New Ways

Inhabitat » GREEN RANT: Lame Eco-Art

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1. Rock Stackers. Your skills are amazing. You can stack rocks higher and prettier than I ever could. You’re even kinda like Andy Goldsworthy, yes, of course. And I’m sure the process is amazing for you, and that the stones talk to you, and you get that beautiful in-tune-with-nature hum.  But I’ve see so many rock stacks at this point they blur together. My eyes glaze over.

2. Tr-art. This is a combination of terms: “trite trash art.” Thank you for rescuing all of those bottle caps, six pack rings, and other crap from the landfill. Thanks for making them into portraits, blankets, sculptures and people. Trash is now a viable medium. But you are not always making eco-art:  sometimes you just happen to make art with trash. Conversely: just because you made it with trash doesn’t mean it is powerful art.

3. Statistic-a-thon. Recycling one can saves enough power to watch 6 episodes of Law and Order. At this rate all of our children will be dead in 20 years. We need 16 more planets if we want to keep watching Comedy Central. Etcetera, etcetera.  I am so inundated with guilt-soaked statistics. Stop finding new ways to slap me in the face with them. If it’s powerful to you then help me understand why. See: Chris Jordan, who does an excellent job of making numbers real.

4. Eco-Snobbery. As a recovering eco-snob myself, I understand how hard it is to stop calling everyone out on their perpetual green sins. It sucks. There are to-go containers everywhere, and everyone drives, and not everyone composts, and what the hell?!?! The icebergs, people! The icebergs! But just because you make eco-art does not mean you have license to aggrandize. We’re a population of pots and kettles. Don’t mistake your good work for a kind of personal superiority. This is true of green culture in general, but it’s especially apparent in accusatory or guilt-trippy art.

via Inhabitat » GREEN RANT: Lame Eco-Art .

RSA AGM: Rethinking the community garden

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grow your ownTomorrow is the RSA’s AGM; the house will be full of RSA Fellows here to discuss the organisation, its future and the new charter. We’ve decided to shamelessly exploit the presence of all these experts being in a single place on a single day by running a series of brain-picking seminars.

I’m doing one with the excellentConnected Communities project which gives me a chance to start talking about something that I’ve been working on for a little while now. Back in the spring I was researching the subject of artists working in productive gardens, talking to people like Fallen Fruit, Amy Francheschini – and more recently Clare Patey of Feast. There is a huge enthusiasm around for this stuff. How can we create new ways to garden? How can we create new places to garden?

That connected with an idea that was put forward by a Fellow and so we’re now on the verge of launching our own project, Rethinking the community garden. The recession has meant that there is a lot of land – particularly building land – which is on hold in cities right now. How can we change the idea of gardens as permanent fixtures to something that’s more flexible, something that maximises land use throughout a city turning semi-derelict land into an asset?

We want to attach that to Fellow’s expertise and experience to make the project come to life in New Cross Gate, South London, an area that Connected Communities are already working in. If you are an RSA Fellow and you want to come along to this, or to any of the other seminars, it’s not to late to register. We need bright heads to brainstorm along the the following lines:

  • How can we persuade landowners to let us use small parcels of land for one, two or more years, and leave them confident that there’s not going to be local resentment when they need them back?
  • How can we persuade gardeners to pour their work into a piece of land they might only have for a single growing season?
  • How can we help the users design gardens in a practical way on land that may only be available for 18 months?
  • Research shows that successful garden projects are often run by a small group of people. How can we make a successful garden project that engages a wide slice of the local population?

Thanks to Harmen de Hoop for the use of Grow Your Own Vegetables – again.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

#dusa, #tcgcon, #emos and other modern conference paradigms

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I think the most stand out thing at the arts service conferences is the buzz around twitter. I allowed for an hour of twitter twitter in my class back in March and I find it all pretty funny. As the target of most contemporary advertising and inventive marketing, and typically an early adopter, I find the fervor more entertaining than anything else. It’s like when I tried to explain the answering machine to my grandmother. 

The feeling I’ve been getting is that the twittachment is somewhat caused by a messianic appeal of a way to reach youth. Somewhere though, the phrase “content is king” got left out. It’s all about the medium and nothing about the message, so that when the medium is the message all you’re saying by using twitter is that you know about twitter. Whether you say something in 140 characters sent out into the ether for all of your casual followers, or you send them a postcard, it doesn’t mean anything unless it means something. 

That is to say, I’m missing the discussion about modeling and alternative revenue streams. It all just sounds like new ways to market the same old thing… like gillette adding a blade to its vibrating razor. The revolutionary thought would be, and I think even going backwards to my idea of “ancient technology” is revolutionary at times, would be to sell an old school straight razor. Between the retro and hardcore cachés and durability in light of disposable disdain, it would be meaningful if not successful. And, when it seems the arts are about losing money for culture, at least as long as we’re attached to our 501(c)3 stati, that might be successful. 

So Theater, Dance, non-profit arts presenters, I ask you: what is your message? Is it that you know how to use a computer and have internet access that you can stick interns on to try and build youthful cache? Or, is it something worth twittering about?