Charles Saatchi: Britain's got talent?
1) Isn’t anyone else disturbed by Charles Saatchi calling his new exhibition of Middle Eastern Art Unveiled? Art dealers’ fascination with emerging art markets might look a little less like Shell’s interest in Canada’s tar sands if they weren’t so eager to titillate with the exotic lure of foreignness and distinct shades of Edward Said’s Orientalism.
2) Does he really need his own “X Factor-style television programme to discover the next best thing in the British art scene”? Charles Saatchi’s TV show will air BBC2. Visit the Saatchi’s Best of British site to answer the question”Do you think you think you have the talent to be among the next generation of Young British Artists?” Well do you?
Untitled, c-print by Shadi Ghadirian from the Like Everyday Series, 2000-2001.
How literature tackles climate change
A few months ago I reported on Ian
McEwan, currently writing a book inspired by his Cape Farewell
journey to the Arctic, who was saying how hard it was to was to tackle
such a “virtuous” topic in a novel.
The trajectory of a short
story is very different from a novel, but Helen Simpson manages it deftly in
her story “In-flight Entertainment” which appeared in Granta 100. In it, two men who meet in the first class cabin of a transatlantic flight discuss global warming, while, next to them, another passenger dies of a heart attack.
“Four hours’ delay,” volunteered Alan, “thanks to those jokers at Heathrow. Alan Barr, by the way.”
“And I’m Jeremy Lees. Yes, those anti-flying protesters. A waste of time.”
“Complete time-wasters.”
“I suppose so,” said Jeremy. “What I meant, though, was it was a waste of their time. They’re not going to change anything.”
“Exactly.
It’s nonsense, isn’t it, this global warming stuff. Trying to turn the
wheel back. Half the scientists don’t agree with it anyway.”
“Actually
I think you’ll find they do. Ah, red please,’ said Jeremy as the air
stewardess offered him wine. ‘What have you got? Merlot or Zinfandel?
I’ll try the Zinfandel. Thank you. No, they do agree now, they’ve
reached a consensus. I ought to know, I was one of them. No, it’s not
nonsense, I’m afraid. The world really is warming up.”
It was published well before the Heathrow decision, but manages to include the line: “Heathrow will get its third runway any time now.”
Nominations for other pieces of contemporary lit which tackle this sort of stuff?
Picture: Still from The Coming Race by Ben Rivers 2006. “An indistinct, slow-moving sea of humanity clambers valiantly up a rocky mountain.” Showing as part of Figuring Landscapes at the Tate Modern, February 6 – 8. Details here.
Doomsday art: is it bad for you?
Does the dark heart of art make it the right medium to discuss climate change? Is expecting anything productive out of the alignment of art and ecology a ghastly mistake?
Alongside the Tantalum Memorial, in the line up for transmediale09‘s Award this weekend at Deep North is Michiko Nitta‘s Extreme Green Guerillas – a final project from her time as a student at the RCA that was displayed by the ICA in 2007 and even attracted the attention of Treehugger.com.
The artwork uses writing [see above], illustration and flash sites to propose the creation of Extreme Green Guerillas. The actual artwork itself deliberately leaves room to imagine that they are already in existence. Nitta writes,”They are a network of amateur self-sustaining people who have shortened
their lifespan to sustain the ultimate green lifestyle. Whilst going to
extreme lengths to protect the environment, they try to enjoy a
decadent quality of life by utilizing urban waste and biosystem. This
consists of embracing emerging technology to develop the ultimate green
solution.”
Her imaginary guerillas take their rejection of consumerism to extremes. They don’t use corporate structures like mobile telephony. Instead they use a network of electronic devices implanted in pets and migrating animals to spread messages around the world.
Instead of relying on agribusiness for our meal, she proposes guerilla hybridisations of vermin with gourmet delicacies, like the piguail (half quail, half pigeon) rattit 
(half rabbit, half rat [pictured right]. Yum.
Extreme Green Guerillas also opt for voluntary euthanasia at 40 to ensure that they do not consume more than their fair share of the earth’s resources.
It’s one of a growing number of artworks which demand the viewer participate by imaging themselves in this future. There was After Nature at the New Musem curated by Massimiliano Gioni; Superflex’s Flooded McDonalds; Heather and Ivan Morison’s work last year for the One Day Sculpture festival or their work at Margate, Folkestone and Tatton Park; Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s TH.2058 at the Tate Turbine Hall. It’s clearly on a lot of people’s minds.
Also up for the transmediale09 Award this weekend is Petko Dourmana‘s Post Global Warming Survival Kit.
This is a room with a caravan in it, and an infra-red projection which is invisible to the viewer until they pick up night vision devices to see it with. The visitor is then confronted by a vision of a devastated world; inside the caravan are blankets, food and communication devices, the bare essentials for survival.
