I guess you’ve seen that my room’s not being used much anymore.  Me and Hal got our own tiny place in Bree-town.  I’m fine!  I’m all right.  Better than all right.  Hal has a good wage and we’ve talked about the future.  He’s going to stay by me.  He loves me a lot.

I’ll be at supper tomorrow to make the pies.  I hope you know how grateful I am for everything you’ve done for me.  I tell my ma in my letters that it’s because of you and Mrs. Des that I’ve gotten as far as I’ve gotten.

Thank you, Mrs. Rosie.

Kait

—–

Helvia, dearest,

Your young Mr. Carter is a delight!  I have no idea if he’s told you about our world adventures, but together we have explored from burning sands to icy seas.  We wrapped him in white robes such as Eruthor might wear, and he told me all about the maritime skirmishes along the Gondorian and Haradrian coasts.  While wearing a cunning fur jacket, Keddric described seals and walruses to an eager museum audience.  So darling!

You’ll be quite pleased to know that he has his own heraldry now, according to the principles of old Arnor and the ways of the Carter family.  I may presume upon you to create some embroidery to that effect, once you see the renderings?  Tomorrow, it’s drawing with Rheb.  What a smart master you are, to give him a bit of a shake-up from alchemical learning.  Not every day needs to be buried in vials or books!

Best,
Kendry

—–

Marshfield,

If that boy of yours sniffs around my Lucie one more time, I’m not responsible for which of my boots ends up in his arse.  Keep your ward on a better leash.

M. Baker.

—–

Ben,

Anna and I have been going over the books, and starting this week, you’ll be getting a bit more coin in your wages.  It’s not as much as we’d like to offer, given your good service over these last years, but it’s enough that I hope it makes a difference.  All of you do a fine job keeping this place the peaceful refuge it’s supposed to be.  We appreciate it.

Mae garnen, Ben.  Well done.

T. Merritt

—–

Rosie,

Kait went where?

Des

—–

One use for a Gordon Matta-Clark is to help think through the question of whether art can be food or food art. The answer is obviously in the affirmative but I have something quite specific in mind. Food, itself. As such. The piece that was also a place which was also a community-borne restaurant called Food, that is.

It’s often said that it was during the process of labouring to turn an old bodega in SoHo [on Prince and Wooster] into a cafe/restaurant for friends and a like-minded milieu in 1971-72 that the living-breathing GM-C cut a section of wall and door frame out and cried “sandwich!” -a moment which supposedly spored his many brilliant incisions and savings thereafter -the pinnacle for me being Thresholes but also Splitting, Day’s End, Conical Intersect and Office Baroque [but it's almost all exceptionally good!]

According to Thomas Crow’s narration of GM-C’s early art-life [GM-C Phaidon 2003] the restaurant provided “reasonably cheap, fresh and healthy nourishment for the youthful contingent of loft-dwellers in a neighbourhood with next to no commercial infrastructure.” Crow writes that Food could not be considered art as such [despite GM-C's attempt to sell it to Castelli], but that food-centred performances were enacted in the completed restaurant after he ‘fell in love’ with his fabled ‘sandwich’… [as Caroline Yorke Goodden, partner in Food, also recalls in the same volume.]

It sounds like and resembles Charlotte Road circa 1992-4 [or Kensal Rise and Talbot Road some years before then; 'sushi', TB's all-night whatever-den and run of 'guest chefs'] or so to me, but that’s banal. More interesting is the way in which a restaurant or food with or without performative elements is or can be instrumentalised as art making. I don’t mean in the sense of acting-out Marinetti etc. [wonderful as that can be GP!] or in the sense of making highly finessed food, wonderful as that certainly is. I mean in the sense of perceiving it as making something-from-nothing; a restaging of life, everyday or otherwise, collectively or otherwise. Also as an interrogating/mining of those everyday structures and processes, etc., across time and place.

This is the inspiration and/or use of a Gordon Matta-Clark that I referred to. One distinct from the short road to pure, albeit funky, commerce pursued by the same Shoreditch and everywhere else too. I realise that any conceptualising of a ‘Folk’ food -the reference being Swedish- is woefully uncool, out of date etc. Or at least it has been during our recent 15 year long boom… But! Times they are a changin’, [soft] Anarchy in the UK, etc….

