Beyond

beyond

beyond

beyond: to share, to stimulate, to prompt discussion, to find new ways to produce and disseminate, to connect, to overcome distance, to have a collective discussion point, to be relevant, to learn, a flexible starting point for others to take further; to reject it, to react to or against, and to go beyond…

The A4 page is the starting point. beyond grows one-page at a time. It has a structure of two parts, the body and the back. As they grow they will complement each other. The body is a combination of reference texts, writing, conversations, artists’ projects and more. The back is a bibliography – a virtual library of references of texts, websites, images, and more.

beyond is produced in different places simultaneously and is facilitated by curators and artists, cultural producers and writers; a board with different interests who will not remain static, but shift and change over time.

beyond exists in hard copy and printed via common means but also lives online for all to share. Parts of pages may be beyond printer margins. beyond invites you to contribute.

beyond has a mailing list so you can receive information on new pages and a website where you can download old and new pages to construct your own hard copy. E: [email protected]: www.beyonddistribution.org

beyond is informally initiated by Kaavous Clayton, Julia Devonshire, Catherine Hemelryk and Lotte Juul Petersen.

submit pages that respond to the intentions and structure suggested by the starting principles, above and beyond. Follow our A4 template but feel free to go beyond. pdfs, jpegs, rtf files can be submitted at any time to: [email protected] contact us for other forms of submission.

Please include your name with any information relevant to the work.

1

beyond

Beyond Fiction

It is a challenge to decipher Stanislaw Lem’s book, A Perfect Vacuum. The premise of the book is

straightforward enough – a book of reviews of books that haven’t been written – and the device is a useful

one: presenting a review allows the salient points of a world to be communicated without having to go to

the effort of creating the entire world: simply by implication the rest of the world is created in the reader’s

mind. But as we analyse this structure and its content our understanding is quickly undermined.

The non-existent books that are reviewed are purportedly written by authors other than the actual

author, Stanislaw Lem, and the reviews themselves vary in their styles and approaches to such a degree that

we might assume the reviewers to be reviewers other than the actual author of the reviews of these fictions,

Stanislaw Lem. This assumption is backed up by the fact that one of the reviews is of a book written by

Lem himself (also a book that does not actually exist), so unless the reviewer is reviewing his own work we

have to assume the reviewers to be other than the author. This construct begins to build up several layers of

fiction: the fiction that the books have been written in the first place to be able to be reviewed, followed by

the fiction of the reviewers as authors of the reviews, and the fiction of the reviews themselves. These are

embroiled with the fiction of the reviewers as separate entities to the actual author.

The premise becomes more complicated still when we read the first ‘chapter’. This is a review of

the preface to A Perfect Vacuum, a preface that does not actually exist. We could see this review of the non-

existent preface as the actual preface, in which case the review would not be of the actual preface but of a

fictional preface that is a review of the actual book. One approach to this book would be to attempt to read it

and take it at face value, but this would immediately throw up questions. If we enter into the fictions that are

created we must imagine a ‘ghost’ book that sits in parallel to the one we are reading, containing a preface

that we are reading a review of. Or we could imagine the book we are reading to be the ‘ghost’, sitting in

parallel to a reality that it is reflecting or echoing into our world.

An imperfect circle is perhaps what this ‘preface’ suggests. This is an awkward concept since every

circle is by definition, perfect, in the same way that every vacuum is by definition, perfect (in platonic terms,

even though it may never actually be achieved). The science fictions that the book’s concept creates are

subtle and complex. The questioning of reality that we are being asked to confront creates loops within loops

where there are no satisfactory answers. The circles become increasingly complicated. This paradoxical

and self-circling nature is for me the most interesting and defining nature of the book and is the crux to

understanding or exploring what we are reading.

These hermetic loops could represent a quandary that is at the very core of fiction as a means of

communication. To accept the ideas being communicated we must suspend our disbelief, something that

is normally more easily done, as there is nothing within most fiction that questions its own existence. But

this review has gone beyond fiction. Usually when a fiction is created by words it is clear and distinct. The

words are generating the fiction. But in this case the words are describing a fiction within a fiction. The text

conjures up a kind of paradox. To communicate the ideas of the book in physical form a text would have to

go beyond the physical limitations of the page, like a Mobius strip of thought that has no beginning or end.

