Breaking the Rules

Skulls, Madrigals, Swedish Films, David

Robin asks me to do an obituary for David Troostwyk who died on the 29th September. It's for Art Monthly which won't come out until November: how can you sum up a man's life in 300 words?  I see the obituary in the Guardian David's obituary : and we cover much the same ground - his dealing in photographs and letters as David Koos (his middle name) and his trajectory at an odd angle to the art establishment. Where we differ is the Guardian obituarist's focus on David's Euan Uglow Review, and my emphasis on his desire to remain a painter: "For me, the act of painting was never considered, never possible unless only painting could provide the means of sustaining legitimate calls of the mind."  Space doesn't allow us to capture the man:  I wrote the catalogue introduction to his 'Private Act' (1999) and interviewed him to do this  - there were stories of his radio am days, sharing a bed with a Welsh (?) farmer as a wartime evacuee, an obsession with canasta...I hope I can find the black T-shirt he gave me at my Chelsea leaving party with the transfer text SB ELIXIR = EX LIBRIS (a typical David word game) which I'd like to wear for his funeral.

Paul invites me to the private view of Damien Hirst's sub-Mexican 'The Dead' exhibition at the Other Criteria. There's an interesting PhD thesis (compare and contrast) to be written on the contrasting fortunes of David and Damien (and conceptual art). It's heaving with the Frieze Fair hordes.

I get home and watch the DVD that Anna-Karin has sent from Filmform in Stockholm, where we met at the ARLIS Norden Conference - very wet I seem to remember. The Lars Arrhenius animation is both funny and sad, and I like the film about the artist Zdenko Buzek, a Zagreb artist. The voiceover by a child gives me an idea for my metonymy show next year.

Sunday is madrigals in Canonbury, so I use it as an excuse to visit the Estorick Collection, which has an exhibition of the Hockemeyer Italian ceramic collection: ceramics had a surprising (to me) at least centrality to the work of Marino Marini and Lucio Fontana. It's amazing how our preconceptions write out chapters of history.

David's importance will eventually surface to its rightful level.

Arte povera

Last Saturday went to the last day of the Giuseppe Penone exhibition at the Frith Street Gallery (now at Golden Square).  Penone  As you enter there is a sickly sweet smell: is the receptionist enjoying a takeaway? It turns out that it's coming from tree resin in a carved recess in the centre of a wooden beam. 'Scultura di linfa' (2006).

'Arte povera' was a 1970s term which elided an interest in materials and a less exclusive practice of art - old clothes and mud were two materials in vogue. Penone's project is different: by paring down to simple materials and structures, he frees the metaphoric possibilities of the substances he uses. 'Lo spazio della scultura, corteccia' (2004) is a bronze cast of cedar bark, partly covered by leather hammered onto its surface, mimicking the tree: part of the leather is unchanged. We are in the world of myths, Ovid's 'Metamorphoses', where a god can become a tree or a man or woman can be changed into a tree or animal.

For Noel

Chris rings late last night with the terrible news that Noel Forster died in hospital on Friday. I have known Noel since the early 1980s when he was a visiting teacher at Chelsea. We became good friends and shared many a bottle of claret at the Chelsea Arts Club and many memorable conversations - the pig/pork dichotomy and abstraction (how this should surface now after the artists' books fair entry ?!)...I did an interview of Noel which is now in the British Library's Sound Archive - and was planning a monograph at the time but could never get a publisher. Earlier in the year I had been reading Thomas Bernhard's 'Frost', thinking how I could use that format for the book.

Noel was in my view the most important post-War abstract painter in England, and his work combined performance, intellectual rigour and the artist's craft. It was simultaneously clever and sensuous. He was an influential teacher too and a very gifted musician. But he was also larger than life.

It's hard to imagine a world without him. The last sentence of the introduction to his Flowers catalogue that I wrote in 1999 talks of his work telling us about the world: "about what we are and what we are not."

A Rest

100 lengths in the Chelsea pool. It's busy both in the pool and the changing rooms. Shop in Waitrose on the way home - remember to get some Marsala for my zupa inglese, a sort of trifle that the Madrigals Group kill for. So beware. I go to see Simon Morley's exhibition 'The English Series' at Art First in Cork Street - his paintings are an interrogation of the book format. Decide to do more galleries - several years ago I did 20 galleries in two hours but that took some planning. Next I see Ben Nicholson's prints at Alan Cristea and then Milton Avery at Waddingtons - Michele, an ex-student at Chelsea but still a practising painter with great talent, is working there this Saturday. The show is interesting and covers work from the 1920s onwards - this must be the biggest show of his work ever in Europe. The show's on to November 24th - well worth seeing. It's a strange reversal - Nicholson, known for his paintings, has a print show and Avery, whom I knew primarily for his monotypes, has a painting show.

