Too Shallow for Diving: the 21st Century Is Treading Water

The “Land“ artists in the 1970s as well as artists like Joseph Beuys and Agnes Denes in the 1980s paved the way for the ecological artists today and for art to act as an agent for social change.

Today environmental art includes various approaches and issues. Artists employ urban landscapes as well as other environments in order to serve as a platform to show their concepts to their audience. Sustainability has found its way to art and culture and artists see new ways of enacting change and of collaborating e.g. with scientists.

The exhibition Too Shallow for Diving: the 21st Century Is Treading Water contributed to this process and the artists’ desire for social engagement. This wide-ranging show supported this trend, which has been the theme of numerous films, writings and exhibitions over the past decade.

Too Shallow for Diving put the focus on problems surrounding water and its impact on our natural world, human health and public welfare. The Curator Carolyn Speranza stated, that “…the sixteen artists aim to provide viewers with new insights and perspectives about our existing world and the enormity of the dilemma facing our water supply.”

More information about the artists and the exhibition can be found in a review in the Artes Magazine here.

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

- Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
- Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
- Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
- Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

France - The Horizons – Arts in Nature event will take place between the 16th June and 16th September 2012. It is the 6th of a contemporary art event based on short-lived visual works of art.

Managed by the Sancy Tourist Office, the call for projects involves the creation of 11 works of art in the Sancy Massif located in the heart of the Massif Central in France and exceptionally within the theme park Vulcania.

The works of art will be put up in places where they highlight the surrounding countryside’s qualities. Discovery trails and Art workshops for children are held around the art piece in order to mediate their content.

The event aims at developing contemporary art in the area, allowing professional artists to contribute their sensitivity to the area. Furthermore it is supposed to reinforce the growth of tourism in the Sancy Massif by addressing so-called cultural tourists as well as people passing through.

The event is open to artists with a strong national or/and international artistic experience and to young talents, who just or recently – less than 2 years- graduated from art school.

To download the application form for 2012, description of the territory and listing of the sites please go to the website of the event:
www.horizons-sancy.com (section: ESPACE PRO)

For further information about the territory, please visit the Sancy website: www.sancy.com
Contact:
Magalie Vassenet
E-mail: m [dot] vassenet [at] sancy [dot] com

Deadline for reception of the applications: Monday 19th December 2011, to the address below:
Horizons – Rencontres Arts Nature – Office de Tourisme du Sancy
Allée du Lieutenant Farmont – 63 240 LE MONT DORE

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

- Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
- Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
- Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
- Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

Call for entries – Open to January 15th 2012

The COAL PRIZE Art&Environment reward each year a project about the environment by a contemporary artist. The winner is chosen by a jury of personalities from the worlds of contemporary art, research, ecology and sustainable development, out of 10 finalists selected from an international call for entries.

The COAL Prize supports the vital role of culture and creation for taking stock and then rolling out concrete solutions. COAL Prize is helping to foster a culture of ecology.

SPECIAL EDITION : in 2012, the COAL Prize will reward entries that focus on rural issues and agriculture.

The COAL Prize, worth 10 000 euros, was launched in 2010 by the French association COAL, the coalition for art and sustainable development

All details on www.projetcoal.fr

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

- Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
- Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
- Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
- Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

By Ronja Röckemann

Reposted from: www.antennae.org.uk/Symposium

The symposium on October 8th 2011 at University College London proposes an exploration of artistic practices involved with animals and environments. In the recent re-surfacing of the animal in contemporary art, emphasis has been given to mammals, mainly because of the most immediate relational opportunities that these animals offer to us. However, a number of very interesting artists has been recently trying to bridge the abyss between ‘us’ and more ‘taxonomically remote’ creatures through the use of art and science as active interfaces. This new focus reveals the interconnectedness between humans, amphibians, reptiles and insects, and the environments in which we all live. Through a multidisciplinary approach, the symposium aims at facilitating a dialogue between artists, scientists and academics interested in informing wider audiences through visual communication.

Speakers Include: Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey / Ron Broglio / Maja and Reuben Fowkes /Rikke Hansen / London Fieldworks / Joyce Salisbury / Linda Williams. See www.antennae.org.uk for registration.

