinburgh). For more information please see here.

Accompanying the Roundtable Discussion was a series of readings from art writers in Scotland: Frances Davis, Kirsty Hendry, Alex Hetherington, Catherine Street & JL Williams, and Richard Taylor. This is the fourth in our series of blog posts on Cooper Gallery Notes to publish the texts from each of the writers who presented their readings at the event.

Catherine Street reading The Practice of Being by Catherine Street & JL Williams.

Photo: Kathryn Rattray

Notes on the reading during the Roundtable Discussion on Saturday 29 November 2014.

Catherine Street presented the reading of her and JL Williams' 'The Practice of Being' over the sound of their video which was projected in the gallery. Print outs of the reading were distributed to the audience.

JL Williams & Catherine Street 
The Practice of Being

JW The Practice of Thinking 27th October 15:37

I could breathe quietly and slowly dreaming as if the
home was the only real place where the women sat at 
the dining table shamed and dreaming their hands white 

birds in the room their lips red buds red purses closed
shut tight as the men rubbed one another with
sweetened oils and the slaves walked back and forth
carrying glass jugs of wine and the poet stood in the
corner of the room declaiming that the rich are too rich
and the poor are too poor and the entire structure is
about to collapse 

CS The Practice of Thinking, 27th October, 22:07
lying awake in a cool room the cosiness of the cotton 
around as steam bursts through the window open with 
the guttural sound of the broken boiler in the pub below. 
And later an erotic train of thought but perhaps that 
leads to a kind of non-thought in the end. Many 
practices require the suppression of concentration in 
some ways. To stop at a full stop and hang and hover in 
suspense over an empty bright void precipice

JW The Process of Content 2nd November 11:31

we have to find a new way to process it is for the dog to 
say what comes next and his nose is on the bone some 
sleep calls for more sleep some for waking and this time 
talking is the only option when the door closes the small 
lines on the floor become apparent and the smell of 
melons in the room the drape of the carpet on the sofa 
the listing and cataloguing of many beings sometimes 
the memories flood in all the mistakes and I wonder at 
the notions of good and bad when really what there is

CS The Process of Content 29th October 08:05
A cooling tower in Germany or a Chinese oil platform. 
Something that’s not immediately in front of our eyes 
can be attended to by realism. But can all things lend 
themselves. Can I be in a talk about realism can I think 
about realism and these bubbles of existence sprout out 
and float up into a documentary eye that blinks sticky. 
She said it’s not enough. What you do isn’t enough and 
you’re not enough for me. You have an iridescent 
surface of a sphere or those balloons that straddle 
across the ocean. Drifting to another continent where a 
better life awaits.

JW The Practise of Thought 2nd November 11:38

Dig deeper into the soil of the mind the hot white flesh 
whose smell intoxicates the fornicator unless my heart 
dries from shedding too many hearthstones in the night I 
will dig dig until the centre is reached when you were a 
minute when did space relent I saw a black dog with his 
nose in the air the space between men is nonexistent 
we want to relent we hope for nothing there is nothing 
but the present moment it is so strange to realise the 
capacity of being when you step outside of

CS The Practice of Thought 30th October 22:54
The light itself is what he sees not the person as a 
young child maybe ten years old he stood gaunt. 
Mysteriously but purposefully striding across the grass 
towards us with white lips and taut hands in pockets.
He stood there curiously light and solid whilst another
figure faded into the background. Figure and ground
that was something that I read yesterday about a 
pyramid with a top that glitters bright against 

JW The Practice of Being 2nd November 11:59
Gutted fried the culmination of cities the slow movement 
of cities toward airlessness the hiving of men into cells 
the strange desire for folding into one another the odd 
terror of space in which the only isolation of the self 
becomes apparent the driving driving force of space the 
dust in the eye the slow decay of cities I imagine the city 
imploding in a slow silent gold silver burst the way a star 
would chewing its own skin off from the inside out
the only moral hook to hang your coat on before the 
burning begins 

CS The Practice of Being 31st October 18:23
Wits about you and flitting. Tip towards the surface and 
angle you are everything in the world that’s happened 
so far. And tip restrict aim for distinct. Distance and 
fragmenting plates join together. You are every event as 
it unfolds. Untold and unfurled resounding delight. An 
escape from representation just let it open out sounds 
are shared wholly more than the image in front of us. Tip 
light and quick move faster than the dead tonight. 
Shaking forwards towards that reflective plain and 
I’m unsure now of what is going to happen next.

JW A Mode of Being 2nd November 10:35
You walked with your eyes open and unseeing trusting 
to the space in front of you trusting that no beast would 
attack and no branch would grab and in the distance 
you could hear the sighing of a river and as you walked 
through the utter dark the cold breath of the blackest 
night kissed your eyes and your cheeks and your lips 
and your forehead and your neck and your hands and 
you walked unafraid and somewhere in the distance you 
could hear hooves crushing leaves

CS A Mode of Being 2nd November 07:04
Hart floor fang dart. Fragmented recollections and 
beats. A diversion tactic. Wrung same span lake. 
Keeping bare and scraped down I can adopt a minimal 
way of staying here. I wish you were doing something 
more worthwhile he said. A straight line of being here is 
just a case of not going away. Upside flat down dark and 
spun. Late at night till morning always hanging on until 
light spreads and keeps. Keep busy and don’t think too 
much. Stop to begin. End to start. In the vast change of 
day it comes as before. I wish you were doing 
something a little bit more worthwhile write more slowly 
now to fill the time only fifteen seconds to go now eight 
now four now one.


Written for The Process of Content: on a temporality in 
contemporary art Saturday 29 November 2014, Cooper Gallery Dundee 

See: http://jlwilliamspoetry.co.uk

and: http://catherinestreet.net

You can watch a showreel of the readings by Frances Davis, Kirsty Hendry, Alex Hetherington, Catherine Street & JL Williams, and Richard Taylor via the video below:

Interested in critical art writing? Check out our developing collection of work by writers based in Scotland on the Studio Jamming Critical Writing Residency website. Group Critical Writing Residency, edited by Maria Fusco, was part of Studio Jamming: Artists’ Collaborations in Scotland curated by Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in June-August 2014.