Reykjavík Grapevine - 06.11.2009, Qupperneq 30

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The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 17 — 2009
MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS – EDDAS AND SAGAS
The Ancient Vellums on Display
ICELAND :: FILM – Berlin – Copenhagen – Reykjavík
Icelandic Filmmaking 1904-2008
A LOOK INTO NATURE
The Story of the Icelandic Museum of Natural History
EXHIBITIONS - GUIDED TOURS
CAFETERIA - CULTURE SHOP
The Culture House – Þjóðmenningarhúsið
National Centre for Cultural Heritage
Hverfi sgata 15 · 101 Reykjavík (City Centre)
Tel: 545 1400 · www.thjodmenning.is
Open daily between 11 am and 5 pm
Free guided tour of THE MEDIEVAL MANU-
SCRIPTS exhibition Mon and Fri at 3:30 pm.
Our correspondent seems less than thrilled with Sequences' opening weekend. Maybe you
don't agree, or maybe you haven't had the chance to form an opinion. The festival's still going
on - check out the schedule at www.sequences.is and go see some art right now.
poetry | Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl
I recently saw a Norwegian
sketch on Youtube about
the invention of the book.
A medieval man has just got-
ten his first book and can’t seem to get
it to work, so he has to ask for help. A
help desk employee shows up to guide
him through this new state-of-the-art
technology, showing him how to f lip
the pages back and forth, read from
left to right etc. The dim-witted book-
owner has trouble understanding the
instructions and the irritated help desk
employee asks if he never considered
consulting the manual.
The manual, of course, is another
book.
Instructional poetry is a modern
day verse form in which the reader is
told to do certain things in a certain
order, often “ridiculous” things which
cannot be done or don’t seem to serve a
“purpose”. One of the most famous ex-
amples of such poetry is to be found in
Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit.
“Make all the clocks in the world fast
by two seconds without letting anyone
know about it” it says in one of the po-
ems. “Decide not to use one particular
syllable for the rest of your life. Record
things that happened to you in result of
that,” says another.
One of the most quoted sayings of
conceptual poetry is from the philoso-
pher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Do not
forget that a poem, although it is com-
posed in the language of information,
is not used in the language-game of
giving information”—I’m even pretty
sure I’ve let it grace these fine pages of
the Reykjavík Grapevine in some ear-
lier column. Instructional poetry takes
this idea to task and uses the language
of information to give information (i.e.
instructions) which deviates from the
thinkable and thereby (literally) bends
reality.
While Yoko Ono provides the reader
with well nigh impossible tasks, Cana-
dian poet Darren Wershler-Henry, in
his book The Tapeworm Foundry, feeds
the reader with ideas for art-works and
poetry books, some possible and oth-
ers impossible and many borderline:
“find the threads in redhats andor litter
keyboard with milletseed so that exotic
songbirds might tap out their odes to a
nightingale andor transcribe the letters
pressed onto the platen when stalactites
drip on the homerow keys andor recon-
struct the ruins of a bombedout capital
i.”
The imperative form of instruc-
tional poetry is a dizzying tool which
can easily send the reader spinning.
Instructions are made to make sense,
they are there to guide us, and yet they
can so easily be used to fuck with our
heads—when they leave the realm of
the expected. Do not finish this sen-
tence. Before proceeding with the ar-
ticle, go back to the previous sentence
(which you obviously finished, you
fool!) and read it again, this time with-
out finishing. Do not read the following
sentence. If all goes well you should not
be reading this. Then jump to this sen-
tence and continue from there.
For an Icelandic example I’d recom-
mend Sigurður Pálsson’s Nokkrar verk-
legar æfingar í atburðaskáldskap (tr. A
few practical exercises in performance
poetry) from Ljóð námu völd.
Italian-American poet and artist
Vito Acconci once wrote a famous in-
structional poem, which contrary to
most instructional poems could easily
be followed. So easily, in fact, that not
doing what it says proves to be impos-
sible even for the most agile readers, the
most cunning minds:
“READ THIS WORD THEN READ
THIS WORD READ THIS WORD
NEXT READ THIS WORD NOW” etc.
etc.
This is the pataphysical, the sphere
beyond the merely metaphysical. Like
in the book-manual-book problem of
our medieval reader mentioned ear-
lier, instructional poetry deliberately
breaches the social code of messag-
ing. It undermines the trust we natu-
rally put in the imperative, and thereby
manages to rid us (at least partially) of
our ridiculous obsession with obeying
everyone that sounds like an author-
ity, while simultaneously entertaining
us with the sweet, humorous sound of
chains breaking.
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl’s third novel, Gæs-
ka (Kindness), has just been published by
Mál & menning.
READ THIS COLUMN
DON’T READ THIS
COLUMN NOW READ
The Sequences festival was formally
launched a week ago, on Friday October
30th. I had heard that major sponsors
had been backing out throughout last
year due to the financial crisis. I don’t
know if this is true, but it would certainly
explain some things. My experiences at
the festival led me to believe that it was
severely understaffed—at times it also
seemed unorganised and chaotic.
Due to prior engagements, I missed
out on the opening night celebrations. I
later heard that the best thing on offer
was Sigurður Guðjónsson's live event,
consisting of a gigantic video projection,
men smashing rocks and the great death
metal band Severed Crotch.