I’m thinking of a Forest near me and straddling the edge of Central London’s Zone 1, in the midst of which people have been growing food in the near abandoned ground, cooking some of it up and eating together, all year long -and against mid-year legal threats and much else from the Local Authority. Thinking of recent conversations around an open-air fire, food growing and being cooked all around, ‘midst hearty chatter -frivolous, happy, earnest and political- with people like those described, albeit loosely, above… People who only very superficially resemble ad-man notions of ‘outliers’/assorted commodifications [yuk!] while they’re living lives founded in the making of something-from-nothing…

I’m thinking of a conversation with someone -a dirty-utopian food grower even in this cold season- who described a “dream” he has of something rather like Food, which I’m going to call Forest Food. A dream that is eminently realiseable in the Forest we were standing in, under trees still bearing leaves which only the first days of December have finally dispelled. A dream of continuing to grow food in the ground marked out and protected by trees half a century old in a zone at the heart of a massive regeneration project still in early stages [pre conceptual master plan submission] which is now drawn out as a public park of significant size stretching from Cuddington Copse and nearby Peace Garden in the east via Chearsely Copse and the Great Silver Maple to the Six Old Men and Sweet Chestnut Slopes that I myself named in the summer [yes! very Arthur Ransome, but don't forget that he witnessed actual Revolution in Russia and made more than one borrowing from Trotsky!]. A park made by or resulting from an inspired pursuit of strategic effect, alongwith communal effort and conviction, which focused on existing trees and all that they represent to defend them from a threatened, laboriously modelled and officially agreed, grid of new roads, uniform podia with private green space, wrapped in equally uniform shops which would otherwise have been dropped on a unique 450-tree Forest straddling Zone 1…

I rehearse this latter briefly because if it’s possible to turn round a global developer on such a scale using watertight if iconoclastically merged argument; ecological, public welfare, health, emerging urban policy [all of which lacked but now have a substantial precedent as a result], but most importantly by a vivid evocation of place in voice and writing, as well as massive amounts of sheer insistence, then it’s also possible to realise the “dream” of growing a cafe/canteen/restaurant, a communal restaurant much as described above, from the ground in the middle of that same Forest, no?

Forest Food would grow some/much/all its own food in the ground [and on its roof?] within metres of its ovens and tables, be owned and run collectively for a community that exists/is emerging and be a beacon of a modest sort [low light, ambitious food!] at the centre of what is intended to be a retail-led development on a massive scale complete with the joyous [I'm not been only ironic] freedom to sit in a chain cafe or its terrace.

Reconfigured as art making, understood as a process of making something-from-nothing, incorporating ongoing two-way research/relays and self-generating actors in which the consumption of the food is of equal value as the cooking of it which is of equal value as the growing of it, then you have something. You have art, in fact. The place itself, as it stands pre-demolition, seems ripe for the kind of interventions that GM-C actually made elsewhere, but what would be the point of that now? Where would the art of that reside? [As fabulous as Conical Intersect was; cutting gorgeous forms and visions through a building to be demolished right alongside the brand new Beauborg centre. Check the film online]. The potential art lies in as yet unrealised forms of making surely? The potency of it lies in exactly the same times and places, no?

One of the points of this for me is or would be the self generation it requires and embodies. As of today, apparently, this is not a remote possibility. To begin to think of making this Forest Food exist through a period of attempted sealing-up of a 23 acre Zone 1 site, large scale demolitions, compete with an obstructive LA in Southwark and perhaps a similarly minded developer in Lend Lease, nervous of the new as ever, requires all the individual and collective energies of an art making.

This form of practice seems wholly in rhythm with our times, including the incorporation of a politics of peoples’ assemblies [village panchayat's, hedge schools through the Urban Forest School generated by these examples in my mind, Summer 2011] and dirty-utopian occupations. Something made from nothing -a nothing which surely includes the vacuous/revolting excesses of the City?

A regen./redev. on the scale envisaged at the Elephant and Castle will require more than the drivers of a new retail ‘offer’ -to soil myself with the jargon. Of course it you pump enough of it in, especially in this place where 9 out of every 10 pounds spent by residents are spent outside the Borough, for example, then it will ‘work’ in part and parlance. At best it would be a deadened/deadening zone though, no?! It would surround a sizeable forested park and entrain commercial creep all over and through it. I’m also not fond of the extant use of art or culture in these contexts either, simply because it’s entirely market-defined, banal at best, a box ticked by a series of charlatans.

A Food for this Forest -Forest Food- would or could be a very different thing. I’d advocate that it could and should be conceived as the making of art, nothing less nor more. Everyone involved in it is then an artist-maker with the liberations and responsibilities that entails. This is at the same time a making of politics, and nothing more nor less, with the variant liberations and responsibilities that that entails. If I don’t at this point sound infected by some form or quality of utopian ‘delusion’ [drive] then I haven’t been making myself clear. Why tarry with anything else or less?

