Royal Academy Schools, 1-2 October 2010

Researching a series of unexplained incidents at this historic building, artist Blue Firth uncovered a first-hand account of apparent poltergeist activity in the artists’ studios.

While patrolling the 18th century corridors one night in 2008, Red Collar guard Nathan Phillips experienced something that prevented him from finishing his shift: “When I got back to where the skeletons are kept, the doors all slammed shut — like boom, boom, boom one after another. I tried to make out what it could be and checked all the doors again. I got to the same point in the same sequence and the bangs happened all over again. I didn’t finish my patrol that night.”

To make sense of what happened to Nathan, Blue has collaborated with parapsychologist Dr David Luke and writer Mark Pilkington. As preparatory research they undertook investigative training sessions with the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP).

Bringing together their knowledge and experience of the paranormal and arts fields, the trio have devised an event that merges Blue’s art practice with David and Mark’s expertise in making sense of the unexplained. The end result is a unique participatory experiment in which the audience are both observers and the observed, the haunters and the haunted.

Participants will be asked to complete psychological and physiological assessments before and after entering the site of the haunting, which will be monitored for any unusual occurrences. The vigil will take place under carefully controlled conditions and in total darkness.

Combining authentic investigative procedures with subtle performative aspects, Vigil examines and subverts the roles of audience expectation, spectatorship and belief.

Spaces for both nights are extremely limited so we advise reserving your position soon.

Visit the Royal Academy web site to buy tickets.

Well, they dominate anyway in ecological terms… But there’s been a meagre addition to this wider accolade within the insignificant sphere of human culture, as the Pestival—a festival dedicated to insects in art, and the art of being an insect—won the Observer 2010 Ethical Aware for Conservation. Apparently it’s the first time a left-field festival has won this award.

I’m honoured to have helped Pestival by getting their website together, which is well worth checking out as they’ve recently taken on some guest bloggers, including resonant figures such as musician and philosopher-naturalist David Rothenberg, who are over there talking about such things as recordings of oscillations from within insect bodies, and the co-evolution of insects and flowers…

Explosion II by Roy Lichtenstein

Just heard via V. Vale’s RE/Search mailing list of an exciting upcoming exhibition in London, Crash: Homage to J.G. Ballard. Running from February 11th to April 1st at the Gagosian Gallery near King’s Cross, this major exhibition celebrates the impact of Ballard’s singular imagination, and of course follows the author’s recent demise.

Drawing on a wide variety of artists populating the Ballardian realms between Surrealism and Pop Art, the exhibition features work by (among others) Francis Bacon, Hans Bellmer, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Salvador Dalí, Eduardo Paolozzi, Andy Warhol, and Ballard himself. Apparently Ballard’s photographs of his own car crash have recently been discovered, and will be on display.

The comfy crust of semi-hibernation got pleasantly broken last night at the positively bustling opening night of the Strange Attractor Salon. It’s an exhibition ably curated by SA guru Mark Pilkington, showcasing art from contributors and allies. Needless to say, the obscure, the psychedelic, the devilishly fascinating and the bizarrely seductive are thoroughly celebrated.

That much was clear, even though the exhibits were lost behind the thick crowd for most of last night—a quiet afternoon of proper contemplation beckons. I did manage a leisurely perusal of the excellent venue‘s basement collection of skeletal oddities, pickled puppies and cultural emphemera. This assembly of strangeness is a fine companion for the exhibition, and another good reason to head there.

Also on the cards are a few performances, salon discussions and film screenings. Check out details and buy tickets.

Art and performance collective Guerilla Zoo are mounting a season celebrating the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky during November in London.

Events include The Gorilla, a new Jodorowsky play starring his son Brontis, an exhibition of work from the Panic Movement, an exhibition of works by Jodorowsky and Pascale Montandon, and of course, screenings of Jodorowsky’s incomparable surrealist alchemical films.

It was a long, winding path of coincidences that led me to Naboland. As it should be.

In the spring I had some time to kill in the West End, so I headed to Charing Cross Road to browse the book shops. I hoped to find something interesting for my research into the Pole Star. I remembered at one point that some good stuff had come up when I looked at material surrounding the terrestrial as well as the celestial north pole. So, in the shop where I found myself, I headed to a section I usually pass by: Travel Writing.

There, laid horizontally on top of the books on the very top shelf, only reachable by ladder—appropriately enough—was a book called The Idea of North by Peter Davidson. I knew the phrase from Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights—though, as Davidson is at pains to point out, it originates with Canadian pianist Glenn Gould‘s experimental radio collage from the late ’60s. In any case, Davidson’s book turned out to be a wonderful, evocative study of the allure of northern climes in literature, legend and art.

Cut to the weekend just gone, and I’m in Dundee visiting my friend Caroline. On Saturday, we’re driving through Fife with a rough remit to visit a souterrain and explore, and Caroline notices road signs advertising an arts festival that’s just kicked off in the coastal fishing village of Pittenweem. I’d never heard of it, but Caroline’s enthused, pointing out as we look for parking the large signs bearing numbers outside selected houses.