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

- Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)

- Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)

- Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)

- Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

A Contemporary Art & Ecology Exhibition on Tropical Forests, Wood & Humans, Using DNA Timber Tracking Technology

By the Migrant Ecologies Project, Singapore

The project traces the “memories” of a teak bed purchased in 21 century Singapore back to the site in the region from which the teak tree originated with the help of DNA timber-tracking technology. Where the project as a whole carries with it a message about the international consumption of illegal forest products, the art works (photography, woodprint collage and stop motion) explore the secret lives of teak trees and timber as materials, metaphors, magic, ecological resources and historical agents.

More info: www.migrantecologies.org

Picture on the left: RANJANG JATI. The Teak Bed That Sent Four Humans to Muna Island Sulawesi and Back Again. By Lucy Davis. Photo Shannon Lee Castleman.

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

- Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)

- Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)

- Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)

- Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

Axle Contemporary's gallery on wheels. Photo credit: Matthew Chase-Daniel, published in the NYTimes Feb. 3, 2011.

CalArts alum Jerry Wellman and Matthew Chase-Daniel transformed a Hostess delivery truck  into a mobile art gallery of contemporary art in Santa Fe, NM. Check out the story in the NY Times.  See also Axel Contemporary’s web site. 

This post is part of a series documenting Sam Breen’a Spartan Restoration Project. Please see his first post here and check out the archive here. The CSPA is helping Sam by serving in an advisory role, offering modest support and featuring Sam’s Progress by syndicating his feed from http://spartantrailerrestoration.wordpress.com as part of our CSPA Supports Program.

Artistic freedom and freedom of the press are under threat in Hungary.

If one theatre director can be dismissed for political reasons, anybody can be dismissed for anything: for being liberal or conservative, for having blue or brown eyes, for being Catholic, Jewish, Roma or homosexual.

Art is a profession and evaluation of art is also a profession. Art should be evaluated by professionals, not politicians. If politicians can decide what is good or bad, what is contemporary art and what is not, what is moral and immoral, political control over the freedom of expression will break loose. We had enough of that in the 20th century.

If a politically biased committee other than the court can have legal control over the content of media, freedom of the press will be curbed.

We cannot accept political control in art and media.

(If you cannot sign this petition, try doing it with another browser)

For more infomation go to:

http://www.wan-press.org/article18748.html

http://www.enpa.be/en/news/hungarian-media-law-fuels-international-concern_50.aspx

via Hands off culture and media in Hungary! – Petitions24.com.

Dubbed “Modern Art” due to the experimentation with paints and other mediums, Modern Art did away with the past reflections and considerations as to what constituted Art. One major characteristic of Modern Art was the use of abstraction. Although their works are not considered Modern Art, the Romantic and Impressionist artists of the earlier 1800′s are thought to be the pioneers of Modern Art. Although Modern Art is considered to have started in the late 1860′s, the term was not used until 1939, when American art critic Clement Greenburg coined the phrase while referring to a piece of art by Jackson Pollack.

Modern Art is also referred to as the art of the -isms. Examples include cubism made popular by Pablo Picasso, Fauvism, created by the young, hedonistic artists in Paris, such as Matisse, and Surrealism, the art that scared and surprised, by such artists as Munch.

Modern Art is not simply exemplified in paintings, but was also shown in free formed abstract sculptures, papier mache, and steel workings. Popular in Europe at the end of the 19th century, the United States did not become a center for Modern Art until after artists moved to America after World War l.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Thursday, June 3, 7 pm
A Collection of Ideas… 
Mel Chin: So I guess it has to be this way… Refraction, response to crisis, reframing a few dreams, and more on the delivery of a 300 million dollar difference
 
In 2006, artist Mel Chin was profoundly affected by post-Katrina New Orleans and developed, alongside scientists, an initiative called Operation Paydirt to help remediate the alarming levels of lead content in the soil there. The estimated cost of treating New Orleans soil is $300,000,000. Chin will discuss the Fundred Dollar Bill Project which supports Operation Paydirt through contemporary art, engagement, and action. TheFundred Dollar Bill Project is a way to become involved in monumental advocacy to inspire and enact change through a process of collecting hand-drawn Fundreds - $100 bill templates that allow for personal expression. Chin needs 3 million Fundreds by July 2010 when he will go to the steps of Congress and ask for $300 million to fund the soil remediation project in New Orleans and ultimately in all major U.S. cities. SMMoA will host its own Fundred Dollar Bill Drawing Party on Saturday, June 12 (see below)

Saturday, June 12, 2-5 pm
Cause for Creativity: Fundred Dollar Bill Drawing Party
 
In collaboration with artist Mel Chin’s Fundred Dollar Bill Project, described above, participants will hand-draw Fundreds that will be collected and presented to Congress as a unique testament of civic engagement through art. Joining us at Cause for Creativity is Daybreak Designs – an arts and crafts business which empowers homeless women recovering from mental illness to rebuild their lives through creative, personal and financial growth. Daybreak Designs will have lovely hand-made goods for sale during the Fundred Dollar Drawing Party. 

