PRESS RELEASE

Flat Time House hosts an exhibition of artworks, archive, movies and sound curated by Tony Herrington (Editor-in-Chief & Publisher, The Wire) and David Toop (musician, curator, long-time collaborator of John Latham).

For a period in the 1960s there was a great creative synergy in the UK between the visual arts, experimental film, free jazz, psychedelic rock, and the energetic poetry scene that formed the UK\’s so-called Underground. BLOW UP will present a visual and aural map of those connections through art works, recordings, archival film and documents, contemporary accounts, posters and album art.

The artist John Latham, who lived at Flat Time House until his death in 2006, was a central protagonist in this explosion of cross-talk and the mythologies surrounding his film Speak (1962) were a catalyst for exhibition. Speak is a powerfully strobing, paper-disc animation and, although it precedes the psychedelics of the high sixties by half a decade, its physical effect on the viewer is typical of the whole mind/body experiences of the early light-show gigs of Soft Machine or Pink Floyd and the environmental happenings of the late 60s organised by artists including Cobbing, Keen, Latham and Jeff Nuttall.

In fact, Speak illuminated some of the seminal events of the UK\’s new counter culture: it served as the Floyd\’s light show at early gigs at the UFO club and the Roundhouse; it was screened at Better Books on Charing Cross Road, the bookshop where Bob Cobbing hatched plans with Allen Ginsberg and Alex Trocchi for the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall, and founded the London Filmmakers Coop with Keen and others in 1966. But it is the film\’s soundtrack that really connects the dots between London\’s art scene and contemporaries in free jazz and psychedelic rock: remarkably Latham rejected as \’too musical\’ scores recorded for him first by the Joe Harriott Quintet and then the Pink Floyd, before adding his own circular-saw soundtrack, pointing towards the simultaneously emerging noise aesthetic.

This exhibition begins to write a history of these connections, artistic, personal, or just in the air, and Speak\’s story is just one of the many told in BLOW UP.
Date: 2010-07-09

Few writers have exerted as great an influence over such a diverse range of art forms as William Burroughs. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and Junky, continues to be regularly referenced in music, visual art, sound art, film, web-based practice and literature. One typically overlooked, yet critically important, manifestation of his radical ideas about manipulation, technology and society is found in his extensive experiments with tape recorders in the 1960s and ’70s. Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs is the first exhibition to truly demonstrate the diversity of resonance in the arts of Burroughs’ theories of sound.
Date: 2010-07-09

Rigorous yet playful, these iconic works include Accumulation (1971), Group Primary Accumulation (1973), Sticks (1973), Figure Eight (1974) and Spanish Dance (1973). From the starting point on the bridge of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, the audience is directed to other parts of the gallery to discover the works as they unfold amongst the permanent collection. This is a unique opportunity to see seminal works that have influenced dancemakers worldwide.
Date: 2010-10-16

at
Hollybush Gardens
5 November, 7 pm
A reading from Manual (2009),
an artist’s book by Eline McGeorge,
designed by åbäke,
read by Oreet Ashery
and Ed Hobbs.
Plus
a screening of two films by Maja Borg:
Ottica Zero (2007) 13 mins;
Construct (Two Moments in Beauty) (2006) 8 mins.
What is to be said? is a year-long programme
of events, seminars and texts
curated by Malin Ståhl.
www.whatistobesaid.org
www.hollybushgardens.co.uk
Hollybush Gardens
Unit 2, BJ House
10 - 14 Hollybush Gardens
London E2 9QP
Tel: 0207 739 9651

Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2009-11-05

German
47 minutes, colour
1973

Date: 30th October

Time: 20:00

Venue: Cafe OTO

Cafe OTO
18 - 22 Ashwin street
Dalston
London
E8 3DL

www.cafeoto.co.uk

Closing Party Live Event: Screening and an evening of music.

Nearest tube: Dalston Kingsgland, Overland

Book Tickets: Cooming Soon

http://www.v22collection.com/herzog/40.html

Helvetic Centre and the Swiss Federal Office of Culture cordially invite you to:

The Most Beautiful Swiss Books, in London
25–29.10. 2009

at
Café Oto
18–22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London E8 3DL
www.cafeoto.co.uk http://www.cafeoto.co.uk/

Sunday, 25 October, 7 pm
Opening party
Guest speaker Laurenz Brunner

Thursday, 29 October, 7.30 pm
‘Superlatives in book design’
Round table discussion with experts from the field of book design

This year’s exhibition is accompanied by the 17 award winning books of the British Book Design and Production Awards 2008. Books designed in London can be seen next to their Swiss equivalents.

The catalogue ‘The most beautiful Swiss books 2009 – The present issue’ will be for sale during the exhibition

with kind support by
Swiss Federal Office of Culture, Bern
Swiss Cultural Fund in Britain, London

For further information and programme details, please visit:
www.helveticcentre.ch