©K

aavous Clayton

2

beyond3

© Aid &

Abet C

ollaboration with A Tw

o Pipe Problem

http://aidandabet.blogspot.com/dow

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beyond

Contribution to Beyond Market Project

During the Escalator retreat ‘The Economics of the Art System’, held at Wysing Arts Centre in October 2009, Market Project were introduced to the painting Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell by John Baldessari.

Baldessari’s ‘tips’ stimulated debate amongst Market Project and it is anticipated that readers of Beyond will similarly find it an interesting starting point for discussion.

Members of Market Project have produced a response to the work, in the form of additional tips for artist who want to sell:

• Add glitter to everything

• Avoid using black or white

• Suggestive ambiguous imagery

• Think big

• Use a highly recognisable baby powder and filter it through the air conditioning system to subconsciously take the viewer back into a pre-paternal state

• Ensure composition is outstanding thumbnail size

• A puppy dogs’s eyes will enchant the hardest of critics...

John BaldessariTips for Artists Who Want to Sell (1966-68) © John Baldessari

See the work here: http://z.about.com/d/arthistory/1/0/d/e/broad_inaugural_01.jpg

4©

Market Project

Annabel D

over, Laura

Earley, Julie

Freeman, Alistair G

entry, Helen Judge,

Davd K

efford, Annabelle Shelton, Elaine Tribley, M

artha Winter

beyond6.1

beyond5

© Lost Toys Records

ww

w.losttoysrecords.com

001: Break Your Little Heart Johnny Parry002: Songs Without A Purpose Johnny Parry004: After the Jumble Lost Toys Sampler No. 1005: Little Prayers Johnny Parry Trio006: More Love and Death Johnny Parry

007: Eau de Nata Betty Frances008: After The Facts Grubby Mitts010: Daybreak Buzzard Lope012: Yonek Totem Ricky Leach

beyond

A Semi Formal Discussion

LB I went to a Public Works thing, which one of the Public Works people transcribed afterwards, another one of them had had a baby recently, and in the transcription it just had big chunks that said “baby crying… response inaudible”.

[Laughter]

LB …and there was about a fifth or a sixth of it designated that way… including most of my comments. But I really liked it. AT In that thing at the end of Jamie’s book, erm that’s a transcript isn’t it?

LB That’s very funny.

AT And it’s all unfinished sentences, and bits of inaudible…

LB I went on this derive with this poet James Wilkes who wrote that piece about coming around Cambridge with us and it was his idea, he wanted to do this thing of looking at fountains in London, drinking fountains. So we wandered about, I think we started by Liverpool St and he had a vague idea where they were, and he had a little MP3 type dictaphone thing and he was recording quite a lot of it. And I thought I mean he’s quite brainy, he reads “Spectres of Marx” by Derrida, he reads books by clever people, and talks in whole sentences. I thought I was… try and keep up the…

[Laughter]

LB But then he sent me the transcript, and I thought we were saying things, exploring ideas, but when he sent me the transcript nothing was finished, no sentence was finished…

RJH Even his?

LB Even the, what do you call it, the object of each sentence, the thing under discussion was never stated.

AT Shall I go and get it?

LB So you read it and think yeah but what ARE we talking about?

RJH [Laughs} You’re talking around it.

MW But you understood it at the time.

LB At the time I felt…

MW Because it was in your mind, you were sharing the idea

6.1©

Semi Form

al Discussion G

roupLaw

rence Bradby, R J Hinrichsen,

Anna Townley, M

ark Wilsher

beyond

LB …this is a nice idea.

RJH It’s opening up rather than closing in on, you’re talking around something by not talking about it. So you’re talking around it, but not at it.

MW And all the other things that don’t come across in the transcript like your tone of voice and the emphasis of each word, that’s what’s communicating isn’t it?

