Tell us a bit about ‘If You Could’, if you would

If You Could started when Will and I were in the second year at Brighton University, and was initially a way to help raise funds for our final year degree show. The first question we asked was: “If you could do anything tomorrow, what would it be?” The project has grown from this question into lots of different incarnations and projects and we are now in our fourth year.

What’s happening for this year’s project?

This year we’re asking 40 artists who they’d like to collaborate with on a project. They don’t necessarily have to be creative  – it’s acting more as an excuse for artists that we admire to work with others with whom they’d like to create something. Who they choose to work with, and what they choose to make is entirely up to them – we curate the show according to their pieces and their wishes. It’s all about facilitating exciting pieces of work from practitioners we admire, with no hidden agendas.

If you could pair any two people, who would it be?

Alex: I’ve always love David Shrigley and would love to see him make a piece of furniture, or a product – so I’ll go for a Shrigley with the quick wittedness of Martino Gamper.

Will: I think the idea of any two creatives at the top of their game coming together to create original work is exciting. I like the idea they are being pushed slightly outside of their comfort zone and there’s potential to see work they otherwise wouldn’t have produced.

How do you think the designers and illustrators benefit from this kind of collaboration?

Well they get to do something that they want to – so the benefits of that are easy to see. Any break from commercial work that facilitates experimentation in someone’s everyday practice can only be a good thing. Especially when they are as talented as they are.

What was the best possible outcome you could imagine when you first thought of doing this?

That it would happen and as many people as possible would see it and gleam something from it.

Please tell us a bit about It’s Nice That

It’s primarily an online resource of creative things we’ve seen but we also branch out into the offline. It’s Nice That is a way of us being able to provide worthy primary content to an audience that we respect.

Will, tell us about Alex / Alex, tell us about Will

Will: Alex does all the things I can’t do.

Alex: Will does all the things I can’t do.

There are a number of things neither of us know how to do, so we find people who can.

What different roles do you bring to your work?

It depends project on project, but in general I guess I do a lot more of the management and organisation, and Will does the design and finishing. The idea and direction is always driven by the both of us and to be honest we cross over quite a bit, and every decision is spoken about, so it’s not really too important what either of us do individually – it’s more about a final outcome.

How does the fact that you’re designers yourselves affect the curatorial work and commissioning you do? Does the fact that you curate and commission affect your own design work? Is there much overlap, and where, and how?

I think any background knowledge in the area you choose to make your living is a good idea. So I see our background as designers as the reason we became interested in what we do. We are very much still designers, whether we are commissioning, curating or working on commercial projects – it’s irrelevant what stamp you put on it.

We have an appreciation and respect for the talented people around us, and that’s the most important thing.

http://www.itsnicethat.com/

http://www.ifyoucould.co.uk/

Installation Week Two by students from London College of Fashion, ‘Read the directions and directly you will be pointed in the right direction’, is up now. Website here. Real life here. We’ll be keeping up with the collaborative installation-in-installments over the next few weeks.

‘I think computers have something to do with it’, says co-curator Joe Coppard of Pat and Trevor

Of the bright arcs
Of your tracings, skimmer,
Skater through summer,
Singing your frantic song
Up, up on the high wire.

Airborn, air feeds you;
Light rules your matings,
Comings, goings,
Only in death
The dark earth holds you.

Real bird, departed bird,
Maker of flight from frail
Bone and feather,
Own end,
Liver, dier,

Words undo you
Cage you in quotation marks.
”Like swallows.”

- June Sturrock

Person One: I like the one with the nice reading voice reading with the posh tall one

Person Two: I like the lady with PVA glue on her trousers reading with the foreign lady

…It was brilliant, and there’ll be more in the future. Photos to follow.

On the screen, you can see how both poets have their stanzas bulge about the middle. We’ve been planning the re-launch of the website this week, and thinking about the representation of these visual aspects on a screen, as well as the mechanics of reading sequences of poems online.

A couple of forthcoming exhibitions – Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. at the ICA, and Harland Miller at the Baltic – take the way words look as their subject matter. Artist and novelist Miller has imagined books with glib northern titles like ‘Gateshead Revisited’, and ‘Scarborough: Have Faith in Cod’. These are painted as reproductions of iconic Penguin paperbacks – an ultimate textual / graphic brand. Meanwhile, the ICA’s exhibition of text-based art practices is inspired by the concrete poetry movement, which explored the literary and graphic potential of language.

Here’s Philip Larkin being surly in his Paris Review interview, making a defence of looking at poetry, as opposed to listening to it:

Hearing a poem, as opposed to reading it on the page, means you miss so much – the shape, the punctuation, the italics, even knowing how far you are from the end. Reading it on the page means you can go at your own pace, taking it in properly.

We’ll be putting that to the test at our Livestarlings event, with readings from the site a week on thursday at the Betsy Trotwood pub in London. Do come.

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Many English poets in the seventeenth century, from Ben Jonson and John Donne, to Andrew Marvell and John Milton, wrote poems that were responsive to or attentive of other people’s poems. Such poems took up the themes and means of their predecessors; sometimes exaggerating them to satirical effect, sometimes in praise, sometimes in disagreement. Many of Donne’s Verse Epistles, Elegies and Satires, and Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter, were written under these circumstances.

A specific form of responsive poetic engagement within a small, niche social group became known as ‘coterie poetry’. Coterie poets met at salons, or exchanged epistolary poems, in which they related news or exchanged advice. The poems were varied. But often, the authors would write narrative poems in which they took for themselves and for their friends alternative names from classical mythology. Sometimes these poems were published in print, more often they remained in manuscript circulation within polite society.

It was not a phenomenon limited to the English. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, a group of young Dutch men and women were said to regularly meet at Muiden Castle near Amsterdam, where they wrote poems in response to one another’s poems. The central figure of this ‘Muiderkring’ group was the poet and playwright Pieter Corneliszen Hooft, resident of Muiden, who invited the company of nobles, writers and scientists, both male and female, including the polymath Constantijn Huygens, the playwright Joost van den Vondel, and the artist and poet Anna Visscher.  A nineteenth-century portrait of the group shows them crowded round a small writing table, with a young woman standing, apparently reciting her poem from a sheaf of paper, while a young man seated to her right takes up his goose-feather pen.

In fact, recent scholarship has found it unlikely that the Muiderkring group met at all, that most of the members of the so-called group could never have set foot in Muiden castle. Many Dutch literary scholars now agree that the men and women knew and interacted with one another only through the poems and writings which they exchanged, and which remain. It has been suggested that such a group could be called a ‘virtual coterie’.