In partnership with The Arts Catalyst and SCAN, Arts & Ecology held a forum at the RSA on Friday 28 November 2008 (10am to 6pm) exploring the impact of nuclear power in art and culture. Nuclear power is re-emerging as a a major modern issue, both in terms of generation of energy, and as part of defence strategies.
Yearly Archives: 2008
The new Banksy?
I’m drawn to any news item that lurks in that Venn diagram space between art and activism, but I’m totally baffled as to why John Vidal of The Guardian is calling the mystery person who broke in an dshut down the Kingsnorth Power station yesterday – apparently cutting Britain’s CO2 emissions by 2% for four hours – “the new Banksy”. Does that make anyone with a pair of wire cutters an artist? This would, of course, open the door to the Michael Stone defence becoming widespread. Michael Stone is, as you will recall, the convicted paramilitary murderer who was arrested trying to burst into Stormont armed with a gun and pipe bombs to murder Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, but justified his act by claiming it was “performance art”. And, as several performance artists from Northern Ireland pointed out last year, such designation would not be a Good Thing.
Photo: CEOs from RSPB, WI, Christian Aid, Oxfam, Friends of the Earth, WWF,
Tearfund, Greenpeace and Ashok from the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition
get together at Kingsnorth to protest the building of a new coal power
station, Oct 6 2008. Thanks to Stop Climate Chaos Coaltion for the picture.
More…
With reference to the post below and the brickbats thrown at the Young Vic, here’s a month-old blog post from Robert Butler The Ashden Directory who have years of experience looking at the shortage of engagement of performing arts in environmental issues:
Six Reasons Why Theatres Don’t Touch Climate Change.
Number seven might now be a fear of publicly falling on their arses. Which is, of course, the worst reason of all not to do something.
On disasters…
Cornford & Cross’s current installation at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, The Lion and the Unicorn, created from 15 tons of locally-sourced coal as an exploration of topic of fuel, climate change and economic stability. Photo by Paul Ward. Until Jan 31 2009.
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In this month’s Wired magazine, columnist Scott Brown takes a hilarious dig at Hollywood’s new obsession with environmental disaster movies.
Actually, no, it’s not that hilarious at all. It’s more just a dig, really, at the forthcoming slew of eco-conscious movies you’ll be seeing next year. There’s The Thaw (deadly parasite unleashed by melting icecaps), 2012 (eco-doom)Â and Strays (nuclear meltdown). Then there are the statuatory remakes. The Day The Earth Stood Still (this time around Klaatu has come to tell us off for wrecking the planet) and Creature From The Black Lagoon, in which the seas wreak vengence on us.Â
“The dopiness of so-called ecotainment – environmentally virtuous entertainment – rises in direct proportion to its message mongering,” says Scott. “Oh the hilarity!” he chuckles.
This default critical line on “ecotainment” (the neologism itself is a stinker, face it,) is interesting. The standard reaction is that the genre is a joke. Hilarity! My aching sides. Etc.
It’s entirely possible that these films will be stinkers. Hollywood blockbusters generally are. Probably unintentially funny at times too. But while right-wing Americans believe that Hollywood is trying to foist a liberal agenda on the world, these films are mammoth investments by hard-nosed producers, so it’s interesting that the disaster-movie juggernaut believes that it can profit successfully from exploiting what is presumably a growing public anxiety in this way.
But there is also an assumption on Scott Brown’s part that the very idea of making a film that contains an environmental message is funny.Â
Maybe it is.
Yesterday I posted an interview with David Lan on the main RSA Arts & Ecology site. David is a man with a reputation as one of the most remarkably creative and successful people in London theatre. As Artistic Director of the Young Vic his productions have been universally lauded.
Until last weekend. The reviews for Amazonia have been, and it’s no fun to admit this, pretty wretched. Lyn Gardner – a consistent champion of new work – was scathing. But her review echoed Scott Brown’s default position. “The preachiness makes you long to rush out and lop down a tree,” she says.
In the interview, Lan is still trying to comprehend what triggered such a hostile reaction. He’s one of the theatre’s most experienced figures – a virtuoso of different forms, and he didn’t see it coming, he says. Now he’s wondering, did they contextualise the play well enough? Did they create enough of those subtle cues that control the audience’s expectations? Or is it just very, very, very hard to make art that says meaningful things about the great invisible beast that is the environment? Now that a critical mass of work about ecology is starting to arrive, mabye it’s time to start soul-searching about whether it’s good enough yet.