RJH And what you can see and the kind of physical…

LB It’s that but it also raises the question of that actually what you were saying was a bit less coherent than you thought at the time.

RJH So then you wonder whether the other person’s having a similar experience that you were at the time, because obviously you’ve got the kind of what’s going on in your head, going “oh yeah this is really good, we’re really talking about it” and the other person going “what the hell’s he on about? Why won’t he get to the point?” You know. But maybe you both had that, maybe its like a vibe, maybe it’s not like a vibe maybe its totally like, “god that guy doesn’t know what he’s on about”.

LB Hmmm. But he did describe to me afterwards what he thought they were. He sent them to me and I made that comment about them being less coherent than I thought we were at the time and he said “yeah”. He had some really nice description of them as “poetry stretched beyond”… something about language being stretched beyond the point of meaningfulness. This really lovely little…

RJH …poetic way of saying it just degenerated.

MW Words stretched beyond the…

RJH Something or other…

LB Did you find it?

AT Yeah. They’re at the back.

MW Transcripts are really weird things aren’t they?

[Pause while they look at the book]

RJH They haven’t got the intonation, they don’t hold the conversation.

MW The first line… “Inaudible”

[Laughter]

6.2

7beyond

© Sem

i Formal D

iscussion Group

Lawrence Bradby, R J H

inrichsen, Anna Tow

nley, Mark W

ilsher

7beyond

© C

-O-L-L-I-D

-E-RW

ill Clifford, Sarah Evans, Bettina Furnée,

Catherine H

emelryk, H

ayley Lock, Rachel Oxley,

Mark Ross and C

aroline Wright

7beyond

© C

-O-L-L-I-D

-E-R

Will C

lifford, Sarah Evans, B

ettina Furnée,

Catherine H

emelryk, H

ayley Lock, Rachel O

xley, M

ark Ross and C

aroline Wright

beyond8.1

8.2

©Y

H485 Press

Aaron Juneau, Jonathan W

atts and Harriet M

itchell

beyond

Not Monte Carlo 2009Duration 00.16.30.02DV - PAL / 4:3 / Stereo Location South Beach, Great Yarmouth

Herring fishing, North Sea oil and tourism are industries that historically have supported a strong local economy in the seaside town of Great Yarmouth. Over the last twenty years this liminal town, situated at the eastern extremity of the UK, has suffered a succession of withdrawals of these industries that seem in turn to have placed its identity in limbo.

Public murals by a commissioned artist present nostalgic images of the fishing and an award-winning museum on the industry celebrates the “people of Great Yarmouth”. Facing the sea, amusement arcades, hot dog stands and themed bars on ‘Yesterday’s World’ line the tourist drag known as the Golden Mile. Yet beyond the glowing fascias is one of the country’s most poverty-stricken communities.

Four years ago, plans hatched for an outer harbour to connect Great Yarmouth with Ijmuiden, north Holland brought with it the assurance of local and regional economic growth. If locals doubted the promise of a new phase in the life of the town, work on the £75m harbor project began just two years later. With minimal public consultation and, contentiously, an itinerant labour force, significant changes to the landscape were effected: fences were erected; inshore seabeds were dredged; granite shipped from across the world was dumped to reclaim land: one morning it was as if Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty had resurfaced off the coast of Norfolk. Delirious with visions of marinas and yacht clubs, one glib councilor proclaimed that “Great Yarmouth will be the new Monte Carlo.”

It was in response to this complex logic of heritage industry, local economy and landscape that Great Yarmouth born artists Aaron Juneau and Jonathan P Watts of YH485 Press produced the work Not Monte Carlo. In sight of the highest point in the town – a monument to Lord Nelson of Britannia looking the wrong way*, next to the outer harbour construction site, Juneau and Watts mobilised the rhetoric of protest art to give a ritual performance of regeneration.

* The tribute to Lord Horatio Nelson designed by William Wilkins and completed in 1819, represents Britannia looking across the land rather than out to sea. In Great Yarmouth it is said that when Wilkins realised his error he climbed to the top and threw himself off.

