Launched at lunch on Sunday 27th November, More is Plenty is a limited edition monograph on multimedia artist Kurt Brereton's work since the mid-1970's, edited by Adelaide art critic and poet Ken Bolton. Contributions include an introductory essay by the editor and essays by George Alexander, Anne Howell, Arnie Goldman, Diana Wood-Conroy, Edward Dore and other art writers.

The book is beautifully produced (in square format) with many full colour images of the work and photographs of performances, installations, works in progress and the artist's family.

It publishes the brilliant Pathetic Manifesto compiled between the years 1997 to 2000, and culminating in 2006 in an artist's talk at Project Contemporary Artspace in Wollongong - Patheticism - A Report from the Illawarra Frontline. Consisting of 46 short statements this discursive talk/manifesto outlines the concerns of contemporary artists who celebrate failure, immorality, style-free art and who have no interest in the romantic abject or sublime.





Kurt Brereton's notes on Patheticism -
• attempts to synthesize disparate accounts of pathos and the pathetic.
• indicates a desire to move beyond the bounds of irony via an unapologetic occupancy of a position which is from the outset acknowledged to be untenable in any heroic sense yet very human.
•ethos of empathy, the democracy of failure, and any other excesses of hyper-individual introspection (from any era).



Some of the reproductions of the paintings -


                        Dreamhome, No 6, 2007


                         Tagging the Escarpment, 2007

For more on this diverse work and info on how to buy More Is Plenty visit Kurt's web site here

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from Big Bridge #14:
Before drifting away from his involvement in poetry in the earliest years of this century, Vincent Farnsworth was involved in poetry milieus in the San Francisco Bay Area, New Orleans and Prague, featured in international festivals in Prague and Bratislava, managing a journal JEJUNE: a.e.i.y., author of Immortal Whistleblower (Lavender Ink, New Orleans) and published in many little magazines and online poetry sites. A graduate in Creative Arts from San Jose State University, Farnsworth studied under the late Naomi Clark as well as Lucille Clifton and was influenced by Tom Clark and Peter Dale Scott. He was featured in the Micro-Festival Poetry Series in Prague, Czech Republic in April 2009, marking a return to his work in the concept of "deep poetics", trying to fuse the contemporarily relevant and political with perennial truths. Farnsworth also performs as "Reverend Feedback" in the music group Blaq Mummy and solo as Pazvuky in Prague, Czech Republic, where he lives and works as a teacher. He has been active in anti-war and human rights activities in Central and Eastern Europe.

Further information and publisher, Litteraria Pragensia.

There is an essay by Louis Armand, the resistance of medium [On the Poetry of Vincent Farnsworth], in VLAK 2.

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With not a word out of place, Laurie Duggan's minimalism is exceptionally distinctive - conceptual, clear, sometimes droll, the mood sustained throughout. This chapbook is an artwork. These twenty nine 'Allotments' compile traces of walks and bus and train trips around Canterbury, to London, to poetry readings, to the back garden of his 'improbable' house and to various pubs. Thinking about music, friends, politics (briefly), poets like Susan Howe, Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn and others as he walks, travels or sits with an ale or lager.

Published by Fewer & Further Press, in Massachusetts, it's an attractive chapbook with a drawing by Basil King on the covers. There are only 200 of them so if you'd like a copy you should visit Fewer & Further pretty much straightaway.

Visit Laurie's blog Graveney Marsh.

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                    Astrid Lorange is fossicking in Sydney for Jacket2.
                    Click here to see her findings, so far.

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