You wonder too, whether the default critical sneer that greets any work that declares good intentions too loudly is also part of it. And whether that needs rethinking too. But that’s a delicate, possibly dangerous path to go down…
Gustav Metzger
The podcasts of the Nuclear Forum are now all online. There’s a wealth of material there. Particularly striking is the final contribution (at the end of the third file) from the artist Gustav Metzger. Touching on art, his obsession with the newspaper and on humanity’s relentless urge to self-destruction, it should probably be listened to as a whole – it’s a kind of prose poem as much as a statement – but here, meanwhile, is a brief extract (with a personal endorsement for The Guardian):
With the coming of the Hubble space telescope humanity has gained a ring side view of galaxies – which is Wagner without the intervals. As you know because you read the same papers as I and most likely the Guardian, it is in fact brilliant, it is outstanding, and one of the reasons I would like to go on living in this country rather than on the continent is for that paper and for many, many others. It really has standards. Â
There are restaurants where diners are placed next to glass tanks with sharks gliding along the glass walls. That is how we, thanks to Hubble, view or can view galaxies safely ensconced in our earthly habitat. We are told repeatedly that life on earth started as star fragments entering earth… Is it, then, that we are joined at the hips with the entire universe with galaxies engaged in that constant and endless creative destruction? The stars entered our blood stream ages and ages ago – still coursing through our veins? Have we internalised the universe? According to theory we are perpetually bombarded, penetrated indeed, by cosmic rays and so totally fusing with the cosmos with or against our will. We might as well accept, there is no choice except to run through permutations again and again testing, testing, testing. We do need to face stellar realities, understand that we are linked to the incomprehensible, destructive powers beyond us and ask are we affected, are we in irresistible chains of connections?
Nietzsche’s vision for the future of evolution of the human being peaked at the mountain, the mountain tops, that was “xxx†years ago, that is a figure in chronological time, but when we reflect on this in real time we are then faced with totally different perspectives. In the time since Thus Spoke Zarathustra [Nietzsche, 1883] humans have entered space flight and are exploring outer space. Computing power, as you know, doubles every eighteen months, time is so packed, our understanding of time is so complex so extraordinary and expanded in so many directions that it is understandable that we transpose Nietzsche’s simile to our accepting the burden of aligning ourselves to the stars and galaxies. For him, mountain peaks were the top, for us I suggest stars and galaxies are our kind of equivalent of what he was driving towards.Â
Let me now endeavour to bring this all back to earth, the earth of the Evening Standard, and of the Today programme. Humanity, I suggest, needs to enter the state attained by the aeroplane as it touches down at the end of the journey when the flaps on the wings emerge to hold back the plane’s advance. We need to uncover and restrain the human drive to the extreme. Intellectuals have a duty to tell the public that the game is up, that there will be no permanent life on earth. We need to search for the origins of destructive drives in human beings, emersion in contemplating the awesome, and indeed beautiful, imagery of galaxies as we can apprehend it through Hubble, may lead to cathartic resolutions.Â
Photo: 100 000 Newspapers. A Public-Active Installation by Gustav Metzger 2003, T1 2 Artspace, London, exhibition view.
Big thanks to Naomi Darlington for transcribing Gustav Metzger’s talk.
Digging for victory
Fritz Haeg, Edible Estates regional prototype garden #2: Lakewood, CA, 2006, owners: Foti Family, produced in collaboration with Millard Sheets Gallery for the exhibition Fair Exchange and Machine Project, Los Angeles
There’s a fascinating article by Berin Golonu on artist Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates and other similar initiatives online at Art Papers. Haeg famously believes in tearing up people’s front lawns to create something less dull and water-greedy and more productive from them. He created an intervention last year at the Tate’s Turbine Hall along these lines.
The greening of suburban American has become a major issue in the US, as Peter Head mentioned in this recent Arts and Ecology interview. Art Papers also points to the work of John Bela‘s collabration with the US Slow Food Nation on San Francisco’s wonderful Civic Center Victory Garden, which in turn drew inspiration from Amy Franceschini and the Futurefarmers organisation she founded. The article also namechecks NY architecture practice Work.ac and their ideas of the Public Farm.
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Golonu gnaws briefly over the but-is-it-still-art question:
Scholar
Victor Margolin considers this question in his catalog essay for the exhibition Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art.
