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How literature tackles climate change

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A few months ago I reported on Ian McEwan, currently writing a book inspired by his Cape Farewell
journey to the Arctic, who was saying how hard it was to was to tackle such a “virtuous” topic in a novel.

The trajectory of a short story is very different from a novel, but Helen Simpson manages it deftly in her story “In-flight Entertainment” which appeared in Granta 100. In it, two men who meet in the first class cabin of a transatlantic flight discuss global warming, while, next to them, another passenger dies of a heart attack.

“Four hours’ delay,” volunteered Alan, “thanks to those jokers at Heathrow. Alan Barr, by the way.”

“And I’m Jeremy Lees. Yes, those anti-flying protesters. A waste of time.”

“Complete time-wasters.”

“I suppose so,” said Jeremy. “What I meant, though, was it was a waste of their time. They’re not going to change anything.”

“Exactly.
It’s nonsense, isn’t it, this global warming stuff. Trying to turn the
wheel back. Half the scientists don’t agree with it anyway.”

“Actually
I think you’ll find they do. Ah, red please,’ said Jeremy as the air
stewardess offered him wine. ‘What have you got? Merlot or Zinfandel?
I’ll try the Zinfandel. Thank you. No, they do agree now, they’ve
reached a consensus. I ought to know, I was one of them. No, it’s not
nonsense, I’m afraid. The world really is warming up.”

“Merlot,” said Alan, rather annoyed.

It was published well before the Heathrow decision, but manages to include the line: “Heathrow will get its third runway any time now.”

Nominations for other pieces of contemporary lit which tackle this sort of stuff?

Picture: Still from The Coming Race by Ben Rivers 2006. “An indistinct, slow-moving sea of humanity clambers valiantly up a rocky mountain.” Showing as part of Figuring Landscapes at the Tate Modern, February 6 – 8. Details here.

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The problems of political public art

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Few pieces of public art gather as much attention as Laith al-Amari’s recent sculpture of a shoe, created with the help of local children to celebrate Muntadhar al-Zeidi’s Bush-ward footware-hurling incident. Its public life has been shortlived, however. Tikrit police have insisted it be removed from its public location because of its “political” nature.

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New not Banksy link at 12:00

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Should we even be passing this on? From the site robbinbanksy.com:

WARNING
THIS
LINK WILL TAKE YOU TO A SITE THAT CONTAINS 2 NAUGHTY WORDS AND SOME
FAUX-SUBVERSIVE SLIGHTLY NAUGHTY ART….. DO NOT CLICK ON IT IF YOU ARE
UNDER AGE, HAVE NO SENSE OF HUMOUR AND/OR REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY THE LINK WILL NOT BE ACTIVATED UNTIL 12 NOON ON TUESDAY 3RD FEBRUARY 2009

At midday today, a link on is-it-or-isn’t-it Banksy‘s site becomes live: http://robinbanksy.com. Is this kind of joke funny any more?

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Can art ask for public money during a downturn?

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WILLIAM SHAW: For the last few months the arts world has been knawing over the fact that the bottom has fallen out of the  private  art market.  Sotheby’s and Christie’s are in trouble, so the latest rumours go. Larry Gagosian says “the art economy is clearly headed for some choppy waters???” Art fairs are cancelled.  Critics wonder if money dragging art down with it, giving succour to those who’ve always said that the art of the last fifteen years was little more than bling? 

But the art world seems to still waft along blissfully unaware that the real fundamental crunch is yet to come. In the discussion of Liz Forgan’s new chairing of the Arts Council there seems to be no space given to the question of precisely where public funding is going to come from over the next five years.

Look to America, a country where the public sector is less involved in the arts. There institutional funding is already disappearing fast; the Huffington Post reports the closure of the Rose Art Museum and the selling off of all its artworks .  MoCA in LA is struggling. The “bailout for the arts” which the American art world has been begging for looks, well… unlikely.

The knock on from gargantuan subsidy for the financial system means that government is effectively skint for the forseeable future. What little money there is for culture is going to be spoken for by Olympic projects until 2012.

Prediction: there will be practically no public money for the arts between 2010-2012, and any that there is will be bound up in pre-existing schemes. As the government starts to make the kind of expenditure cuts it’s going to have to make, even existing funding committments will be broken.

So what happens then?

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On Monbiot, Agas, and sustainable middle-class living

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Atlantic Books might possibly be regretting using an Aga as the cover image for Andrew Price’s book Slow-Tech: Manifesto for an Overwound World, out this month. This is also the month in which George Monbiot chose to trash the reputation of the middle-classes’ favourite icon of the bucolic life – presumably in an effort to distance himself from accusations being a middle-class activist himself.

That’s not to say the image doesn’t sum up Andrew Price’s thesis pretty succinctly. The big disappointment with the book is not his demolition of the idea that “efficiency” has anything to do with social progress or environmental sustainability. That’s all good. But it starts to get a bit shaky when it turns out that his inspirations for the idea of slow-tech seem to be based more on nostalgia than any idea idea of sustainability. Aside from the now-reviled Aga, Price champions his father’s old petrol-glugging Bentley, and the old family sailing boat. As I say in the review on the main site, his idea of sustainable living soon starts to look a little like a rather jolly picnic in a BBC2 period drama rather than a real manifesto.