8.2©

YH485 Press

Aaron Juneau, Jonathan Watts and H

arriet Mitchell

9.1beyond

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© PRO

JECK

TField Scan 1, Rebecca Birch &

Rob Smith

9.2beyond

© PRO

JECK

TField Scan 2, Rebecca Birch &

Rob Smith

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© PRO

JECK

TField Scan 3, Rebecca Birch &

Rob Smith

© K

aavous-Bhoyroo

10beyond

A discussion between Kaavous Clayton and Jane Bhoyroo

Kaavous: Who is going to ask the first question?

Bhoyroo: That seems to have been you! I would like to continue by asking you to recall why we had the idea to work together to commission artists to make editions (and see if that fits with my memory). K: It feels difficult to think back without all the other thoughts and reasonings that have come since having some kind of effect. As far as I can remember it came out of a mutual desire to work with artists. Not to represent them in a traditional way, but to find an approach that could work with, or alongside, our lives in a way that would be relevant, push ourselves and the artists, and explore new markets. The idea of commissioning editions on a regular basis seemed to have an inbuilt flexibility. It would allow us to work with a wide group of artists to test ideas of what an edition can be and have the result of art as a product, encouraging new buyers of art through some kind of familiarity or ease in terms of object and cost. Does that fit with what you remember? Was there anything else? B: I agree. The desire to work with artists has always been there. I would just add a bit of history, since you set up OUTPOST in 2004 I have closely followed its intriguing programme and encountered many exceptional artists, and then, when we came to collaborate for the Voewood project in 2008 it became clear that there was room to do something really different, creating new and open opportunities for the artists and for the audience. I think that the choice of artists has been a really interesting journey. Looking back since we began on the summer solstice in 2008, how do you perceive the collection to date?

K: Thinking of it in terms of a collection is interesting. Because we encourage each artist to approach the commission or invitation to work with us in an open way and to explore what an edition could be with no restrictions in terms of numbers or production methods there is naturally a diverse result. I think this is to be expected in respect of who we have asked to work with us, but has also been a surprise at times and given a strength to the collection in terms of diversity. Production techniques have ranged from the hand-made to the mass produced and some of the resulting objects have touched on aspects of the commercial world that are very familiar, like badges, tea-towels, cds, and cat-boxes. The artists’ interpretations or use of these object types have certainly made me rethink my relationship with the world. And of course there have been other approaches too. How about you? And do any editions stand out for you or would that be too revealing?

B: Yes, too revealing I’m afraid! I have been really inspired by the way that the artists have taken risks and surprised us as they explore the nature of the edition, often learning new skills to take their practice forward. While they are by no means restricted to a single quality, the ones that stand out for me are Leo’s daring, Simon’s wit, Coco’s skill, David’s humour, Lee’s elegance, Rob’s intelligence and Rosie’s poeticism – each artist has shown a real commitment to developing new ideas and I have very much enjoyed living with all of the editions. Where do we go from here?

K: I hope we carry on. The discussion may pause but never end as I think there’s plenty more to say.

B: Definitely, but unfortunately no more room to say it here.

beyond11

© Stew

Black Hole, K

evin Parker

beyond12

© O

UTPO

ST TD

OH

Mat, c/o Jaques Rogers

beyond13.1

© France Fiction &

Valentinas Klim

asauskasThe beginning of a conversation

14.1

beyond

1. “Let us take the Foucauldian definition of biopolitics as a starting point. The term “biopolitics” indicates the way power, at a certain point, transforms itself to govern not only individuals, through a certain number of disciplinary processes, but also humanity constituted in “populations.” Biopolitics (through local biopowers) is thus concerned with the management of health, hygiene, food, birth rate, sexuality, etc., as these various fields of intervention become political stakes. In this way, biopolitics starts to engage with all the aspects of life that will become the arena for welfare state policies: its development is in fact wholly taken up in the attempt to better manage the labor force. Let us listen to Foucault on this point: “The discovery of population is, simultaneous to the discovery of the individual and the trainable (dressable) body, the other great technological node around which the political processes of the West have evolved.” Biopolitics is based, therefore, on principles that develop the technologies of capitalism and sovereignty: these principles that are greatly modified, in time, through their evolution from a disciplinarian form to one that adjoins to discipline the mechanisms of control. Whereas discipline was an “anatamo-politics” of bodies and essentially applied to individuals, biopolitics on the contrary represents a kind of great “social medicine” attempting the control of populations in order to govern their life: life now belongs to power.”The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics, by Antonio Negri. 2008, Semiotext(e). Éditions Stock, 2006. Page thirty.

