Three short letters to a dear friend for the opening of a DIY writing scene

Letter # 1, 03/07/2012, Warsaw

dear R.,

So good to see you at the moment, in between two of your neighbors.

So we share a drink at the one on the corner, right next to your flat, some time ago. And also you telling me about a DIY zine you start with the second one, a bit further on from your flat, south east, if I remember correctly. Only now I come to understand that we only talked about the neighbors, nothing more really. Isn’t that why I was constantly coming back to Margaret Thatcher?

I might have been not sensitive enough in that, I know. But the only point I was trying to make back then is that “Do-it-yourself” is nothing but her infamous “There is no such thing as society”. Or maybe even more – an executive statement of Margaret’s wish; a bright motto carrying the same content but presenting itself as an opposing agenda. The way I read it was: if there is nobody to count on, if there is no such thing as society, the only thing you can do is what you do yourself, no?

Well, but in the end there are always neighbors. Now I check it and here it is. She goes on: “It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbor”. No, she was not promising the disappearance of a communal life – she was actually proposing a community art of no relation to a state. Alternative communities. She makes it clear now, in her diary. To get rid of the people constantly asking for public money.

And who made that wish an evergreen? The ones who criticized her the most… underground artists. Does it make them less Thatcherian to have their day time jobs, parents, neighbors covering the rents? Or does it make them more Thatcherian?

Surely, I dunno.

Probably had more things on the way to talk about so I missed the chance to ask what do you think… Perhaps one day we live on the same street.

Prost, m.

Letter # 2, 03/07/2012, Warsaw

dear R.,

You may find this delayed post scriptum a bit too academic. Because it is academic. At least he was  academic, a square composer, Cornelius Cardew.

But what can I say? It was him who made the point of some value to our long postponed discussion. I was studying his works, both notated and written, and got to a point, in the late seventies where his criticism’s addressee was punk culture. He had number of reasons, but let me just mention one. Underground for him was a symptom of withdrawal, a resignation, a mere falling into a self-contained circuit of people, trying to convince the convinced. Or shall I say, confirm the confirmed.

Now I find a vague continuation of that in this wonderful book by Simon Reynolds, “Rip It Up and Start All Over Again”. He mentions Skritti Politti song “Skank Bloc Bologna”: “Something in Italy / Is keeping us all alive” referring to a local revolt of 1977. It is already in 1978 when the admired DIY-ers and squatters of Skritti are looking up at Bologna as if they had already known that there is no such thing as underground. Except for Italy, maybe… an autonome cell, as they call it, or, as I would like to put it: as I wanna put it: self-contained circuit which we know in an incarnated form at the experimental music gigs with five friends in the audience.

So once it quickly vanished from Bologna – where did it evaporate to? If not Berlin… This one and only town where everybody comes for a kebab for 1.50 and a cappuccino right about this price. This one and only place where all the money comes with the workers from outside, via their national grant givers and scholarships founders becoming a hardly hidden logo of the legendary underground Berlin scene. Like any legendary underground reality.

Let me say that frontally: I don’t see any other town now, where the division between the underground and the overground would be that strong. But the division is not in the money or policies. It is only in habits of people going either to Festspielhaus or Sowieso. It is in Berlin where I find myself put in a position to choose. But by definition this is a self-safety reasoning. Perhaps this is why Cardew insisted on staying overground. Which for him – an academic composer – meant: playing with the trade unions at their gatherings and composing songs for the demonstrations and playing in Queen Elisabeth Hall.

Dear, well, right, this is just to make it clearer why despite my declarations, I won’t subrent a room in coming future…

Prost, m.

Letter # 3, 03/07/2012, Warsaw, cloudy sky, temperature under 30

dear R.,

Last one, promise.

Just staying on a balcony (rain) with all that in my mind and I start to think it makes sense to also rewind Margaret a bit. Just one line. Look, she becomes critical! “I have a problem, I’ll get a grant”. It is these people, this approach, this motto she is trying to marginalize with her politics.

Now reminds me a bit of something. There is this guy I know in Kraków, running his off-everything gallery. He coined this lovely term “grant-art”, being obviously against all the subsidies he finds disgusting.

