It's time we moved house
Maybe this future house project by Danish art group N55…
… doesn’t look quite so eccentric if you bear in mind Bettina Furnee’s Lines of Defence, filmed in Bawdsey during eight months in 2005:
Justifying bad behaviour
A few weeks ago, the artist Francesca Galeazzi travelled to the Arctic, to one of the world’s most beautiful, unspoiled places, a snowfield on the Jakobshavn Fjord, and deliberately, wantonly, turned the valve and released 6kg of pure CO2 into the atmosphere.
It was an act of environmental vandalism. Or maybe not? Afterwards she announced that she had offset the CO2 by paying the appropriate sum to a Gold-standard carbon off-setting scheme. In its entirety, the piece of work – offsetting included – was called Justifying Bad Behaviour.
Understandably, the piece provoked some hurt and angry reactions immediately among her fellow travellers on the Cape Farewell project, which took her and her ominous-looking black cylinder there in the first place. As Arts & Ecology were partly-responsible for funding her voyage, it seems reasonable to ask, was Justifying bad behaviour justifiable? Is it OK to deliberately despoil the environment to make a point – even if, as Francesca points out – 6kg is the equivalent to only a 25-mile car journey?
Or maybe, just how much carbon should she have released, in order for the world to sit up and notice? This was art as provocation.
Next month, when the new Arts & Ecology website launches, we’ll be running a major interview with Francesca about her piece of work and her views on the responsibility of the artist.
Thanks to Nathan Gallagher for the photograph
After the flood
Somehow this seems as poignant a collision of arts and ecology imagery as there is. Last month Mies Van De Rohe’s Farnsworth House, in Plano, Illinois, was flooded for the second time by rising waters from the Fox River following an unusually wet season. Last autumn exactly the same thing happened.
The house, formerly owned by Lord Palumbo, is open again offering tours to raise money to cover the costs of restoration.
Thanks to culturgrrl
New logo
As you’ll notice, the blog is using a new logo in preparation for the
launch of the new Arts & Ecology Centre website. Do you like it?
Live art & the ICA
One of the very best art blogs around is Click Opera, written by Nick Currie, better known as the musician Momus. It’s passionate, idiosycratic and usually brilliantly argued. If you want to know why, read the recent post “Is live art dead”, a furious swipe at Ekow Eshun for closing the ICA’s live art department.
It’s not just closing the department that has provoked this reaction; this declaration by Ekow also got backs up: “It’s my consideration that, in the main, the art form lacks depth and cultural urgency,” he said in a statement.
“On what planet has this man been residing for the last few years?” writes Lyn Gardner in her blog.
Where
has he been? Obviously not in the same places as me. Quite simply,
we’ve been experiencing an unprecedented wave of activity in live art practice
that is attracting both a new generation of exciting artists and new
audiences. The evidence is all around us in the huge success of the Spill festival (which will be back next spring) and in the way live art is steadily infiltrating our main stages – whether it is Gob Squad
at Soho, Ursula Martinez, Duckie, Lone Twin and Robert Pacitti at the
Barbican or even Katie Mitchell’s experiments at the National.
To which Currie, after singling out a number of performers who exploit the boundaries between choreography, theatre and art like Pina Bausch for praise, adds his own ringing views:
While all sorts of things (records, books, films) may be in trouble
because they’re ubiquitous and digital, live performance has a strong
future, because people still want to leave their computers from time to
time and interact in physical space, experiencing something ephemeral,
something that can’t be archived, a fleeting and unique communal event.
Live art that deals with the body — in this age of disembodiment — is
all the more relevant. That’s not to say Live Art doesn’t have clichés
all its own, especially body clichés. Nakedness is one, though I guess
as long as it’s taboo elsewhere it’s going to be relevant in live art.
I’m not a big fan of the Freak Show Self-Injury School of Franko B and
Ron Athey, whose acts consist of bleeding themselves or attaching
weights to their balls. Sure, I get it: church, circus, hospital,
they’re all connected. Pain can be a drug, and watching someone else
suffer is never dull. But, you know, do I have to?
For anyone who, like Currie, lived through the darker cultural days of the 1980s in London post-GLC, the ICA was an extraordinary beacon of light in a city largely devoid of experimental space. It was particularly energised by becoming a venue for live performance from the 70s onwards. At the time, it seemed radical to have an art venue where bands could play. The music influenced the art; the art influenced the musicians, and bands like COUM/Throbbing Gristle who played there in 1976 were among those who laid the foundations of the Live Art movement. Oh, and Momus played there too.
(Not to mention, of course, the patron saint of Art & Ecology, and pioneer of Live Art Joseph Beuys, who created notable performance-based work there in the 70s.)
But in the last decade, outshone by more dynamic, versatile spaces, it’s been struggling to shake off the public perception that it’s not relevant any more. Nought to Sixty, the quickly rotating series of new work, has been a very admirable attempt to force itself into a kind of urgency. It seems a little unfair that the general reaction to it has been that the series been a bit of a mixed bag, as that’s what you’d expect from a thread that includes so much new stuff*.
But the sad fact is that in this decade the ICA has become more famous for the pronouncements of its leadership than the art it gives a voice to. With that in mind it’s worth saying that Ekow’s statement about Live Art is still nothing compared to the former chairman Ivan Massow’s spectacular declaration in 2002 that modern art was “pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat” and “the product of over-indulged, middle-class, bloated egos who patronise real people with fake understanding”.
Thanks to codepope for the photo of Momus at the ICA in 2003
*Dave Briggs suggests bloggers who’re in danger of sounding like haughty editorial writers use the word “stuff” occasionally
New Londoners
At the Tate Modern last night photovoice.org launched the publication of New Londoners Reflections on Home, a book of photographs by 15 young refugees, all separated from their families, who have made London their home. Mentored by professional photographers like Sarah Moon, Jillian Edelstein, Jenny Matthews, Gayle Chong Kwan, and Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg, the project becomes a unique way to see the city through newcomers’ eyes as much as an excercise in giving the marginalised a voice. To quote Susan Sontag, “Essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality.”
