#gairfish

A Pauper from Irishgait Tannery, Pete Fortune (The Compositor’s Setting Stick), £7.99 + £2.90. And jist like that, the blog re-commences wi a mini-review o Pete Fortune’s new buik in Scots – or, as Scotocorrect wad hae it, Pete Fortune’s new Buick. As has been said afore, these reviews are occasioned by the author askin for a few lines and me no bein able to provide as few a lines as are…

The Gairfish Years (3/3)

These final volumes perhaps illustrate the way that Gairfish was a pre-commodified publication looking forward to both the commodification of poetry (as symbolised by the first configuration of ‘New Generation Poets’ in 1994), and of information itself in the dawning of the Internet.

Or perhaps we were in our different ways already fidgeting in the editorial role, which we handed over to Helen Kidd for a women’s issue, before we made an attempt at rethinking the anthology in our alphabeticised summary of Informationism, after which Richard moved on and I wrapped up almost all the loose ends in Overspill.

artsplaining: nine sentences about informationism

Informationist art is art that tells you stuff you didn’t know you wanted to know in a manner you didn’t think was really art.

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Information about Informationism is inevitably Post-Informationist: the movement was designed to be over as soon as anyone had heard of it. (1)

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Some theorists argue it was over as soon as it was thought of - most Informationists were not informed in time and so were already Post-.

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Actually, this being Scotland in the 1990s, the rule about Informationism being over once it was heard of gave us 25 years of uninterrupted work. (2)

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To this day, the key practitioners of Informationism toil away neither knowing that they are Informationists nor that it is already all over.

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Because anyone who’s heard of Informationism has only heard it’s over, they have not really been informed about Informationism at all.

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Thus, as the Founding Informationists found out from the outset, Informationism both persists and is Post-Informationist at the same time.

(1) Nods, nodes, and noodles of ongoing Informationism in the Post-Informationist era are, properly, not known as Informationist Eccentres.