Paul Haworth

Paul Haworth + Sam de Groot @ Ti Pi Tin, October 29

29 October 2015

Paul Haworth and Sam de Groot‘s new hip-hop album Illegal Emotions will be released with an event at London’s Ti Pi Tin artist space on October 29.

The London and Amsterdam duo, will play tracks from the new long-player –including titles like ‘British Values’ –which subtly plays with the form. They will also present a selection of their books, including Deeply Emotional, Alone, Desperate, Going Nowhere and Letter to Robin Kinross.

Haworth has previously contributed to Berlin-based artist Martin Kohout’s publications Linear Manual, as well as Sleep Cures Sleepiness.

See the Ti Pi Tin event page for details or listen to some tracks from the duo.**

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Sleep Cures Sleepiness reviewed

22 January 2015

Resist the urge to work. That’s the resounding message of the latest Martin Kohout-edited TLTRPreß and 1822-Forum-supported publication Sleep Cures Sleepiness. It’s one that’s been echoed across contemporary discourse, from Gerald Raunig’s Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity (2013) to Maja Cule’s Facing the Same Direction (2014). They’re essentially the product of the realisation that the model of the freelancer, or the artist, is one that’s become the exploitative structural status quo of a post-fordist economy.

“To work is to be”, repeats Petra Van Brabandt as the running mantra of a system of employment that aids in internalising an artist’s work ethic in ‘Laziness Cures Resentment’. It’s probably the strongest and most succinct exposition on the fate of us ‘animal laborans’ of modern economics, as part of a “neo-liberal organisation of labour” where “cheap labour, precarious labour, flexible labour, stupid labour, labour that destroys humankind and the planet, bullshit jobs” keep everyone out of the welfare system and in work at any price.

Photo by Salinas Bergman.
Photo by Alejandra Salinas and Aaron Bergman.

Van Brabandt’s is a piece that goes across pages 1.1 to 1.6.; each contributor to Sleep Cures Sleepiness having been alphabetically assigned a number in a book that eschews linearity in favour of the most workable collation of contributed pieces. It’s index page numbers 8, 4, 7, 6, 3, 1, 5, 2, and starts at the end with Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1877 argument against “extreme busyness”, ‘An Apology for Idlers’: “it is better to be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle”. The end comes in the second single-digit of Palo Fabuš’ ‘Historical and Contemporary Transformation of Temporality’, when “world time became inseparably connected with globalization; global instantaneity and simultaneity became the norm; distance ceased to be a barrier”.

Interrupting these pieces, and doubling-up the page numbers is Kohout’s #4, where light-grey pop-ups narrate ‘The Memory of Fish’. It’s a rectangular box reserved for ‘Sarah’ and ‘Mathis’ the hyper-connected couple who wait, reply constantly and sleep twice a week “because they scheduled it that way”. They behave much like one does when “going into robot”, as referenced by Angela Mitropolous in ‘Do Androids Dream of Sleeping?’, who identifies the delineation of “the human from machine” as central to the history of the labour movement, while being interrupted by an impotent, hypothetical link to the question, “Have you heard of the International Dark-Sky Association?” It’s a non-profit organisation fighting to preserve the night and combat light pollution.

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“There is smiling and smiling…” says Sarah’s manager in a Kohout-contributed speech-bubble right before the commencement of an untitled poem by Paul Haworth (“wake the fuck up”) but after an uncredited digression into the definition of the word ‘tide’. It’s an archaic term for time, period or season and “when used on sundials the ‘tides’ were around three hours long, starting with dawn and ending with dusk, the working day divided into these four tides”.

A lower third news slide, that would probably move if it could, announces the false claim that “an hour of massage could compensate for 24 hours of sleep” below Egle Kulbokaite and Carl Palm’s ‘lol on by’ – a song complete with hook, verses and chorus: “mr Tom don’t wake me up before you leave”. Meanwhile, ‘Mr Cock’, ‘Mr Longfellow’ and ‘President Shaft’  exchange pointless pleasantries as stock market graphs go wild between text in Alejandra Salinas and Aaron Bergman’s ‘Idle Arcadian Adventures’ (credited to one ‘B.S Cock’). It’s appended by a note, in the corner of a page and under the circular arrow of the ‘refresh’ symbol: “During sleepless nights we look at our window to the dreamy skyline of Seattle, the original site of the anti-globalization movement, and find no trace of it”. **

Sleep Cures Sleepiness (ed. Martin Kohout) was published by TLTRPreß in May, 2014.

 

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A retrospective reading of Linear Manual

23 May 2014

“We need to talk about the stick again,” declares Johannes Thumfart in Linear Manual a collection of essays, images, sidebars, “slides and poetry” exploring themes of tools, power, fetish, surface and, of course, sticks. Featuring 13 contributors, “hosted” by Berlin-based artist Martin Kohout and published under his own bespoke TLTRPreß (TooLongToReadPress) publisher, as well as PAF, the book may have been published two years ago but its ideas are no less (if not more) relevant.