So, I invite you now to join as artist-makers or political-actors in this making in the Forest; Forest Food. Bring a Gordon Matta-Clark if you like but don’t fail to bring an appetite for something actually new and a determination to snatch it out of or carve it in to the ground of what is or will otherwise be the same-old same-old…

There are some months ahead [almost three seasons] to demonstrate what it can and will mean, followed by fierce and real wrangling to preserve that and actualise it fully as a central pivot in a coming green economic zone [more on that to come] and eventually for it to take the form of a building. I suggest the ground should not be ceded. That, you might say, was and is one of my “dreams” here…

Interested?

Instant Coffee, Disco Fallout Shelter, 2009, Concept collage

“For both Manet and Baudelaire, can their invention of powerful models of modernist practice be separated from the seductive and nauseating image the capitalist city seemed to be constructing for itself?” [1]

                                                                                                Thomas Crow

At first, I couldn’t understand why Instant Coffee would deep-six itself into a Fallout Shelter. Their motivations for doing this seemed rather obscure to me. Weren’t bomb shelters a thing of the past? The millenialism of the gesture a little late?

A garden today more readily evokes narratives of sustainability. Whatever the state of contemporary geo-politics, there is hardly a nuclear winter on humanity’s horizon.

When I asked IC’s Jenifer Papararo about this she averred — the tale told here was a happy one, it may be “a dark fairytale…but, we are together, even under fallout.”

Ah, survival. So IC sees its future to be much like its past.  Improbably succeeding, setting the agenda. Outwitting and outlasting and the competition. Still here. Ha.

And if the terminus point imagined seems a bit grim, well, artworks are never only about the artists that make them. Implicit to Instant Coffee’s Fallout Shelter project is a larger narrative about the fate of all utopias.

………..

Now clearer that my first impression had been too literal, I remembered that I had always kind of misunderstood what IC was trying to do. And I was not alone in this.

Severed from work done in a specific medium, the zone of representation is a tricky substance from which to hone an art practice. This is especially true if you hardly bother to—or deliberately avoid—differentiating what you do from representation’s more mundane existence as the language of commerce.

Perhaps, too, because of the collective’s proven ability to anticipate the forms of their ongoing relevance which is on pace with wider art world trends, but may be a little in advance of their audience, the Instant Coffee project has always been somewhat misunderstood.

Throwing parties will do that to your reputation; enjoyment, for some reason, is one of the more hypocritical realms of human experience.

………..

The art show as party was the original format of IC-engineered inclusivity. In the collective’s own words, creating event-based exhibitions was a way to “renegotiate…traditional exhibition structures”.  In the process, they jettisoned outmoded medium-specific hierarchies of the more traditional exhibition venues.

Self-reflexive about their own role as facilitators of art experiences, IC recognized the important part that brand identity could play to formalize the collective as a framework of possibility. Cannily adopting the language of globalism, IC staked its territory as a “service-oriented artist collective.”

The claim is funny in itself.   Self-aware and proactive, it lives up to the ideal of truth in advertising, yet partakes of the peculiarly Canadian preoccupation with being nice and non-threatening.

……

To embrace a plurality of practices means to embrace the plurality of artists responsible for them. And at the point of this connective tissue, we find the core Instant Coffee ethic. Not only were collective members party people, they were people people too.

So, for instance, in early incarnations, Instant Coffee’s parties and their predecessors — Jin’s Banana House and the Money House — used the device of the slide show to provide an easy format of participation for all invited, artists and non-artists alike.

Instant Coffee, Disco Fallout Shelter, Toronto Sculpture Garden, 2009

A practical approach to curating contemporary art, Instant Coffee’s democratizing strategy was also a way to contend with the difficulty of assigning value to artworks. This is a problem, one of positively diluvial proportions, that follows in the wake of post-minimalism.

Increasingly, when de-skilled and neo-conceptual, the possible in contemporary practice has become difficult to differentiate from the necessary.

IC’s brand-defining rhetoric energetically addressed this predicament. Starting with their name, Instant Coffee (i.e., the ersatz version), the collective declared itself a non-arbiter of value. Taste, they contended, distracted “from the fundamental reasons for ingesting either the real thing or its substitute.”

The above excerpt from IC’s manifesto—which has served as the collective’s credo throughout their career—suggests that artworks are a medium of social interaction, and in some cases a mere pretext for it; an idea which has subsequently played out in the contemporary art world at large.

In Instant Coffee terms, the figure of ‘the party’ was the refuge—and the metaphor, perhaps—for the demotion of the curatorial role. To explain the circumstances they saw themselves operating within, the collective chose an ironic voice…

Instant Coffee. No Better Than You… Instant Coffee: it doesn’t have to be good to be meaningful…

…creating a ground ripe for misapprehension; but that, too, was part of the act. Those observers who took the IC party for the main event were missing the point.

