Zollverein

In Germany with Forced Entertainment making programme about the evolution of their new production having its world premiere at PACT, Zollverein, Germany.

Merzman

the reconstructed Merzbau at the Sprengel Museum , Hannover, 2011.

the Merzbarn, Elterwater, October, 2011.

the Merzbarn wall, at the Hatton Gallery Newcastle on Tyne, 2011.

Been working on a new radio documentary about Kurt Schwitters, the German artist who died in the Lake District in 1948. He called his art Merz, and the word could apply to anything he made, from painting to montage to sculpture to sound poems. He even changed his middle name to Merz, so he was his own artwork. His most important pieces were his Merzbau - live-in, walk-in environments he constructed from all sorts of materials he collected, first in his house in Hannover, and then, after the Nazis forced him to flee Germany in the late 1930s, in Norway - and finally, in a barn in Elterwater, near Ambleside. This Merzbarn was unfinished at the time of Schwitters' death, and its one complete wall was later removed, partly due to the efforts of the British pop artist Richard Hamilton, and taken to the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle. Despite this fragmentation, the Merzbarn is the only surviving example of Schwitters' original Merzbau works anywhere, the others having been destroyed. The programme, Merzman: The Art of Kurt Schwitters, is transmitted on Monday, January 9, 2012, at 4.00pm.

Driven

Have a look at my entry for this year's Observer/Comica graphic novel competition.

worksop

Worksop, where coal was once king, is now home to the world's biggest sandwich factory. It's also got all the other problems familiar to post-industrial Britain:  from unemployment and drug abuse to a vague sense of meaninglessness and blankness when you walk around the town centre. It's a town that's neither northern nor of the midlands, but somewhere in between, and with an eye on East Anglia. My idea is an absurd one: to investigate, through looking at this town, whether sandwiches and snacks have had more of a makeover in the past twenty years than the people who make them. Do governments and corporations think about marketing more than about communities?  

I'd like to point something out....

I'd like to point something out to Manchester City Council. This building, currently undergoing refurbishment, is a library. NOT a plinth for a car advert. Apart from the fact that the car looks fucking stupid, the whole context of this piece of propaganda is offensive. Wouldn't the Council be better off using the Library space to encourage people to use public transport - like the Metro, which is RIGHT OUTSIDE?

konjic

Pravdoliub Ivanov: Behold

Basim Madgy: Our Prehistoric Fate

service tunnel leading to main bunker

Iaona Nemes: Monthly Evaluations (06.09.2006) detail, in Tito's bedroom, containing the bunker's only double bed.

Mladen Miljanovic: Today I Became A Real Artist

Excavated between the 1950s and the late 70s, the nuclear bunker near Konjic in Bosnia is the setting for a new contemporary art biennial, called Time Machine. The name is appropriate. The bunker was designed for President Tito and 350 of his military and political elite to survive for six months in the event of a nuclear attack from the USSR and other Eastern Bloc countries, after Yugoslavia was expelled the Cominform in 1948. The bunker, known as ARK (Atomska Ratna Komanda, or Atomic War Command) contains hundred of rooms, in which fixtures and fittings are perfectly preserved. Attending the opening of the Biennial on May 27, amid the politicians, the media and of course the artists, were also the few coachloads of local people , who up till recently will not have had the chance to visit the bunker, because it's still in the hands of the Bosnian army. I'm working on a radio documentary about the event, to be broadcast on July 14, 2011, on BBC Radio 4.

Schwitters again

In Bury on May 1 to visit Warth Mill, where Kurt Schwitters was incarcerated in 1940, as an "enemy alien"... performances of Ursonate took place as part of Bury Text Festival.. when I get a minute I'll add a full namecheck of artists. Very spooky atmosphere down there in the basement, where the prisoners really did have to live. A big contrast to the blazing sun and white plasterwork reflecting it outside.