I do not think any one of us needs a special reason for being disgusted with the showcase arts and big festivals. But is it grants? If you one doesn’t apply herself, his hands are probably cleaner as the grants become less visible, sure. But why not trying this: if we are so much disgusted by what is happening in the world of grants, let’s apply for more to show what to do with the money… And not give Margaret the reason believe she was right.

She wasn’t.

There is nothing more simple than just doing what we do. Overground, underground, public money, private money, no money. Whatever.

If what we are saying is strong enough, institutions won’t eat us.

No?

OK, R., just wanted to ask: who are we trying to talk to? Or with?

Prost, m.

Netaholic Frolic

Life is delineated by small obsessions, in my case they are creating art and poetry, bird watching, gardening, networking and, probably the most essential yet the thing to which I pay the least attention, surviving.

I am reasonably certain that the mesh of the net I use to keep the Blackbirds from devastating the strawberry patch on my garden allotment is not of general interest, neither, I presume, would be the fact that there is no safety net to catch me when I stop paying full and necessary attention to the requirements of road safety and suddenly fall off my bicycle because I had unexpectedly switched to bird watcher mode.

A CD dressed in black came out of the blue. The black envelope was decorated in mail-art colours reminiscent of things produced in the good old days of mail-art when there were Post Offices and postage stamps you had to lick.
The envelope featured my address, obviously, and that of the sender, fortunately, there were the decorations of two strips of several times overwritten black Dymo tape, 2 images from an IKEA instruction leaflet, a red sticker stating VAPORIZED ART MOVEMENT and an artiststamp from PROTALEATORIA and, of course, the official postage… sticker… telling me that the envelope came from Italy and it cost €2,40 to send.
The contents of the envelope were a yellow A4 with stamped texts and images and a CD-R without label.
Why out the blue? Simply because this was the first mail I have ever received from the sender, Stefano Balice of Givoletto which, according to Google Earth, is in the Turin area close to the Alps. I Googled Stefano’s name and discovered he is a member of the International Union of Mail Artists and there I saw that we recently had some small contact through that network, though little more than the exchange of greetings.
On the day the CD arrived it was too hot to be worrying weeds in the allotment and all birds, including the Sparrows that share the terrace in my back garden, were hiding within the cooler shade of thick hedges, so I stopped listening to ‘Sigur Rós play Dave Brubeck’ and put this new acquisition into the tray of my CD player.
What I heard was something of a pleasant surprise, I experienced something close to nostalgia…

Whilst I listened I checked out the rest of the mail that had shared the drop through the door slot onto the mat. There was an envelope containing political cartoons from Alexander from Kherson in the Ukraine, another highly decorated envelope containing an artist book created from a cut up painting by and from the South African artist and art historian Cheryl, a blue postcard from Greek Katerina, another postcard with a painted bird from Kaz in Japan and finally the latest bunch of visual poems from John M. Bennett from Columbus, Ohio.
With the exception of the CD from Stefano a standard mail-art day thus.

The CD, number 1011 in the VEC audio archive, carries 26 minutes of the sounds of spoken text in the form of a political newscast over a mix of concrete sounds and the noise of tortured transistors all in a deftly handled full dimension stereo. The sounds develop into speech cut ups and other familiar aspects of classic audio art. The work is reminiscent of the cassette pieces created back in the early 1980s by MB (Maurizio Bianchi). It had been so long since I had heard these kinds of sounds that listening to it gave me the same pleasure as I would get meeting an old friend.

Eventually I was woken from my reverie by the insistent knowledge knocking at both the back of my head and my stomach lining that it was necessary to wrench myself away from the studio monitors and return to kitchen to bake bread. Just before the mail had arrived I had fed the remnants of the last loaf to those Sparrows bopping on my terrace.

Ah well, back to the real world, but I have placed Stefano’s CD within easy reach, I will certainly listen to it again but for now I’ll give the new Sigur Rós another listen whilst I make suitable answers to all that mail. Hey that’s 777 words and I have only mentioned Iceland once!

Rod Summers/VEC
Maastricht
1 June 2012