Start the Week

31/01/2011

Andrew Marr talks fonts with the graphic designer Neville Brody, whose Anti-Design manifesto criticised the fear and lack of risk inherent in the art world, and challenged fellow artists to come up with something truly dangerous. Objects, overlooked and rejected, lie at the heart of much of Susan Hiller's work, which has been described as "investigations into the 'unconscious' of our culture." Hiller has been inspired by Minimalism, Fluxus and Surrealism, and Alex Danchev celebrates the best and worst in artists' manifestos. And the Nigerian writer EC Osondu, who works and lives in the US, explores the frayed bonds between his adopted country and his homeland.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 42m
Broadcast on:: 31 Jan 2011
Audio Format:: other

Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello art and modern design today with some influential voices round the table. Alex Danchef has edited a book of some of the most resonant voices in modern art from futurism onwards - 100 artists' manifestos. Susan Hilla has been a big figure in the new art of video protections, mixed media installations and recycling in Tate Britain is giving her a big retrospective which opens tomorrow. Later we're going to turn to the Nigerian writer, E.C. Osondu about his collection of short stories, old-fashioned stories about Nigerians at home and in the United States which work very well indeed. But first a man known around the world as a designer of something close to genius who gave the magazine the face, its face and shaped arena and who's responsible for the world's best-selling graphic design book, it's called The Graphic Language of Neville Brody, for it is he who is also the new head of the Royal College of Arts, Visual Communication Department. It had a different title before and you've changed it to Visual Communication Neville. Why was that? Because I think that the old idea about graphic design and communication being a space of I guess a cloistered elite activity, I think this is not relevant anymore and I think that today anyone working in visual design needs to understand that it touches moving image, it touches sound, it touches interactive design, it touches storytelling and it runs across all media including into three-dimensional space. So this is very interesting because you made your name with typography and layout and colors on flat spaces and so on. To what extent has it been the arrival of the internet and it has pushed a designer like you into film, storytelling other areas? I think the digital public space that we're going to be stepping into will radically change all of our lives. The BBC itself is understanding this new space, it's much more convergent, you'll be watching TV at the same time understanding a different layer of information on top of that. You'll be stopping and starting, carrying on watching it on the bus, maybe moving into a building, touching walls, things will happen. As we've seen even with kind of the gallery world, this multimedia approach I think will become intrinsic to every part of our lives. So a lot of the trades which have been sort of ingrained in our heads as sort of specific forms of trade dissolve and breakout, I suppose the question is therefore for something like the Royal College, where do the special new skills come in that you are going to transmit to the students? Well it's a really challenging position isn't it? Because in all honesty we don't know and I think that the old idea of teacher and pupil dissolves now and it's much more of a kind of collaborative research rather than anything else. We have to understand the world what it needs and what the rights rules are to deal with that. Well except that the students who are now paying lots of money to come to somewhere like the Royal College will want something special back so if it's not pupil and teacher it's possibly sort of I don't know master and detailier or something like that. I mean they're going to come to people like you for specific ideas and skills. Well we're calling it an unfinished school. So people may come with highly formed skills and ideas and we're trying to break down the ideas and then understand which are the more appropriate skills to apply to that. And it's becoming I mean clearly it's a challenging space clearly the arts and culture are under attack right now with the funding issues, clearly colleges like the Royal College with 80% cutting funding needs to rethink and become much more dynamic models. And to be honest one of the main goals I have is actually to re-chain the staff in many ways. The students are coming in with a much deeper kind of investment in what's happening digitally on their everyday lives and I think it's a multiple skill set space it's a partnership coming forwards. This country used to have a very strong and very distinctive specific sort of typography and design tradition if I can put it out. We think back to the sort of iconic typefaces and design achievements going back in the 20th century from the tube map onwards to Eric Giltwal the sort of well-known designers of typefaces and you indeed redesigned the times phase recent a little while back but it looking at the way magazines and flat spaces of all kind appear now it seems we've gone away from any kind of national look. It's a smorgasbord or a pulling in of looks and colors and designs and traditions. Well I think that's a healthy space if you go into the Royal College today you'll probably find like 25 different nationalities within within our group of about 150. I think this idea of Britain being a place of a