“For, I is an other”
“For, I is an other. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it isn’t to blame. To me this is evident: I give a stroke of a bow: the symphony begins to stir in the depths or comes bursting onto the stage.” (Arthur Rimbaud)
The ethics behind A Book of Ours and The Homeless Library projects: “the story is theirs to tell.” How do the leaders of arthur+martha fulfill this remit when it is they who have planned, organized, and conducted, and participated in the lives and imaginations of the homeless? They come with various marks of visibility and power that a society based upon inequality confers on some but denies to others. Phil Davenport and Lois Blackburn, along with their colleagues musician Matt Hill and calligrapher Stephen Raw acknowledge the privilege—with its access to workshop space, funding, and education—as they are vigilant about reducing to a minimum the temptations of appropriation and exploitation of the precarious vitality of other lives. They characterize their roles as “curators or midwives” (Matt Hill) of lives and works not their own. They are conservationists in the way that poets, from the beginning of recorded poetry, “conserve the image of a person across time” (Allen Grossman). They facilitate, rather than control and interpret, an event of living and shaping.
A man called A came into a music session and, listening to Matt’s guitar, asked if he could borrow it for a moment. A very good player, he began a striking melody, which Matt immediately recorded. Matt asked A to repeat it but he suddenly became shy. Matt nonetheless placed it as an undersong to “Killing Floor,” returning to the fragment throughout the song. A didn’t know where his melody came from: an unidentified shard of musical history saved from oblivion by Matt’s attentive and practiced ear, a disarming presence not interpreting but apprehending and conserving something of value. Commissioning becomes a form of collective artistic practice: I will do some of the work on your behalf . . , but, says Lois, “we are always checking where the power is,” making sure that no one’s authority gets usurped by another’s. To intervene or enhance often means to compensate for a severe handicap — most evident, the leaders come to their project with acquired training: when they see a blank page, they know how to begin filling it up, with language or with design. Without that experience, a person “comes naked into the world,” terrified of a boundariless emptiness. The leaders give them boundaries, coordinates. Lois draws a horizontal line, puts in an image, marks out a space for a text; Phil lineates the poetic speech of a participant. Phil, Lois, and Matt, along with the other makers around the table, abolish the terror of creation in isolation.
Phil introduces the group to Blake, Shelley, Hildegard of Bingen, and A Book of Hours, at which point he lets go. The books join the mayhem of pages on the worktable. The makers receive treasured bits of the tradition as occasions for their own re-purposing. “Education” comes with no ideological baggage; the mind works from its own resources and with its own ends; the treasure may be stabilizing: “Books, people, pictures, those were the solidities in a life that otherwise knew only unsteadiness” (Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance). Phil introduces, facilitates, but doesn’t “educate” the way to canonical thinking and the artifact as capital.
A BOOK OF OURS was exhibited at Bury Art Museum May-July 2021, then Manchester Cathedral Oct 2021-March 2022, after which it went permanently into the collection at John Rylands Library, where it can now be viewed. It is the final project by arthur+martha CIC.
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