More "art" idiocy.

[Gob]

The Lancashire artist Jamie Holman is paying 150 people £10 each to howl in unison as part of his upcoming exhibition, a memorial to the last wolf killed in England.



Holman put out the call for participants on his Twitter account last month, asking people to join him at Preston bus station on Sunday 30 May to “contribute to a piece of art”. Holman says the performance will run from 2-4pm and he’s promised every participant £10 and refreshments.

“We invited [an initial] 100 people to gather at the iconic brutalist bus station in Preston. It’s going to be filmed and exhibited outside on a large screen [at the Lancashire Encounter festival] in September.”

Last year’s Lancashire Encounter festival was cancelled due to the pandemic but this year the arts festival will return to Preston on the weekend of 17-19 September.

The promise of a tenner for turning up for a day of howling was enough to get the initial 100 sign-ups in half an hour, and Holman’s only regret is that he can’t give away more money.

“I really should have done 500 people but we couldn’t do it with Covid distancing. When my studio gets public art commissions we try to divert that funding back to people so they feel like they’re part of the event.

“It’s nice to not have to ask people to turn up and contribute something for nothing.”

Holman says the “mass howl” is intended to symbolise the end of wildness in England, by gathering in the same county, Lancashire, in which the last wolf was supposedly killed.

The idea also has more modern origins in terms of the pandemic’s impact on our relationship with nature over the past 15 months.

“We’ve had to deal with this idea of nature again and kids haven’t been able to go outside and people haven’t been able to gather,” said Holman. “There’s also this idea of howling in sadness, desperation and trauma but also relief.”

Holman describes the artwork in two stages. The first being “the big cathartic performance piece” and the second being the “beautiful film” which he is hoping to play across the country once people are allowed to gather in order to encourage people to “reengage with wildness” once lockdown is over.

“It’s about being a pack again,” he said.

[MajGenl.Meade]

I would like to make it clear that this is not my son, Jamie. No relation at all. Not. No. Yuck!

For those who remember

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
and so on ad nauseam

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl

[ex-khobar Andy]

That's the kind of thing for which Pseuds Corner was invented.