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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.

Theaters in Trouble

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A few articles out there on economic trouble putting theaters in peril and even closing their doors:

On Blog Stage: More Shows Are Closings, But Broadway Is Optimistic 

The list of Broadway shows closing in January has reached double digits, the New York Daily News noted yesterday. Many of those are early curtain calls related to a struggling economy, as we’ve been reporting daily on Blog Stage andBackStage.com, but some seasonal shows with scheduled closings are contributing to the exaggerated stats.

At the Village Voice:Downtown’s Ohio Theatre Likely to Close

Before 66 Wooster Street became the Ohio Theatre and various apartments, it had a former life as a textile factory. Theatrical legend has it that before the first performance–in what was then called the Open Space–the cast and crew went down on hands and knees, armed with magnets, pulling decades of dropped pins and needles from the floorboard. Many years later, the Ohio is on pins and needles again. The building that houses the Ohio is being sold, and in a few weeks or months the Ohio Theatre will almost certainly cease to exist.

And on Bloomberg: Silicon Valley Theater Collapses, Blames ‘Tarzan’ Co-Producer 

Silicon Valley’s largest performing- arts organization is preparing to file for bankruptcy this week and blames a theater in Atlanta, 2,442 miles east, for its collapse.

Art at work: global warming, step off.

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Dystopia: super motivating, right? Part of why we’re all so excited about green living and moving and breathing is that constant potential for utter global collapse. Ooooh. Potential ecological apocalypse. I gotta get me one of them CFLs.

Artist Petko Dourmana creates this eerie potential future. In Global Warming Survival Kit, he realizes this generation’s “nuclear winter” by setting up a station for a watchman of a border between land and the North Sea. The border lies on an ash-covered future landscape, images of which can only be seen with night-vision goggles. Perhaps the best way to prevent an apocalypse is to change our perspective.

The piece is on display as part of Brand_Dourmana at the Edith Russ Site for New Media Art in Oldenberg, Germany. It was recently nominated for the 2009 transmediale award.

Go to the Green Museum

In the Audience

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I’ve worked in theater in some form or another since high school. I have had a bad habit throughout my life in theater of being the type who says (or at least thinks) “I don’t want to go watch theater, I see so much of it from backstage, from the booth, I see it in rehearsals all day long…” So, I don’t sit in the audience much.

Now, because of the illness that blindsided me over a year ago, I really feel like a spectator sitting in the audience watching the future of green, eco-responsible theater rushing by in flashes. It’s difficult to do. So much has happened in the last few months, and ecoTheater has missed it. People close to me will roll their eyes when they find that as I write this lament I am sitting in a hospital room in Indianapolis waiting for my second and final round of high dose chemotherapy to commence. “Who cares about green theater?” they will ask.

I won’t lie — it isn’t that difficult to realize that I’ve missed out on reporting on the big Broadway initiative, supported as it is by the mayor of New York City, or the up and coming Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts (CSPA) (founded and driven by Ian Garrett, a regularly mentioned activist on ecoTheater), or the fast approaching Earth Matters on Stage (EMOS) at the University of Oregon, or, or, or…

I mean, it’s easy enough to see that there are bigger things to consider in my life right now. But, what can I say? For once, I hate being just a spectator. It’s like sitting through hours of rehearsal, not saying a word to anyone, and not participating in any way in the production.

For now, I have taken a leave of absence from my job with CTM and have done very little “work” of any kind in the last month or so. The only project I have spent time on is The Cancer Stories Project, hopefully the first stage work for the still-being-founded Wisconsin Story Project (WSP), which I hope to be a new model of theater that will take bits and pieces from many idea-makers, heading towards not just ecologically sound theater production, but also aiming to be a model of theater that solves for pattern (or here).

Who knows? Perhaps one day ecoTheater will simply morph into a blog tracking the progress of WSP, and how we’re doing our best to stay green, while tackling other issues that plague today’s so-called regional theater.

But no matter what I’ll be back here writing soon. So, don’t forget about me…

Go to EcoTheater

The Reclamation Project

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Now this is just beautiful. Xavier Cortada has helped to instigate waves of tree plantings and land restoration with his piece The Reclamation Project. He begins with legions of mangrove seedlings, artfully arranged in clear plastic cups. The seedlings can be adopted by individual donors or businesses. When they are ready, the teeny trees are then transplanted into areas where they will naturally thrive. In this way each plant begins its life as part of an art piece and matures as an act of restoration.

Begun in 2006 as a program partnered with the Miami Science Museum, the program expanded the following year to included native Florida trees on land. This season mangrove seedlings were adopted by several Florida schools and a host of local businesses. Growing, sprouting, planting as art. Beautiful.

Go to the Green Museum

MOCA faces serious financial problems

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From the LA Times:

Since its inception, MOCA has grown to encompass three exhibition spaces. The “Temporary Contemporary,” later renamed the Geffen Contemporary, opened in 1983 in a warehouse at the edge of Little Tokyo that had been revamped by architect Frank Gehry. Three years later, the museum’s permanent home, designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, opened on Grand Avenue, where it is a mainstay of the planned redesign of the area known as the Grand Avenue project. In 2000, MOCA acquired an exhibition space at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood.

Before the national economic crisis hit, Strick said, MOCA was gearing up gradually for its first major endowment campaign since the mid-1990s, when it raised $25 million. Now, he said, there’s no time for that, and the focus is on “immediate issues and how to move ahead in a very different world.”

An irony of MOCA’s plight is that, thanks to the appetite of wealthy international collectors, the market value of its prime pieces has soared. Corporations and individuals routinely sell sculptures and paintings in an economic pinch, but a museum that did so would be violating its reason for existing, which is keeping art in the public domain. The codes of ethics of both the American Assn. of Museums and the Assn. of Art Museum Directors, although not legally binding, specify that the only acceptable reason for selling artworks from a public collection is to raise money for buying other, presumably more desirable, pieces.

As a Native Angeleno and frequenter of MOCA (admittedly primarily the Grand Avenue and Geffen Locations) this is a tragedy to me in my personal arts participation. To me this highlights the issues of reliance on contributed income in the arts world. 

See the Original Article by Clicking Here.