Dourmana’s work dreams a time in which governments have collaborated to create a nuclear winter as a last-ditch response to global warming. It’s a scenario that could be the setting for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. If that is what it takes to survive, you’d want to end it all now.
We recently asked a poll question on the main RSA Arts & Ecology website about whether apocalyptic visions were more or less powerful in leading to change than positive encouragements. A majority, 41%, reason that positive images are more likely to lead to change. But a huge 22% are undecided.
Conventional wisdom suggests that carrots work better than sticks. Matthew Taylor held this line in an article on our website Climate Change = Culture Change:
this throws in interesting distinctions about what art can do in terms
of encouraging strong feelings, and what actually inspires us to do the
right thing. We know from social psychology that telling people that
things are terrible is often just disempowering.
According to that view, all this work is disempowering.
Two points:
One. To understand why art so often finds darkness, death and contemplations of destruction more productive to depict than positivism, hope and light would require a much, much longer post than this, (and the Gulbenkian Foundation’s Sian Ede will be discussing this in an interview shortly to be posted on the main site) but the fact is, it does. To wish it otherwise is to wish that black was white, or that Damien Hirst would finally realise that it’s not clever to sound like you don’t know much when discussing your own art.
Two. If a scientist tells me straight that we’re going to hell in a handbasket I’m terrified. That scientist knows big stuff I don’t. But if an artist creates an installation envisaging a post-nuclear winter, I don’t start panicking. Art is not journalism; it is not science. It is art. None of the artists above have any more power to predict the future than I do. I don’t know of anyone who has ever mistaken one for the other. But what artists do engages the brain in totally different ways and and one of those is to make me think, but what if… in ways that are totally unexpected.
Which is good. Empowering, even. So bring on the apocalypse. It’s great. Artistically speaking, at least.
Gaza and the impartial gaze
The BBC is being accused of moral dishonesty over its decision not to screen the appeal from the Disasters Emergency Committee – which includes Oxfam, Save The Children and The Red Cross. The ever-sharp Robert Butler of the Ashden Directory reminds us that during the broadcast of Live Earth the BBC insisted that Jonathan Ross remind viewers that “climate change may not have been caused by human activity, as the broadcaster tries to stay neutral on current affairs.”
Robert wonders what kind of neutrality it is that contradicts the Royal Society, the National Academy
of Sciences and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Tantalum Memorial: an analogue response to Congo's coltan war
A couple of years ago I went to the Congo, to an isolated, uneasy spot called Gbadolite on the Ubangi River, hundreds of miles away from any regular electricty supply, a place patrolled by bored, nervous members of the United Nations task force MONUC. For all its isolation, Gbadolite astonisingly boasts one of the longest runways in Africa; it was built by Western-supported kleptocrat dictator Mobutu Sese Seko so that Concorde could fly supplies of champagne to his nearby palace.
The palace is deserted now. The gold taps went first, apparently. Looted, swimming pools dry, the bush is slowly reclaiming it. I was there to meet child soldiers whom an NGO was trying, with mixed success, to reintegrate back into the society they’d been dragged away from to be forced to become killers. It’s quite horrifying to look into the eyes of a child who has almost certainly murdered and raped, or been raped.
Today I was just posting a listing for transmediale.09 on the main site when I saw that one of the artworks listed for this year’s Award is UK artists’ Graham Harwood, Richard Wright, and Matsuko Yokokoji’s Tantalum Memorial, a work that was exhibited at last year’s Manifesta 7.
Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji were formerly associated with the digital media collective Mongrel. Tantalum Memorial grew out of a piece of work Mongrel did called Telephone Trottoir. Telephone Trottoir recreated the informal “pavement radio” of Central Africa – the phone calls by which news is passed in opressive states – by creating an audio messaging network for Congolese regugees in London.
Tantalum Memorial is an old-style telephone exchange built from Strowger telephone switches to animate the Telephone Trottoir system, dialing up numbers provided by the network of Congolese refugees as the diaspora reconnects with itself, using a technology from before the high tech era of modern digital telephony. It is an analogue response to a largely ignored horror created by our digital era, a tiny act of marking an unmarked holocaust.
Though the wars in the Congo of the last 12 years are often portrayed in the media as tribal, arising originally from the spillover from the Hutu and Tutsi conflicts of Burundi and Rwanda, they are more honestly described as being fuelled by the profits from looted minerals. In mineral terms, Central Africa is one of the very richest parts of the world, though none of that wealth was evident among the huts of Gabolite.
One mineral in particular has proved lethal to the area: coltan is the colloquial African name for columbite tantalite. Coltan is used to make high-performance capacitors, the sort needed to produce chips for video game consoles, laptops, digital cameras and mobile phones.