singular vision was always slightly inaccurate. I think we've always been a place of influence. Well most of these people half of them were sort of Germans and Swiss and Jewish migrants in the first place of course. Yes absolutely and then we went out of course and then influenced their culture so it was a great big melting pot and we tend to look at it as a British vision what we tended to do was bring I think strategy more than anything else. We used to understand how to collect ideas from different places and turn it into a deeper story and philosophy but these days it's changed I mean with the internet you can go anywhere in the world and you can actually have access to the same basic information and cultures. You emerged through the kind of very vigorous energetic period of punk. Yeah so they do. Indeed indeed. But what I was going to ask is to what extent do you think there is that energy coming back now? I think that for the last 30 years our culture has become fairly stagnant. I think post Thatcher things became geared towards what I would call success culture. Everything was geared towards success culture. Students went to college to understand how to learn success skills and we've seen in the past few years that that's collapsed. Students are having a harder time than ever. There's no guarantee of getting work when you when you leave college and I'm seeing more and more students returning to the idea of ideas of revolution. How can we better serve society? And I think there's going to be an energetic explosion of new ideas, new risks and it's going to be the most exciting time. Alex we're going to come on and talk about artists manifestos in a moment but do you agree with that? Do you think that there's some of the energy that would in your manifestos is going is bubbling back at the moment? Yes I think I do. I'm encouraged to hear Neville talk the language of revolution and I wonder whether there are young artists at the moment or young designers at the moment, drafting such tracks? Well there are. We're finding especially with the current cohort at the Royal College there's some extraordinary students who are highly skilled and do not want to turn into highly finished professionals. They're much more interested in relevance. How can they grasp an idea in society? How can they deal with a problem and become important within that space? What is their tactics? They're learning skills as a tactical action and I think it's going to change everything. Do you think they're reading manifestos of the past? I think I've heard you say that you were inspired by some of those earlier what? Massively. Well you know the the thing that prompted me when I was at college was the work of the futurists and the dardis especially in Rochenko and I think without that in history I think that I may have been in a very different place and I think the resonance from those manifestos is still highly relevant and appropriate today. You see it soon do. I think that you know for one of the things that stands out for most African writers is the issue of ideology you know and one sees that everyone sees African right in his political you know African right in his true political people say that even sometimes in an accusatory manner but I think that shown of ideology what's art after all I think that ideology is really important it's what moves the world which is why I was asking earlier why there was no but we'll probably come to that why the negative attitude wasn't represented in your book. And that was a question to Alex. We will come on to that in a second Susan you want to jump in on I was interested in the way everyone was discussing this issue of students and their let's say their politics toward their professional life and I think there's an interesting problem now for students because it's a question of defining what it is that they should do if they're in a field like designer art I mean what is their what is their job and the sky's the limit in a sense but there are other limits on what they can do financial ones etc etc so they're having to reinvent their role this is a this is a very fascinating and precarious thing to be doing. That's an excellent excellent I'm very very inspired by that change because it is a big change. I think that the potential for change is phenomenal I think people keep talking about this being a digital revolution I think it's a knowledge and cultural revolution we don't talk about the steam revolution we talk about an industrial revolution you know what comes out of steam digital is the enabler and at the same time there seems to be a collapse in systems that we've believed in for so long like the banking system and that undermines the kind of society that we've built and then that throws open the question what are the correct functions for the artist and designer and something I've seen you address very clearly I think in your exhibition Susan. Well let's move on then to these these artists manifestos that just been mentioned this is it's a one into the Penguin Modern Classics collection and there's a hundred manifestos here Alex and they start with the Futurist Manifesto 1909 which caused a massive eruption of interest around Europe front page on newspapers it's astonishing to think of artist manifestos being clearing front pages these days and it's it's marinetti and a moment of kind of rage almost against all of the old art of Italy yes marinetti is really the the model the template for all that come after I think and he managed somehow to mobilize in this extraordinary thing that is the founding manifesto of futurism the language the rhetoric the