Return home and sweep up the fallen leaves in my car parking place. Squeaky the cat comes to hinder. Decide to cook ratatouille, couscous and lamb kebabs for dinner - lamb kebabs and bacon sandwiches are the obstacles to my ever becoming a vegetarian. I have a PhD draft to read so I need fortification.

Breaking the Rules now seems a very long way away, but there are events and talks planned for the next four months. I wonder how many people came to see it today?

Zero -8

Bump into Alan on my way in and give him a set of corrected labels - the more times we go through these the better. John rings to discuss the curatorial support for the Britishnness/Citizenship exhibition. I plough through more emails - more suggestions for invites to the private view. I check with Lorna whether the meeting room for the National Co-ordinatinng Committee for Art & Design is still booked and request visitors' passes for Wednesday. I confirm with Jane that I can meet her at the Whitechapel opening tomorrow and sign the Book Works accounts. The show is Langlands & Bell.They were very helpful when I did my 'Artists' Multiples' book and we have kept in touch. I attempt to fill in my Performance Management Mid-year Form for my meeting on Friday, and request a better Magna Carta slide for the presentation I'm preparing for the Director. Sort out the walkthroughs and press views on the 7th and 8th.

My first meeting is the Additional Storage Programme Moves Board - this is the biggest move for the British Library since we moved into St Pancras. We discuss the moves methodology and the risk register. It's a video-conference and I am starting to like the format - you can see more behaviour than in a normal physical meeting.

Back to the sign-off of the last panels. Little errors like Munch for Munich, Franz for Frans...Then another meeting - a brainstorm on collection storage strategy, with post-its left, right and centre. Geraldine rings to ask me down to Exhibitions to discuss a problem with the End of the Avant Garde section. British Library exhibitions have tended to fade out rather than end, and I'm determined we have closure. The problem is that we need to accommodate a computer screen, two collection items and a text panel in a small space. I can cut the text and we solve the problem.

It's 5.30 and I decide to go home. The Tube is very slow tonight. I get home and cook one of my standbys - chilli, garlic, pepper, pasta and olive oil, accompanied by a glass of red wine. Then a salad and a pear. Next door's kitten pours through the backdoor when I unlock it. I feel I could sleep for ten years.

Turps Bananas

After lunch with my sister and after I have flagged down a taxi to take her to Liverpool Street Station, I walk back to the Fine Art Society where I had noticed out of the corner of my eye that there was an auction for 'Turps Banana', a painting magazine turps banana jointly edited by Peter, whom I knew when he worked for DCMS (Department of Culture Media and Sport - could all these be in the plural, besides Media?). There's a notice saying it's closed for rehanging - but Peter is having a fag outside and he shows me around - work by Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Peter Blake and a wonderfully phallic banana by the Chapman Brothers - there's a good Chelsea contingent: Keith Coventry, Rebecca Warren, Harland Miller, Kirsten Glass, Neal Tait...The auction is tonight. But I can't go along as I have to finish off the copy of the Breaking the Rules exhibition leaflet.

A day off?

Hoped to have today off, but I have to come in to work to revise the copy for an article. I send off the revisons - it's another translation into a language that a different audience can understand.

I respond to some emails, then seek refuge in the Humanities 2 Reading Room to work on the copy for the exhibiition leaflet. It's a fold-out and on one side I have suggested that I do an exquisite corpse of definitions of the chief isms - expressionism, cubism, futurism, dada, constructivism and surrealism. The text will awkwardly abut and in different type-faces: gothic, caslon, futura etc. (I begin to think of making an artist's book with 'avant garde' in different type-faces...) I finish the draft, and decide we should drop names of individuals randomly into the text...Hope John in our Design Department likes this idea.

More emails: it's a bit like playing table tennis against a ball-firing robot. And I'm running out of memory so I have to purge my mail boxes.

I go off to Cassie's exhibition - it closes tomorrow and the District Line is out at the weekend, so this is effectively my last chance. From Mile End Tube I walk up to the Roman Road and find St Paul's Church on St Stephens Road. Cassie has painted 50 small pictures of memorial park benches, isolated in the white space of the paper. There's an intersting tension in her work between the well-madeness of the painting and its conceptual purpose, the exploration of loss and the subversion of memory.