The Congo has the world’s largest coltan reserves. These have been systematically fought over by the new kleptocrats, the warlords, and exported clandestinely via neighbouring countries, Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda. The boom in mobile phone sales coincided precisely with the eruption of what has been the world’s bloodiest conflict since WW2. Around 4 million have died so far in the violence and its aftermath. Disease and ongoing violence means that Congolese are still dying at a rate of 45,000 a month.
We are technophiles; Tantalum Memorial is a remarkable reminder of the cost of technophilia.
Tantalum Memorial by Graham Harwood, Richard Wright, and Matsuko Yokokoji, Manifesta 7 2008 courtesy of Paul Keller
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On Monbiot, Agas, and sustainable middle-class living
Atlantic Books might possibly be regretting using an Aga as the cover image for Andrew Price’s book Slow-Tech: Manifesto for an Overwound World, out this month. This is also the month in which George Monbiot chose to trash the reputation of the middle-classes’ favourite icon of the bucolic life – presumably in an effort to distance himself from accusations being a middle-class activist himself.
That’s not to say the image doesn’t sum up Andrew Price’s thesis pretty succinctly. The big disappointment with the book is not his demolition of the idea that “efficiency” has anything to do with social progress or environmental sustainability. That’s all good. But it starts to get a bit shaky when it turns out that his inspirations for the idea of slow-tech seem to be based more on nostalgia than any idea idea of sustainability. Aside from the now-reviled Aga, Price champions his father’s old petrol-glugging Bentley, and the old family sailing boat. As I say in the review on the main site, his idea of sustainable living soon starts to look a little like a rather jolly picnic in a BBC2 period drama rather than a real manifesto.
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The obligatory Obama post; a hurrah for democracy (plus an attempt to use cultural theory when discussing art)
Piano Phase by Steve Reich played by Peter Aidu
…a YouTube clip about which Bruce Sterling says: “Holy cow, he’s manually playing out-of-phase tape loops for almost five minutes. That’s like climbing Mount Everest backward.”
Obama was sworn in yesterday, and I was struggling to think of anything relevant to say, until I found that clip on Bruce Sterling’s Wired blog.
Having endured the downside of American democracy for the last eight years, the world is now thrilling to how good it feels when it functions. Living and working in the US for a while in the 90s it I realised that Americans’ and Britons’ notions of democracy that are as different as our understandings of the word “fanny”. In Britain you only need to look at the freakish history of Lords reform to see what a bizarre concept we have of it.
By and large our political system is like the average British house, an elderly pile with with DIY extensions added on in an attempt to achieve some kind of vaguely practical solution over the years. Democracy is the renovation we gave the house somewhere late in that house’s history.
America’s revolutionary history meant its house was actually founded on democracy, and the idea permates society in a totally different way. That’s not to say American democracy always lives up to those ideals… often quite the opposite, but as democracy is at the heart of what it is to be American, it seeps into the way artists think about culture there.
In American orchestral music it often turns up in a particularly profound fashion. 19th century classical music was the ultimate heirarchcal form; the “great” composer and the “great” conductor overseeing the subsurvient orchesta, who in turn delivered a work of great art to the mass of the people.
In Europe, composers like Schoenberg rebelled against classical heirachy in a kind of hefty, intellectual way, with the 12 tone technique, which uses evenly spaced notes so that no note had any more meaning or value that the next one. It’s kind of a radical egalitarian approach, and like many radical egalitarian experiments, it gathered a few earnest devotees but never set the world alight. Understandably, audiences found it hard to perceive what the meaning of such music might be.
American composers toyed with Schoenberg, but also took a different route. People from Charles Ives onwards were as interested in what the audience hears as in what the composer writes. The notion that the act of listening is as important as the act of writing is a very democratic one. Ives’ 
own democracy of sound rings loudly in the apparently chaotic passages of works like Three Places In New England, in which popular tunes collided head on with avante-garde orchestral passages. Each time you listen you create a new path through the piece.
The idea reached its zenith in pieces like John Cage’s 4’33″; a
piece composed entirely of silence onto which the listener imposes his
own experience, perhaps chosing to listen to the ambient sound of the real world as music. (As David Berridge explains on the main website here, this became a central inspiration for the Fluxus movement. )
Steve Reich’s thrilling Piano Phase was written for two players, both playing the identical musical figure. One of them then speeds up and slows down slightly so that the musical ecology between the two sets of notes changes subtly. (That’s why Peter Aidu’s so performance is jaw-dropping… though mainly in a kind of bizareely geeky Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not how-neurologically-do-you-do-that? way). The piece is never the same twice, and again, the listener will discern their own pulses and patterns within the piece.
For all the politics implicit in Steve Reich’s work, there’s a lot of that’s explicit too, from his hair-pricking debut tape experiment Come Out, created from an interview with a survivor from a race riot, to Different Trains, which reflects on Holcaust transports that took Jewish children to their death.