Because inventing an art scene that accommodated and gave validity to the activity of your peers was a kind of utopia – symptomatic, maybe, and expressive of a wider condition — but a utopia nonetheless.

………

It is possible to characterize ICs commitment to inclusion as a practice of extreme courtesy, an idea that is fully in keeping with the collective’s ethos. Which is why their Toronto Sculpture Garden project is a departure in more ways than one.

…

With the inception of the Instant Coffee Disco Fallout Shelter, the question arises as to who now is being served? For the outside observer, a look into the sculpture’s video kiosk reveals the collective to be inside the shelter hanging out; business, for them, as usual.

But six people living cramped together in an underground space – what kind of paradise is this?

By choosing to sequester only IC’s immediate members, and by making an artwork out of that decision, it is as if the collective has devolved into real personalities.  They have become the artwork.  It is a hard won conclusion to this story—or at least this chapter of it.  The IC Disco Fallout Shelter probably has always been IC’s inevitable destination.

SICK thieves have stolen a cherished statue from the grave of a child who accidently strangled
himself on a window blind cord.

Little Thomas Crow, two, was found with the drawstring tangled around his neck in a horror accident in January 2004.

The youngster, who has a twin brother Ethan, was rushed to Dunfermline’s Queen Margaret Hospital but was declared dead shortly after arriving.

Now his parents, Michael and Nicola, from Dalgety Bay in Fife, are being forced to relive their agony after learning callous thieves have made off with a two and a half foot Peter Rabbit statue from their son’s graveside.

The despicable theft of the rabbit pushing a wheelbarrow took place between August 3 and 7 from the Fife town’s Hillend Cemetery.

Terrible memories

An emotional Mrs Crow, 38, said: “We’re absolutely devastated someone could do such a thing. It was terrible for us at the time and this just adds to all the trauma.

“I don’t really want to talk about it anymore because it brings back such terrible memories.”

Fife Police believe the cruel-hearted thieves used a vehicle to make off with the treasured graveside memento because of its considerable weight.

Hillend Cemetery is an isolated plot of land located just outside Hillend village, near to Dalgety Bay.

A cemetery worker, who wished to remain anonymous, said: “I was working here last Wednesday when the young boy’s aunt informed us about the theft.

“She was really upset and was crying.

“It’s really quite disturbing that someone could just drive into a cemetery and steal from a child’s grave.

“What kind of world are we living in when people get up to that sort of thing. My heart really goes out to all the family concerned.”

The blonde two-year-old boy, nicknamed Tom Tom, died in the freak accident as his twin brother lay sleeping nearby in 2004.

After finding their son hanging from the venetian blind drawstring his frantic parents tried in vain to revive little Thomas as they waited for the ambulance to arrive.

But he pronounced dead shortly after arrival at the Fife hospital.

Although the two boys were not identical they looked very alike and were said to be inseparable.

Unique statue

The distinctive Peter Rabbit statue is described as a concrete construction, about 2.5ft tall and pushing a wheelbarrow with honey brown coloured hat with ears sticking through the hat.

It was cemented on to a black and grey covered base about 6 inches high.

PC Dale Brown, the officer in charge of tracing the thieves, said: “The statue is unique and could only have been moved and taken away in a vehicle owing to its weight.

“This theft has brought untold distress to the family concerned and I would appeal to any member of the public who knows anything at all about this theft to come forward and contact us.”

Thomas Crow on pages 168-9 of Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Artworld:

“I just try to keep myself out of the text. Half the battle is in the description. If your material is vivid enough, you don’t need to adopt an ego-driven voice where you’re always reflecting on your own formative experiences or your own complexity of mind.”

“I don’t like cults of personality, even minor cults. It gets in the way of observation and learning. Your material should be out in front, carrying the weight.”

“Many of the artists who are ruling the roost at the moment – Jeff Koons, Maurizio Cattelan, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin – exploit constructed personae. Cults of personality are realities, people are attracted to that, but there has to be a space between you and the people that you’re writing about, so you’re not just echoing the situation that you’re trying to analyze.”

Thornton comments: “Although art historians are always making judgments about what is worth their time, Crow believes that ‘severe attitudes and extreme judgments are a bit out of place.’ For weekly columnists who are read for the consistent taste, ‘their readers enter into a regular relationship with them. They want to know whether they thought it was phony or great.’ However, ‘If you’re an art historian, you can’t just decide that you like this little piece of history because it appeals to your self-regard. A real historian doesn’t do that.’”