Breaking the Rules

e-books

Tuesday morning. Rain again. I start to think of Ruskin's storm cloud of the nineteenth century - a warning of how industrialisation could change the climate. Arrive at work at 7.45 and plough through overnight emails, then do my online 360 degree survey for a colleague who has entered the developmental centre programme. That takes about 20 minutes and I organise and read my papers for today's meetings. Time for an early coffee with Carole and she tells me (without ruining the plot) about the new Paul Auster novel, 'Man in the Dark'. Lawrence from the Press Office interrupts to ask if I'd do a quick interview for ITN on the Sony e-book reader Sony e-book reader at 11.30. But first, straight into a meeting with Jude and The National Archives' corporate research manager, Valerie, on our research strategy and our use of Independent Research Organisation status with the Arts & Humanities Research Council AHRC. Our research break scheme seems to be the envy of many institutions. We've just reviewed the last five years of its operation and are pleased with its results. Then its the ITN interview - I'm curiously unnervous - maybe I have done too many: it's good to have a slight fear as it stops you being over-confident and too relaxed. The trouble is that I have to familiarise myself with how the Sony reader works and think how to contextualise it at the same time. The shoot is outside the King's Library Tower and it's re-assuring to think of Henry VIII annotating some of its volumes. The Sony reader is in a light brown leather case - surely not in imitation of a leather binding ?? It's small, smaller than the Kindle. Navigation is intuitive to anybody who can use an MP3 player. The old backlight problem has been solved - though I have to tilt it for the cameraman. It's probably not a rival to the book as a threat to a medium-sized collection of books - the student and the business man might find it useful in their pursuit of content, but the book-lover and leisure reader will probably still use the book. And there is no guarantee that your electronic titles will last as long as your hardcopies. Another thing that strikes me is the e-book's adherence to the sequence of the book - can't all the preliminaries - imprint details etc. now be relegated to the end of the book. Yet it defeats the book structure: every page is a recto - you have no sense of where the text lies in the book - there is no left or right, only right. Then it's back to my office and I have to plough through a business continuity exercise for the collection areas. It's time for a meeting with Jo on Project Gateway and approaches to news content. A Research Board for our Mellon Project on identical books ans VOCs - volatile organic compounds - follows. I then have to ring a dealer in Edinburgh who is an intermediary for the purchase of a futurist book, made from tin. We are struggling to prove who owned it 1933-1945. It's time to home.

A busy week

Monday - a string of meetings, including a Directorate Management Team, where we discuss the effects of the Government's Spending Review on our activities etc. I then chair the Digitisation Task Force and we have a workshop on strategy led by Lucie. Then a Content Strategy meeting.

Tuesday - a one to one with Peter. Then I wade through the papers for the Additional Storage Programme. My one achievement for the day is to link the RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People) with the European Digital Library Project. Then it's the Additional Storage Programme Board - the agenda has printed on it '199 working days before it goes live' - a salutary thought. I answer a couple of emails before I go to the Advisory Group for the Royal College of Art Printmaking Archive. Julia from the Tate is there and I thank her for helping with the Matt's Gallery print portfolio event. I decide to get the bus home and I just about have the energy to make an omelette, which I consume with a salad and a glass of red. I start to plan out my Walter Benjamin piece - my provisional titles are 'One Way Walter' or 'Unpacking Benjamin'. Time for a couple of chapters of Julian McLaren Ross' novel 'Of love and hunger' - a seedy sub-Orwellian world. It has a strange repulsion-attraction effect on me, brought up in a puritan work ethic.

Distillation

Get in early to work, overcoming a profound reluctance to get out of bed: my mental clock is a day out and I pretend that it is Saturday. My desk is a pile of papers, contrary to my usual clear desk policy. The exhibition and multiple projects have sabotaged that. Check that the Writers and Scholars Centre is set up for the Toril Moi seminar. It's good to meet her and she talks about the change (deliberate) in Ibsen's handwriting (and beard) when he achieved fame. She asks if we are still collecting Scandinavian materials and I re-assure her that we are. I forget to ask her to give a plug for the exhibition.

I have a quick look at the exhibition. On the comments wall there is a remark that it could have been more distilled. Not sure I fully understand this. The show is a huge simplification and its thesis is telegraphically abridged. The avant garde on the ground bursts through the constraints we have tried to place on it.

Looking at the Nazi book burnings again, I suddenly make the connection that must be obvious to everyone but me. Whilst Marinetti and the futurists attacked the institution of libraries, that was always a metaphor and their dependence on the print format made such burnings inconceivable: as in case of the manifesto, the Nazis perverted this position and really burnt the books.

Then it's a one-to-one with Peter, my Head of Maps - he's just given three papers in Chicago. He also advised on our maps of Europe in the exhibition 'chronology'. We discuss the handling of some vacancies and some items up for auction. Then it's a Project Board for the Mellon Preservation Project: one of the streams is looking at the historical internal (as opposed to just climactic) environmental conditions in which books were kept over time and it is proving difficult to track these conditions over time. It would be good if we could at least establish a baseline for the future, but is this perhaps another project.

Next is a Property Strategy meeting - a videoconference: I inject security into the principles, and add time/availability as a variable to the fixed space cake. Straight on to a discussion of the Arts & Humanities survey. It's very supportive of what we do, and the variation from what we have proposed as a forward strategy is not great - the greatest deviation perhaps is the lack of interest in multi-disciplinarity and instruction in research methodology.

