WORDS / WORLDS: Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Practice

Date: 9 May 2013
Time: 1.30-5.30pm

9th May 2013 The Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster University: Centre for Performance and Practice

Convened to mark the appointment of Tim Etchells as Professor of Performance and Practice at LICA, Words / Worlds is an afternoon symposium focused on approaches to writing in an interdisciplinary context. The event takes its title from a two-part neon work All We Have is Words / All We Have is Worlds by Etchells, which quotes and then repeats with modification, a line from Samuel Beckett.
Beginning with a keynote paper/performance from Etchells, which opens questions relating his to text-work in different media, WORDS / WORLDS proceeds with panels and presentations from visual artists Martin John Callanan and Penny McCarthy, from curator Mathieu Copeland, from the novelist Tony White and from the performance maker and scholar Andrew Quick. WORDS / WORLDS celebrates the possibilities of a cross-disciplinary conversation between and about text-based work and writing. A statement by William Burroughs – that the purpose of writing is to make things happen – provides one point of departure for the discussions, which will see each of the participants touch upon key works and ideas from their practise as they think around texts and inter-texts, texts as interventions in, and transformations of, the world, texts as tests or probes of reality, and text as a tool for fragile and temporary world-building.

Free to attend
Organising departments and research centres: Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts

more info

Martin John Callanan: On Systems and Processes (de sistemas y procesos)

art.es arte_contemporáneo_internacional a

Article and interview with Pau Waelder in Art.es #53

Download the full article as PDF

art.es international_contemporary_art announces the publication of its issue #53, with the following contents:

• art.es Project #44: Marina Núñez, Necrosis. (2013), digital image.
Cover and 22 inside pages. As always, an exclusive for the magazine (the originals belong to the art.es Collection).
Introductory text: Susana Cendán: Marina Núñez: “Everything has to do with the monsters”.

• Reflections:
– China’s Long March (4/10) (Zhang Fang).
– Meschac Gaba: Trying to change African society (Abdellah Karroum).
– A quantum reflection of Bakalhau (Cod Fish) (Fernando Galán).

• Media Art:
– Martin John Callanan: On Systems and Processes (Pau Waelder).

• Interview:
– Rafa Macarrón: “the solitude of man before the universe inmensity” (Fernando Galán).

• Film:
– Lipsett: a personal dilemma (Jorge D. González).

• Work_and_Word:
– Marco Ayres (Portugal)
– Simón Vega (El Salvador)
– Luis Gordillo (Spain)
– Pipo Hernández (Spain)
– Natxo Frisuelos (Spain)

• Exhibitions:
– The sublimation of detail: José Ferrero (Madrid) (Terry Berne).
– Bunga: beyond space: Carlos Bunga (Santa Mónica, California, USA) (Béatrice Chassepot).
– The descent into Marina Núñez’s hells (Valladolid, España) (Alfonso León).
– Reinterpreting art’s recent history: Roger Gustafsson (Madrid) (Fernando Galán).
– If you like small things: group show (A Coruña, España) (Nilo Casares).

• Museums
– Critical museology (2/2): On the limits of institutional art criticism (and critical museology as established discourse (Jesús Pedro Lorente)

• What’s going on in… Toronto? (John K. Grande).

• Books:
– “La Movida”, counterculture and normalization (La Movida, au nom du Père, des fils et du Todo Vale) (Juan Albarrán).

art.es is a 100 % bilingual magazine (English/Spanish) with contributions from the world over, and aimed at the entire world of genuinely contemporary art.

art.es focuses on established art as well as the latest creative iniciatives emerging from every corner of the planet. It informs and reflects on topics of interest, but with a fresh language and crisp design which are comprehensible to both specialists and amateurs. It has over 90 specialized collaborators and correspondents covering each and every geographical and thematic area of the contemporary art world.

Press release

MARTIN JOHN CALLANAN: Martin John Callanan, Horrach Moyà, Palma de Mallorca










MARTIN JOHN CALLANAN: Martin John Callanan
Horrach Moyà, Palma de Mallorca
29 November 2012 – 17 January 17 February 2013 (extended one month)
Opening, 8pm, 29 November 2012

On May 16, 2008, Martin John Callanan changed his name to Martin John Callanan, by Deed Poll, sworn and sealed at the City of London Magistrate’s Court. On July 5, 2012, Martin John Callanan assumed the name of Martin John Callanan by Deed Poll, sworn and sealed by a Comissioner for Oath, and enrolled in the Supreme Court of Judicature. Through this action, at once absurd and totally in keeping with the laws of the United Kingdom, the artist Martin John Callanan (formerly Martin John Callanan) turns an administrative process into a reflexion on his own identity and the systems that validate the laws and institutions that govern our society.

