Friday, August 05, 2005

Regular readers of my blog will be very aware why I'm so excited about the Greenbelt appearance of Eyal Weizman. Let's just say that with an exceptional slide-show and penetrating analysis he opened my eyes to the way that the very landscape of the occupied Palestinian territories - the very look and feel of the place - is being altered by the conflict there. And when you start to understand, deeply, how the everyday has become exceptionally abnormal, then you start to understand, deeply, what this conflict is really doing to its people. Eyal's seminar will be awesome. And the Greenbelt audience will understand.

Thursday, August 04, 2005

There’s a small gallery on Fairfield St in Manchester called the International 3, whose tagline is "Art is Our Airplane".

I love that expression.

If art is your airplane, where will it take you today?

I’m looking forward to flying Greenbelt airlines in a few weeks time. The destination is often surprising.

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

I’d committed to cutting back on the Greenbelt work from the rather ridiculous levels of the last few years. Spotting an area of need, getting a solution up and running and then getting someone to take it over is a good pattern and delegation of the venue manager management was key to my plans to workload reduction.

A quick glance at my email folders suggests this has been pretty successful. Greenbelt 2004 folders contain exactly (spooky!) 2600 emails. So far the Greenbelt 2005 folders total 1642, which with only a few weeks left to go means it’s looking pretty good.

The continual improvement on the information we’re able to make on available via the website has had a major impact over the last few years on the number of ‘common’ questions that get emailed, but that notwithstanding I know where most of the ‘missing’ emails have gone this year...and I need to buy Ben a pint of quality organic beer as a thank you.

Monday, August 01, 2005

This is the month Bill Drummond comes to Greenbelt. For me his appearance is almost in the league of Billy Bragg's two years ago - ie, one of those gigantic influences from the cultural left-field (and way outside the church), who in all sorts of ways have altered my life, coming as a guest to that other major gigantic influence - the festival which perhaps more than anything else has shaped and formed me, over 26 years.

Now, I'd be pretending if I suggested that Drummond is as life-affirming as Bragg, and I'd be hiding if I neglected my very real concerns that this singularly iconoclastic artist might make all the wrong noises at Greenbelt and alienate a lot of people. But, alternatively, I'm hoping, he'll shine. He should shine because a substantial lot of Greenbelters like engaging with creative people who think angularly, and no-one's more angular than Bill Drummond.

This is an artist who calls his projects 'jobs'. Today I've been looking at Job No. 41 in the Catalogue on his website www.penkiln-burn.com, which is called A Friendly Thing To Do, and consists of knocking at the door of strangers in their homes and presenting them with a cake you made for them (look it up). It's one of those jobs which makes you ask, "Yes, but is it art?" Like most of Drummond's projects, such as his barely-legal adventures in sampling technology with the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, or the one he's on at the moment, visiting homes of people on a line connecting Belfast and Nottingham, at their invitation, and making soup for them.

It's also one of those jobs which might provoke some recipients or observers to anger, like the classic Drummond episode when he and his sidekick Jimmy Cauty took £1 million in notes to the Island of Jura on 22nd August 1994, burned it all, then toured the country asking audiences if they might help answer the question 'Why did The K Foundation Burn A Million Quid?', well-documented in the book of the episode.

But it's also a job which might amuse some, like I'm amused by his Job No. 5 - How to be an Artist. This is the one he's billed to be doing at Greenbelt. The How to be an Artist Job Spec, he says, is 'To restore one's relationship with a work of art.' The story is long and convoluted (and the subject of another book) but essentially he decided that he wanted to get rid of his $20,000 print of Richard Long's photography and text work A Smell Of Sulphur In The Wind and when no-one would buy it off him he chopped it into 20,000 small squares and is now touring the country selling them off at a quid apiece. I'm the proud owner of one of these, mounted on a little certificate. If every Greenbelter buys one this coming bank holiday weekend, he'll be in clover. But will he or any of us be any the wiser about how to be an artist? Some would answer, no, to that, immediately. Drummond would probably cogitate and suggest, maybe. That's what I like about him. And that's why I'm so glad he's coming to Greenbelt to provoke us this year.

As I look at my diary this morning, there is the dawning revelation that I only actually have two weekends left before I head site-wards.

Aside from the nagging feeling that I should have spent more of the weekend just gone sorting out the boxes of kit that I’ll need to take with me (let’s face it emptying them from last year would be a start even…), it means there are important phone calls to be made.

Chief amongst which is the call to make my pre-festival haircut appointment.

Now experience tells me that this is a bit like ‘festival shoes’, in that most women, but few men understand this concept.

Let’s just say that if you’re going to spend a week and a half, walking round and round a large site, whilst living with only basic amenities, decent yet attractive footwear and manageable hair is a must.

It’s a girl thing...you wouldn’t understand…