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Artist Catherine Pears certainly sees the benefit of recycling, but to her, the most obvious way to be green is to reduce and reuse. She reuses everything and when she was commissioned to build a float for this years Mardi Gras, she carried those practices over into designing the float. See how she turned what some would consider trash into a stunning Mardi Gras float.
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via Eco-Artist Catherine Pears Puts a Green Twist on her Mardi Gras Float : TreeHugger.
The hoo-ha over the Dubai EAIFL literary festival grows. Geraldine Bedell had been due to launch her romantic comedy The Gulf Between Us there. After reading the manuscript, the festival’s organiser Isobel Aboulhoul pulled the title from the programme, citing “cultural sensitivities”. The book apparently includes some discussion of Islam and features a gay character.
This week Margaret Atwood withdrew the festival saying that as a vice-President of the writer’s organisation PEN, she couldn’t attend an event that censored work, and yesterday the children’s author Anthony Horowitz said he was considering joining her. Activists have started a campaign to blacklist the festival, on blogs and a Facebook group.
Geraldine Bedell aks: “Can you have a literary festival and ban books because they feature gay characters? Is that what being part of the contemporary literary scene means? The organisers claim to be looking for an exchange of ideas – but not, apparently, about sex or faith. That doesn’t leave literature an awful lot of scope.â€
From not being described as “the first true literary festival in the Middle East” the Dubai event now finds itself being portrayed as a hotbed of Islamic homophobia. Finding herself at the centre of this storm Isobel Aboulhoul issued a counter-statement which suggests, wryly, that she’s fallen into a subtle trap by censoring the book:
“I did not believe that it was in the Festival’s long term interests to acquiesce to her publisher’s (Penguin) request to launch the book at the first Festival of this nature in the Middle East. We do, of course, acknowledge the excellent publicity campaign being run by Penguin which will no doubt increase sales of her book and we wish Ms Bedell the very best.”
On another statement on the main site Ms Abouhoul points out that the decision had been communicated to Geraldine Bedell in September; she is curious why this matter has only come to the public’s attention in the month that Bedell’s novel is being published.
It’s eleven years since I lived in Los Angeles. Something subtle seems to have shifted here, and for the better. One example of why is Fallen Fruit, a collective of two artists and a writer who live in the Silverlake district who started to map all the fruit and trees in their neighbourhood, the ones which had branches hanging over onto sidewalks so you can pluck their oranges or figs for free.
I’m here for a couple of days researching art projects that are about growing food and about the places where you grow it so 
I’m due to meet them later in the day. In the morning I check out their website, fallenfruit.org. For the last couple of years they’ve been holding Public Fruit Jams – communal jam-making sessions - handing out free fruit trees for people to plant next to their fences, or encouraging others to make fuit maps of their neighbourhoods.
I notice that there’s a map for where I’m staying – Echo Park, 
made by someone who’s taken up their enthusiasm. After a couple of minutes trying to figure it out I notice there’s a group of fruit trees right next to my friend’s house. I walk 30 yards out of the door and there they are, just as they are shown on the map, right next to each other. A lemon tree overhanging the pavement, fat with ripe yellow fruit, and right next to it a small fig tree, figs just a few weeks away from being ripe. I stand there, smiling, ridiculously happy to have found them.
They’re by no 
means the only example of this kind of strangely unironic sincerity that has taken root among some of the art projects here. I’m also here to see the artist Fritz Haeg whose Edible Estates Attack on the Front Lawn has been encouraging people to replace the uniformity of grass with fruit and vegetables.
I reach up and pluck a lemon from the tree. I doubt I’d have even noticed these trees normally.
{Albertosaurus Dinosaur Head, by Justine Cooper}Seed Magazine has a great slide show of behind-the-scenes images of the American Musuem of Natural History. It’s part of the magazine’s Darwin 200 celebration.
> Check out the images here and see Justine Cooper’s other work at her website.
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Artists exploring gray areas: Interspecies at Manchester Cornerhouse until March 22. Four new pieces that attempt to work with animals, not as subjects of their art, but “as equals”. The artists involved include performance artist Kira O’Reilly, whose piece involved 36 hours living, sleeping and eating, with a pig called Delilah. You can read O’Reilly’s blog about the experience on her site here.
It’s not the first time O’Reilly has worked with pigs, though last time it was with a dead one, and the Daily Mail was incensed. “IT’S ART SAYS THE NAKED WOMAN WHO’LL HUG A DEAD PIG ON STAGE” ran the headline to a piece that accompanied her 2006 performance in Newlyn.
Interspecies has been curated by Arts Catalyst, an organisation that works in that strange but sometimes extremely productive space of the Venn diagram between arts and science. They partnered with us to run the Nuclear Forum at the end of last year with Gustav Metzger and James Acord – exploring the depths of another subject that often goes undiscussed.
The power of the subject of Interspecies is the way in which it encounters our increasingly uncomfortable relationship with animals. As any anthropologist will tell you, animals have always been the subject of taboos – which ones you should eat, and which ones you should stroke.
Post-industrial society assumes it’s past such primitive notions as taboos. OK, sex is everywhere in these days, but try asking people when they last saw a dead body? In our society death, as natural a process as sex or birth, has become invisible. Victorians used to hold dinner parties in graveyards; you’d get arrested if you tried that now.