We live in a multitude of systems: natural systems that affect our environment, social systems that define the possible actions in the framework of an established community, computer systems that enable and control the transmission and storage of data with which we create our memory and the image of our world. They shape our everyday reality, but we tend to ignore their existence or assume it as an indisputable fact: as the clouds floating overhead, these systems respond to a logic that is largely out of reach of the average citizen.

Through methodical and precise processes, Martin John Callanan explores the notion of citizenship in a globally connected world. The relationship between the individual and the systems that surround and affect our lives take shape in a series of works in which both the structures and the fragility of these systems are shown, sometimes by resorting to the absurd and the excess of information. The atworks in this exhibition at Horrach Moyà Gallery venture into the dynamics of natural, economic, administrative and mass media systems by means of an observation both on the cosmic and the microscopic level.

Inspired by the forms of scientific data visualization, the artist made in A Planetary Order (Terrestrial Cloud Globe) a globe that only shows the position of the clouds during a second in February 2, 2009. This ephemeral map, made from hundreds of photographs from NASA satellites, is embodied in a sculpture created with a 3D printer and shown as an unattended object, an ignored finding, a fragile piece containing an unusual vision of our environment .

The economic system, which has raised to such notorious prominence in recent years because of its obvious impact on our lives, is a complex structure whose functioning is increasingly necessary to understand and, as much as possible, to predict or even control. In this sense, and in response to the dominance of macroeconomics in the discourse of the media, the artist chooses a microscopic view of the world economy. The Fundamental Units, a series that begins with the works produced by Horrach Moyà Gallery for this exhibition, is an exploration of the lowest denomination coins from the world’s currencies using an infinite focus 3D optical microscope at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington (UK). The images obtained with the microscope have been combined to form an extremely detailed large scale reproduction of the least valuable coins from Australia, Chile, the Euro, Myanmar and the Kingdom of Swaziland. In these images the humble metal acquires a planetary dimension and is displayed as the atoms that shape the global economy.

The reality shown by the media consists in turn of its own units, the news covering the front pages of newspapers and circulated by television and radio, websites, blogs and social networks. The speed and density of the information flow that is generated in every corner of the planet and invades all communication channels exposes us to a saturation that paradoxically makes data illegible. I Wanted to See All of the News From Today deals with this excess of information by means of a web site that automatically collects the front pages of hundreds of newspapers around the world and displays them in a grid. From these data, the artist has produced a series of prints in which the pages of newspapers form a totemic picture of everyday life in the information society.

Martin John Callanan completes this exhibition with Deed Poll, which is both the action taken in the process of change (or recovery) of his name on July 5, 2012 and the legal documents, canceled passport, letters and responses, official notice in the newspaper and other items related to this administrative procedure. Callanan thus adds to his analysis of the systems that determine the conditions of life in the societies and the planet we inhabit an action on a personal level, as an individual and citizen that participates (voluntarily and involuntarily) in the dynamics generated by these systems.

Pau Waelder, Curator

Texto en español (PDF)

Reviews in El Mundo, Diario de Mallorca and Ultima Hora: PDF (Spanish)

Video of Deed Poll, 5 July 2012, Whitechapel Gallery

On the fifth day of July in the year 2012 at the building known as 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX, Martin John Callanan (formally Martin John Callanan) assumed the name of Martin John Callanan. A Deed Poll was made to that purpose. A Statutory Declaration sworn and sealed by a Commissioner for Oath to that affect. The Deed Poll shall be enrolled in the Supreme Court of Judicature. A public notice was published in the Camden New Journal, 5 July 2012.