“How do we think about art that moves from discourse to action, art whose intent is to produce a useful result,” he writes,
and by what criteria do we evaluate this work?… In the never-ending
debates on the difference between art and design, the distinction
usually comes down to the primacy of discourse in artistic practice….
But when artists want to achieve social results without identifying
themselves as designers, how should the critical community respond?
“Once artists enter a realm of action,” he continues, “it is difficult
to characterize their projects differently from those of other actors
such as landscape designers or even architects… the discursive has
spilled over into the practical, and the practical has become more
discursive…” Â
Victor Margolin considers this question in his catalog essay for the exhibition Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art.
“How do we think about art that moves from discourse to action, art whose intent is to produce a useful result,” he writes,
and by what criteria do we evaluate this work?… In the never-ending
debates on the difference between art and design, the distinction
usually comes down to the primacy of discourse in artistic practice….
But when artists want to achieve social results without identifying
themselves as designers, how should the critical community respond?
“Once artists enter a realm of action,” he continues, “it is difficult
to characterize their projects differently from those of other actors
such as landscape designers or even architects… the discursive has
spilled over into the practical, and the practical has become more
discursive…” Â
… but without getting anywhere much. The point isn’t whether it’s art or not, but the fact that it’s happening and as a movment appears to be reaching a kind of critical mass.
EDIT:Â
In addition to the above, Michaela Crimmin reminds me of Jeremy Deller’s work on allotments in Berlin, which fits into the same picture… and looking at David Barrie’s most recent blog post, there’s also the example of Dott07’s City Farming project in Middlesborough:
In the project, people grew food in vacant public places across the town, took cookery classes in neighbourhood centres and then, come the final harvest, cooked a ‘town meal’, in an event attended by over 8000 people and curated by artist Bob and Roberta Smith.
Poznan
The news from Poznan COP14 Climate Change conference seems to be fairly dire. In a dry statement, the leader of the WWF’s Climate Initiative, Kim Carstensen describes progress during the first week of negotiations as “sloth-like”. Wouldn’t it be nice if all WWF statements had to come with an endangered-species simile? He goes on, scathingly:
 “Industrialised countries have been sitting on their wallets far too
long, and laggards like Canada, Japan, Russia and Australia have not
even set domestic targets for 2020. These countries
should finally respond to what developing countries are proposing – to
take us into 2009 on a high note and to ignite the spark needed to put
us on track for a strong Copenhagen treaty.â€Â Â
long, and laggards like Canada, Japan, Russia and Australia have not
even set domestic targets for 2020. These countries
should finally respond to what developing countries are proposing – to
take us into 2009 on a high note and to ignite the spark needed to put
us on track for a strong Copenhagen treaty.â€Â Â
The mammothness of the process is dramatised in this interview on the Guardian site in which George Monbiot gives UN Climate Chief Yvo de Boer a very hard time for letting the United States off the hook at Bali and onwards. Monbiot is free talk with an activist’s shining purity and directness. De Boer, hobbled by his role as a negotiator and a bureaucrat, presents a target as big as a barn door. Mobiot scores easy hits from the unfortunate de Boer – who will be forever remembered for crying tears of frustration at Bali last year. The truth is, the sort of negotiations are, of their nature, sloth-like.
Whether we can afford for them to be sloth-like, is another matter. This morning’s protest at Stansted reminds us that there seem to be increasing numbers of people who don’t think we can.
Thanks to Pierre Pouliquin for the sloth
Blog round up
Eco Art Blog asks the best question ever asked in the history of blogs with the word “eco” in their name:
The New York Times had an article
last month about regenerating mammoths for about $10 million. The story
was interesting with lots of scientific and ethical considerations, but
left unmentioned was an even bigger story: what would paintings by
mammoths look like? And how soon can we get these regenerated mammoths
in the studio?
last month about regenerating mammoths for about $10 million. The story
was interesting with lots of scientific and ethical considerations, but
left unmentioned was an even bigger story: what would paintings by
mammoths look like? And how soon can we get these regenerated mammoths
in the studio?
Eco Art Blog’s post Regenerate Mammoths. And Then Have Them Make Paintings ponders whether we have got our priorities slightly wrong, trying to revive extinct animals at a time when we’re driving record numbers off the cliff of existence.