2. “A term Foucault introduced in 1976 which names configurations of power relations that concern themselves not with exercising the old sovereign’s right to put subjects to death or demand the sacrifice of their lives in war but, rather, with exercising the power to make human beings live. Networks of biopower are institutionalised relations and practices that function to oversee, regulate, and direct populations so as to increase or decrease fertility and longevity, manage public health and mortality, control epidemics and maintain living environments. Biopolitical strategies may include governmental programmes for public hygiene, state- or corporate-sponsored campaigns to improve workers’ morals and physical fitness, mandatory vaccinations, tax or age incentives for marriage and family planning, state regulation of fertility, public surveillance and crime management, insurance, and a host of related social and economic programmes. Biopower emerges out of normalised disciplinary power in the nineteenth century; it differs from disciplinary power in that it does not focus on individuals (as disciplinary power does) except as members of populations, but the two types of power are complementary in the development of contemporary forms of state and corporate management of human lives. Foucault discusses biopower in Part V of The History of Sexuality, Volume One (1980) and chapter 11 of ‘Society Must Be Defended’ (2003). In both texts, he links the rise of biopower with the rise of state racism in the twentieth century, suggesting that the imperative to manage populations typically involves or leads to a desire to ‘purify’ them.”L. McWhorter. “See also: Agamben; state of exception”The Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, edited by John Protevi. Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

3. “QUESTION: It seems to me, with a certain degree of difference, that the concept of a virtual senate is similar to Negri’s and Hardt’s concept of Empire. [Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000)]CHOMSKY: Empire, yes, but I have to say I found it hard to read. I understood only parts, and what I understood seemed to me pretty well known and expressible much more simply. However, maybe I missed something important.QUESTION: Yes, and the book arrives to the same conclusion as yours but through a more complicated, less readable way...CHOMSKY: If people get something out of it, it’s okay. What I understand seems to be pretty simple, and this is not a criticism. I don’t see any need to say in a complicated way what you can say in an easier way. You can make things look complicated, that’s part of the game that intellectuals play; things must look complicated. You might not be conscious about that, but it’s a way of gaining prestige, power and influence.QUESTION: Do you look at Foucault’s work in this perspective?CHOMSKY: Foucault is an interesting case because I’m sure he honestly wants to undermine power but I think with his writings he reinforced it. The only way to understand Foucault is if you are a graduate student or you are attending a university and have been trained in this particular style of discourse. That’s a way of guaranteeing, it might not be his purpose, but that’s a way of guaranteeing that intellectuals will have power, prestige and influence. If something can be said simply, say it simply, so that the carpenter next door can understand you. Anything that is at all well understood about human affairs is pretty simple. I find Foucault really interesting but I remain skeptical of his mode of expression. I find that I have to decode him, and after I have decoded him, maybe I’m missing

something. I don’t get the significance of what I am left with. I have never effectively understood what he was talking about. I mean, when I try to take the big words he uses and put them into words that I can understand and use, it is difficult for me to accomplish this task. It all strikes me as overly convoluted and very abstract. But what happens when you try to skip down to real cases? The trouble with Foucault, and with this certain kind of theory, arises when it tries to come down to earth. Really, nobody was able to explain to me the importance of his work...”The Dominion and The Intellectuals, Noam Chomsky interviewed by an anonymous interviewer, Antosofia, 2003. http://chomsky.info/interviews/2003----.htm

4. “... Foucault’s work allows us to recognize the biopolitical nature of the new paradigm of power.(2) Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it. Power can achieve an effective command over the entire life of the population only when it becomes an integral, vital function that every individual embraces and reactivates of his or her own accord. As Foucault says, “Life has now become . . . an object of power.”(3) The highest function of this power is to invest life through and through, and its primary task is to administer life. Biopower thus refers to a situation in which what is directly at stake in power is the production and reproduction of life itself.”Empire, by Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri. Harvard University Press, 2001. Page twenty three.

