Novel ~ Upstairs
NOVEL
Upstairs
Edited ~ Alun Rowlands & Matt Williams
Designed by Sarah Boris
ISBN 978-1-5272-0375-4
www.novelnovelnovel.org
NOVEL asks us to think of writing as something distinct from information, as at least one realm of cultural production that is exempt from the encompassing obligation to communicate.
In print
Ed Atkins, Lutz Bacher, Hannah Black, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, James Hoff, Lisa Holzer, Travis Jeppesen, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Zoe Leonard, Stuart Middleton, Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, Richard Sides, Cally Spooner, Studio for Propositional Cinema, Martine Syms, Gili Tal, Oscar Tuazon, Peter Wachtler, Steven Warwick & Nora Khan and Canary Wharf.
Hannah Black, It’s Not That Deep, 2016
We would like to thank all the artists for their participation and the following for their kind support: Martin Clark, Maria Rusinovskaya, Steinar Sekkingstad and everyone at Kunsthall Bergen; Hauser & Wirth; Cabinet; Carlos/ Ishikawa; Arcadia Missa; Vilma Gold; Maureen Paley; Rodeo, London; Greene Nafatali; Callicoon Fine Arts; Bridget Donahue; Reena Spaulings; Rhizome, New York; Rodolphe Janssen; dépendence, Brussels; Exile; Bill Kouligas/ PAN; Isabella Bortolozzi; Supportico Lopez, Berlin; Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna; gb agency; Galerie Chantal Crousel; Goton, Paris; Jenny’s; Venus Over Manhattan, Los Angeles.
NOVEL is an editorial and curatorial project, publishing artists writing and texts that oscillates between modes of fiction and poetry. NOVEL acts in-between the potential performance of a script, and the indeterminate transcript of the event. The journal hosts a cacophony of voices that coalesce around writing as a core material of a number of artists exploring language and the speculative force of fiction. Here, art writing is an apparatus for knowledge capture, writing as parallel practice, writing as political fiction, writing as another adventure, renegotiating unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects.
00 Ed Atkins
Front cover
01 Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff
contribution dispersed throughout the publication
02 THE EDITORIAL (after D.B. 4 May, 1968)
03 Lutz Bacher Horses, 2013
04 Elaine Cameron-Weir Data Collection, 2016
05 Lawrence Abu Hamdan Diagram of a future flat, 2016
06 Lisa Holzer, Eat Me, 2016
07 James Hoff Every Second 17 Packs of Cigarettes are Consumed by US Kids, 2016
08 Sidsel Meineche Hansen
Contribution dispersed throughout the publication:
NO TO PEPE (USA), 2016 Credit: Shrub, Linked by Air; FREE WIFI STUDENT DEBT (CalArts, LA.), 2016 Credit: Shrub, Linked by Air; We’re Better off Out (White Chicken), 2016; AGAINST UBER (San Jose, Costa Rica), 2016
09 Lynn Hersham Leeson, Women Art Revolution, 2016 (extract from graphic novel written by Lynn Hersham Leeson and Alexandra Choweniac, drawings by Spain Rodriguez)
10 Martine Syms, Misdirected Kiss Notes, 2016
11 Zoe Leonard, I want a president, 1992
12 Stuart Middleton, Tup, 2016
13 Travis Jeppesen, Poem against the fog, 2016
14 Studio for Propositional Cinema, Dialogue AS WATER DISSOLVES SUGAR…, 2016
15 Cally Spooner, Assorted early research methods On False Tears and Outsourcing (a novel in progress), 2016
16 Hannah Black, It’s Not That Deep, 2016
17 Oscar Tuazon ongoing serialization of Last Try, 2009 (extract)
18 Canary Wharf, Father 3 George Iacobescu The total annihilation of a human being 3 April 1999, 2016 (extract from ‘Architectural Fathers’, volume 3, OCR)
19 Peter Wächtler, News 1, 2016
20 Steven Warwick & Nora Khan, Fear Indexing the X-Files, 2016 (extract)
21 Richard Sides, dread, 2016
22 Gili Tal, Weather Forecast, 2016
NOVEL explores the apparatus of exhibition making and the sites of reading (gallery, publication, screen). The residency proposes an ‘op-ed’ curatorial method of counter programming and staging a dispersed scenography of reading practices. This enquiry tests how renewed emphases on editorial sensibility in curatorial contexts are being shaped and transformed. How new editorial positions emerging through exhibitions and publishing platforms (digital, print, and broadcast), as well as expressly socialized events that bring talks, screenings, and live events into closer proximity and influence with art production, its reception, and narratives? What are the aesthetic and political potentialities and responsibilities of the editorial, and what makes contemporary art a ready context for an emerging orality.
Bringing together international artists, writers and performers, to explore reading as a distinct and singular practice within contemporary art, NOVEL Upstairs starts with the publication of a special issue of the journal alongside a durational film programme, talks, scripted performances and reading. ‘On Reading’ a public symposium reflects on the research including tele-presence remote conversation between Moyra Davey (New York) and Aven Seek (Calcutta) live streamed and archived by Kunsthall Bergen.
NOVEL asks us to think of writing as something distinct from information, as at least one realm of cultural production that is exempt from the encompassing obligation to communicate.