Pittenweem, it turns out, is a veritable hive of artists, and the festival is basically a chance to wander around the village, in and out of their houses, where living rooms, conservatories, sheds and bedrooms have been temporarily converted into little gallery spaces.

I was only lightly charmed at first—naturally, much of the art is of the rather twee landscapes-for-tourists variety. Coffee and cake segued into a visit to the village’s old hermit’s cave, and then we started hitting some interesting art. Often the impact of the art was secondary to the unique experience of walking through a kitchen, where the artist is messing with some materials and listening to the radio. You exchange some greetings, and wander into their normally private spaces to view their work.

Going in someone’s front door and our their back door, into a series of interconnected back gardens, some bedecked with sculpture, some just ordinary private gardens… It’s a totally unique experience of art that becomes hypnotically greater than the sum of its parts. Especially when you get to the houses on the steep hills, where you end up feeling like you’re wandering through the creatively labyrinthine communal nesting structures of a crossbreed between genteel artists and some bizarre cliff-dwelling creature.

We’d seen a bare fraction of the houses that had been opened up for the day—maybe a dozen, and we’d seen numbers outside houses go up past seventy. We decided to just pass through a couple more on our way back to the car and call it a day.

As I started browsing the art in the next house we went into, I was gripped by a strong sense of familiarity. I quickly realized I was looking at pieces by the artist whose work graces the cover of Peter Davidson’s The Idea of North. I turned to see where Caroline had gone and tell her this, and, following her into a small, cramped room, I got one of the most potent rushes of artistic wonder I’ve had in years…

The artist was German-born Reinhard Behrens, who, it turns out, has lived in Pittenweem for the past thirty years or so. (It turned out that Caroline knew him as a colleague at the University of Dundee’s School of Media Arts & Imaging, where she’s a forensic artist.) While working as an archaeological draughtsman in Turkey in the ’70s, Behrens was stricken with sunstroke. During recovery, he happened across a newspaper article about a collision between a cargo ship and a submarine in the Bosphorus. Reminded of a toy submarine he’d found on the German North Sea coast a year earlier, and beguiled by the name of the cargo ship (“NABOLAND”), the course of his imagination was set.

Since then, he has produced a range of paintings and installations that seek to document Naboland, a fantastical continent apparently lost between Arctic legend and Himalayan fancy. But, thanks to Behrens’ meticulous archaeological illustrations and imaginative coherence, Naboland has grown more and more elusively tangible, through images of ancient rusty cutlery and decaying hunting tools (as seen on the cover of The Idea of North), and reconstructions of the research dwellings of the explorers who had set out to discover more—chiefly the diminutive occupant of the submarine Behrens had found. This little adventurer pops up in otherwise realistic depictions of realms associated with Naboland—Tibetan monasteries, Arctic wastelands, even the canals of Ghent found in Flemish art of the Northern renaissance.

The room I stepped into in Behrens’ house was a staggeringly detailed installation crammed with the tools, finds, and paraphernalia of this explorer. A half-caged bit in the centre contained a desk, with scientific instruments, tiny whisky bottles, endless little trinkets, even a half-size bunk bed slotted in just above and to the side of the study area—everything faded, aged, battered by long use and harsh Arctic conditions.

At one end of the room was shrine-like tall, shallow decorated Buddhist cabinet, opened to display a brown fur coat with a golden lining. This was from Behrens’ installation ‘The Great Yeti Hall’, and the coat purported to be the coat of the last Yeti, the triumphal treasure from an expedition to the Himalayas in search of remnants of Naboland…

Behrens is currently raising funds for an animated short which will “prove the existence of Naboland”.

For more information, visit www.naboland.co.uk.

The International Arts Pestival—a celebration of insects in the arts and the art of being an insect—is looking for volunteers for this year’s event, which will take place at the Southbank Centre in London, 3-6 September.

“Calling all insect workers, educationalists, artists and budding naturalists. . . . Reasonable out of pocket expenses paid.”

More details »

Anton Ehrenzweig [from The Hidden Order of Art]: “Any creative search, whether for a new image or idea, involves the scrutiny of an often astronomical number of possibilities. The correct choice between them cannot be made by a conscious weighing up of each single possibility cropping up during the search; if attempted it would only lead us astray. A creative search resembles a maze with many nodal points. From each of these points many possible pathways radiate in all directions leading to further crossroads where a new network of high- and by-ways come into view. Each choice would be easy if we could command an aerial view of the entire network of nodal points and radiating pathways still lying ahead. This is never the case. If we could map out the entire way ahead, no further search would be needed. As it is, the creative thinker has to make a decision about his route without having the full information needed for his choice. This dilemma belongs to the essence of creativity.”

And:

If a “last line,” or “conclusion,” occurs to me upon starting to write, I have learned to put it in immediately, so it does not hang before me, a lure, forcing the writing to skew itself in order that this “last line” continues to make sense as such.

More information here…