iam : one day bookshop

information as material & The Laurence Sterne Trust presented a fundraiser to benefit Shandy Hall (Registered Charity no. 529593 )

Saturday 27th October 2007

Shandy Hall, Coxwold, North Yorkshire, Y061 4AD
Shandy Hall was the home of 18th-century English writer Laurence Sterne (1713-68) and is now conserved as a public museum. The ambition of the museum is to combine the preservation of this Grade 1 listed building - where Sterne wrote his most celebrated book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and the world’s foremost archive of his works, letters, illustrations and ephemera remains - with historically progressive programmes which explore the former pastor’s continuing influence on exploded narratives, innovative story-telling and experimental writing.

Italo Calvino described Tristram Shandy as “the undoubted progenitor of all avant-garde literature of the 20th century”, and in this spirit information as material and the Laurence Sterne Trust were proud to present a trio of events in celebration of experimental writing.

bookshop 10am-5pm
From 10 am until 5pm the on-site gallery was transformed into a one-day bookshop for experimental literature, open to everyone. Books and text based artworks were donated from around the world by artists and poets, including: Sarah Bodman, Christian Bök, Paul Bonaventura, Christine Burgin, Craig Dworkin, Alec Finlay, Robert Fitterman, Kenneth Goldsmith, Sharon Kivland, Doug Nufer, Ed Ruscha, Peter Weibel and many more. These works were sold to raise funds for the continued up-keep of Shandy Hall. As Sterne has been hailed as the forerunner of modernist language works, it seemed a fitting opportunity to temporarily bring together a melting pot of texts indebted to his lead.

poetry readings 3-5
Throughout the afternoon contemporary poets from Britain and America performed readings of their work, invigorating the historical space with their literary experiments. The line-up included conceptual
poets Kenny Goldsmith & Ira Lightman, graphic-text artist-poet Alan Halsey, and conceptual reader Nick Thurston.

film screening 6-7.30
At 6pm the premiere of information as material’s documentary film Sucking on Words took place. This was screened in Coxwold village hall, which hosted the 2005 world-premiere of Steve Coogan’s film A Cock and Bull Story. sucking on words introduces the art of New York poet Kenny Goldsmith and the emerging movement of Conceptual Poetics, which his own books and curatorial activities have brought to the fore-front of writing’s progression into the new millennia. Shot on location in Manhattan earlier this year, sucking on words features interviews with leading critics and poets Bruce Andrews, Barbara Cole, and Robert Fitterman. In November, 2007 sucking on words had its Scandinavian premiere when it was screened at the Oslo International Festival of Poetry.

The film will gives British and European audiences a rare insight into the American perspective of how conceptualism has engendered a fertile crossing of the linguistic sophistication of late modernist poetry with the contextual and material sensitivity of the visual arts.

From 20-28 October 2007 the American contemporary poet Kenneth Goldsmith, author of nine books and founder of Ubuweb (the world’s largest online archive of sound and visual poetry) was the poet-in-residence at Shandy Hall. During his residency, he headlined at various public and academic appearances arranged by information as material in conjunction with York University and ArtSpace.