Zoe Leonard, I want a president, 1992, typewriting on paper, 11 x 8 ½ inches
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
“It was 5.30pm, with the sun going down, when Cecilia was hit in the lip by her Bic multi-option pen. With a book in one hand, and the end of the Bic in her mouth, her tongue pushed down the blue option, fiddled about, found then raised green. Green pops up fast, lip trapped by green, lip cut and swollen. Transference Burn. Writes Janet Malcolm, via Joanna Walsh; Cecilia closes her book.
So interested is Cecilia in this new psychic term, she forgets the lip pain, and roles onto her tanned back to face the clouds, wondering what in her life burns, and what can be transferred. On the other side of the rock, she hears Aldo talking to his Editor through a Samsung phone’s speaker.
“So,"crackles the phone, "you have a big plan!”
“Sure!” Aldo replies loudly, facing the Aegean sea in high wind.“I’m going to storm on to that page… and just break this shit down and…” His voice is carried away by the weather.”
Cally Spooner, Assorted early research methods On False Tears and Outsourcing (a novel in progress), 2016
Steven Warwick & Nora Khan, Fear Indexing the X-Files, 2016 (extract)
Mark Leckey
Untitled (Sodium Light), 2014
For the Upstairs residency, NOVEL (Alun Rowlands & Matt Williams) will host events, readings, screenings and the dispersion of a new publication. Upstairs will be cast in the yellow glow of Mark Leckey’s Untitled (Sodium Light), 2014 and filled by the sound and textual image of Hannah Black’s Power Cut 1970, 2012. The NOVEL archive covers the walls of Upstairs as a locus for reading and the fictioning of a scenario.
Lynn Hersham Leeson, Women Art Revolution, 2016
“fantasize over the dendritic chalcedony pit, the polluted red cooling quadrant of the fictional dryhead mine ,over alien off the charts sterile salinity of white salt flats, prone to wet mirage which Revive the noncognitive sexuality of the seeming dead suggestive abiogenesis and of course with this in mind it want to of course it submit itself to translation and it want it known that what could be is what is in the first place therei is no door on that threshold no sentry no guard but empty chair, an unoccupied position, a proposition hypothesis). only a WIDE opening The radical concept of , a specific perceptual perfection, a honed functioning a focusing of libidinal propensity to a single point, extreme concentration of attention always an erotic notion. Electrified gas burning overwhelminglly in the glass vein, the humanoid vein violent plasma blue fork of lightning The concupiscent abundance of energy striking this one concern like all nerve roadds lead to clit a minor diagram of some insane sci fi weapon of mass destruction, as trance darkened eyes rolling back soft in the socket multiple times perpetuum and engage i in n the innate sexuality of objects, its a slime-greased surface,its an inherent currency of being, a false meniscus limit border of and rational valuation abandoned replaced hormonalchemical imbalance pull from the depthless cortex a coiled serpent a distillation, an erotix a readilyy available anti repression a constant state of queer pique and so so so much to grind and burn a wild expenditure and a crushing debt simultaneous dissolution reconstitution and the sa em same sky azure + still pregnant with the general possible after all these singular fucks in the early sprawling reflected int the parabolic pool of mercury, in the shack encased telescopic space eye of the first rotating liquid lens in, there it is reflecting terrestrial. an idea witness with boots on the ground all the while examining the innumerable and light years away the technological tells the desired data which students on a budget pay to collect for the government… this data of desire is information based on a dream, theoretical stab in the dark line of enquiry so huge it must be computed into comprehension yet.remain illogic forms of exchange and , like the named ordering of material state change we find insane description so ambrosial drip neccessary to justify the urge erotica of interpretation, of looking at somthing, scrutiny a solid turning on of the taps a twisting of nipple, fetish of inquiry of aquiring immaterial in orgasmic everything body now,,. ran rampant all over you electric odor of animality left on ritualistic overnight 1000s of year scraped off with a microscope slide wielded with tender info lust oh why not why should it be embarrassed about knowing what it want when it want nothing we know everything so wisdom says”
Elaine Cameron-Weir Data Collection, 2016 (extract)
“Her knapsack full, she poked her head out of the dumb-waiter and listened, she could hear Awd Mandy rowing with Darren about him being too rat-arsed to drive and pick her up later and him saying she should learn how to ride a bike. Running at a crouch she burst out the front door and vaulted the stile into shoulder length grass gone to seed. Crushing a narrow path down with her feet she made her course diagonally, picked up a piece of dried cow parsley and broke the stem in her teeth, an earwig crawled out into her mouth and she spat it away “pah,” she could hear the combines in the other field, they were working from morning till night. She went over into the back of number 16 and then through the hedges one by one, stepping over the gnomes and the cat shit, the millstones and the mouse mushrooms. She broke out of the wide conifers onto the main road and went west, over the county border and over the 5-bar into the big stubble field. “The thing is” Dick-Rodger had said, “The thing is: bunkers aint just for the roundheads you know, theres bunkers all over the country, stuff left over from the cold war and that,” He was quite knowledgeable about this kind of stuff, typical boorish way. He claimed he’d dug his way into “the room where they keep all the maps” and that old Winston Churchill had been there once, and Dick-R said “how do” to him which didn’t add up.”
Stuart Middleton, Tup, (extract) 2016