5. from General election turnout 1945 – 2005, http://www.ukpolitical.info/Turnout45.htmThese figures show “the percentage of registered voters who actually voted ... excluding votes deliberately or accidentally spoiled.” Other years: 1997: 71.4, 1992: 77.7, 1987: 75.3, 1983: 72.7.

6. I have attempted to find out who said ‘no matter who you vote for the government always wins’ on the web. It is often attributed to ‘anarchists’ and I found one reference to Emma Goldman. My search was not exhaustive.

7. Who Needs Socialism, Socialist Standard, January 2005. http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/jan05/whoneeds.html

Is Labour Government the Way to Socialism? Socialist Party of Great Britain, 1946.http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pdf/ilgws.pdf

8. “Social and political scientists could not help noticing during the years of New Labour Government that its policies converged with those of its Tory predecessors. … In industrial policy, training, education, pensions, crime, [is] found an almost complete convergence … [the Tories] cannot do anything about any of these major issues and the more New Labour endorses and carries out Tory policies, the more hopelessly shackled the Tory Party becomes. … Convergence is disastrous for everyone in a democratic society, … Though both parties and their spokespeople made every effort during the general election of 2001 to concentrate on their differences, convergence kept creeping back onto the agenda. The electorate got the point at once. Labour won the election by another massive majority. But their vote (10.7 million) was dramatically lower not just on 1997. … The Tory vote was down too, and so was the Liberal Democrat vote. Indeed the most striking feature of the voting figures in 2001 was the huge numbers of voters who did not vote. With the single exception of 1918, when the vote had just been granted and the people were recovering from a ghastly and pointless world war, there never was a time when fewer people used their right to vote than in 2001.”The Vote: How It Was Won and How It Was Undermined, by Paul Foot. 2005, Viking. Page four hundred and twenty three.

9. “... now for the producer; I mean the real producer, the worker; how does this scramble for the plunder of the market affect him? The manufacturer, in the eagerness of his war, has had to collect into one neighbourhood a vast army of workers, he has drilled them till they are as fit as may be for his special branch of production, that is, for making a profit out of it, and with the result of their being fit for nothing else...”How We Live and How We Might Live, by William Morris. 1884. http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1884/hwl/hwl.htm

10. The Collins Paperback English Dictionary, 1990 edition. Chief Editor Patrick Hanks.I have used this dictionary and http://www.thesaurus.com/ extensively during writing.

14.1©

Adam Burton

beyond

Words Regarding Biopower.

I am writing about this word: biopower. - In the context of the premise that: the concept of biopower can have cognitive affect as both a concept explained - its definition irrespective of the word, and a concept - the word alone with an implicit definition defined in the head. Also I am asking: is the suggestion manifest without the word? I do not intend to convince with my answer or to get anywhere. Though I might. I want only to write about biopower. I wonder: the philosophical vernacular serves whom?

As with everything, political philosophy has terminology and in the midst of that body of specialized words we may encounter innumerable layers of complication. These dialects are open to interpretation but their explicit meaning and significance is informed by a wealth of secondary resource inaccessible to those not fortunate enough to have been suitably educated.

My grasp of the term biopower1 is not total. It is framed with several particular citations, which restrict - by choice - for the purposes of this writing, my capacity for the lingua franca of political philosophy.

My own denotation and subsequent connotations of the locution biopower2 are infused with and influenced by the opinion that convoluted and coiled lingo can be used as a means toward the establishment of power3. I am writing of this confluence.

I think that the significance of a word can someways be conveyed by its context. Moreover, the task of realising the meaning, purpose, and use of ‘biopower’4 was necessarily a part of my eventual perception of the word. However I do not think that the process should be prerequisite, for it is not the function of language to obscure thought.