hyperbole the almost gratuitous insult that became characteristic of the genre so if I try on you a couple of lines we wish to glorify war the sole cleanser of the world militarism patriotism the destructive act of the libertarian beautiful ideas worth dying for and scorn for women yeah well of course these guys became a lot of them became passionate supporters of Mussolini after the war didn't they the futurists and indeed some of the early manifestos of Russian revolutionary artists a lot of these people turned and became Stalinists or at least at least apparently supporters of Stalin later on and so there is this kind of uneasy yoking together of the energy and the rebellious energy of the early 20th century with how that was channeled pretty quickly yes it's hard to pin down the politics often i i think the politics of artists manifestos is radically unstable i don't think it's right to say that marinetti began as a straightforward fascist and continued in that thing throughout full stop i think he began uh more on the radical left actually and and there was a lot of those people went from the radical left to the radical right back again and because so much it was about destruction of the old order which of course both Marxists and fascists were also i mean windham luice who appears in your book um by the 19 late night early 1930s he was writing a book about hit like the first book on on hitler in english and saying this this chap's really worth listening to you know yes luice is a remarkable figure but i i think you're right to pinpoint the strand of well revolutionary zeal and that's a really important motor yes for these for the classic manifestos the futurist ones the dataist ones and there they can see a way in which this might happen across europe there's been a russian revolution of course yes they thought that was going to be a german revolution for good reason which didn't quite happen in the way that they'd hoped nevertheless everything was possible for a while yeah um fair to say almost that the best manifestos here the ones that are most enjoyable to read are very often not by the best artists i mean there isn't a direct correlation in fact there might be an anti-correlation between the ability of somebody as a as a plastic or visual artist and the ability of somebody to write exciting manifestos that's a good observation i think uh it may be interesting to hear Susan Hiller on that um it's true i think that the great manifestoists have been more artists figures in the artistic firmament rather than artists themselves marinetti uh tzara the dadaist andro breton the surrealist these are all impresarios yes if you like yes and that's been a very important strand in the evolution of the manifesto indeed in the evolution of modern art and these so-called manifestos don't necessarily tell you very much about what the movements never mind the artists so then going on to do sometimes they're just pro's poetry not just pro's poetry they are pro's poetry i'm thinking of close oldenberg later on in the states his his so-called manifesto is it could be a poem by any one of the great you know 1950s american poets yes or even what would be a horror let us say frango hire someone like that yes i think that's right the language of the manifestos is magnificent often so why do we why should we read them now we do we read them really just for their their pro's energy i mean rather than as a as historical documents for inspiration certainly the young derrick jarman to revert to our earlier conversation produced a manifesto as a student which is very young at the time here for the first time actually and i think he drew inspiration from earlier ones and so there's a a sense of a continuing conversation i think which is very important but they're also trying to set out a new way of life almost i think that's part of the yes importance of them after modernism post-post-modernism are people still writing manifesto the stuckists who are a post-post-post-post-modernist group or something or other um have a have a manifesto i can see susan hiller shaking her head in absolute horror the stuck is it's hard not to think that there's been something has been lost between the futurists and the stuckists one might say but i one thing that i think is happening is that individual artists are still manifesting yes i'm we should explain who the stuckists are of course the stuckists the stuckists um certainly started out uh billy childish um was was possibly the best known of them um and it was a kind of cry of anger against all kinds of conceptual art wasn't it really it was it was pro-traditional art anti-conceptual art and it the name comes from tracy emin we think who said to billy childish who was for a while her boyfriend that his art was stuck stuck stuck in the old world so he called himself a stuckist so that's the stuckist yes and you would probably it's fair to say susan hiller not been absolutely uh total enthusiast for the stuckist well no i think their manifesto is an absolutely honest you know scream of pain and anger which which actually characterizes a lot of the uh the manifestos that that we've been reading and talking about because this is the kind of adolescent male anger and hatred of women and mothers and establishment and everything all jumbled up together um eloquently or not expressed but the thing is that this book is a fantastic um collection of material for anyone who's interested not just in art but in the kind of emotions that go into the making of art and the kind of fantasies that artists have about what their work is and what their work could achieve