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Katy Macleod
Writings:
What is writing?
15 Books
Poetry
Short stories
| Useless Splendour In 2010 the CfUS published 'The Centre for Useless Splendour' – A book which contained, amongst other texts, Katy Macleod's 'Ray at the Seaside' a version of which can be found in Short Stories |
An Introduction to The Centre for Useless Splendour |
| 'Welcome to the Centre for Useless Splendour. Do come
in and spend some time with us. Feel free to wander around the
space, being sure to check out all our rooms and to explore all
the wonderful research that gets carried out here. The Centre is a virtual or unofficial research hub operating within the Contemporary Art Research Centre (CARC) at Kingston University. It was initially conceived by Elizabeth Price who drew on a surrealist legacy in a practical attempt to grapple with the difficulties, as well as the possibilities for re-cognition, brought about when artists working or studying within university Fine Art departments are institutionally re-categorised as ‘researchers’. The Centre’s four rooms envisage different ways in which art manifests itself as an encounter with the world: the social (Foyer), the technological (Machine Room), the epistemological (Hall of Records), and the material (Lumber Room). What may appear at first to be a strategy of confinement within subject areas therefore turns out to be just the opposite: a potential opening out to the world and common experience. There is no immunity for art, either within the gallery or the academy. As the Centre for Useless Splendour itself moves beyond the gates of its initial institutional conceit, becoming manifest in the world in forms such as this book, we may ask: is it not in fact the Contemporary Art Research Centre which exists within the Centre for Useless Splendour, rather than the other way around? Perhaps CARC is merely a sub-department of CfUS, another room further down the virtual corridor. Another fiction; or a front. A centre within a centre within a centre...This may be idle speculation, and yet I seem to hear the words of Nietzsche echoing through the chambers of time: ‘Behind each cave lies another, deeper cave - a stranger, more comprehensive world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every ground, beneath every 'foundation'.' Dean Kenning, 2010 |
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