Lots of emails to answer: tours for the exhibition, meetings to arrange on newspapers and US patents. Organise some files to be sent from the corporate archive at Boston Spa. Check that our contribution to the wiki Romani bibliography, hosted by the National Library of Serbia, can be automatically updated through The European Library. It's time to go home. As I get to the Tube I look down at the congested entrance to the Piccadilly Line. It's seething with a mass of bodies, so I turn back and get on the Hammersmith and City Line. Slow and rattlely as it is, at least it's above ground. I decide to make a mushroom risotto and polish off the remnants of a bottle of rioja.

Sunday off

This is the first Sunday in quite a while when I haven't had something to do for the exhibition. I checked the remaining labels yesterday.

I always get confused with the time change and almost leave for the swimming pool an hour too early. The Chelsea Pool has re-opened after refurbishment - new lockers and showers. In the pool they have just tiled over the old tiles and the shallow end is now really shallow as I find out when I jump in - or have I got taller? It's good to see some of the regulars - but there's only a few. I do my 100 lengths and feel quite tired afterwards. Get home for a late breakfast - banana, brazil nuts, a fig, yoghurt and milk. Time to tidy up the piles of papers on my table - they are all about Breaking the Rules, but today that seems a distant memory. I dig out the translation of Zola's Le Reve. It's one of his Rougon-Macquart cycle that I haven't read - it's the one before 'La Bete humaine,. Zola does a hilarious summary of the Golden Legend as Angelique, the poor embroideress, reads it. A nineteenth-century French novel is my idea of a break.

The Book

David emails to say he has an unbound copy of the book, 'Breaking the Rules', on his desk. I have a one-to-one meeting with one of my reports - he's late but I don't mind as I can work on the extra text for the leaflet. After our meeting I go down to David's room - he's out but I look at the book - it's all there, cover and all -just missing the binding: there are going to be hardback and paper versions. And it's to schedule. David's team and Lara in particular have been a dream to work with. The curators who did the city sections excelled themselves and met all the deadlines. Effectively we did this in six months.

There are more queries about the wall graphics and I wade through those. We need to set up a meeting to check through the 200 or so labels. It will have to be Monday as I have a European Commission High Level Group on Public Private Partnerships for digitisation tomorrow, and then have to train up to York for our Senior Leadership Team meeting in York on Thursday. It's back up to Leeds on Friday for a Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) on Friday. This may be my last blog for some time.

The early afternoon is a two-hour video-conference of our Human Resources Strategy Group and we go through the slides. I get back to the office and Laura from Exhibition Loans rings to see if I can sign the loan agreements for the Sex Pistols T-shirt we are borrowing for the legacy side of the Manifesto cases. Janet rings to see me on a HR matter in European. I then have to see an artist who has asked me to speak at his book launch at the House of Commons.

It's time to go home. I'm already starting to think about other projects I must now move from the back-burner to the front - not least the Text Engine piece I did at Yale which they now want to publish. This could be quite a lot of work as I spoke to a set of visuals.

What am I going to read tomorrow on the train? I decide I'll take Luca Frei's 'The so-called utopia of the centre beaubourg: an interpretation', an artist's book published by Book Works that Jane gave me last night. It imagines a 76 storey building below the Pompidou Centre where non-official culture is alive and well.

More writing

This weekend's task has been an article for one of the big daily newspapers - 1500 words. It's difficult getting the last article out of my head. A different approach is necessary so the focus is on the exhibition layout and the differentials between 'Breaking the Rules' and other exhibitions on Modernism, Undercover Surrealism, Dada etc. Cendrars and Klebnikov get another mention. And Futurism is looming larger and larger as the umbrella of all the isms - whether it's Marinetti in London, Moscow, St Petersburg, or being translated into Czech etc. I once defined the Dadaists as 'futurists who disliked futurism' - and there is a lot of truth in this. I end the piece with the Nazi Book Burnings of May 1933 - this included some of the works in the exhibition - Sander, Roh etc.

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.

Exhibitions as Research

I've always thought that exhibitions are a form of research, and that curators need to do them to learn more about their collections, fill gaps, relate to other collections and make their knowledge accessible.

Quite by chance we were given a book by the Foreign Office - 'The Hurricane Captain' by Grazina Sviderskyte, published in Lithuania in 2006. It's about Romualdas Marcinkus, a talented footballer, who became a Lithuanian Air Force Pilot, then a RAF pilot during World War II - ending up as a POW,  being involved in the Great Escape and executed by the Gestapo. In 1934 he was part of a team of Lithuanian pilots who made a round-Europe flight in ANBO-IV planes: Kaunas to Stochholm, Stockholm to Copenhagen, Copenhagen to Amsterdam, then to Brussels, London, Paris, Marseilles, Rome, Udine, Vienna, Prafgue, Budapest, Bucharest, Kiev, Moscow, Velikie Luki and back to Kaunas. I wish I had known of this before we planned the layout of the City Section of the exhibitions. I do a bit more research on this and call up a magazine we have, 'L'Aerophile', which began publishing in 1893. You get a real sense of excitement, novelty, experiment and you can see the commercialisation of the invention - routes, equipment, fuel, parachutes, air fairs etc. I hope the 1934 volume will tell me more about the Lithuanians but it doesn't. I tell the Head of our Philatelic Collections about this as we have a great collection of airmail materials - including letters with weights to be dropped from balloons etc.