Intermittent thumbnails, photos, illustrations of people and animals holding and using twigs, batons, staffs, rods are strewn across the thin, pale-pink covered book –designed by PWR studio’s Rasmus Svensson. Arrows, pointers and cursors direct the eye, one toward the Linear Manual title of the spine, another to an opening quote from Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur where its confused protagonist Mathias finds himself pondering an excuse away from his hosts:

“The complete lack of form which presided over the latter’s arrangement prevented the salesman once again from knowing what to do.”

Based on and built around the structure of a conference meeting, Kohout provides the form Mathias’ meal is lacking in the “Morning session”, “Lunch break”, “Afternoon session” and “Tea at five” segments splitting and interjecting the sequential, or ‘linear’, nature of his chosen book format. Paul Pieroni’s text-box antagonisms pop up with the odd haughty comment across “Better ignorant at 47 than self-aware at 30. So STICK AROUND” or “This one’s after some Jagermeister…” and Jo-ey Tang’s series of photocopied pages composed of text revealing “the age of the questioned document… completely dropped”. Tang’s words follow Paul Haworth’s poignant eulogy to a broken heart that unfolds across a bathroom and the subway; emotions in relation to space and infrastructure –“this is my life”.

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“Here too he found himself unable to act according to any rule he could interpret as applicable…”

That’s another echo of the aforementioned Robbe-Grillet quote, as one contemplates Brian Droitcour’s brilliantly deadpan ‘Robots in the Commune’. From the outset it calls out the “hordes of hipsters… fuelling the same corporate giant they’re trying to take down” during #OccupyWallStreet with their iPhones, accompanied by an image of onlookers taking happy snaps of riot police. A familiar Office Assistant icon of a paperclip personified (“You’re computer seems to be turned on”), accompanies the piece as it deconstructs the “totalitarian networks” of word processors and Google search engines and their role in developing and perpetuating ideology through ‘contextual discovery’: “robbie williams naked. Related searches: robbie williams fat”.

Juliette Bonneviot also recreates the monotonous and misleading nature of unreliable online constructions of reality through film stills for ‘La Mort De Lully’ (‘Wikidemia’). Here, the story of Baroque composer Jean-Baptiste de Lully, is told through the non-descript, grayscale CGI form of a male archetype, narrated by white bubble text: “Lully refused to have his toe amputated and the gangrene spread, resulting in his death on 22 March”. It not only illustrates the banality of the network’s malevolence but questions how we allow for things like this happen. Pieroni’s blunt answer comes in one of his forthright interjections: “Convenience FUCKO.”

Dieter Roestraete’s ‘Jena Revisited (Ten Tentative Tenets)’ links what he thinks is the problematic “rhetoric of emancipation through immersion” –where the “idea of the art world starts to eclipse the idea of art” –to the network as well. He uses Caspar David Friedrich’s famous ‘The Wanderer Above the Mists’ as an allegory for the “haze that fills today’s art world”, where, like in Droitcour’s ‘Robots in the Commune’, it exposes the “utopia of mobility”as becoming “a dystopia of absolute immobility”.


Perhaps that’s why the timeless format of the bound book is such an apt one for Linear Manual; it’s segments offering a structure to the multimedia presentation that an actual interactive, multimedia format couldn’t. Yet, while the book form itself perpetuates the arbitrary idea of duration in the imposed structures of the working day, Linear Manual also both mimics and negates the distracted habits of the online browser. Because, while the diversion from Thumfart’s ‘Why We Need to Talk about the Stick Again: A Post-Deconstructivist Meditation’ is encouraged away from the “Animals use Sticks too!” subheading by a ubiquitous arrow pointing toward a 2011 wikipedia entry on the New Caledonian Crow, the extent and breadth of this distraction is still restricted to content curated by Kohout. You may have the option of disregarding it, but it’s still the only content there to disregard.

Meanwhile, the smoothed-edged box of Pieroni’s aphorisms continue to appear as listless distraction alongside and away from Linear Manual’s central pieces. Kohout’s dazzling ‘Sticks: Class A’ series, photographed in collaboration with Rachel de Joode, fashioned and fetishised by bold colour blocks, sport grips and wrist bands against a blue-clouded backdrop are met with Pieroni’s, “I like the look of awkward vegetables on the glass”. There’s fetishisation throughout Linear Manual; of textures, the nine-to-five workday, a chrome draw handle suspended in white space. The complexity and stark beauty of a corporate-like glass railing is set and displayed on its own with a “Four Seasons glass railing available at www.glass-railing.net”, an actual showcase of glass railings for sale online.

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Published in 2012 Linear Manual holds up in its interrogation of contemporary technologies, despite a widely held assumption that their progress is advancing at such a rate that softwares can become obsolete within a matter of months, but there are things that don’t change. We’re all still Thumfart’s “animals in human costume”. The lack of distinction is not only illustrated by the New Caledonian Crow’s ability to also use tools like we do but our own persistent exploitation of these tools for “allowing men to treat their fellow men like animals” –whether by stick or by internet. Sadly, there’s been no tool invented for circumventing human nature, as Mathias’ narrator declares within The Voyeur’s confusing and ambiguous time frame: “the meal had no more reason to be over than it had to continue”.**

A new TLTRPreß publication Sleep Cures Sleepiness will be available on May 26, to launch with Martin Kohout’s Gotthard project anniversary at Berlin’s Exile gallery on June 13, 2014.

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