I was talking to the designer Julia Lohmann recently; she is the creator of the cow bench – a single cow’s hide stretched over a wooden skeleton that ends up looking uncomfortably like the animal that surrendered its skin for us. It’s physically uncomfortable to sit on too, but that’s the point. Lohmann is in fact a passionate animal lover. When she returned from a spell working on a farm to London she saw an advertisement for dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets that so disturbed her that she set out on a process that ended with making a sofa that looked like what it really was.
And, as O’Reilly’s work suggests, our relationship with meat has never been stranger.
My Arts & Ecology colleague William Shaw, editor of our site, interviewed Superflex on the eve of their work opening at the South London Gallery.
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Billboards, Gelatin silver composite print, 74″ x 25 by Matthew Betcher.
C4Gallery in Hollywood is hosting a benefit for Friends of the Los Angeles River this Saturday, 2/21 from 5 pm to midnight. Work featured includes photos by Matthew Betcher and Oramah Bagheri.
Unfortunately, the FOLAR page doesn’t have links to individual posts so you’ll have to click here and scroll down for more info.
And here’s the info about the event that I received in an email:
Join us on February 21st for a special closing party, celebrating art inspired by the LA River. C4 Gallery has generously offered to give Friends of the LA River a portion of the proceeds from the event – so please come and show your support for the River and FoLAR.FoLAR was founded as an art project, based on the idea that art and the attention it can bring to the LA River could serve as a catalyst for action and change along the River. As we’ve seen over our 23 years, art has a particular power to attract attention, sometimes for good, sometimes in less productive ways. Either way, the more people we can introduce to the River, the more people will be inspired or involved in the River revitalization effort.
> More at folar.org and c4gallery.com
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If art is dependent on context, what kind of context does the new industrial landscape of Ebbsfleet make? In the art world, the thumbs nay be up for Mark Wallinger’s Ebbsfleet horse. Ian Jack has a column in Saturday’s Guardian which looks at this from a different persective; what the people who live in the economically uncertain landscape of Ebbsfleet think of Wallinger’s horse:
According to Sandra Soder, the secretary of the Gravesend Historical Society, Wallinger’s horse has aroused diverse local opinion, with the loudest voice coming from those most opposed, but the general feeling is that the promoters had deemed the people of north Kent “too culturally inept” to have a deciding view on the form Britain’s biggest work of art should take. In the words of one Northfleet man, nobody had asked whether or not “they wanted to wake up every morning looking into a giant horse’s arse”.
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MICHAELA CRIMMIN: I went to a fascinating talk at the weekend by David Cotterrell, whose work is being shown for just one more week as part of the Wellcome Collections’s War + Medicine exhibition, where both complexity and the everyday are tackled through art.
Cotterrell’s video pieces in the exhibition were made in response to being a war artist in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, hosted by the Medical Corps of the British Army and supported by Wellcome. He presents an overwhelming sense of the everyday of war, the small tragedies, the waiting, that never make it to the newspapers. This is the real stuff of war, and neither devoid of beauty nor of humanity. Cotterrell’s work is also being shown at Danielle Arnaud; Aesthetic Distance features a series of visually arresting photographic and further video works. There is one more week left to catch both shows. Go if you are interested in understanding war and in a real account of the complexity and the humdrum of war.
In the information that accompanies the exhibition are a number of Cotterrell’s diary entries – here’s one:
2 T1’s and a a T4. I assume a T4 is a light injury. I am wrong – T4 means dead. I don’t know what to do. My problems of appropriate behaviour are insignificant compared to the enormity of the events taking place. I find myself feeling clumsy and self-conscious.
This personal response is largely denied to all but celebrity journalists; an intensely subjective account of the confusion of war and its paradoxes and contradictions are of no interest to the broadsheet editors. It’s simply not the stuff of news. What is different about your response as an artist?, asks someone from the audience. Cotterrell responds that as an artist you’re trusted as a sensitive observer. You look at the routine, the banal and the overlooked. This is the stuff of art. Finally it is what artists do with their material that stands them apart from the media. Artists have time to digest. He was quick to say how bewildered he felt on his return to London and that it is only now, a year later, that he has been able to marshall his responses into a work that is nevertheless equivocal.
Another part of Cotterrell’s practice as an artist is in a very different context, the world of planning and architecture. He ended his talk by musing the fact that planners necessarily ignore the reality of the chaos of the street.
We have to be reductive but how much truth is lost along the way? In thinking about the multiplicity of real and potential connections in ecology, you can’t help but grapple with the problematics that come with acknowledging the inevitable complexity of just about everything. At the same time there are so many important findings lost because they seem so boringly everyday. As an example, see a brilliant column by Slavoj Zizek in the Guardian last June:
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…Bear in mind the lesson of Donald Rumsfeld’s theory of knowledge – as expounded in March 2003, when the then US defence secretary engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophising: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” What Rumsfeld forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns” – things we don’t know that we know, all the unconscious beliefs and prejudices that determine how we perceive reality and intervene in it.
Illustration: Gateway series by David Cotterrell, c-print, 2008, courtesy of Danielle Arnaud contemporary art
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