How the Nuclear Forum went…
A remarkable day at the RSA, opened by ”nuclear” sculptor James L. Acord, (pictured right). The story he told is an extraordinary one. Captivated, as a sculptor and amateur physicist, by the dark romance of nuclear power and weaponry, he took the transmutational power of atomic physics seriously. Sculptors are, he reasoned, people who transform one thing into another. Couldn’t the act of transforming one element into another be an essentially poetic act? His plan was to create a precious metal – ruthenium – from a element created as nuclear waste, technetium.
This work has been the focus of his life for almost two decades. To amass sufficient material to create his sculpture and to gain access to a reactor, became the central obsessions of his life. After a false start, he studied for two-and-a-half years to become the only private citizen ever licensed to work with nuclear materials. “I eventually got my license and immediately had the number tattooed on the back of my neck,” he said drily, “which is not a requirement.” It’s there, under the short, military crop: WN 1040701. Though he later achieved his goal of owning sufficient uranium to create the work, the material was confiscated for bureaucratic reasons before he was ever able to arrange access to a reactor.
His ambition is either magnificent, or insane, or both, but the continual thwarting of it, and the extraordinary convolutions he has gone through to try to achieve his dream, shines an interesting light on how society cloaks the nuclear industry in dense of security and secrecy. He comes over as a man profoundly disappointed at his inability to achieve his one “great idea”. He may have failed as a sculptor, but his life succeeds as a piece of performance.
There was a lot going on, so forgive the thumbnail highlights. There was also a great contributionfrom Warwick University’s Paul Dorfman (third from left in panel, above) of the Nuclear Consultation Working Group, who talked compellingly about the way notions of risk in the nuclear industry become enshrined in the legislation that surrounds them, and then passionately about the flawed process behind Gordon Brown’s recent 2006 public consultation on nuclear energy. It was an exercise in creating consent, he says, not one of enquiry.
Way too much going on to go into here at any depth; a longer article will appear on the main website when the talks have been transcribed.
However the day ended as it began, with an extraordinary moment when a fragile-looking Gustav Metzger took the microphone, rustling a few sheets of paper, to read an extraordinary, eliptical meditation on the history of humanity’s love of the apocalyptic. He traced the path through Ludwig Meidner’s brutal paintings to Picasso’s Guernica. If artists were people who felt the need to test the boundaries of of the world, to go to the most catastrophic extremes, they were doing something essentially human, he said, (if I’m paraphrasing him correctly). As humans we were, he said, almost whispering, driven towards destruction. We needed, he concluded, in an exhausted voice, to apply the brakes.
Photographs:
James L. Acord’s t-shirt
Panel: From left: Chris Oakley, Keith Barham, Paul Dorfman, Kypros Kyprianou, Simon Hollington
Kate Hudson
Kate Hudson talking to Gustav Metzger
MoCA choker
A sign of the times. LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art is in the grips of a financial crisis. The value of its investment portfolio has plummeted and it’s having trouble covering its operating costs. Still, Art:21 Blog reports that the local art community has rallied around the museum.
On Sunday around 450 people showed up there – at the Gehry-designed Geffen Contemporary – to pledge their support. This was an artist-organised event sparked by last week’s news in the LA Times that the gallery was in deep trouble. The gathering was hastily arranged a Facebook group, MoCA Mobilization set up by LA artist Cindy Bernard. Artforum reports that:
A number of prominent artists attended, including Paul and Mara
McCarthy, Andrea Fraser, Katie Grinnan, Martin Kersels, Alexis Smith,
Jennifer Steinkamp, and James Welling.
Among the speakers was artist Richard Jackson who urged LA to consider the value of the place: “I think we should get people to fill it all back up with money.”
It’s great to see artists taking collective action. But before you start filling it back up with money here are two (supposedly correct) facts in this LA Times piece. 1) That MoCA costs $20m a year to run. 2) That it averages 250,000 visits a year. If those figures are right, that’s about. um, $80 per visitor. Are those figures right? If so, in a city whose greater metropolitan population is somewhere around the 13 million mark, how come so few are turning out to see a collection of post-war American art that includes Rothkos, Lichtensteins, Rauchenbergs, Twombleys etc?
Mobilisation, however you spell it, is a wonderful thing. Anything that works in Downtown LA is a good idea. In times like this though, it makes you wonder if MoCA Mobilization shouldn’t be making the case for something a little more ________* than just filling it up with more money.
*Insert adjective of your choice here.
Thanks to Ray Castillo for the photo.