because there's sometimes a tremendous mismatch between the work and the manifesto and there's there's another point that i'd just like to raise in relationship to alex's book i wouldn't call a lot of these statements manifestos you know because they're not meant for public proclamation the jarman piece which is absolutely marvelous and you mentioned of course is a private uh notebook piece and quite a few of them are unpublished and um unknown and one of the values of your book is that you've brought these out for public contemplation is very interesting to compare them with the tone of the public uh manifestos for example you've included and i think this is an incredible contribution to uh art history scholarship you've included some manifestos by women artists which were totally unknown to me and several of them have a private aspect to them like menaloy writing a feminist manifesto in the early 20th century uh in a letter to a friend and then deciding i think not to publish it because you discovered that someone else had had the idea for this manifesto earlier that sort of thing that's very very gentle and and decent behavior and most unusual is not the least bit gentle it expresses tremendous anger um in a slightly different tone than most of the other manifestos so for all these reasons i think what you've put together is much more than a collection of of artists manifestos it's almost like uh taking the temperature of art as time passes you get up to the present with um somebody like merrill eucalyse and her manifesto about um the function of art to take care of things that's a very considered text doesn't go into a tie rate of anger the way some of the earlier ones do so that kind of temperature taking is an important element of your book that one you've just mentioned by eucalyse is called the the maintenance art manifesto and it's it's a feminist one in fact because she draws a distinction between the inspirational art as male and maintenance art as female so uh she asks the question after the revolution who is going to clear up the garbage hmm and yeah this is an example i think of private and public conversation among artists and others before we leave them i'm very nervous they're going to stick up for some bits of the stuccist manifesto here because we were talking about what what went wrong perhaps in in in the art and cultured world of the last 20 or 30 years and they do say in this britard in being sponsored by the sarchies mainstream conservatism and the labor government makes a mockery of its claim to be subversive or avant-garde and he talks about ego it's a little bit of a point there isn't that well there's not any of that but the last point of the stuccist also says that in design education and art education um everyone should be allowed to go regardless of their financial background um so yeah i i think i'm probably a stuccist at heart um i did have i did have a point it's very interesting Alex to see all of these manifestos put them in a egalitarian stage where actually you're just looking at the content and the text um devoid of the visual presentation i'm i know a lot of the manifestos but as visual presentations as uh maybe exciting bewildering sets of typography um to put them on this egalitarian stage i found actually a bit of a culture shock it's true that we haven't talked about the the manifesto as artwork in the sense of typography because you've penguin work gonna just give you enough money to do it do it like that that's a problem um easiest one do you mention the lack of of of of blackout manifestos yes all that to ask Alex how did you choose your guest list you know negative it's really huge um just it's uh it encompasses art literature uh even even fashion you know and one of the things that one of those it had a lot of critics as well people in the past said magnitude uh the tiger does not need to proclaim it's tigeritude you know how did you peak on the guest list those who were invited and those who were not i suppose some invited themselves uh the futurist the dub is the zerilist others i wanted somehow to embrace some of the areas that you've mentioned in fact there is a futurist uh manifesto of men's fashion there is a futurist um manifesto of cooking the futurists were not only against the past they were against pasta right well we're going to move on now to um one of the big shows um of the the spring in london susan hillards show at the date at tape britain um susan um it's always difficult to talk about um what is what is visual um and um tactile and so on on the on the wireless as we used to call it um but you've done video installations audio installations web pages let's just talk about a few of the works that people will find if they go to your show at tape britain there's one which was um if not a lifetimes work at least took you a very very a lot of your life which is about collecting holy water um from different wells and sources all over the place in small bottles just talk us through that well you've picked something that is quite uncharacteristic of me in a sense um but characteristic in other senses i mean this is a work of mine which i've called uh homage to joseph voice but you're right i started collecting the bottles of holy water a very long time ago in fact when i lived in whales in the 70s and um i started to discover the abundance of holy wells in this country something very new to me coming from the states and i knew a lot of people have britain too i have to say only when they hear about it you know any place where there's a Celtic tradition um you're going to find a lot of wells that were