The Internationaler, Prologue

by Alex Hetherington, 15 Jan 2008

I guess I wanted to write a kind of Prologue to our first blog on Falkirk, an opening of thoughts describing something I saw on the cover of the periodical The Internationaler, published in Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield which I bought at Site Gallery’s bookstore (which also featured a great set of artists buttons for losers of the Turner Prize). I was down in Sheffield Friday and Saturday working on an essay with Site Gallery’s Platform projects on the artist Brigid McLeer’s installation and performance Vexations (http://www.sitegallery.org/) which has been running as an open residency/work in progress since December. I am still working on this essay, which will appear at a later date on Site’s site.

The cover of The Internationaler has an artwork announcing a BLOG NOTICE from something called La Critique de la Universalis Institutionalé Europa & C, and Non Prescriptives of the CULTURAL INFERNO, its by-line is a NON-HIREARCHICAL (sic) DISCOURSE AS, AND FOR, VARIOUS REFLECTIONS OF MANNERISMS de CULTURALÉ, the remainder of this is scored out, scored over, unfinished. 12 bullet points, drawn as little boxes, reflecting a calendar or schedule, outlines the intentions, I guess of this Blog, summarizes its purpose. I don’t know. I don’t know who the artist is, I don’t care. I don’t understand what this ‘institution’ fully represents but I have a fever for its list of concepts that somehow seem to synchronize with our intentions for our residency, and for all residencies (I wanted also to mention here BEDWYR WILLIAMS’s publication on artists’ residencies, sieved through his idiosyncratic, cynical autobiographical scrutiny that merge geography, stand up comedy and surrealism that seemed to be read by EVERY resident artist at SSW in permafrost Lumsden, Aberdeenshire because the first line of his book is about artists during their residencies never knowing how the heating works).

I bought The Internationaler because it had an interview with Lars Von Trier, and I have always wanted to use The Idiots in my work, it featured Brigid’s work on an essay about hands and their ‘memory’ (she relearns to play the piano in Vexations, her most recent work) and because it will be used as source material for the magazine Janie and I intend to publish through the Falkirk residency, named The Village Voice in disregard/homage to New York’s more famous publication on art, culture and politics.

The artwork on The Internationaler lists these approaches/themes and I kind of want to memorize them through this project: THE LIGHT, THE DEPARTURE, THE MECHANICS, THE SPACE,THE MUD, THE FRAME, THE STRATEGIES, THE SHIT, THE DIALOGUE, THE OPAQUE, THE THREAD, THE AMPLIFICATION, THE ORTHODOX, THE INTERACTIVITY MINEFIELD, THE VAGUE & INCONCLUSIVE, THE AUDIENCE, THE EXPERIMENTAL, THE SPECIFICS, THE OPEN-ENDED.

I have in mind the creation of a biker gang made up of hazing victims, The Idiots, with these helpful hints as tattoos, as theme songs, as false memory syndrome symptoms.