Coolhaus ice cream sandwiches van on site

FREE
RSVP: rsvp@smmoa.org or 310.586.6488 x125

In this guest post, Kellie Payne, reports on Bruno Latour's recent talk at the Tate.

The French sociologist Bruno Latour gave the keynote address at this month's Tate Britain’s symposium Beyond the Academy: Research as Exhibition. His address considered the environmental crisis as a particular challenge which would require natural history, art museums and academia to join forces. The challenge, he said, was that “climate change is currently unrepresentable”.

In an effort to address this, Latour has embarked on a number of projects. One is the School of Political Arts at the Sciences Po in Paris. The school, which will be formally launched this year, will bring together young professionals in the social sciences and arts to attempt to represent the political problem of climate change. Latour says the school will “not join science, art and politics together, but rather disassemble them first and, unfamiliar and renewed, take them up again afterwards, but differently.”

Latour is also working on establishing a new type of Biennale in Venice, which will incorporate social scientists into artistic production. By bringing together social scientists and artists, Latour wants to address these issues in new ways. He expressed interest in Avatar, calling it the first ‘Gaia’ film, beginning this task of rethinking the ecological crisis and exploring ways of making it representable.

His engagement with climate change includes his participation in the Nordic Exhibition of the year Rethink: Contemporary Art and Climate Change which was staged in Copenhagen during COP15. He contributed to the Rethink exhibition catalogue with the essay “It's Development, Stupid” Or: How To Modernize Modernization. It is a response to Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through – From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. In this essay, Latour argues that the separation of the subjective from the real into dichotomies such as 'nature' and 'culture' must end. In order to begin to tackle the challenges we are facing, we must acknowledge just how closely human and nature are entwined. He has given a lecture on ‘Politics and Nature’ at the Rethink The Implicit venue at the Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art.

Latour spent most of his Tate talk discussing two of his previous exhibition projects which combined the talents of artists and social scientists. Both exhibits were produced with Peter Weibel at ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. The first, Iconoclash (2002), which brought together a team of curators, including Hans Ulrich Obrist from the Serpentine Gallery, examined how iconoclasts are represented in art, religion and science. The second, Making Things Public, partnered artists with social scientists to create individual exhibits. The exhibition was centred on a number of themes: Assembling or Disassembling; Which Cosmos for which Cosmopolitics; The Problem of Composition; From Objects to Things; From Laboratory to Public Proofs; The Great Pan is Dead!; Reshuffling Religious Assemblies; The Parliaments of Nature. The exhibition sought to materialise the concept of a ‘Parliament of Things’.

Latour conceptualised his exhibitions as thought experiments, but found the exhibitions themselves to be failures, saying that most of the individual projects within the exhibition failed as works of art. The books that accompanied the exhibitions, in particular, Making Things Public, a large book created after the exhibition, were more successful.

This was one of the themes that emerged from the day at Tate: whether certain exhibitions work better as books. Latour said that working on exhibitions has been one of the most interesting parts of his academic life. Exhibitions, he said, have a different rhythm and intensity of work and creating the ‘thing in the space’ adds to intellectual life. But creating an exhibition must be different to writing. When exhibitions merely illustrate a point, no gain is made.

Latour’s interests have now moved towards ecology and the role of the arts in representing our environmental challenges and the need for artists and social scientists to collaborate on these issues. He said he himself is writing a play on climate change.

Kellie Payne is a PhD student in the Geography department at the Open University researching culture and climate change.

via ashdenizen: representing the unrepresentable.

2-Day Workshop in Joshua Tree, 12 students, $120 fee

The New Everyday Live is an endeavor designed to both stimulate conversation and catalyze action by considering overlap between contemporary art and craft, sustainable living, survival skills, ecology and earth science, and cultural variation. Each participant in The New Everyday Life will leave with a new set of skills and inspirations, after intimately experiencing the Mojave desert’s unique context for life and living.