WAITInG AROunD On A
SATuRDAy AFTERnOOn
On Saturday my art walk began by the
harbour, at the beautiful Maritime
Museum, which I was visiting for the
first time. I was there for a performance
by a couple of Danish artists that call
themselves Prinz Gholam. The event
was supposed to start at 14:00. Half
an hour later, nothing had happened.
Nothing at all.
A person I assumed to be one of the
artists walked around in circles, looking
all stressed. Nobody said a word. The
25-strong audience said nothing, and
for a moment I found myself thinking:
“Wow, art can be so hard to understand,
this is so post-modern! A happening
that imbues in the viewer a feeling of
inferiority and insecurity.”
This was not the case. After poking
around with a TV set for quite a while,
talking about technical difficulties and
scolding a six year old for treading too
near the TV, the artist finally set the
piece in motion. It consisted of these two
Danes doing physical therapy exercises
for twenty some minutes. “Suspended
time and absorption are central in our
performative work,” I read about this
piece. It is true, that is what it is. It
felt self-absorbed, and time sure was
suspended. But I did not like it so much.
From the Maritime museum I went
to see The Spartacus Chetwynd Mime
Troupe. I was excited to see them. The
name of their piece got to me, Feminism:
Little Tales of Misogyny. But at the
House of Ideas, my friends and I waited
around for forty minutes before giving
up and leaving. We did not want to be late
for the airing of the video instillations at
the Regnboginn movie theatre.
When we got there, we sat around in
the dark for 25 minutes before hearing a
voice in the dark saying the show was not
happening due to technical difficulties.
Turns out we missed the only thing that
had actually been screened.
See now. Three events visited,
and three suffered from technical
difficulties. That is understandable.
Technology will sometimes fail you. Not
so understandable, though, is the fact
that not a single representative of the
festival was to be found at any of these
events. No one stepped forth and told the
waiting audience what was happening or
why they were waiting
This is not cool. Sequences is a major
cultural event, and there was nobody
there to represent it. In my book, that is
seriously amateurish.
What saved my Saturday at
Sequences was the Parfyme group. In
the programme, the group says that they
work with "immediate actions carried
out – without too much planning." The
event seemed super organised and
together compared to the other events
visited. Their post office was a friendly
place to visit, the postmen were all
smiles and their concept is a great one.
Write your friend in the countryside a
line, they deliver it on a gigantic postcard,
videotaping the journey and bringing it
back in a week. I loved it!
SunDAy AT THE REykJAVík ART
MuSEuM
My Sequences Sunday began at the
Reykjavík Art Museum, at an artist
talk with Egill Sæbjörnsson and Macia
Moraes. The two shared a relaxed and
nice chat about the elements in Egill’s
work. It was actually really good. Egill
managed to wear a wig and eyeliner
without being pretentious, and his ideas
where utterly interesting, the way he tries
to put our presence into a larger scale of
time and ideology. Well done! Afterwards
Egill walked the audience through his
show, and it was great. His piece The
Mind is mixed media of theatrics, sound
and images, all brimming with meaning.
I loved it!
The honorary artist of the festival,
Magnús Pálsson, was next up. His
operetta, Taðskegglingar, was surely
the main event of the weekend, as was
indicated by the mass of people lining up
to see it.
The Icelandic sound poetry choir
performed the piece to a packed room
of spectators. It was boring. It took too
long, and it was hard to follow. There
was a pretty cool scene where everything
clicked, when the group formed into an
airplane with suiting soundscapes. The
rest was just incoherent and confusing.
Magnús Pálsson is for sure a major
figure in the world of performance art in
Iceland, but still this was not as good as it
should have been.
Halldór Úlfarsson was next on the
schedule. His work in the Icelandic
Graphic Gallery, entitled Almost
Nothing, was interesting, a circling video
camera and a monitor videotaping the
room, looping it in time. This set quite a
nice scene, and the artist’s presence was
not to spoil it.
The last event on my list was
S.C.O.U.R.G.E by Melkorka Huldudóttir
at Dwarf Gallery, a tiny Basement
in Þingholt. The piece was nicely
overwhelming in the very fitting room.
A black helmet connected to tubes giving
out a mechanical breathing sound while
different lights lit up the small space, the
artist sticking her head into the helmet
and pulling it back out repeatedly.
LAZy ARTISTS
The last thing I managed to fit into my
Sequences schedule was Páll Haukur
Björnsson’s This Dumb Region of the
Heart, which turned out to be one the
weekend’s highlights. His companions
picked me up in a shady looking car, the
driver put on his driving gloves and his
cohort put a portable DVD system in my
lap. The drive began and so did the piece.
It is in some ways a road film, these video
recordings of Venice-scapes. His take on
death, travelling, the repeating patterns
in reality and God. I loved it!
This about sums up my experiences
at the first weekend of Sequences. I
wish I could have made more of it. Then
again, not so much. I witnessed too
many things that led me to believe that
performance art is the platform of choice
for lazy people, or those just plain not
ready for other things.
Art | Sequences Real-time Art Festival
Technical Difficulties
My weekend at Sequences 2009
BóAS HALLGRíMSSOn
JuLIA STApLES