Bbc Radio 4

Margaret Atwood is with the bears

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Margaret Atwood and Helen Simpson discuss I’m With The Bears, a new collection of short stories about climate change, with Mariella Frostrup on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book.

Helen Simpson says one problem of writing about climate change is the moralizing:

“That’s about as popular as telling someone they need to lose weight. It’s the nagging and being preached at element that is very hard to avoid around this subject”.

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ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

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Bill Viola videos God

Like Brian Sewell at a Jeff Koons show, BBC Radio 4’s John Humphrys seemed baffled by the idea of Bill Viola creating a video installation altarpiece for St Paul’s cathedral when he interviewed him a couple of weeks ago.

It’s interesting, in this secular age, that art keeps its privileged position to engage with the spiritual. Religion makes the British twitchy. Increasingly, we’re more at ease with Richard Dawkins’ shouty there-is-no-God-and-anyone-who-suggests-there-is-is-an-idiot line. I am a nullifidian to the bone, but 10,000 years and more of human culture suggests Pascal’s  God Shaped Hole may well exist, as some neuroscientists seem to be saying, and this uncertainty is territory that art has always been perfectly at ease in.

Art has always represented the shape religion takes but at the moment it appears we’re not too sure what that shape is. The Romantic-era  God, glimpsed in the sublime of the perfect landscape has taken a hike, gasping for breath. The foot-stamping God of vengence is making a come-back, true, but here is plenty of space for art to build a new God.

Bill Viola’s installation should be complete by 2011.

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