Jarvis Cocker

David Buckland: The Art of Climate Change

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httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ifhfCnLUZQ

David Buckland is an artist with an international reputation. In 2000 he created and now directs the Cape Farewell project, which brings artists, scientists and educators together to collectively address and raise awareness about climate change. This highly successful artistic intervention has spurred worldwide activity and underlines the power of artistic engagement to stimulate and vision the necessary cultural shift to build a sustainable and exciting society.

In The Art of Climate Change, David explores what happens when artists collaborate with scientists and educators in response to global warming. Cape Farewells highly successful artistic intervention has spurred worldwide activity and underlines the power of artistic engagement to stimulate and envision the necessary cultural shift to build a sustainable society.

Resources:

Twitter: @capefarewell

Facebook Group: Cape Farewell

Cape Farewell: www.capefarewell.com

David Buckland: www.bucklandart.com/

Background:

In October 2009 delegates from across Canada and beyond joined Artscape in Toronto for our third Creative Places + Spaces: The Collaborative City conference. In a packed two-day program inspirational keynote speakers and ground breaking projects made the case for the power of collaboration to solve complex multi dimensional challenges and to fuel innovation. www.creativeplacesandspaces.ca

Over the next few months “The Campaign of Ideas: Video Knowledge Exchange” series will bring you a regular diet of conference highlights focusing on the major themes of the conference and some of the tools for collaboration that were presented.

Respond to Our Current Poll: Visit the Creative Places + Spaces website at www.creativeplacesandspaces.ca and tell us what you think is the most practical and relevant conference learning on the theme of Collaboration Fuels Innovation. The poll is located on the lower right-hand side of the website.

Keep Informed About Creative Places + Spaces:

You can follow us on Twitter @CPandS, use #CPandS″ in your tweets and join in the conversation on Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. The Creative Places + Spaces website will be updated often, so be sure to check back for updates or subscribe to our RSS Feed or Email Updates. www.creativeplacesandspaces.ca

Creative Places + Spaces was presented by Artscape in collaboration with MaRS Discovery District, Martin Prosperity Institute and the City of Toronto: Economic Development, Culture & Tourism.

www.torontoartscape.on.ca

www.marsdd.com

www.martinprosperity.org/

www.toronto.ca/culture/

Think. Create. Collaborate.

Icebergs vs. art: the photographs of Frank Hurley

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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 it”. 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.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Jarvis Cocker saves the world

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Invited to guest edit Radio 4’s Today Programme this morning, Jarvis Cocker launched into a passionate plea to government to take a less foot-dragging laissez-faire response to climate change:

A few months ago I went on a trip to the Arctic set up by an organisation called Cape
Farwell to see the effects of climate change at first hand. Whilst on
board we also went to lectures by scientists who told us, among other
things, what it was that individuals could do to try and help with the
biggest problem facing the world at this time, and that part I found
profoundly depressing because it basically came down to things like,
“Go and buy some energy changing light bulbs.”

Although
I believe that the actions of individuals are important, it seemed to
me that the problem was so large and so profound that it would be nice
if we got a bit of help from somewhere else. If the only things that
would have the necessary impact would be to make radical changes to
things like food transportation, deforestation or air travel, it would
be nice to think that the government might help out with some
legislation designed to address those issues. And that’s why I got
depressed. Because non-interventionist laissez-faire free market
policies have been the order of the day for so long, why would they
change now?

Then I came home.


The thing about being on a boat in the middle of the arctic ocean is
there’s no telephone or wi-fi coverage. Whilst we’d been up there
observing one kind of meltdown, it seemed that another kind of meltdown
had been taking place in the world’s financial markets. In fact, we
came through Reykjavik airport on the day that Iceland basically went
bust, though none of us knew it at the time.


Banks were going under and a massive stock market collapse had
occurred. And lo and behold, one of the first things that followed was
a massive government intervention. And I thought, “Hang on, perhaps,
bizarrely, there’s a chink of light here. If the government is wiling
to intervene decisively in such a huge way in this area, maybe it would
intervene in another area – climate change – too.”

Read more here.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology Blog