Monthly Archives: December 2008

Gustav Metzger

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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.   

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. 

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. 

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

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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.

 

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…” 

 

… 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: 

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

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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.” 

 

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

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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?

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.

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

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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

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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 Díaz, 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.

Art in the unshockable world

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In art’s current spirit of soul searching for a sense of engagement Art 21|blog attempts to ignite the debate:

Have you ever been shocked by a work of art and if so, why? What’s your take?

 

They reference Kara Walker‘s images of slave rape, and the different extreme reactions they provoke from different parts of the American psyche.

There are , of course, who’d respond by saying there’s quite enough shocking art around. That would be glib, however.

Welcome to RSA Arts and Ecology

Announcements, RSA Arts & Ecology,

We are now synidcating the feeds from the RSA Arts and Ecology Centre. 

From the RSA Website:

The RSA Arts and Ecology Centre is an organisation whose role is to catalyse, publicise, challenge and support artists who are responding to the unprecedented environmental challenges of our era. Using their inspirations, RSA Arts and Ecology aims to create a positive discussion about the causes and the human impact of climate change through commissioning, debate, interdisciplinary discourse and a high-profile website.

The RSA Arts and Ecology Centre was set up by the RSA in 2005.The centre’s head, Michaela Crimmin, says “Artists have always had a powerful relationship with the natural environment. Equally artists continually question and re-examine society’s notions of progress. We need their unique perspective on the enormous challenges ahead – on the relationship between environmental issues, and not least climate change, and people.”

For over 250 years the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has been a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress.  Our approach is multi-disciplinary, politically independent and combines cutting edge research and policy development with practical action. Find out more…

The Conversation Was Conservation

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The best way to curb planetary debasement? Conserve resources. Use less, think differently and, most importantly, don’t depend on recycling to protect humanity from becoming an endangered species.

This simple but habit busting truth was the main theme in the conversation among panelists on Sunday, December 7, as part of Moving Art’s – Moving Green Mini-Expo. The theatre company organized the event as part of their presentation of E.M. Lewis’s Song of Extinction at the Ford Theatre in Hollywood. Several tables with ecologically friendly products and programs were set up in the lobby and on the patio. There was even a Smart Car to ogle and learn about. After the matinee, four leaders from the public and private sectors discussed practical strategies for reducing planetary impact.

The audience gleaned excellent tips and information from Jessica Aldridge from the Burbank Recycle Center; Stephanie Barger, Founder and Executive Director of Earth Resources Foundation in Costa Mesa; Natalie Freidberg, Manager of All Shades of Green sustainable living center in Silverlake; and Ian Garrett, Executive Director of The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts (CSPA) in Los Angeles. The panel was moderated by Rebecca Rogers, a member of the NRDC Leadership Council and Executive Producer of the documentary film F.L.O.W..

Conservation at home or at the theatre requires small shifts in thinking about how and why we use resources. According to Garrett, the first step in theatre is to increase the life cycle of materials that typically function for a 6-week, or even shorter, run. Lumber and set materials can be donated to other theatres or used in subsequent productions. Non-toxic paints and sustainable lumber can be used for set construction. Energy efficient vehicles can be used for touring shows and materials transport. The goal is to reduce human exposure to toxic materials, reduce waste in landfills and incinerators and to, ultimately, conserve dollars, since most non-toxic, sustainable materials are still more expensive than those that aren’t.

CSPA is collaborating with Earth Arts Partnership in Venice (brought to you by the green folks at the Electric Lodge) to build an infrastructure for the storage and transportation of theatre materials and to encourage a green arts business model.

Lighting efficiency is another key area where theatres can save energy and money. Using tools from the EPA website, CSPA tracks the amount of electricity used by a theatre production and estimates the amount of equivalent energy used in gallons of gas, or barrels of oil, or the amount of energy used in the average American home over a one year period. He made the case that sold out houses at the theatre means less energy being used at home, which even with a single run of a show can eliminate the carbon foot print of one house per year. The upshot: go to the theatre to save energy!

Conservation at home begins with properly insulating your house. Freidberg said that up to 44% of home heat or air conditioning is lost when a home is not well insulated. She added that this one step is more important than installing solar panels, if you want to practice sustainability.

Another easy step is to reduce phantom load, or, the miscellaneous power that is used by all those devices in your home or office that remained plugged in when they’re not in use. All Shades of Green sells Smart Strips that sense when a device is in use or not and automatically turns off to stop power drain. This small step can significantly decrease your power bill, especially if you use a lot of cell phone chargers, computers, camera battery chargers, etc. To dispose of the worn out batteries, Ikea, Home Depot and Ace Hardware reclaim them.

According to Barger, if we really want to reduce energy use and limit our dependence on fossil fuel, we all need to stop using plastic bags. Californians use over 19 billion plastic grocery bags each year. Grocers generate over 31 million plastic bags every day. These bags break down into smaller pieces, but they never degrade. They accumulate in landfills or cling to fences and bushes or end up in the stomachs of sea turtles and other marine animals who can get tangled and drown.

Californians have a huge opportunity to reduce pollution in the oceans. Barger’s small but mighty Earth Resource Foundation implemented the “Hold On To Your Butt” campaign that, in one year, changed the laws in Orange County and turned all the beaches into smoke-free zones. Rapid change like this comes from a fusion of personal and political will. She spoke to a clichéd but truthful reality: that organized citizens can and do change laws and make the world a better place.

One law that Barger would like to see changed is the amount it costs waste haulers to use municipal dumps in Orange County. She compared San Francisco’s fee of $180/ton to Orange County’s at $19/ton. Which dump do you think has more waste in it? But if the rates go up and, at the same time, the recyclables market is suffocated by global recession, what happens? There are no easy answers, no simple equation to make everything balance just so. But it is clear that recycling is not the best prescription for preventative planetary medicine, especially when the economic incentives dry up like so much soda in a puddle.

A startling illustration of this came from Aldridge who explained that papers and cardboard at the Burbank Recycle Center are sorted by hand then baled for shipment to companies who remanufacture the material into new products. Many of these companies are located in India or China. With global recession, no one’s buying. The bales are piling up on the warehouse floor. There is no more room for locals to earn money by selling cans and bottles, and these people are turned away. Similar scenarios are happening across the country. There is no room for our recyclables. We have to use less and conserve.

The good news is that we have an incoming administration that is engaging us instead of making us want to curl up in a ball with our fingers in our ears and our eyes squeezed shut. From the dude selling his cans and bottles to the corporate executive trying to figure out how to keep people employed, to the mother trying to keep her kids warm in winter, this new political climate can help everyone ride out the tough times. The federal government can actually inspire and support the work of artists (ala a new Works Progress Administration…it could happen) and the work of each of these panelists, all of whom use their particular expertise to educate people, companies and governments, so that all members of society reap the benefits.

Inspiration is what led Moving Arts to organize the Green Expo at the Ford. Song of Extinction is ripe with metaphors that weave between ages and cultures, scholars and businessmen, the animal world and the music of the spheres. Lewis suggests that there is no break in the continuum, that all life resonates and that death is not the dividing line that we perceive it to be. We can ignore this profound truth, or we can choose to honor these ephemeral connections. The key is to conserve Earth’s riches for the quality of life of all living things and for those that will come long after our bones turn to dust.

Allshadesofgreen.net

Burbankrecycle.org

Earthresources.org

Sustainablepractice.org