61.4 percent of the UK electorate voted in the general election of 2005, an increase of two percent on the previous election5. Allow me to suppose that the inclination to not vote, though commonly disregarded as voter apathy is, opposingly, a conscious choice. I feel as though said demographic might be with the (anarchist?) aphorism ‘no matter who you vote for the government always wins’6, and on that basis I reason the group do recognise that whichever of the political parties vying to manage capitalism7 succeeds at taking power their government will keep the population alive. It might be slightly more or slightly less grim depending on which side of the central point of convergence8 that politico set is positioned but all the same we will be permitted to live - and thereby work - until permitted to perish. I believe abstention to be an acknowledgement of the truism that the majority of human beings are compelled to sell their labour “and so enable the capitalist to play his game,”9 and an awareness of the concept of biopower.10

14.2©

Adam Burton

beyond15.1

© H

ayley Lock & C

aroline Wright

beyond15.2

© H

ayley Lock & C

aroline Wright

beyond

beyond16

© Stine H

ebert D

irector of Baltic Art Center – BAC

,Visby, G

otlandHoburg Lighthouse, Gotland. Built 1846. Automated 1978.

When the poet John Donne wrote “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main” in 1624; the common characteristics of an island were laid out in the same sentence. Arguably, no island is a man; but man lives on islands. Inherent in this logic is isolation and attachment as contradictory terms disconnecting the two parties: man and island. As an island inhabitant myself, I find this ambivalence most strikingly incarnated in the concept of the lighthouse. Functioning simultaneously as a warning for the people at sea, as well as a marker, manifesting an existence in the vast ocean. It is comforting to signal to someone out there that something is right here.

beyond17.1

© C

harles Avery,U

ntitled (El Sellers), 2008from

the series The Islanders

beyond

beyond17.2

© C

harles Avery,U

ntitled (Flat Map), 2008

from the series The Islanders

beyond17.3

© C

harles Avery, U

ntitled (The Place of the Route of the If’en), 2008from

the series The Islanders

beyond18.1

© Birta G

urdjonsdottirArtist and D

irector of The Living Art Museum

,Reykjavik

beyond18.2

© Birta G

urdjonsdottirArtist and D

irector of The Living Art Museum

,Reykjavik

beyond

11Crisis in Utopia; the ordeal of Tristan da Cunha, Peter A. Munch (1971)The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand (1964)Utopia or Oblivion, Buckminster Fuller (1969)Small is Beautiful: A study of economics as if people mattered, E. F. Schumacher (1973)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

2A Perfect Vacuum, Stanislaw Lem (1971)The Man in the High Castle, Phillip K Dick (1962)

1The Number of the Beast, Robert A. Heinlein (1980)The Stochastic Man, Robert Silverberg (1975)Watt, Samuel Beckett (1953)

1Venusia, Mark von Schlegell (2005)Open Sky, Paul Virilio (1997)In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin (1977)Dreamland - A Self Help Manual For A Frightened Nation, Andri Snær Magnason (2006, transl. 2008)Finnegans Wake, James Joyce (1939)

1Braço de Ferro, http://www.bfeditora.net/english/catalogue.htmlThe Reading Room, Nottingham, http://hinterlandprojectsreadingroom.wordpress.com/Charles Harrison ed., Essays on Art & Language, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA / London, 2001CAC Interviu, http://www.cac.lt/en/publications/interviewBrian Aldiss, Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, Concept Store Journal #1, Arnolfini, Bristol, Autumn 08

1The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living, Fritjof CapraCritical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, Philip Ball

1The Road to Interzone: Readng William S. Burroughts Readin, Michael Stevens (2009)http://www.socialfiction.orgThe Anthropology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault (1969)Social Aesthetics: II Examples to Begin with, in the Light of Parallel History, Lars Bang Larsen, Afterall Issue I, Autumn/Winter 2000 http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.1/social.aesthetics.II.examples.begin.light.parallel/)

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