Art and war
Artist David Cotterrell was on Radio Four this morning talking about his installation Theatre that opened last weekend as part of the War and Medicine exhibition at the Wellcome Collection (until Feb 15th 2009). Cotterrell initially went to Afghanistan with the Army to document the medical facility Camp Bastion; it’s a collection of his photographs and videos there and closer to the front line. There was a poignant moment when he talked about the awkwardness of the artist as observer:
Sarah Montague: How did you feel going there, because you’re an artist and you’re an extreme situation where someone’s live is in the hands of the other people around and – I hate to say you’re just standing, watching – but did you feel incredibly uncomfortable.
David Cotterrell: There’s a great deal of guilt in being an observer at a trauma and it’s extremely difficult to rationalise your own position. I was jealous of the medics who had a very clear role, and for me it was my moral and ethical justification for being there was something that was being defined as I stood there. It became obvious that to people around me they felt it was valuable having a witness, somebody who would actually keeping a record of something which they felt was under-represented and should be more discussed and understood by the wider public.
I arrived back in Britain feeling a great sense of anger. I was frustrated by my previous ignorance of the frequency of injury. Soldiers are surviving wounds that would often have been fatal in previous conflicts. Body armour, medical training and the proximity of advanced surgery to the front line have led to a “disproportionate” number of casualties surviving.
In the media, we hear only about the deaths, with occasional reference to the wounded. I came home assuming the violence I had witnessed in Afghanistan would be the focus of the news. But reality television, local politics and other less dramatic events occupied the headlines. For me, the incongruity between what I had seen and what was presented as the public face of conflict was, and continues to be, profound and irreconcilable.
Delete or decay
Aside from recently posting another take on the new austerity and how “create a culture of thrift” (“The dirtiest word of this year is ‘junket’”) , Tomorow Museum’s blog also has a great piece on a virtual artwork Second Life Dumpster by eteam who are the New York-based artists Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger.
Items acquired by Second Life inhabitants are, inevitably, trashed – just as in real life. In Second Life that means they’re moved to a folder and deleted. eteam found this simple act of making them disappear unsatisfactory. 
They created a script through which anyone’s unwanted virtual items could end up in their virtual dumpster, and allowing these items to “decay” there. This is a world which, say eteam, “never looks used or worn-out.” Their work reflects on the limits of our ideas of perfection.
eteam describe their fascination with the virtual in an interview:
to be a kind of utopia, where people would create things that are
impossible to even think of in the Real World. But, even after SL
replaced our first life for a while, we could not permeate the top
layer. There is no shovel around to dig that ground, no way to go
beyond the surface. Maybe that’s why we are currently investigating the
possibilities of our SL land as a public dumpster — to fill the place
with some kind of history by leaving traces, to introduce the decay
script.”
Look for RSA Arts and Ecology’s own commission on Second Life – Dirk Fleischmann’s residency there. As Tomorrow Museum says, “Does anyone actually use Second Life who isn’t an artist or grad student writing a thesis on it?”
Nuclear: art and radioactivity
Nice big mention of Arts Catalyst’s installation by Chris Oakley and Simon Hollington & Kypros Kyprianou at the Nicholls & Clarke Building in Spitalfields in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph – and also a good plug for the RSA nuclear debate on the 28th November featuring artists Gustav Metzger and Steve Kurtz, and CND chair Kate Hudson. It’s also one of Time Out’s picks.
The debate’s free, but places are now in very, very short supply. Email for details.
Ackroyd and Harvey Reach New Heights
MEREDITH CARTER: Artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey are probably best known for their industrious, ephemeral grass installations. Indeed, last summer passers by saw one of their most ambitious works yet – a lawn that lived and died atop London’s National Theatre fly tower. However their latest work, a 20-metre high tower with solar panels and a wind turbine, is going to be around for quite sometime. The tower, located at the centre of Bristol’s Newfoundland Circus roundabout, was commission by the Bristol Alliance as a part of their Cabot Circus development. Look out for Ackroyd and Harvey’s totally self-sufficient sculpture as you come off the M32 into the port city and know this sight can be enjoyed for years to come.
The things you really need or The New Austerity
There’s a lot of talk around about the new austerity. Bruce Sterling writes a brilliant adieu as his last note – or rather sermon – for the Viridian Design Movment, an essay on how to over-ride the financial crisis and use it to create a better life for yourself, stripping down to the things you need, functionally and emotionally. “You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. ” It’s his vision of how to outgrow the 2oth century:
You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.
- Beautiful things.
- Emotionally important things.
- Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.
- Everything else.