Mombiot.com excoriates Lord Turners report on climate change thusly:
Lord Turner has two jobs. The first, as chair of the Financial Services
Authority, is to save capitalism. The second, as chair of the Committee
on Climate Change, is to save the biosphere from the impacts of
capitalism. I have no idea how well he is discharging the first task,
but if his approach to the second one is anything to go by, you should
dump your shares and buy gold.
Authority, is to save capitalism. The second, as chair of the Committee
on Climate Change, is to save the biosphere from the impacts of
capitalism. I have no idea how well he is discharging the first task,
but if his approach to the second one is anything to go by, you should
dump your shares and buy gold.
And finally, Ecoviz tells us How to survive global warming using art, with the Post Global Warming Survival Kit… an art installation that imagines the kind of apocalyptic scenario Cormac McCarthy envisages in The Road.
Miami in a vice
I remember interviewing Jake and Dinos Chapman at Frieze a couple of years ago when they were doing their ten-minute portraits in the booth there. They were full of millenarian glee at the overblown state of the artmarket, to which they were obviously contributing with their presence. “Artistic production,” said Jake between brush strokes, “is nothing to do with utility, it’s to do with excess. It’s to do with surplus.”
So Art Basel Miami Beach opened yesterday in an altogether different era. The days of surplus are over. It was widely noted just about everywhere that its opening coincided with the announcement that America was officially in recession. “The fair’s main sponsor, Swiss bank UBS AG, has recorded about $50 billion in writedowns and losses,” wrote Bloomberg.com. The word schadenfreude is being bandied about widely. Art dealers are, journalists insist, fretting at the non-appearance of the Russians.
It’s amazing the amount of unalloyed, hand-rubbing glee unleashed at the prospect of the wheels coming off the Big Art machine.
Illustration: Mutant Skull by Tony Oursler 1997/98
Plaster, paint, sound, and mixed media, skull. Lisson @ Art Basel Miami
There is no road
I’ve just posted an interview with sustainability expert Peter Head – named by Time magazine as one of the Environmental Heroes of 2008 – on the main RSA Arts and Ecology website.
He’s a great, genial, avuncular man, full of positives and enthusiasm. Or rather he was until I asked him this question:
Given that the IPCC has created this target of an 80% reduction of greenhouse emissions by 2050, where do you estimate we are now?
At this point his whole demeanour changed: “Nothing’s happened yet,” he said, optimism slipping. “There’s lots of talk. Well, it’s a bit crude to say has happened, but given the scale of the global challenge it’s tiny, tiny, tiny steps that have been taken. And I think it just gets more challenging every day because the problem seems to get worse all the time and the rate of delivery is just not matching it. If you take the London Climate Change Action Plan, the dramatic drop in emissions on their graph starts just after the Olympics in about 2013. So you do wonder how we are going to get all the measures in place to make that happen.”
Just so you know, this is a man who was a senior advisor to the Mayor’s London Sustainable Development Commission. If he doesn’t know which way is up, no-one does. And he’s saying that the gulf between what we say and what we do is getting dangerously large.
This interview is published in the opening week of  COP14 – the prequel to COP15, next year’s last-chance UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. COP14 is being held in Poznan, Poland, which is convenient because it gives the world community a chance to lean on Poland. To George Bush’s glee, Poland and Italy are turning out to be the two countries who may well scupper the European consensus on climate change. (For background, see Amplified Green’s post on the subject here.) Poland is against mandatory targets because it’s a 90% coal-based economy. Italy is against them because Berlusconi is mad as a duck in a shoe shop.
Now, this would be a perfect case for a bit of avaaz.org-style agitation; the world’s internet users could send the leaders of Poland and Italy a message letting them know what they think about this intransigence.
Only given the gulf between what we say and what we do, as pointed out by Peter Head above, I don’t think they’re likely to pay us much attention until we put our own house in order.
The illustration above is taken from an upcoming exhibition THERE IS NO ROAD (The Road is Made by Walking), a series of works about real or imaginary journeys (with tenuous links to the above) that opens at the LABoral Centre for Art
and Creative Industries in Los Prados, Spain on 12 December and runs until 3 March. It features moving images and other installations from artists Axel Antas, Ibon Aranberri, Ergin Çavusoglu, Gabriel DÃaz, AK Dolven, Simon Faithfull (who did the Ice Blink exhibition in 2006 as a result of his expedition with the British Antarctic Survey), Annabel Howland, Roberto Lorenzo, Lutz & Guggisberg, Alexander & Susan Maris, Simon Pope and Erika Tan.