That said, though these ideals inform his practice, Reich remains cautious about music’s ability to create change the world beyond him:
I like to give this example: Maybe one of the greatest
paintings that Pablo Picasso painted was “Guernica,” and “Guernica” was
painted as a protest against civilian bombing. Now, as a painting it’s
a masterpiece. As a political gesture: a total, complete failure.
But if Picasso hadn’t painted “Guernica,” Guernica
would be a little footnote in the history of the Spanish Civil War, and
now many of us know of Guernica because Picasso painted it. So he made
a memorial. Because it moved him, because he was a Spaniard, because he
cared about it, he made this wonderful piece.
Japanese Times interview 2006
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The catalogue that changed the whole earth
In the beginning, Stewart Brand created the Whole Earth Catalog. And the earth was without the web, google or blogging (which the Whole Earth Catalog is credited with inspiring). Steve Jobs described it as “an amazing publication… one of the bibles of my generation… It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions”. And now that modestly titled journal, which drew together the passions, insights and enthusiasms of experts and amateurs from 1968 to 1972 and beyond is finally available online for free: http://www.wholeearth.com/about.php
Whole Earth Catalog was premised on a notion of social progress that Brand and others believed would happen through engaged individuals working in decentralized networks to build their own environments. (There is more to it than that, but this is a blog). And the catalog provided ‘access to the tools’ to make this possible, and enough evidence of people transforming their own lives that it generated a great self-belief in its readers. For many of their increasingly huge 1970s readership, it was their first introduction to sustainable technology and alternative energy. This was counterculture that has become mainstream.
For those at Whole Earth Catalog, technological innovation was the route to a better future via shared knowledge and a profound commitment to ecology. In the 2009 online version, you can flick through the magazines and scroll through the cover art of that and related publications, which range from the dynamic cartoons of Robert Crumb to photographs of the earth from space. In fact, Nasa’s now-famous images were only a rumor until Brand successfully petitioned for it to become public in 1966, led by his belief that it would be a social good for humans to see the earth as one whole.
That so many fascinating resources of the past are available online today is a true gift. The delight of historical material (by which I mean anything that is more than 30 years old - harsh I know, but where do you draw the line?) is that you can re-examine the context of the then-new ideas and sense the energy of the vision. I’m not advocating nostalgia. What is exciting about the past is what it tells us about now and the future. Without being able to imagine past events in context and recognise why people chose to do what they did, it is not possible to understand the role of individual human agency in social change, which is what is needed to generate visions of the future.
I am aware that this is obvious to many, but I feel it needs to be explicitly restated within the arts and other areas at the moment. A self-inhibiting short-term thinking has become the fashion, which is characterised by a faux-cool cynicism, trimmed with reactionary views that are passed off as thoughtful criticism but that belie a fatalistic lack of faith in human potenial. (I’ll spare you more idiosyncratic metaphors). What is great about people like Stewart Brand is that they generate substantial change in the world – and the excellent thing about human potential is that all people can be great - whenever they realise it and actively choose to be so.
Since Whole Earth Catalog, Brand et al have moved and changed with the times and continue to stay several steps ahead in their thinking. Now that people have a good conception of the whole earth, his current collaborative project, The Long Now , sets out to transform peoples understanding of time so that we can think more ecologically. Titled by Brian Eno, The Long Now ranges from 8000bc to 12000ad (the logic being that ‘now’ refers to days: yesterday, today and tomorrow and ‘nowadays’ refers to decades: the last decade, this decade and next decade). Ecology is a fascinating for many reasons and it demands complex, holistic, joined-up ways of thinking about the relationships of living things to each other and their environment. And the arts are very well suited to engaging with this complex, exploratory form of enquiry into what it is to be human. Whole Earth Catalog and The Long Now are trail blazers in what is possible.
The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller, Fall 1968. Whole Earth Catalog 30th Anniversary Edition, 1998
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Public art and public space
… if you were listening to Radio 4 this morning you would have heard a very brief snatch of RSA Arts & Ecology’s Michaela Crimmin respectfully disagreeing with the plan to use the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Squarefor a memorial to World War Two hero Sir Keith Park. The RSA were instrumental in turning the Fourth Plinth into a unique public contemporary art space.
Listen here.
Photo: Alison Lapper Pregnant by Mark Quinn taken by my old friend Daveybot.
Emma Thompson on free market economics and the environment
Actor Emma Thompson discussing the proposed third runway at Heathrow:
demand for child prostitution, but that doesn’t make it moral! The
demand for more cars and planes is immoral.”
Hat tip Robert Butler @ The Ashden Directory.
RSA Bookshop
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Future RSA Events- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - State of Emergency October 20, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Reporting Live From The End of the World October 15, 2010
- The Flaw October 11, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Dispatches from the Dark Side -The Death Of Justice October 8, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No-One Can Pay October 7, 2010