TINA

TINA has arrived and again fulfilled its promise as a festival of enticing thought and creativity. For those who mightn’t know it (after 13 years?), THIS IS NOT ART is an Arts Festival, an “Independent, Emerging and Experimental Arts Festival” according to the Official Program Guide, held annually in Newcastle, across a range of interesting city sites.

One thing to like about the Festival, from a local angle, is that it introduces even the locals to the city they live in. You attend the festival, alongside the many others coming in from Sydney, Melbourne and everywhere else, as a “tourist”, exploring the city's surprising potential, feeling that, no matter how insular old Castelnuovo might seem, you’ll never really know it. TINA’s also resourceful, making imaginative use of the many otherwise disused buildings scattered around the place. And there’s the feeling of a general relaxing of civic regulation in the number of smaller temporary licensed venues operating as part of the festival, and nurturing in their own way the kind of spirit that any successful festival of this kind requires.

If these things are important at all, they’re incidental to the real appeal of the festival: an experimental arts focus. The festival guide promotes the experimental as a priority; the first pages of the guide tell you, “independent” “innovative”, talk of “experimental art practices”, “exploratory practitioners”, “thinkers”! In the end this seems a fair description, of the festival’s intentions and of the things it delivers.

I went to four presentations over a couple of days. The first was, “Late Night at the Gun Bar: Poet’s Guide to Philosophy” which was held at the United Services Club on Watt Street, a venue I didn’t know existed but am very happy to have found. The presentation was truly terrific - seven young poets and thinkers talking about poetry and philosophy and the relationships the two might share – for three hours! and everyone glued to their seats (a grand final atmosphere). Melbourne poet and editor Tim Wright introduced the evening with a reading of John Forbes’ “Ode to Karl Marx”, a poem which, in a summative sense I guess, explores ideas of theory and practice, cause and effect, consciousness, body, mind and so on. This then led into some illuminating discussion. Jessica Wilkinson said that reading philosophy can be about the personal breakthroughs we make, the little bits you take away and what that means to you (which is one of the little bits I now take away from the three hours’ discussion). The panel was Jal Nicholl, Keri Glastonbury, Nick Keys, Jessica Wilkinson, Harriet Johnson, Tim Wright, Stu Hatton and Sam Langer. I place my order now for more of the same next year please.

The second presentation I attended was a talk on coterie in the arts. This again was an engaging discussion. It looked at the range of factors that might lead to the forming of a coterie, political intellectual or social, online networking as a support mechanism for young and independent artists, the problem of dominant paradigms in arts culture, and lots more. Aden Rolfe, Keri Glastonbury, Mike Rosenthal and Ben Byrne are very easy to listen to and like.

At once an acknowledgement of the inherent complexities of philosophical enquiry and a repudiation of the myth of philosophy’s impenetrability, Tom Lee’s presentation on the cosmology and metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, was another “paper session” I thoroughly enjoyed. Tom was joined by Jennifer Hamilton who spoke on the significances of meteorological references in King Lear. Neatly-timed, intelligent questions from facilitator Ella O’Keefe were also helpful. I should mention I was late coming in (nicked out to check the grand final score) and missed a video link-up that featured Sydney poet Astrid Lorange. Something I would have liked to see. Hi Astrid if, by chance, you’re reading this.

Saturday night saw a return to the Services Club (Gun Bar) for an event titled “The Poetics of Intoxication”, led by Melbourne poet and author of the forthcoming, How to be Hungry. The subject matter varied enormously. Readings in French. Impressive live translation by Jal Nicholl. Deleuze on Fitzgerald. For a while gender hijacked the whole thing. Dust and nebulae. Rimbaud appeared and re-appeared, though, unlike an irrepressible audience member, knew when to sit down. Something about a super-poet. Of course, lots and lots more to think about and enjoy. Poetics and Intoxication was with Stu Hatton, Tom Lee, Bella Li, Sam Langer, Corey Wakeling, Josh Comyn and Jal Nicholl.