Natalie Jeremijenko, Phillip Galanter, Robert Harriss, Helen Lessick and Amy Balkin in conversation at SOSHouston.org
Monthly Archives: March 2009
Dr. Robert Harriss
At SOS Houston
THE SCIENCE ART INTERFACE
Systems of Sustainability
Today is the first day of System of Sustainability at the University of Houston. You should come. Miranda, myself and our Czech colleage and friend Misa Rygrova are all here all weekend.
SOShouston.org
Earth Hour and the curious effect of candlelight
This Saturday from 8.30pm to 9.30pm is Earth Hour. All over the world people will switch off their lights for sixty minutes. Public institutions worldwide will go dark. Myself, I’m going round to my friend Paul’s house where we will eat dinner in candlelight. Paul has to take part, of course; he works for the WWF who are behind the whole concept that draws 2,700 towns and cities, 20,000 businesses and millions of people in 84 countries around the world together for an hour. It’s part symbolic gesture, and partly a way of engaging us all in the idea of using less. Of course the idea of being thrilled at the prospect of using less for an hour could have very middle-class, Presbyterian tang to it. Using less is possibly not quite as exotic to the billions worldwide for whom electricity is a historically recent miracle.
But it’s worth doing for another reason too; there is something fabulous about darkness, something that is easy to lose touch with if you’ve grown up with the idea of electricity being cheap and plentiful. Using less doesn’t have to be a hair-shirt thing.
I was reminded of this last year when I went off-grid for a month with my kids in Devon, using only solar power, paraffin lamps and candles for light. I wrote a piece about it for The Observer:
While I wait for the water to boil I fill the lamps with paraffin; the shack is lit by candles and oil lamps. Snow starts to pelt down outside. I wonder if I’m underprepared.
After eating, we get out a board game; the kids crowd round the table. Despite the icy cold outside, the shack is suddenly lusciously warm.
A red glow seeps from the stove. Our faces are pink in the paraffin light.
Electricitylessness is an astonishing novelty in the modern age. My daughter’s friend says: ‘I keep reaching round the doors expecting to find a light switch.’ Instead, they carry torches or candles to light their way. ‘It’s fun lighting candles,’ says Tomas with a dangerous glint in his eye. I remind him that this building is made of wood.
Electricity fills every corner of a house with light. In contrast, the paraffin lamps on the table light only our faces; it has the miraculous effect of drawing people together into a close, sociable circle. It’s like being in a 17th-century Dutch painting. I am suddenly reminded of the joy of being a boy during the power blackouts of the Seventies.
I step outside. In an exceptionally starry frost, I look in through the windows at the children playing contentedly at the table and feel curiously proud of having provided for them, in a hunter-gatherer-type way. It’s a sentiment that doesn’t strike me much at home.
Image: The Matchmaker by Gerrit van Honthorst (1592-1656)
EDIT:
As viral campaigns go, this one is kind of genius, and shares Caravaggio-type lightint with the painting above. Warning. Won’t watch it if you’re squeamish. Contains grauitous violence.
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APInews: RFP: Status of the Creative Economy in L.A.
For its 2010 exhibition year, 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, Calif., is seeking proposals that address a common theme: the status of L.A.s creative economy.
via APInews: RFP: Status of the Creative Economy in L.A. .
Antony Gormley and snobbery
Ben Street at Art21 | Blog is among those who sneer at Antony Gormley’s One And Other, the sculpture which will be installed on the Fourth Plinth from July 4. The piece consists of 2400 members of the public standing on the fourth plinth, one at a time. Volunteers submit their names to the One And Other website and have their names chosen, apparently at random. Street sniffs:
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 “snobberyâ€; 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 Nelsonâ€, 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.
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Manchester Festival announces programme: it’s good
The second Manchester International Festival released its 2009 programme this week. It’s turning into the the best multi-platform arts festival in the UK – but then the size of its budget – a whopping £10m this year – probably helps with that. That said, they’re making great artistic decisions. While the Edinburgh International Festival is clearly on the up under Jonathan Mills, Manchester is setting a great standard in new commissions.
And obviously chosing to put an image for Gustav Metzger’s new plea for environmental sanity Flailing Trees, which is one of those commisions, on the cover shows a kind of ethical intent which other festivals need to match.
More about Metzger’s sculpture here.
Enter the EPA’s Earth Day photo contest | green LA girl
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Fancy yourself an eco-inspired photographer? Then send in your best shots to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as your good Earth Day deed. The now-hopefully-less-deadbeat-since-Obama’s-president agency’s looking for inspirational photos for its EPA Earth Day Photo project.
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All you have to do is upload your photo onto one of those 3 Flickr groups — people and the environment, the beauty of nature, and wildlife — by April 30. The winner gets whatever fame comes from being featured on the EPA Earth Day site — and the happy knowledge that the photograph could inspire eco-activism in others.
via Enter the EPA’s Earth Day photo contest | green LA girl.
Ed Miliband, Mark Lynas, Pete Postlethwaite & Franny Armstrong
If anybody hasn’t seen this, here’s Franny Armstrong, Mark Lynas and Pete Postlethwaite ambushing Miliband at the London premiere of Age of Stupid last weekend. It needs to be said, Miliband was there, he takes it on the chin and responds well. The political reality is that until movement that Armstrong and others are building really achieves a critical mass, he’s always going to be forced to acquiesce to the more pro-business agenda of Peter Mandelson, as cabinet did over the third runway at Heathrow.
RSA Design & Behaviour: Ordinary Heroes
I’m stealing this post wholesale from Jamie Young’s RSA Design & Behaviour blog. Let’s call it recycling:
Last year I read a report published by the IPPR that made me think. It was called Warm Words, and analysed the language and discourses used in the media and campaigns to talk about climate change.
The authors identified several discourses at the time of publication (August 2006 – so it’s a bit out of date now) that fell into three main groups; alarmism (we’re doomed), “settlerdom†and “British comic nihilism†(climate change is just too fantastic to be true), and “small actions†(messages that encourage people to beat climate change by doing little actions like turning off lights). I thought this was all fascinating, coming at the same time I was getting slightly power crazy after being exposed to the sort of sneaky public engagement strategy that campaigning organisations use, and the ideas behind social marketing and population segmentation models.
The report suggests most of these discourses are pretty ineffective, and among its recommendations are to improve the way the media uses the small actions discourse:
As mentioned earlier, populist climate change discourse (for example, in magazines) tends to put together alarmist and small-action repertoires, through features such as ‘20 ways to save the planet from destruction’. In bringing together these two repertoires without reconciling them, these articles feed a notion of asymmetry in human agency with regards to climate change.
This, the report says, is pretty disastrous, and makes people think that while their actions are responsible for climate change, they are also powerless to do anything about it. How can turning off my telly make any difference to rising sea levels and ecosystem collapse?
Their conclusion is to create a new discourse which they call “ordinary heroismâ€, an attempt to create a (very British by the way) language about climate change (more about heroism in another post soon). Their explanation of what makes this unique isn’t entirely clear from the report to be honest, but the examples they quote of early uses of this discourse in the media all have in common that little changes from lots of people add up to be significant.
This is absolutely one of the reasons that technology and the internet is so crucial to helping us change our behaviour. My own energy saving rituals (nothing odd, I promise) seem negligible until I’m connected to everyone else, when I realise that the cumulative effect of my and our small actions are beginning to bring about significant change. This, as well as the competitive and social proofing reasons, is why it’s great that socially-networked energy displays/smart meters are beginning to find their way on to the market.
But what else can we come up with?
Ps. Here’s a couple of other things that do this too: