Last weekend, Robert Butler of the Ashden Directory, in associaton with Charlie Kronick of Greenpeace and writer Caspar Henderson invited 15 academics, writers and activists to explore the issue of how we create narratives around climate change. RSA Arts & Ecology blogger Caleb Klaces returned enthused by the debate and …
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What if women were in charge of cutting carbon?
Caleb Klaces writes: In December this year representatives from 192 countries will meet in Copenhagen for the 15th UN Conference of the Parties (COP15) to discuss international targets for the reduction of CO2 emissions. The roughly 1,500 delegates will mostly be men, as they always have been. During the period …
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End Games | review: The End of the Line
Caleb Klaces writes: The Age of Stupid uses a dramatic, fictional character to frame a series of apparently disparate contemporary documentaries. Pete Postlethwaite’s man on a chopper looking back from the future, as well as pithy animated sequences explaining the scientific, economic and sociological facts and figures, connects the people …
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Icebergs vs. art: the photographs of Frank Hurley
Caleb Klaces writes:
Frank Hurley, official photographer of Shackleton’s 1914-16 Antarctic expedition, went to great lengths to get the photographs he wanted. After the rescue and return home of the expedition members, Hurley went back to try and follow the route Shackleton and two other men had taken on foot across South Georgia to get help for those stranded on Elephant Island, as the first time around Hurley had been one of those left behind.
A selection of Hurley’s black-and-white photographs were on show last month at the Royal Geographical Society in London. They included humbling shots of the frozen-solid Endurance vessel looking tiny and brittle, a black stick insect sticking out of the shades of white which fill the frame. One desperate image was of the men harnessed to a boat, dragging it across pure white ground, taken from a precarious vantage point; the companionship in a portrait of a man-sized dog leaping up to hug one of the crew also captures a sense of loneliness.
But to me there’s something curiously incomplete, and unaffecting, in the portrait of the landscape itself. This could be because in my imagination the Antarctic exists on a scale too large ever to capture – dooming the photographs in my mind to fail; it could be that these older photographs suffer because images of polar regions are so familiar to us now, and often trite.
I now wonder if capturing the landscape is the wrong way to think about it. In a video post while on a recent Cape Farewelltrip to the Arctic, the singer Jarvis Cocker said that “People have made a lot of great art over the centuries…but an iceberg basically pisses on itâ€. For Cocker, the landscape is a kind of artwork already, to which we can only respond, not capture. This might be truer to Frank Hurley’s experience, too, who never did make it across South Georgia to get those photographs.
Caleb Klaces is a poet,and founder and Editor-in-chief of www.likestarlings.com, a website which pairs up established and new poets to create new poetic conversations.
Read Caleb Klace’s interview with Leo Murray on RSA Arts & Ecology.
Read Tony White’s essay Antarctic Scenarios on RSA Arts & Ecology.
Interview with activist/video maker Leo Murray
I’ve just posted an interview that Caleb Klaces did with Leo Murray for on the main RSA Arts & Ecology website. Murray did the clever little viral video Wake Up Freak Out – Then Get a Grip which has been doing the rounds on the net.
Art has the ability to move people in a way that nothing else does. In the world we live in today, screen media is the most prominent cultural feature. People spend the majority of their waking hours staring at screens (computers and TVs), which gives you a clue if you’re trying to propagate social change. If you don’t try and come at people through their screens you’re just standing behind them tapping them on the shoulder saying “Hey, over here…â€. It’s really clear that there’s no way to bring about the social change that we need to deal with climate change without the use of screen media. Aside from mass media, I’m pretty certain that The Age of Stupid [which Murray animated the first three minutes of] is the most powerful tool to motivate people around climate change that exists now. It does the opposite of what I do in my film, it barely addresses the science at all. It’s set in the future and uses narrative to suck you in. Taking a historical view seems a very productive perspective…
Wake up freak out: movie that makes sense of the science
Caleb Klaces writes: The London-based philosophy fanzine Shoppinghour has been putting on monthly Evenings of Delight at The Candid Arts space in Angel, London, since the start of the year. April’s theme was Environmental Surrealism, explained in part by Mika Ebbesen in the event’s introduction with the good question, “what can we look to when we are tired at looking at ourselves?â€
Seven videos, a sculpture and a live VJ performance provided some answers. In an evening of welcome, if patchy, experiment (including a speaking vagina, and the Chicago skyline judderingly filmed to a soundtrack of Walter Benjamin), two films stood out. Amanda Wasielewski’s Supervision: Wawina, MN cuts together old and contemporary footage of the lush, nondescript town of Wawina to the sound of elegiac messages recorded onto an answerphone in June 2006, just before it became the last place in continental America to switch from an analogue to a digital phone system. The messages are left by “phreaksâ€, phone hackers from all over America, for whom Wawina was the last hackable oasis.
The excellent short animation Wake Up, Freak Out – Then Get a Grip also looks simultaneously at “ourselves†and outside of us. Climate science is abstract and difficult at the best of times, so making ‘feedback loops’ – the way current changes in climate affect how the climate will change in the future – understandable and entertaining is tough. If it doesn’t make complete sense the first time around, Leo Murray’s ambitious and important film is intelligent and stylish enough to be an enjoyable watch several times over.
Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.
Caleb Klaces is a poet,and founder and Editor-in-chief of www.likestarlings.com, a website which pairs up established and new poets to create new poetic conversations. He reviewed Marcel Theroux’s Far North recently for RSA Arst & Ecology.
When artists fail to read the small print
Caleb Klaces makes a point in his review of Marcel Theroux’s new novel, Far North, on the main RSA Arts & Ecology website: the moment when Theroux starts to try and create a plausible scientific scenario for the catastrophic future in which his novel is set is the point where you start going, “Umm. Really?â€
It takes a great writer to be able to incorporate research into a novel. Theroux opts to include a character explaining how we got into this mess:
The planet had heated up. They turned off smokestacks and stopped flying. Some, like my [Makepeace’s] parents, altered the way they lived. Factories were shut down […] As it turned out, the smoke from all the furnaces had been working like a sunshade, keeping the world a few degrees cooler than it would have been otherwise. He said that in trying to do the right thing, we had sawed off the branch we were sitting on. The droughts and storms that came in the years after put in motion all the things that followed.
See? It’s not really quite like that, is it?
Read the review here.
G20 protests: does the lack of iconography = a lack of vision?
Guest blogger Caleb Klaces writes: In Everything that rises: a book of convergences, Lawrence Weschler compares graphic imagery used in Communist-controlled Poland’s Solidarity movement with later social justice movements in the US. He argues that the image of an angry crowd facing directly forwards was instrumental in really bringing people together in both cases. In his view, the image was more powerfully drawn in Poland than the US because the movement itself had more vitality.
The image I remember from the ultimately unsuccessful anti-war in Iraq protests in London is of Tony Blair with a tea cup on his head: “Make tea not warâ€. The British anti-nuclear movement has long had the circular peace sign, and the Greenpeace dove and rainbow.
The peace sign was still the face-paint of choice at last week’s protests in London around the G20. The symbol has arguably lost some of its import by being employed in support of such a broad spectrum of causes. But I haven’t seen a powerful new image or symbol from the Climate Camp and Put People First protests that the discontented could own and rally around.
Has anyone else located a semiotic centre? If not, what could it be?
Caleb Klaces edits the poetry website likestarlings.com; his review of Far North is on the RSA Arts & Ecology website.