Only a few spots left as of 4/21. Email info.hdts@gmail.com

For more information go to: http://www.highdeserttestsites.com

Go to EcoLOGIC LA

Learn about the Beuysian school of art and sustainability on this progressive summer course.

via Weimar Art and Sustainability Summer School « Sustainability and Contemporary Art.

Finally got to see some of RETHINK; it’s a wonderful exhibition. The Saraceno is gigantic, but the human biosphere, suspended high in the air, was closed for repair today so I wan’t able to go in it, which saved my vertigo.

Allora & Calzadilla’s A Man Screaming Is Not A Dancing Bear (2008) is stunning. Filmed in New Orleans, post-Katrina, it’s strange and elegaic. Repeating through the film are moments in which a barely-glimpsed man drums on some abandonded Venetian blinds. It lends an angry, jumpy soundtrack to the slow pans across water-stained walls.

Kerstin Eregenzinger’s Study for Longing/Seeing (2008) was unsettling in a very different way. Sheets of dark, lifeless rubber suddenly twitch unexpectedly, driven by strange spider-arms beneath them. It feels like a landscape that’s coming alive, animated by some strange pulse. “The work,” says the catalogue, “Is a reactive installation using data from seismographs and sensor-based structures to simulate a landscape and its changes. The installation responds partly to movements in the earth outside the exhibition building, and partly to audience movements in the exhibition room itself…”

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

If you haven’t found them yet, the people behind RETHINK, Contemporary Art and Climate Change have set up a number of debate pages on their website athttp://www.rethinkclimate.org/.

There is also plenty of extraordinarily rich material on the site to debate. Take this essay fromSøren Pold which starts by namechecking Petko Dourmana’s Post Global Warming Survival Kit (mentioned round these parts earlier this year):

Digital media art like Petko Dourmana’s installation offers the opportunity to experience another, new nature, or at least it gives us a new and up-to-date perspective on nature. In addition to being a crisis for the globe and for humanity, the climate crisis is also an epistemological crisis, and we need to change our perception of our environment in order to better understand and deal with it. In other words it is also a cultural, epistemological challenge.

The nature, the weather, that previously we have regarded as something out there simply beyond our reach, as something that was in opposition to culture when we analysed poetry in high school, this has now turned into yet another structure of signs to be read and interpreted. We cannot see the greenhouse gasses or their effects directly with our senses so our understanding of the climate challenges are very much based on climate models, and we must act on this background in our daily lives as well as, obviously, politically and culturally. The climate crisis introduces us to the fact that our immediate surroundings are being mediated by complex visualisations, interfaces, statistics and carbon quotas – thus an imaginary computer interface lurks in the blue sky, even deep in the country with no computers in sight!

This isn’t the point that Pold is trying to make but there is also an inescapbable sense in which our vision has become polluted by the science we now need to understand it.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Mathematical Nature Painting: Nested, 2008 by Keith Tyson

Contemporary art about climate change is still sometimes seen as the frivolous dilettante who has showed up late to what it thinks might be an interesting party.

Writing about both the Royal Academy’s Earth: of a changing world and RETHINK Contemporary art and climate change exhibitions in today’s Guardian in an article titledThe Rise of Climate Change Art, Madeleine Bunting states, “Some activists have wondered why the art world has been slow to grasp the significance of climate change.”

Actually, activists think everyone is slow to grasp everything, but anyway… It’s less that art has been slow to grasp the significance, more that art rarely produces the kind of loud kazoom that activism does – or wants it to.

To many this remains a source of huge frustration. James Mariott of Platform, which programmed the lively 100 Days strand at the Arnolfini in the run up to COP15, expresses continued frustration at the artworld’s timidity.

“The arts stumble along the fault line between representation and transformation,” Marriot said to Bunting. “But, until 50 or so years ago, all art was about transformation and persuasion. Look at Goya: he wanted to persuade you of the horrors of war.”

Almost the polar opposite view comes eloquently from artist Keith Tyson. Tyson told Bunting how he had gone to a lecture on climate change at Cern, Swizterland. To hear scientists talking baldly among themselves about the true graveness of our situation was an experience he recalls as “terrifying”. But still he does not quite see himself as one of Marriott’s more focused “persuaders”:

“[The role of art] is not to advocate solutions. It is something much deeper and more subtle – to make us reflect and rethink what it is to be a human being in the 21st century. We don’t have that much power. It’s nature that creates us. That’s the kind of education too subtle to put on a syllabus: that’s the important role of art.”

