Learning ‘to read differently’ to be debated at professorial lecture

‘Learn to Read Differently’ will examine the relationship between reading and art and propose a new method of making art via ‘conceptualist performed readings’. It will take place at Leeds Beckett’s city campus Rose Bowl building from 6-7pm on Wednesday 1 February.

Professor Morris said: “The psychoanalyst Dr Howard Britton referred to me as ‘philosophically irresponsible’ in a special edition of the French journal, the Revue d’esthétique, which examined the relationship between contemporary artists and philosophy. The critic Robert Clark referred to me as ‘an inspired lunatic’ in the Guardian newspaper in reference to an exhibition I had curated, entitled ‘The Perverse Library’. These playful epithets make reference to my experimental work with the book as a form ripe for examination in the digital age.

“Using art strategies, I test the very nature of the literary medium to find out what its limits are. My investigations may involve inviting my students to cut up Sigmund Freud’s entire text from his celebrated work, The Interpretation of Dreams into 223,464 distinct words and then throwing the severed language out of a moving car or copying out, word for word, a seminal work of fiction, Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road,’ all 120,000 words in exactly the same order, and republishing it as an act of appropriation, or inviting pigeons to read a text about reading. My work tampers with language, its use, and misuse, its presentation and its reception. My work is intent on disrupting the triangulation between meaning, support and context. The materiality of words and the materiality of the ground on which they are inscribed, the context that frames the meaning, the margins, the edges, the borderlines.

“In my creative practice, I aim to achieve an engaging interplay between word, context and the medium of the page, as well as recording the current shift between the analogue and the digital. What these works all have in common is a process of questioning and, to borrow a phrase from the French experimental writer Georges Perec: These are questions that I ask and I think there is some point in an artist asking them.

“Historically, this has been a commonplace practice since the 1960s, with some artists using books as containers for their ideas in the same manner a sculptor might use a block of marble and a chisel or a painter might use oil paint and canvas to express their thoughts.”

Professor Simon Morris joined Leeds Beckett’s Leeds School of Arts (AAD) from Teesside University. As Professor of Art, his role includes organising the School’s public lecture series, INSIDE/OUT, and coordinating art and design research.

His own research appears in the form of exhibitions, publications, installations, films, actions and texts which all revolve around the form of the book and often involve collaborations with people from the fields of art, creative technology, literature and psychoanalysis.

Professor Morris added: “Conventional books are what I would refer to as ‘information carriers’ and to be activated, they require a readership. Artists’ books don’t necessarily have to be read in the conventional manner from left to right, from beginning to end but, like artworks, they do require a thoughtful engagement or what I would call a thinkership.

“This is an art of reading things differently, and I intend to present a number of these experimental works in my public lecture.”

Professor Morris has written numerous experimental books, including ‘Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head’ (2010) and ‘Pigeon Reader’ (2012) and has directed documentary films including ‘Making Nothing Happen: Pavel Büchler’ (2010).

He regularly gives talks across Europe and North America about his work and has had solo shows at the Freud Museum in London and Printed Matter Inc. in New York City.