Being Bruce Sterling, stripping himself of useless possesions don’t necessarily mean using fewer words, but the ones he uses are, as ever, hugely entertaining.
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Art, change and cat-herders pt. 2
Still waiting for the site to really come on line? Yup. In the meantime, as an exercise in finger thrumming, here’s a quote from art historian/philosopher/practitioner Boris Groys from a new interview in Art Info by David Grosz:
Boris Groys: What really interests me is the situation of art and politics.
I refer in my talk to a famous passage is Walter Benjamin’s essay “Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in which he distinguishes
between the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of art.
The aestheticization of politics is what we would call branding, or
design, which presents politics as a seductive spectacle. It’s the same
idea as Guy Debord’s “society as spectacle.” Politics becomes a way to
seduce people, which can actually lead to fascism and war.
On the other hand, the politicization of art is a way to get free of
that and to act purely politically — beyond aesthetics, beyond art,
beyond seduction, beyond spectacle. The question is: Is this possible?
For Boris, that’s a definite yes. In his book Art Power he writes that art has “an autonomous power of resistance”. Boris Groys is a fascinating man; he cut his teeth in the Soviet Union of the 70s and 80s, when art really was resistance.
All of which sounds good. But Susan Platt from Art and Politics Now, a blogger for whom the word “engaged” was coined, remains sceptical, working up the argument the art historian Groys is trapped by that history:
First, he [Groys] is defining “resistance” as “resistance to external
pressures”. Well, of course he is shaped by his own background in the
Soviet Union as the champion of the dissident art movements. In that
context, resistance was to external pressures to be doctrinaire and
follow a party line. His concept of the “autonomus power of resistance”
is an oxymoron, resistance cannot be autonomous. What I think he meant
was the power of art to defend its autonomy, which of course is a
meaningless modernist dead end.But in the US in 2008 resistance
in art is resistance to capitalism in all its manifestations in the art
world, and outside of it.The artist today who can use “the power of art” to speak to the problems in the world, like those artists of the 1930s, is the resistance artist. Why should resistance be focused on defending the autonomy of art? What a waste of time!
Hold on… Just checked. The site really does seem to be up now.
The RSA Arts and Ecology Centre site…
Check, as they say, it out.
*EDIT* That’s a kind of George Bush “Mission Accomplished” moment, written in excitement. Some of the website is live.
Art, change and cat-herders
The topic we keep circling around in the office in the run up to the launch of the new site on Monday is should artists be herded, cat-like, into engaging directly with the idea of climate change.
I was talking to Ekow Eshun, and he remains sceptical that its wise, possible, or even remotely desirable, to try and set the agenda for artists in this way. All the same,on Monday we’re publishing a piece by Olafur Eliasson – a brilliant essay on the idea of light, the way we fill darkness with it so indiscriminately, and the relationship between our abundance of light and the ecology. In it, he writes about whether art has a responsibility to action: “Today we cannot afford not to think about the environmental consequences of our individual actions;
about the relation between the individual and the collective.”
Which is a pretty stirring call to arms. Of course some people find the very idea of artists being engaged absured. Raw Art Blog has just put up an enthusiastic short essay on Fernando Botero’s paintings of Abu Ghraib which are currently on view at the Casa de Las Artes in Vigo, Spain. When Botero announced that he wanted the paintings to make the deeds carried out there notorious, and to do for Abu Ghraib what Picasso’s artwork had done for Guernica, Christopher Hitchens responded with patrician verbosity in Slate:
The first of these ambitions is probably otiose: Where in the world
are the images of Abu Ghraib not already notorious?… The second ambition is a bit dubious. It’s also a bit stale: An article by Jonathan Steele in Britain’s Guardian has already employed the Guernica comparison—this time to compare it to the U.S. Marine Corps’ re-taking of Fallujah.
Which makes you think Botero must be doing something right.
Hitchens, loud-mouthed in his support for the Iraq war, remains equally loud-mouthed about everything to do with it since, attempting to slice ever finer moral points to justify his good opinion of his own opinons.
The Guardian blogger David Cox was equally sniffy when he laid into Steve McQueen’s Hunger last week, another film about the maltreatment of prisoners. How could this aesthete begin to understand the reality of politics in 1980s Northern Ireland? Tsk. Clearly artists should stay out well out of these serious topics and stick to making nice things.
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Future RSA Events- The Selfish Society April 22, 2010
- The Big Short April 19, 2010
- The Tyranny of Guilt April 19, 2010
- Red Tory: The future of progressive Conservatism? April 1, 2010
- Doing Good is Good Business? From rhetoric to reality March 30, 2010