originally named after Celtic goddesses and then became christianized so that's another long thing i'm not going to go into that now but anyway i thought these places were fascinating and delightful and i began to take little souvenir uh samples so to speak as people do now when they visit shrines and so forth if you go to lures they have bottles of holy water for sale um there are Islamic shrines and Jewish shrines and Hindu shrines and so forth the same kind of pattern well i'm also interested in joseph boars because i'm doing a series of in a sense self-examination looking at artists in the past whose work i feel still relevant to me either for positive or negative reasons but usually combination of both and i'm very interested in boars' uh pose if you like as a shaman or or healer for those who don't know we should say this is the great german artist of the last century he was he was he was a an air force pilot in the german air force and shot down and burned and created a whole series of artworks with a lot of of um wax and felt and and materials natural materials basically which he somehow through his work was able to give a special almost sacramental quality too so that these these materials became almost transformed they became special although they weren't in essence special so i began to think about the holy waters that i've been collecting in this sense i mean water is water water is everywhere water is of course fundamental but water is also something we take for granted and the idea of a holy water is very paradoxical because water is always in circulation you know it goes up it comes down and uh pick something pick pick another work then which is you think it's made for video work yes more characteristic it's very difficult to talk about work and words i know it is it is okay i've got in this exhibition i've got a piece called an entertainment which is based on british punch and judy shows and again as a foreigner you see i'm i'm always intrigued uh by things like come across in this country which seem somewhat unfamiliar to me that maybe if you grew up here just seem ordinary so i was struck of course by the two things the violence of punch and judy and the way that children were being taught to enjoy the violence and the kind of ritual of uh acculturation really to be anthropological about it that through terror and pain you learn to accept certain kinds of values and this is a scary room people are going to now be scared it's a scary room for adults so a lot of your art is not only about using unfamiliar techniques in terms of traditional art but looking sideways at a culture looking for the the nooks and the crannies and the the the parts of the culture of the culture which perhaps not often found in tape britain well you know i think that that's what artists do i think if you were going to come right down to it and ask what it is an artist does an artist is is is uh self-assigned the job of making visible uh elements in the culture that we all share but we don't notice that's what we do um in all in all the fields that we call art so yes i do it explicitly in my work yeah and do you think that as a a woman artist there you are finding things that the male artists are not focusing on properly there's a lot about the unconscious um you know i think that um paradoxically being a woman is uh more of an advantage than a disadvantage because when you are an an underdog type person you see things very very clearly and um yes i've had that privilege of observation what did the rest of us make of this show level i thoroughly enjoyed it um no i'm not necessarily supposed to say that but um i what no mutual praise here please okay um what i found really interesting um was that in a way through your work season i think we we saw sort of almost a birth of multimedia the idea that other kind of elements of the sensual experience could form an artistic experience um be it sound be it film be it projection it's really what you were talking about right at the beginning level growth isn't it i mean the the the breaking down of old barriers absolutely um we move from the artifact and the object to where we're looking at the object with a lot of other experiences attached and we start to understand i think in your work how we invest magic in objects um and we invest fear and we invest superstition we actually give a a daily object some sort of power over us and i found that a really almost disturbing experience i'll extend you i i agree i was especially intrigued by the the work from the Freud Museum a collection of objects one might say and what intrigued me in particular was the words you use to describe what you did with them uh remained an organized process found all those sorts of words and i wondered whether they were sort of keys to the process yes the process yes absolutely and um i didn't have to think too hard about them they came naturally in the process of making each each element of the work we don't have time to describe that word but uh i think that um the use of words in my work is is is in a sense um part of the practice of attempting to be very clear about what i do and yet i know that in the end the artist can't claim to understand the work really that was one of the there and then it changed it was changing exactly and but the and but the titling of the work is very important as well the work that you changed you like titles which well that's going to take us neatly on to ec asondo's collection of short stories voice of america ec that because the first story these are stories of all sorts of different people and conditions of people in nigeria um and