Shifting Audiences: Reconfiguring Pasts

OoPs Seminar 19th March, Senate House, London
OoPs Seminar 19th March

Goes to Show: Rough Music in Frownlands

Out of Practice Seminar (Oops)
 
This talk considers the contexts and motivations of two recent works: a poem and performance. Each explores relationships to music, visual art and the noise of cultural and critical dissent. E.P. Thompson’s survey of the long standing European traditions of ‘Rough Music’ reveals the uncomfortable tensions between community-based rituals and the local enforcement of law. This talk will demonstrate how Thompson’s archival survey of folk traditions is highly generative for the formation of a contemporary poetics alive to its own fragility, even complicity with its apparent objects of subversion. Olsen’s recent performance, Frownlands, 1969 both celebrates and resists aspects of the commonality and energy of 60’s counterculture. At Bury Art Gallery she presented a feminist inflected performance-text, a nominy delivered karaoke style in a non-site plywood replica of the original scene of production: the Californian Woodland Hills house where the infamous album, Trout Mask Replica was recorded. The talk will explore the overlaps and gaps between imagined and empirical audiences. What happens when the reality of performance and poetic language come up against wider conflicts of interest and power relations at large in the speculative imaginaries and curatorial fantasies of public engagement and participation?

Bedford Room, G37, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Speakers Redell Olsen (Royal Holloway, University of London), Christopher Ohge (Institute of English Studies, SAS) 19 March 2024, 5:00PM – 7:00PM
Contact IESEvents@sas.ac.uk

https://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/shifting-audiences-reconfiguring-pasts

Frownland, like it’s 1969

New performance work Saturday January 27th at Bury Museum and Art Gallery as part of an exhibition by Derek Tyman and Andy Webster.

Art-writing performance that builds on instrumental outakes from Beefheart’s, Trout Mask Replica. Olsen plays through and counters the often punishing methods of production endured by the original band members with an homage that is also a rewriting of the master’s voice. She offers a provocative chorus of speculative fragmentary imaginings from a variety of sources and eras to recast the legendary narratives of the making of the original album alongside interruptions drawn from the erased history of female drummers, nostalgic imaginings for futures that never were and cacophonies of protest relevant for our present day Frownlands.

Group Exhibition:

https://royalholloway.ac.uk/about-us/the-library/the-exhibition-space-at-the-emily-wilding-davison-building/words-from-the-wild/

Dell Olsen

This exhibition is curated by my Phd students: Briony Hughes, Caroline Harris and Gareth Hughes in collaboration with the Culture Team at Royal Holloway. It features work from artists and writers working with text and image in relation to ecological and environmental issues. It reflects the cultural environment and work of the practice-based students that I teach at MA and Phd level on the Poetic Practice pathway and some of the work by contemporaries that we admire, including: Susan Johanknecht and Kate Meynell and JR Carpenter. Really delighted to be showing some of my work from the Plume of the Volants series in this company.

This exhibition is open from 17 January 2024 – 24 March 2024 in the Davison Building Exhibition Space at Royal Holloway.

Take A Ruler

“Silence cannot be heard in terms of pitch or harmony: it is heard in terms of time length” John Cage

“If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence” Middlemarch, George Eliot.

Redell Olsen 2020

from: Weather, Whether Radar: Plume of the Volants Limited Edition to coincide with exhibition (200 copies): currently available from foundmaterials@me.com £15 Digital Studio: https://weatherwhetherradar.art/work

Moonflower, 2021 or, a scarlet transfer : For Margaret Mee (1909 – 1988).

poem essay in The Ethnobotanical Assembly (TEA)

https://www.tea-assembly.com/issues/8/moonflower-2021-or-a-scarlet-transfer

Details of the full issue and introduction from Felix Driver and Caroline Cornish below:

https://www.tea-assembly.com/

Review of issue from Herbarium World

Weather, Whether Plume: Extract

preface I

A question of measurement arises both in relation to weather and noise. How to take a ruler to the weather or a gauge to more than rain: the flicker of wings in swarm, a memory of crushed insects on a car windscreen.

The naming of clouds proves a starting point. In possibility we name the shapes as if to produce an inventory of natural phenomenon of the unnoticed or forgotten. A change in climate affects the dew point. An increase in humidity magnifying the effects of heat waves. A body unable to cool.


Noise of silence as music is not a new approach. Thunder sheet. A roar on the other of silence. Go back into the things dismissed as noise with new parameters of attention, make new sense of the data. Parameters set while agreeing that it cannot know how to in advance of itself. A process of unfolding.


Distinctions between central and peripheral tone are eroded or bagged out into new stories. This is not about the expansion of everyday sounds into music but concerns the attention and tuning of location to the everyday.


Once the containers and containment of measurement are exhumed we find ourselves in the frame as prime enemies of climate justice and more. Facts picked up in the data with the question of what is noticed, how and for what purpose?

How to find ways to monitor wildlife in our skies through the repurposing of older technologies once developed for war. Radio Research. Research Radio. The colocation of the question.

What was later a possibility for the detection of insects began with the identification of destroyers.