documents and more

“Now or Lately Known As”: The Whitechapel’s London Open

Structuralist and post-structuralist linguistic theory has it that the relationship between the name (signifier) of a thing and its essence or identity (signified) is an essentially arbitrary one – there’s no reason why a thing should be called by one name and not another, save for habit or convention. In his performance Deed Poll, Martin John Callanan shows in an imaginative and quietly witty way how things aren’t necessarily so straightforward. By changing his name from Martin John Callanan to Martin John Callanan using the eponymous legal procedure, the artist demonstrated to a live audience at London’s Whitechapel Gallery the vectors of legal, political and religious power that underpin the day-to-day performative use of names in Western societies. The various hoops to be jumped through in order to satisfy banks and government bodies, including swearing on the Bible, spoken declarations, testimony from a responsible third party, signatures from witnesses, and the stamp and signature of an official registrar, are a far cry from the free movement of signifiers imagined by the post-structuralists.

Callanan’s performance accompanied the presentation of two of his works, International Directory of Fictitious Telephone Numbers and Letters 2004-2006, in The Whitechapel’s summer exhibition, The London Open. The gallery’s stated intent was “to showcase the most dynamic work being made in London in 2012”, with works being selected through an open submission process. The result is a mix of the poetic, the intelligent, and the tedious. Besides Callanan’s contributions, the intersections of power and language were also explored by Sol Archer, whose video work Palace in the Left spun a dazzling web of references encompassing hummingbirds, particle physics, Mayan rituals, neurobiology, and more. Just at the point when you are ready to believe in the interconnectedness of everything, however, the video concludes with the promise that all this is “coming soon to your future home”: networks of meanings made possible by their subsumption under the category of consumer product.

http://afternoondust.co.uk/now-or-lately-known-as

Notice of name change

Notice is hereby given that at the time of 3pm on the fifth day of July in the year 2012 at the building known as 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX, Martin John Callanan (formally Martin John Callanan) will assume the name of Martin John Callanan. A Deed Poll will be made for that purpose with a Statutory Declaration being sealed by a Commissioner for Oath to that affect. The Deed Poll shall be enrolled in the Supreme Court of Judicature.

London Open Whitechapel Gallery, London

This exhibition showcases the most dynamic work being made in London in 2012. Take a journey through a selection of the latest art trends and see potential stars of the future amongst 35 artists chosen by a panel of international artists, curators and collectors.

Political and social subject matter is a theme in many works. The show features artists using performance and DIY approaches to making work whilst others investigate kitsch, outsider art and countercultural groups. The exhibition includes Arnaud Desjardin’s live printing press, Leigh Clarke’s negative casts of masks of political figures often worn during demonstrations, Nicholas Cobb’s photographs showing fictitious model riot scenes at Bluewater shopping centre and Pio Abad’s work featuring Saddam Hussein’s gold taps printed on an imitation Versace silk scarf.

The London Open includes work in a diverse range of media from painting, sculpture, film, textile and photography to installation and performance. It includes Paul Westcombe’s intricate illustrations on takeaway coffee cups, Alice Channer’s body-based sculptures, Lucienne Cole’s pop culture-inspired performances and Martin John Callanan’s conceptual works, such as International Directory of Fictitious Telephone Numbers (2011) and Letters 2004-2006.

The London Open is a chance to see some of today’s most innovative artists. The Whitechapel Gallery’s open submission exhibitions have shown artists including Grayson Perry, Bob & Roberta Smith and Rachel Whiteread early in their careers.

Artists: Pio Abad, Peter Abrahams, Caroline Achaintre, Greta Alfaro, Sol Archer, Thomas Ball, Martin John Callanan, Dale Carney, Paul Carter, Alice Channer, Leigh Clarke, Nicholas Cobb, Lucienne Cole, Beth Collar, Chris Coombes, Shona Davies, Jon Klein & Dave Monaghan, Arnaud Desjardin, Sarah Dobai, Shaun Doyle and Mally Mallinson, Ana Genoves, Mark Harris, Emma Holmes, John Hughes, Nikolai Ishchuk, Robert Orchardson, Heather Phillipson, Ruth Proctor, Amikam Toren, Charlie Tweed, Roy Voss, Paul Westcombe and Rehana Zaman.

Selectors: Patricia Bickers, editor of Art Monthly; artist Rodney Graham; collector Jack Kirkland; curator Marta Kuzma; and Whitechapel Gallery curator Kirsty Ogg.

Martin John Callanan will also have a Performance on 5 July


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