I begin to think how the avant garde used old bottles for new wine - Joyce encoding his modernist novel in the Homeric epic; Malinowski's revolutionary social anthropology of Melanasia described in terms of the Ancient Greeks as in his title - 'The Argonauts of the Western Pacific' (1922). I remember talking to Colin St John Wilson about this when we did an exhibition to celebrate his 80th birthday at the British Library - he wanted to show books published in 1922, an annus mirabilis, of writing - but he kept wanting to include books published in 1921 or 1923. And then there are those who appear to be avant-garde but their works aren't - maybe the Sitwells. And the opposite: TS Eliot, epitome of the Anglo-Catholic bourgeois - but the early work is truly avant-garde. I'd like to explore more about his reading (or not - though this is unlikely given his acquaintance with modern French poetry) of Apollinaire and Cendrars.

The New St Pancras Eurostar Terminal

I took this photo last week and already things have changed - there is a large red crane in front of it this morning. I had wanted to contrast this with a picture of the interior of our gallery for Breaking the Rules in a sort of competition as to who is going to finish first. The new terminal was one reason we wanted to do the exhibition in the first place - and for a while there were lots of trains potentially in the exhibition - I think we are down to the Cendrars/Delaunay 'Prose of the Trans-Siberian' and a Russian photomontage book cover. We had even thought of reviving the title 'All Change'. 'A Slap in the Face' was another possibility until the Estorick Collection used it first - I quite liked the idea of getting somebody in the gallery to slap visitors in the face.  We did some quick market testing on visitors to the popular 'London in Maps' exhibiition:

Breaking the Rules 9 1st choice 2 2nd choice

Tango with Cows 4 1st 2 2nd ('sounded like an academic trying to be clever')

World in Reverse 3 1st, 5 2nd

Manifesto 2 1st, 0 2nd

Speed and Noise (1 1st, 2 2nd)

So Breaking the Rules it was. It's easy to get pedantic on rules! What rules did the avant garde break? Don't you need rules so you can break them? Did the avant garde create their own rules? Is conformity the new rule-breaking? etc.

But the title also references typography - the type-high strips of metal used in printing - and after 'Blast', 'Dada', El Lissitsky and Rodchenko graphic design certainly wasn't the same again. Type-high and rules reminds me of the book artist, Ken Campbell, who used letterpress and nearly every printmaking process to print and overprint books that broke the rules Ken Campbell's Broken Rules. The revival in interest in and production of the artist's book in the last twenty years may have something to do with the book being liberated from being the sole carrier of information. (But how does that relate to the Russian Futurists in the 1910s challenging traditional notions of what a book should be, but at the highpoint of print culture ??)

I have drifted off the Eurostar subject. I would still like to get twenty or so people together for one of the first arrivals with those signs you see in the arrivals halls of airports etc. held by car drivers and greeters, but this time with the names of the avant garde on the card: 'Apollinaire', 'Ball', 'Breton', 'Tzara', 'Schwitters' etc.

Breaking the Rules: are there any left to break?

Welcome to our new blog about the British Library's forthcoming Breaking the Rules exhibition. Featuring the latest news about the exhibition itself - as well as comment, opinion and behind the scenes insights - this is a space to discuss all sorts of issues and questions raised by the exhibition's theme.

Breaking the Rules opens on 9 November at the British Library in St Pancras, London NW1. If you're a postgrad studying in the creative arts, you can join our Facebook group and enter our great competition.

So why not subscribe to the blog feed and tell the curators what you think? What does the term 'Avant Garde' mean to you now, in the 21st century? Indeed are there any rules left to break?

About Breaking The Rules

The 'Avant Garde' movement is traditionally associated with Paris and Berlin, but this exhibition explores the rapid exchange of ideas and the presence of the Avant Garde in many European cities - including London, Brussels, Leiden, Munich, Weimar, Zurich, Vienna, Florence, Milan, Rome, Barcelona, Madrid, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Cracow, Prague, St Petersburg, Moscow, Tbilisi, Belgrade, Bucharest and Budapest. ‘Avant Garde’ is a French term meaning vanguard, and refers to people or works that are novel or experimental, particularly with respect to art, culture and politics. The term encompasses a variety of artistic styles and each is traditionally regarded as a movement in itself - Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, Suprematism, Constructivism and Surrealism. Breaking the Rules brings these movements together for the first time and explores common themes and the creative transformation which took place, as well as the continuing impact of the Avant Garde on contemporary culture.

The Avant Garde was characterised by its exploitation of the printed medium and Breaking the Rules draws upon the British Library’s unrivalled collection of literary manuscripts, sound recordings, flyers, posters, manifestos, artists’ books, and photobooks from across Europe, complemented by loans from other European museums and collections. Star items include Marinetti’s futurist experiment with words, type and visual text, Zang Tumb Tuum, the Burliuk Brothers’ Tango with Cows and the notebooks and corrected proofs of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.