also in the united states that's good over there um but i was interested in this whole business of titles and indeed design because the first story waiting um is children um in a refugee camp and they could it's a they could be Dickens's children these little boys but they are titled they are they get their names from the t-shirts that they're wearing yes which brings us to the whole idea of graphic design and the one of the most fascinating things especially if you've traveled around africa is how you find people wearing all kinds of t-shirts even people who cannot read the inscriptions on the t-shirts are sometimes weird and funny and people are wearing them and sometimes the t-shirts for instance that has chicago bulls for instance i've been told that some people who are in parts of africa have affinity for that because they think it's connected with being a shepherd of some sort okay so the main character just to explain to people the main character here is orlando zaki and he's because he's got an all out of t-shirt from orlando in florida there's another one that who's called acapulco and there's a girl called sexy whose t-shirt just says tell me i'm sexy and one called paris whose t-shirt sees parents and and so on they're just taking their they get their names from something on the t-shirt yes and i'm also interested in talking about aid you know because people in the west also feel that it's important to help those in africa and so you have these t-shirts that have been sent by those over here and people wear them over there what do they make of these inscriptions these inscriptions also become aspirational you know sometimes this inscriptions become depressing you know the lady says there is this one who got a t-shirt that says london and he's in london and so there is a lot that is imbued it's it's almost superstitious you know what does your t-shirt do for you if the t-shirt stays my father went to yellowstone and got me this lousy t-shirt how come my life is so lousy in this refugee camp you know so that's that's the kind of thing because also in africa in my part of the world uh in my part of the country i know that names uh the name that you're born with the name that you're given is supposed to guide you in some way okay and so these inscriptions on these t-shirts become some kind of guide for these characters and the characters here are almost in one way or another are always looking to the west in general with america in particular for a living vision of a better world yeah i'm not i'm not so much interested in the fact that they're looking towards the west as i am interested in the fact that they have this fantasy of the west that's really what it that what i think this collection tries to do what's the reality and what's the fantasy of the west uh this kids look at the west as a place where everyone has a swimming pool in their backyard i live in the west and i know that that's not true for instance okay and so i think that that's this there's this dream of the west and then there's the reality of the west and that's what i've tried to do in the stories okay what's the dream highlight the dream and then highlight the reality which never matches up to the dream and these are very straightforward hard-edged narratives these stories in the tradition of check-off or the great short story writers i'll also say the tradition of oral storytelling in africa which is something that was surrounded me when i was growing up and that is it's it's it's people i embarrassed to accept that literature should instruct and entertain okay but i i subscribe to that to a very light extent it's very old-fashioned but it's true the stories that i was told in the past about you know if you don't lock the door egos is going to come and carry you to the land of the dead you know i still believe in those and i think that's kind of guided my hand when i was putting the stories does that make it um perhaps an advantage as a storyteller to come from a culture which is still storytelling and oral which of course many people in the west no longer do i i was reminded of of dickens but i was also reminded of vs night paul um who coming from a storytelling culture in the caribbean as well um just the sheer raw material the sheer the sheer quantity of stories it's good i mean but there is of course you have to think of the transition from the oral to the scribal you know uh you're just uh there is there is uh you're called come from a storytelling culture are you just it's added by a telling stories you know you have to distill these stories but it certainly helps it's an advantage but you've chosen um a collection of short stories which is quite interesting because the dominant sort of tradition at the moment is novels long novels with over which people are slumped silently during very you know aircraft journeys or at home for long periods of time and in a sense there is the sort of the babble of voices comes out of this book i've also heard people see that we're leaving the edge of the short story the attention span is really short you know people want to get in and get out people saw the the age of the novel this is prolin maraton you know that the age in which relief people do not have the time for it but i think what's important whether it's the novel or whether it's a short story is a story itself there has to be a narrative you have to have a story to tell and i think that's what i try to do here and it has to resonate there has to be a hook which holds the imagination later on no doubt no doubt what did the rest of us make of this never really um well i was captivated um