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John Prescott responds: the tangled web

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Last week Matthew Taylor commented on John Prescott‘s new blog commenting on Matthew Taylor. I commented on Matthew Taylor’s comment, with the unoriginal observation that reading New Labour blogging was like watching your father dancing to hip hop. I see that John Prescott now commented on my comment… posting a video of himself set to drum and bass. 

The authority of old media is being eroded by the growth of new media. The problem for new media is how it can acquire the authority the old media once had. I’m not entirely sure this is the right way to go about it.

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Making links: John Thackara, Felix Guattari, Heath Bunting

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MICHAELA CRIMMIN: One of John Thakera???s inspiring newsletters containing accounts of his activities has just come through. It includes a generous reference to Arts & Ecology and eureka, I get it. The blogosphere is all about making connections, rather than as I???ve previously thought, the musings of frequently brilliant, witty, provocative individuals following linear lines of enquiry as they drink their morning coffee.

Connections are inherent in the word ???ecology???. When we first set up Arts & Ecology in 2005 it was Felix Guattari???s interpretation that seemed so right. It was important that we had a framework that was trans-disciplinary with a project promoting and debating artists??? responses to current environmental challenges. You can???t leave out philosophy or politics or economics or sociology, or the arts, when addressing the complexity of climate change and its effects. (If Descartes saw how we are exploiting the environment surely he would have thought differently?)

On the 5th anniversary of Facebook, here???s to relationships, here???s to blogs! And here???s to encouraging connections in virtual and real space. There???s plenty to explore in both, including Heath Bunting???s work for a new exhibition at Leeds City Art Gallery opening on 11 February. I really encourage you to open the link here. And of course there???s the new exhibition Altermodern that opened at Tate Britain yesterday.

Illustration: Woman, from An A-Z of The System by Heath Bunting 2007. All the maps are online here, and discussed here. 

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Tantalum Memorial: an analogue response to Congo’s coltan war

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A couple of years ago I went to the Congo, to an isolated, uneasy spot called Gabolite on the Ubangi River, hundreds of miles away from any regular electricty supply, a place patrolled by bored, nervous members of the United Nations task force MONUC. For all its isolation, Gabolite astonisingly boasts one of the longest runways in Africa; it was built by Western-supported kleptocrat dictator Mobutu Sese Seko so that Concorde could fly supplies of champagne to his nearby palace.

The palace is deserted now. The gold taps went first, apparently. Looted, swimming pools dry, the bush is slowly reclaiming it. I was there to meet child soldiers whom an NGO was trying, with mixed success, to reintegrate back into the society they’d been dragged away from to be forced to become killers. It’s quite horrifying to look into the eyes of a child who has almost certainly murdered and raped, or been raped.

Today I was just posting a listing for transmediale.09 on the main site when I saw that one of the artworks listed for this year’s Award is UK artists’ Graham Harwood, Richard Wright, and Matsuko Yokokoji’s Tantalum Memorial, a work that was exhibited at last year’s Manifesta 7.

Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji were formerly associated with the digital media collective Mongrel. Tantalum Memorial grew out of a piece of work Mongrel did called Telephone Trottoir. Telephone Trottoir recreated the informal “pavement radio” of Central Africa – the phone calls by which news is passed in opressive states – by creating an audio messaging network for Congolese regugees in London.

Tantalum Memorial is an old-style telephone exchange built from Strowger telephone switches to animate the Telephone Trottoir system, dialing up numbers provided by the network of Congolese refugees as the diaspora reconnects with itself, using a technology from before the high tech era of modern digital telephony. It is an analogue response to a largely ignored horror created by our digital era, a tiny act of marking an unmarked holocaust.

Though the wars in the Congo of the last 12 years are often portrayed in the media as tribal, arising originally from the spillover from the Hutu and Tutsi conflicts of Burundi and Rwanda, they are more honestly described as being fuelled by the profits from looted minerals. In mineral terms, Central Africa is one of the very richest parts of the world, though none of that wealth was evident among the huts of Gabolite.

One mineral in particular has proved lethal to the area: coltan is the colloquial African name for columbite tantalite. Coltan is used to make high-performance capacitors, the sort needed to produce chips for video game consoles, laptops, digital cameras and mobile phones.

The Congo has the world’s largest coltan reserves. These have been systematically fought over by the new kleptocrats, the warlords, and exported clandestinely via neighbouring countries, Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda. The boom in mobile phone sales coincided precisely with the eruption of what has been the world’s bloodiest conflict since WW2. Around 4 million have died so far in the violence and its aftermath. Disease and ongoing violence means that Congolese are still dying at a rate of 45,000 a month. 

We are technophiles; Tantalum Memorial is a remarkable reminder of the cost of technophilia.

 

 

Tantalum Memorial by Graham Harwood, Richard Wright, and Matsuko Yokokoji, Manifesta 7 2008 courtesy of Paul Keller

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