Earth: Art of a changing world was also on this morning’s Today programme, there reporter David Sillito gave a third view of what art could be doing at the party, claiming: “For those who are immune to debates in science and politics, culture -  art, songs, stories jokes – can have a power far greater than any scientific paper.”

Art, Sillito seems to be saying, has the disruptive power to reach the mass unconverted by activism and reason.

You see, it’s not so much that art is even late to the party. But it is true that at times art is not exactly sure what it is doing there.

In a few days the Culture|Futures symposium kicks off in Copenhagen. The symposium, led by the Danish Cultural Institute and a partnership of arts organisations from around the world, is based on the premise that the scale of the transition to the environmental age is so massive that just waiting for the right technological or political solution to show it self is not enough. It requires fundamental cultural change, and very fast change.

It’s a chance for the symposium to start asking those pesky student union bar questions that could help us understand what, if any, art’s role in int he transition is going to be. Does the kind of activist art James Marriott has curated at Bristol actually change any minds – if so, where’s the evidence for that? Do “deep and subtle” explorations make any difference outside a gallery or theatre? Is art really a shortcut to the unconvinced? Do we even have the time to be “deep and subtle?”

Apologies for the hiatus over the last few days: swine flu.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

What I find so vital in their work is that they are strongly against the misanthropy that seems to underpin much of the dominant narrative around the environmental movement. To my mind, the idea that humans are stupid, indifferent and deliberately destructive is not only an inadequate account of human nature it is heartbreaking. It is heartbreaking because it is debilitating at every level. At a time when we most need compassion and creative thinking the very sentiments that block these – pervasive cynicism and conservatism – are prevalent. (I’ve used too many words beginning with ‘c’ in that sentence, I’ll move onto the letter ‘R’ for a while).

What roots the rigorous accounts given by ecological experts such as Brand and Morton is that people are hugely capable of complex thinking, adaptive living, resilience and resourcefulness. We have created this situation of environmental change so now we must rise to challenge of transforming how we think and behave in response to it. And when I read documents like Peter Head’s Entering an Ecological Age, and see speakers at the RSA like Graciela Chichilnisky, not only do these extraordinary changes feel crucial they appear do-able.

Drawing on Brand, Head and Morton, I have written a short essay for the Copenhagen exhibition RETHINK: Contemporary Art & Climate Change.
Here’s a bit of it:  Art and ideas are not timeless, they are historically specific. The uneasy realisation of our current situation is that we are part of an ecological system that we influence more than we previously thought was possible. We are not outside observers, we are participants; we engage and affect systems whether we intend to or not. … we are the co-creators of our environment. Yet we do not yet fully recognise ourselves as such. This is a revelation awaiting to be fully explored through the arts.

It is the beginning of some work I’m developing for the Arts and Ecology Centre on what the arts may contribute  in moving us towards an ecological age.  Some of the ideas are controversial. And as part of this, writer Josie Appleton has been commissioned to write an essay for this website, as her work sets out to explore fresh thinking about human capability.The Challenge of Climate Change: Towards a New Human Consciousness – is a ‘thought experiment’, as she says in her blog – so comments are welcome.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Shai Zakai, eco-artist, photographer, founder and director of the Israeli Forum for Ecological Art

Touring Exhibition opportunity in UK

The tour is coordinated in partnership with the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (CCANW). Parts of the exhibition have shown in Israel, Korea, United States, and Japan. See http://www.jewishexponent.com/article/17614/ for information regarding its latest US showing.

It will be shown at CCANW from 10 October – 22 November 09 and Shai will be lecturing in Falmouth, Plymouth and Totnes.  It is supported by BI ARTS, the British-Israeli Arts training scheme.

From end of November 2009, the project is available as a temporary or permanent installation in the UK. It will be adapted for each venue by the artist and/or co-designer, Eran Spitzer. Shai is also available for lectures and public workshops.

Artist’s statement and exhibition description (abstract)
After a thirteen year journey to record some of the imprint of humankind on the environment with leaves, stories, and photographs, the project is drawing to a close.  It has created 170 up-cycled boxes, containing organic material from nineteen countries.