i i like the way that in fact these short stories are made then of even smaller short stories within um they seem like montages or collages of short episodes that you string together to make a complete event like the um the uh asian teacher who hung herself in in matter of three paragraphs from arriving in the u.s the international student the international student um and i i think i saw you in the short story the simple case well there was a character in there who ends up innocently in the worst prison in in presumably legos who saves himself from the baddies in the room by telling a story yes that's true i i think that there always had the expression the story would save your life you know and i thought well is this possible for a story to save your life and that's uh that's uh what i tried to do in that story is it possible that's how vision lies in storytelling i was also wondering if you'd say that there's um the afric has the afric has a misconception about the west and it's projecting a lot of um idealism to it i mean do you feel that we do the same in the west towards africa i also think that the west has a lot of misconceptions of africa and and of course it's the uh what do you call it there is there are two extremes in the west there are the afro pessimists and then there are the afro optimists i think these two extremes are dangerous africa is probably somewhere in the needle africa it's not all about hunger and wars and diseases there are people who are leading regular normal lives and the west it's not a paradise so to speak either uh not everyone do you have uh it's swimming pool in your backyard i don't say okay so yeah so that everyone does but i i think that the reality is slightly different yes which is not a bad thing but the reality is slightly different um and what about the the question of of writers um in nigeria africa generally i suppose because you know you're working a lot of the time now in the states and there is pushing with this dilemma that a lot of your raw material or inspiration comes from nigeria and yet to have a career to make money and so on um a lot of writers have to move i don't know about making money but i know i know that he said hurriedly yes i don't know about making money but i know that there are more opportunities for writing and publishing that the structures are there in the west but that is not to say that there is no hope for africa there are new publishing companies that are springing up and some people are beginning to set up literary journals online so that is beginning to change perhaps the time is coming when we'll all move back home because that's really where our raw material is absolutely yeah Alex i was wondering about the performing of the the stories yeah one of the things about uh manifestos is that they were often performed declaimed and so on as you will know is there also a tradition are you are you continuing a tradition of uh performing them in some way i'm not i'm not an oral performer i mean i read my work you know but the oral storytelling tradition is intrinsic it's really part of this uh do i see myself as a spoken word artist of some sort not really not really but the stories are meant to be read and enjoyed privately yes mhm soon i was interested there is a connection here because a lot of your art seems to be different forms of storytelling you are taking um you have something to say which is pretty much a narrative and you will break it down cut it up reassemble it uh and present it in a way that but is is nonetheless a form of yeah sorry story performance i suppose that you said that because it's taken me a number of years to discover that really um that is something that's very deep in in my work and in me and i was absolutely fascinated by the way that um these african stories actually grip you immediately that there's sort of the essence of stories you've boiled down into an incredibly simple but probably very hard to achieve um style that appears to be very direct but of course what you leave out and what you put in those decisions is that is that is that how you is it cut cut cut reduced reduced the source reduced that i think that's uh really what's at the heart of art what do you put in it's it's like a good cook you know uh you don't just put everything and then set the micro you know it's there is a time for everything so it's more like what do you put in what do you take out you know and so i mean you know you again and again here artist and and writers saying it's you know you you've got a large amount of material and it's bring it down to a much more amount is distillation for me in in that sense then there's an enormous gap between an oral storyteller and what you do yes because oral stories in my experience of hearing them in different places is they do go on and on and there's a lot of repetition also listening to the audience and the audience reaction to certain things reinforces repetition your stories are not like that at all well i would i would love to go on and on and on but sadly this this oral performance has come to an end we've run out of time thank you to all my guests Neville Brody the new head of the Royal College of Arts visual communication department Susan Hillers exhibition opens at Tate Britain on Tuesday tomorrow you see a Sundo's voice of America and Alex Danchef's hundred manifestos are both out now next week Mike Figgis takes on Lucrezia Borgia in the opera Jocelyn Bell Bernal talks about the end of time as the mains see it and we indulge in a bit of willful blindness with Margaret Heffman but for now thank you and goodbye

Producer: Katy Hickman.