Its a great invite! well done Chris. Really strong visually, and clever..... and funny. I like it.

On the other (date and time etc) side of the card, do you think it would be a good idea to have a map of where the gallery is? Once you get into Imperial its a labarynthine and quite hard to find Blyth (if you've got any where near as bad a sense of direction as I have anyway!).

Claudia

(never done a blog entry before so hoping this is going to go through) 30th March 2010

Postcard

(Update) Well, this is what I've come up with. Based on John Berger's Ways of Seeing - it's a postcard within a postcard. There are many references to the Waste Land without ever mentioning it. It's very playful, partly nonsense... perhaps like the Waste Land... I think it strikes the right note. Please feel free to disagree, although I will defend it!! :) Check out the original design of Ways of Seeing below to compare. (I spotted a grammatical error so have updated. There are probably loads but that never stopped a particular Margate lass!)

Hi Chris,

I love the nod to John Berger. Very witty and beautifully crafted.

Carolyn, Anna and Aline - if you could send me any background to your work in the form of text or images, plus an idea of what you plan to exhibit, that would be great! My email is james.cahill@hotmail.com

Speak to you all soon,

James

Re. Chris's comments

I can't seem to get this to upload as a comment on 'Amanda's Work' post. i've tried a hundred times!!! so i'll have to place it here. if anyone has any thoughts on what i might be doing wrong, please let me know, and i can remove it and post it as a comment - anyway on response to Chris's comments....

i love the comments you made, you couldn't never off piste! there is no such place! It is your reading of the work, but in any case, it is spot on... I love the thought of all time and labour captured and used, without care for importance, this i think is really true. All activity for me is part of the work! Re. grey matter, I have been thinking about this for the paper i am writing, particularly in relation in the pursuit of an elusive image, the dream photograph i have been trying to make in Dust Passing, which was inspired by Robert Shapazian writing on Man Ray's Dust Breeding, the long exposure of settled dust on Duchamp's The Large Glass, in which he describes how the came about. Whilst I was reading the text, I envisioned a kind of anti-photograph. Almost everything that a well-made photograph isn’t. Instead of an image made from various tones of grey. It is a thick fog, a magical, amorphous haze of grey grain on the photo paper. And within which one can imagine any and every image… You also talked of grey matter, in relation to the works in your show, on the phone as well. Is there anything you have been reading about grey, dust, the imagination, the sublime, boredom and generation? I have found some references in some essays about Benjamin by Teresa Stoppani, e.g. Dust Projects: on Walter Benjamin’s Passengen-Werk (have a photocopy of if you want me to send by smail mail?)
and also i need to find Andrew Benjamin ‘Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity’ in ‘Walter Benjamin and History’ (London, Continuum, 2006)

Tate article about failure

Tate article about failure - http://tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue18/failure.htm

Publicity/postcard/invite

14/03.... I really like the look of this layout and design. I like the way the book starts on the cover. Been thinking more about it. Almost contrary to what I said before..I think it should be simple and direct. Home-made. A bit old-fashioned but I think the title should be on the front along with a list of the contributors. Nothing enigmatic, no metaphors etc. Just allow it to be a postcard/invite. No smart-arsed antics. No over-the-top cut and paste, punky aesthetics either. Anyway, shall post it when it's made.

Hello all,

Well, it's about 12 weeks to go until we install our work at Blyth; 12 weeks in which to pull together and attempt to make it work as a group project. The first creative obstacle is the invite/postcard which has to be ready for the end of March.

I am not really interested in the postcard containing a snapshot of one of our works, or even an abstract close-up. It's too illustrative and not interactive enough.

Anyone got any ideas?

My initial thoughts are that it should contain the fingerprints of the artists involved made visible using a light coating of dust. I will have to do a few experiments to see whether it has any clout as a piece of visual ephemera but I like the way it draws us together, while apart. Alternatively, the postcard could be white and printed with a special ink which reveals the 'image' under certain conditions, or which perhaps reveals itself over time. I also like the idea of something semi-random. The word: 'Bee' - a social insect, a group worker. How might we each represent it using a biro on paper. The results could form the final design of our publicity... a sort of doodle, if you like. In a time when people are talking about relational aesthetics perhaps it's not too pedantic a concern.

Please feel free to post your own ideas. But please respond soon as this deadline is looming. Also, say if you have any objections to your address being known to the other artists in the show (applicable if we go ahead with my idea, or something similar).

Modernism in contemporary art

Dear all,

I have noticed an article in this month's ArtReview that mentions the predominance of Modernist aesthetics - and arguably methodologies - in contemporary art. The piece makes reference to a (much more insightful) article on the subject by Martin Herbert in Tate Etc. which is pertinent to my planned discussion of your works' parallels with Modernism: http://tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue15/newmodernism.htm

Looking forward to discussing things further,

James