The project is a visual, yet restrained, warning.  It is a place to contemplate on human nature, while using most of our senses – touch, smell, sight, and sound – simultaneously. The multi-media installation is an observatory and a collection of mostly damaged nature, highlighting the daily effects of global warming set in motion by human beings, i.e., the loss of biodiversity, deforestation, human indifference.

In the exhibition, visitors are invited to leaf through boxes from Japan; Australia; Cyprus; Kirgizstan; India; Israel among others; to read the texts inside each box; and to ponder on the species that we are destroying unthinkingly.  If this irresponsible behavior toward our environment continues, it will be possible to visit the leaf library and be reminded how nature used to look.
About the artist
Shai Zakai, a photographer and ecological artist, is author of the book Faces and Facet (Portrait of a Woman) and the project Concrete Creek 1999-2002 – in which reclamation of a stream functions as an artistic creation.  She is the director/ founder of the Israeli Forum for Ecological Art, and holds an MA in Art and Environmental Policy.  She has shown in more than sixty exhibitions in museums and galleries in Israel and throughout the world.  Her works are to be found in both private and museum collections.  She has represented Israel in art and environment exhibitions and symposia in Africa, Japan, Italy, China, Korea and the United States.  She is a guest lecturer and curator as well as a consultant for ecological public projects, and organizations for the development of creative environmental leadership.

All enquiries about the exhibition:
Clive Adams, Director
CCANW
Haldon Forest Park
Exeter EX6 7XR
01392 832277
adams@ccanw.co.uk

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

There have been some blips and blurps over the past few weeks on the greenmuseum blog as we settle into this new, fancy-pants version of WordPress. It didn’t like our old theme. So we changed to this one. It’s Green. To mark the occasion, here’s a link to an excellent interview of Maja and Reuben Fowkes of translocal.org,  with discussion of everything from Sustainable Art with capital letters to curator Nicolas  Bourriaud, pictured above. A quote:

In general we prefer to talk about the sustainability of art,
rather than Sustainable Art with capital letters, as our
primary interest is in the implications of a broad notion
of sustainability for the whole of contemporary art,
rather than just a niche area, such as is associated with
the term Environmental Art. Artists that consider the
ethical aspects of their formal decisions, such as what are
the implications of the use of animals in art or of people
in community art projects, are in that sense giving
precedence to ethics, rather than aesthetics.

Fascinating. Discuss.

Go to the Green Museum

Maja and Reuben Fowkes interviewed in Antennae Magazine – the whole issue can be downloaded from their site as a pdf

Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, was founded in September 2006 by Giovanni Aloi, a London-based lecturer in history of art and media studies. The Journal combines a heightened level of academic scrutiny of animals in visual culture, with a less formal and more experimental format designed to cross the boundaries of academic knowledge, in order to appeal to diverse audiences including artists and the general public alike.

Ultimately, the Journal provides a platform and encourages the overlap of the professional spheres of artists, scientists, environmental activists, curators, academics, and general readers. It does so through an editorial mix that combines academic writing, interviews, informative articles, and discussions with an illustrated format, in order to grant accessibility to a wider readership.

via Interview about Art and Sustainability « Sustainability and Contemporary Art.

They’ve just started a new strand with What Is The Value of Art, introduced by Beth Allen:

The questions of how art is valued and how it is monetized inevitably overlap: artworks perceived as “important” yield high prices at auction; economic development funding goes to out-of-the-way cultural institutions that bring high quality programming and consequently, tourists, to their neighborhoods; exhibitions that push boundaries attract grants from foundations dedicated to promoting free speech; arts education is consistently underfunded… Buried within questions about the economics of art, are assumptions and often, judgments, about its value that beg to be examined: How is the value of an artist’s intellectual versus physical labor calculated? Are collectible works valued differently than ephemeral projects? How does individual “taste” and critical reception affect the value of an artwork, exhibition, or institution? What factors influence the way we value an artistic experience, as individuals and as a society? How do we quantify the intangible benefits that art education provides? How do we talk about the subtle and personal value that art has in our lives?

And, of course, they’re looking for contributors to stir the pot.

Image:  Photo of Fear Eats The Soul [date unknown] by Rirkrit Tiravanija taken at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, November 22 2008 by j-No

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Go to www.oneandother.co.uk and press the “Register your interest” button.

