Titles

Blast Echo
A series of new commissions for artists, poets and art writers.

Blast Echo is a space for participants to access, re-think and make vigorous responses to Wyndham Lewis’s original Blast, as his revolutionary magazine approaches its 100th birthday. AD propose to show the long reach of Blast’s impact and chart speculative new ground for artists’ publications.
Blast Echo brings historical depth and insight to the current burgeoning interest in art writing. It addresses the interface between words and image as part of contemporary art practice. Using the distinctive figure of Wyndham Lewis as the hinge for investigation, the new commissions will demonstrate the claim of art writing as an innovative and integral part of art practice now.
At present art writing operates within several niche areas within the art world, however, its history and genealogy is not formalised within art history, nor is it well known. This proposal provides a vital part of that history that can quickly inform any enquirer across a range of practice.

 

 

Dust and Other Stories by Paul Rooney

Paul Rooney is an artist and writer, and winner of the 2008 Northern Art Prize. His writing is admired by poet George Szirtes and has been reviewed by The Guardian, Art Review and MAP Magazine, among others. Rooney’s new collection of short fiction includes 12 stories all written in his trademark style, which has echoes of Iain Sinclair, Samuel Beckett and Donald Barthelme offset by Liverpudlian humour. The starting point of Rooney’s fiction is often taken from a real interview with a person or group of people, or is triggered by a scene from a novel, a TV documentary or an overheard urban myth. The cultural and historical references within these stories are then skilfully woven together into complex tales. For example, Towards the Heavenly Void begins with a ghostly encounter in a nightclub dressing room and goes on to describe a fantastical tale involving the comedian Les Dawson swapping identities with a man from Macclesfield, in order to join Che Guevara in the jungles of Bolivia. The stories, with their comically odd twists in narrative or shifts in the literary style, provide a glimpse into a world of unsettling absurdity or ambiguity. Within the monologues and stories collected in this anthology we meet an evil Lancastrian airborne sprite battling against the good forces of dub reggae; a Christian evangelist spreading scripture through toy military vehicles that speak; a self-hating tree that dreams of being chopped up and carved into the busts of early Baroque composers; and a call centre worker pretending to callers that she is eating blue-veined cheese while sitting inside a rusty water tank.

La Décision Doypak, 16mm film transferred to DVD.

La Décision Doypak, 16mm film transferred to DVD.

 

 

The Collected Writings of Jon Thompson
Ridinghouse 2011

Jon Thompson (born 1936) is an artist, writer and curator. As a tutor at Goldsmiths College, Jan van Eyck Academie and Middlesex University, he is credited as one of the most influential teachers of his generation and he is also well known internationally as a curator. What lies hidden is 30 years of writings through which Thompson systematically addresses the key issues in the art practice of the day.
Thompson’s writings are a legacy to current and future generations of art students and artists, and are a mine of information to those who are interested in the visual arts. Bridging a panoply of discussions arising over a period of time which has seen extraordinary changes within the British art world Thompson examines the influences and artists at the sharp end of these changes.
Selected texts include: Deadly Prescription: Jannis Kounellis in Moscow; In the Groves of Philadelphia: A Female Hanging (Marcel Duchamp); New Times, New Thoughts, New Sculpture; Doing Battle with Decomposition: The Work of Mark Wallinger 1985-1995; Realism, Pop and Poverty (Art of the Sixties from Warhol to Beuys); Thinking Richard Deacon, Thinking Sculptor, Thinking Sculpture; Steve McQueen; Piero Manzoni: Out of Time and Place; Art Education from Coldstream to QAA; Painting and the Creative Imagination; Panamarenko: Artist and Technologist; The Economics of Culture: The Revival of British Art in the 80s; The Mad, the Brut, the Primitive and the Modern: A Discursive History (Outsider Art).
All through Thompson’s writing there is an overriding concern for the artist and artistic expression and he repeatedly makes the case for the artist and their role in society. The writing is constructed under the penetrating lens of philosophical and theoretical knowledge, fully researched and related with humour and care. The essays are closely argued; Thompson is a detective as well as commentator. His firm commitment to be an artist first leaves him at greater liberty to speak outside the constraints of art criticism or art theory; his voice stays fresh because it comes from a desire to understand ideas from the perspective of a working artist.

 

 

The Field by Gary O’Connor
Transition Editions, 2009

‘This all began with her. When I told her about the field she just laughed so I never mentioned it again. I remember picking up the telephone and hesitating, and Trish encouraging me. She said, “It’s something you always wanted…”’ The vast, flat featureless Fens landscape is the backdrop for the disquieting story of a man whose decision to take singing lessons brings him to question his perception of reality.
Cambridgeshire based artist and writer Gary O’Connor was born in London in 1963. He studied Fine Art at London Guildhall University and completed an MA in Writing the Visual at Norwich School of Art and Design. O’Connor has developed a symbiotic relationship between his writing and his art practice, by incorporating text and spoken word in his artworks. In 2006 he was selected for the Escalator literary programme and awarded an Arts Council grant for The Field.
The Field is the outcome of AD working closely with Gary over an 18-month period after O’Connor elected AD as editors and mentors for this new commission. Our meetings were casually based and generally took their content from whatever document, new story or writing fragment Gary had emailed through prior to the meeting.
In some respects these meetings were like tutorials, although it is fair to say that our part as respondees to the writing was as open to discussion as Gary’s role was as the writer. We discussed the writing formally, how it read and how it did or didn’t work. We offered ideas and possible edits. We also discussed technique; including what source material he was looking at and how he approached writing as a discipline.

 

 

The Alpine Fantasy of Victor B and Other Stories
Serpent’s Tail, 2006

Salvador Dali, Giorgio de Chirico and Andy Warhol all wrote fiction – but there has never previously been a compilation of artists’ stories. The Alpine Fantasy of Victor B and Other Stories brings together 17 of Britain’s leading contemporary artists in one collection.
Moving, humorous and sometimes deeply macabre, this collection deals with dementia, mortality, mass murder and madness. A young woman derails a train killing twenty people as an experiment in conquering death; a boy fakes an accident to get the attention of the girl of his dreams; an alpine hiker advocates murder as an environmental clean-up solution; and time goes backwards as we witness the ‘unlynching’ of a paedophile by the local neighbourhood watch. Challenging and expanding notions of what artists do, The Alpine Fantasy of Victor B and Other Stories is a haunting exploration of the impulses that drive today’s artists.
Contributors
Edward Allington, David Batchelor, Ian Breakwell, David Burrows, Brian Catling, Jake Chapman, Juan Cruz, Mikey Cuddihy, Polly Gould, Chris Hammond, Janice Kerbel, Balraj Khanna, Brighid Lowe, Gary O’Connor, Paul Rooney, Jon Thompson and Martin Vincent.