Several of the photographers spoke passionately about how photography had changed the way they saw and interacted with Britain – and also about how it was changing the way people saw them. Hassan Almousaoy, whose photo is above, put it simply: “Without photography people will not believe me [if I say I see something]. With photography they will understand.” Almousaoy came to London from Baghdad in December 2006.
You know what was nice? Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Homes and Families, spoke very eloquently about the book, clearly having spent enough time with the photographs to be able to talk intelligently about them. A small irony, perhaps, is that this event should come on the day that Immigration minister Phil Woolas announced that he was going to speed up the process for removing failed asylum seekers. The majority of the photographers have not been granted permission to stay in the UK.
Photo © Hassan Almousaoy/ New Londoners/ Dost/ Photovoice. The caption to the picture reads “My friend had no electricity for three days because the landlord did not pay the bill… This reminded me of Iraq where each day we only had one hour of electricity.”
If you go down to the woods…
Richard Woods’ installation Stone Clad Cottages was opened on Saturday at Fermynwoods, near Kettering. Woods loves transforming buildings using the language of home improvement. In this sylvan context, his jokey… maybe slightly sneery?… take on the British DIY aesthetic will look even more provocative than usual. It’s accompanied by work by Jacques Nimki, who “will be investigating the most wonderful array of weeds currently
inhabiting the cottage gardens and the SSI wild flower meadow”. Jacques Nimki’s practice is about human interactions with the natural world and involves collecting, drawing, and
pressing plants, often within neglected gardens and urban landscapes.The map of the footpath to The Sudborough Green Lodge cottagescan be downloaded here.
City Eco Lab accellerates…
Look at this. Makes them Amish in Witness look like beardy slackers in comparison:
This is John Thackara’s City Eco Lab, being put together at high speed in St Etienne in readiness for the Biennale Internationale Design that starts on November 15th. City Eco Lab is designed to be a scaleable, reproduceable experiment in creating a sustainable urban enviroment. More about it here at Thackara’s Doors of Perception network.
Chilling at Frieze
Amongst the sensory art overload of Frieze, Tue Greenfort’s Frieze Project seems like a brilliant oasis. Chancing on the door, tucked away between stands, you enter what at first feels like total, numbing darkness, a black refuge from the ominpresent white of the Frieze tent. Soundproofed from the jabber of gallerists, all you can hear is the sound of sloshing waves and the gentle thrum of what sounds like an air conditioning unit. As your eyes adjust you notice a window; and in the window are plastic water bottles, slowly filling as water drips down a tube into them.
Because this isn’t an oasis; it’s an anti-oasis. The dehumidifier is sucking the water from the air, the water leeched from your breath and skin. Greenfort has reversed the polarity; instead of consuming water from plastic bottles, humans are filling them.
Greenfort has long been fascinated by our relationship with water. Body Water Condensation is a close relation of an earlier Greenfort work BONAQUA Condensation Cube, which itself was a nod to Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963-65), in which Haacke sealed water inside a clear cube, allowing the artwork’s environment to dictate the state and appearnce of the contents. Greenfort added a deliberately political twist to his version by adding Bonaqua – the notorious Coca Cola-branded tap water which, in India, led to water depletion of wells in villages around the bottling plant.
Last year at the Münster Skulptur Projeckte, his installation Diffuse Entries consisted of a silver agricultural manure sprayer spurting treated water into Lake Aa, a lake badly polluted by agricultural run-off. Greenfort’s water contained ferric chloride, the chemical pumped into the lake to counter the resulting algae bloom. Typically for Greenfort’s work, it was about transparancy – revealing how humans and the natural world really interact. And talking of transparancy, did anyone spot Greenfort’s commission for RSA’s Art & Ecology, lurking by the exit ramp? More about that soon.
Anyway nice that Adrian Searle singled out Greenfort’s Frieze commission for special comment:
Dehumidifiers hum, and all our sweat and exhaled moisture is being
collected. It drips through plastic tubing into recycled water bottles,
visible in a glass-walled aperture. The water may be pure, but I
wouldn’t drink it. Greenfort wants us to think about our relationship
with water, and the ecological wastefulness of drinking the fancy
imported stuff.This room is more than a lesson. I stand in this
wonderfully cloistered gloom and feel myself slowly dessicating, as I
watch my entire being dribbling into an old Evian bottle. Stand here
long enough and I’d be dust. Just add water.
Apocalyptica
Unsurprisingly perhaps, there is definitely something millenarian in the air. Laura McLean-Ferris at artreview.com draws the parallels between Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s TH.2058 and the Roberto Cuoghi sound installation at the ICA. She writes: “If both of these artists ask us ‘what will it be like at the end?’,
then Cuoghi’s sound installation at the ICA answers in a din of
wailing, crying, spitting and shouting.”
Q. Who wrote the line: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a Wimpey”?
Roberto Cuoghi’s statue of Pazuzu on the roof of the ICA. Photo: Zoe Franklin
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The RSA Bookshop, in partnership with Blackwell's the UK's leading academic bookseller, offers Fellows and friends an opportunity to purchase books and to explore our speakers’ ideas in greater detail. Visit the RSA Bookshop.- Future RSA Events
- The Unforeseen Cost of Human Civilisation May 24, 2010
- The Selfish Society April 22, 2010
- The Big Short April 19, 2010
- The Tyranny of Guilt April 19, 2010
- Storytelling: How narratives shape our reality, ideas and behaviour April 8, 2010