It’s interesting to see that Antony Gormley’s Fourth Plinth project is rapidly becoming a lobbying prospect. The idea of using the plinth as a site for contemporary art was initiated by the RSA , no mean feat as it turned out and we learned a lot about the complexity and the ambiguities of the word “public” with respect to both public space and public art.

William Shaw will shortly be interviewing Bob & Roberta Smith for the website. His idea for the Plinth was shown at the National Gallery last year – very much referencing environmental issues, as does his current work at TATE’s Altermodern exhibition. I went round this yesterday. Bob is having a weekly conversation with the show’s curator Nicholas Bourriard and then makes a new work replacing the previous week’s piece. This latest work addresses climate change and as ever his work debunks – it puts the public into art with no affectation and no patronising – with a directness that is exhilarating.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Only a culture so profoundly in love, as the UK is, with the process of celebrification could endorse a proposal that equates mere self-expression with art. The project description is full of phrases that are begging for qualifying air quotes: “Participants will be picked at random, chosen from the thousands who enter, to represent the entire population of the UK” [emphasis mine]. Gormley has the temerity to suggest that he has been the victim of press “snobbery”; surely pomposity of that Meatlovian scale is crying out for some leavening criticism. The use of the political buzzword “participant” shows how neatly the rhetoric of contemporary art has, since 1997, dovetailed with the rerouting of political discourse towards an emphasis on “openness,” “transparency,” and “interactivity” while actually being none of those things. The suggestion of the term participant is that the person has an active role in the creation of the work of art, whereas the truth of much participatory contemporary art is that the participant simply becomes the medium for the artist to express whatever it is he or she is expressing (usually a toothless critique of the patron rubber-stamped by same).

For Gormley’s project, as for much contemporary political discourse, language is bent to purpose. That dreaded term empowerment is so beloved of official arts bodies when angling for funding is dragged in, but what does it mean here? And to what extent is this, in Gormley’s words, “about the democratization of art”? It means that after what will certainly be a protracted screening process, members of the public, who have conflated exposure with success, will be allowed to spend an hour of their time gesticulating slightly out of earshot above the tinkling fountains and rumbling buses. Some of them will moon Nelson. Gormley and the subsidizing bodies will feel good about “democratizing” art and “empowering the public.” That all this is happening in the shadow of the National Gallery, one of the world’s best collections of painting (and free to enter), has a ring of embarrassment about it. We get the public art we deserve, I suppose.

Leave aside, for a moment, the much gnawed over question of whether Gormley’s oeuvre is any cop or not, and consider whether it’s entirely reasonable for Gormley to claim he’s been the victim of snobbery, as ridiculed here by Ben Street.

The art world’s and the broadsheets’  invective against Gormley – where it exists – has grown in perfect parallel with his popularity. That would suggest either that his work has become worse as his popularity’s grown, or that there is a disagreeable horror of populism in the art world.

Q1. Which of those two propositions above is the more plausible?

Q2. Might the assumption that the British lumpenproletariat are too vulgar to be trusted to behave properly with art, and that when Gormley gives them the opportunity the best they will achieve is to “moon at Nelson”, not be a perfect example of the kind of snobbishness Gormley is complaining about?

Another Place by Antony Gormley photographed by Richard Dutton

PS. I’ve signed up to to be one of the 2,400. In the slim likelihood that I’m picked, I welcome suggestions about how I should spend that hour. No mooning, please.

PPS. Michaela Crimmin, who has been involved in the Fourth Plinth from its inception – it was, lest we forget, an RSA initiative, promises to blog further on the Plinth some time in the next couple of days.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

The RANE ’Comprehending Nature’ Lecture Series for 2009 will include:

Andrej Zdravic 
9 March
Slovenian film and sound artist Andrej Zdravic has lived and worked across the US and Europe. Inspired by music and nature, he has created over 30 independent films focusing on the energies and spiritual aspects of natural phenomena. This screening of his film ‘Riverglass’ will be followed by a question and answer session.

Linda Weintraub 
20 April
Linda Weintraub is a curator, educator, artist, and author of several popular books about contemporary art. She is currently writing the fourth book in her eco-art series that is titled Avant-Guardians: Textlets in Art and Ecology. This series is designed to highlight and accelerate the integration of environmental principles throughout university art pedagogy.

Entry to the events is free, but you need to reserve a place.

www.rane-research.org

 Go to the Ashden Directory