Up on the roof | JR's photographs of a Nairobi slum
There’s a piece in today’s Independent about the graffiti artist-turned-photographer JR‘s installation in the Kibera slum of Nairobi. JR photographed the women of Kibera and installed the photos as roofs to the subject’s dwellings. The piece was also mentioned last month on the Wooster Collective site, who published some great photos of it. It does look impressive, and the material it’s printed on does help waterproof the roofs it’s installed on, apparenty, but I wonder if creating high tech art that’s best viewed from a helicopter is entirely sensitive its location in Africa’s biggest slum.
Art, vandalism and the act of making good
At a conference on Friday I met a woman called Paivi Seppala who had been involved in an arts project in North Kent called Hei People. I hadn’t heard the story she told, but it was a great one. Hei People was originaly created by Finnish artist Reijo Kela. The idea is simple; a crowd of scarecrows suddenly appear in a field somewhere, dressed in off-cast clothes, all seeming to stare in one direction. Their heads are made of clods of earth from which sprout grass. There is no pre-publicity, or explanation for their existence; they simply appear – a throng of figures, all seemingly staring in the same direction, clothes flapping in the breeze.
Having previously installed the Hei People in two locations, Seppala moved them to a third location in the summer of 2007 on the Isle of Sheppey. It’s a deprived area; a bleak piece of bog sticking out into the Thames Estuary. Locals call themselves “Swampies”. It houses three prisons. London Mayor Boris Johnson recently proposed turning it into an airport. You get the picture.
In other locations, the Hei People had suffered small-scale vandalism, but when they reached Sheppey, catastrophe struck. The Friday night after they were errectd, the entire installation of 400 figures was destroyed. Not a single figure remained upright. Seppala was distraught. The installation was supposed to be there for weeks. It had been wrecked within a couple of days. She felt she had no option but to reinstall it, though funds were limited, and replacing 400 figures would be a labour-intensive task.
And then, on the following Sunday morning, just as she was about to make the journey back there to Sheppey to start the work she got a phone call from the farmer who had donated the land for the installation: “Well done for getting them back up so quickly,” he said.
Seppala was baffled. What? She travelled up there and indeed all 400 figures were standing again – a little broken and muddied, maybe, but standing nonetheless. Over the next few days the story emerged in dribs and drabs. The people of Sheppey are tired of their reputation as ne’er do wells. When they heard that the Hei People had been trashed, they were distraught. This act of vandalism would only confirm outsiders’ assumptions that the people of Sheppey were no good.
People started to put one or two back upright. Seeing them, others joined in in the task of rebuilding the Hei People. Within a day, all the figures, which had originally taken days to install, were back up again in an odd act of spontaneous, anonymous barn-raising. It’s an extraordinary example of the potentially potent relationship between art and community.
Like any other activity which drains the public purse, art must be expected to justify its existence. This is a case of how difficult that can be for the arts. On the one hand this is an exemplary project, a relatively cheap piece of work which drew in a community, took on a meaning for it and left it with something to be extremely proud of. On the other hand none of what happened to the Hei People on Sheppey was either predictable or even remotely planned for. It happened simply because it was a good piece of work that Seppala and others had faith in.
Photo: Hei People 2007, Sheppey, Photo by Steve Weaver.
The concrete-domed radioactive landfill of Runit Island
This via Pruned, (which possibly does itself a disservice by calling itself merely a landscape architecture blog):
Picture caption: (According to the Brookings Institution, “beneath this concrete dome on Runit Island, part of Enewetak Atoll, built between 1977 and 1980 at a cost of about $239 million, lie 111,000 cubic yards or radioactive soil and debris from Bikini and Rongelap atolls. The dome covers the 30-foot deep, 350-foot wide crate[r] created by the May 5, 1958, Cactus test.” Photo by the Defense Special Weapons Agency. Thanks, Capability B., for the link.)
The Fourth Plinth: a call to artists
This is my blatant call to artists to use the Fourth Plinth – particularly with respect to bringing fresh ways of exploring social issues in what you could argue is the country’s most central space of debate – Trafalgar Square. I’m not at all sure I want to see myself as the Linda Snell of the RSA but I have a similar yearning for public performance and spectacle – but by artists!
Go to www.oneandother.co.uk and press the “Register your interest” button.
It’s interesting to see that Antony Gormley’s Fourth Plinth project is rapidly becoming a lobbying prospect. The idea of using the plinth as a site for contemporary art was initiated by the RSA , no mean feat as it turned out and we learned a lot about the complexity and the ambiguities of the word “public” with respect to both public space and public art.
William Shaw will shortly be interviewing Bob & Roberta Smith for the website. His idea for the Plinth was shown at the National Gallery last year – very much referencing environmental issues, as does his current work at TATE’s Altermodern exhibition. I went round this yesterday. Bob is having a weekly conversation with the show’s curator Nicholas Bourriard and then makes a new work replacing the previous week’s piece. This latest work addresses climate change and as ever his work debunks – it puts the public into art with no affectation and no patronising – with a directness that is exhilarating.
Earth Hour and the curious effect of candlelight
This Saturday from 8.30pm to 9.30pm is Earth Hour. All over the world people will switch off their lights for sixty minutes. Public institutions worldwide will go dark. Myself, I’m going round to my friend Paul’s house where we will eat dinner in candlelight. Paul has to take part, of course; he works for the WWF who are behind the whole concept that draws 2,700 towns and cities, 20,000 businesses and millions of people in 84 countries around the world together for an hour. It’s part symbolic gesture, and partly a way of engaging us all in the idea of using less. Of course the idea of being thrilled at the prospect of using less for an hour could have very middle-class, Presbyterian tang to it. Using less is possibly not quite as exotic to the billions worldwide for whom electricity is a historically recent miracle.
But it’s worth doing for another reason too; there is something fabulous about darkness, something that is easy to lose touch with if you’ve grown up with the idea of electricity being cheap and plentiful. Using less doesn’t have to be a hair-shirt thing.
I was reminded of this last year when I went off-grid for a month with my kids in Devon, using only solar power, paraffin lamps and candles for light. I wrote a piece about it for The Observer:
While I wait for the water to boil I fill the lamps with paraffin; the shack is lit by candles and oil lamps. Snow starts to pelt down outside. I wonder if I’m underprepared.
After eating, we get out a board game; the kids crowd round the table. Despite the icy cold outside, the shack is suddenly lusciously warm.
A red glow seeps from the stove. Our faces are pink in the paraffin light.
Electricitylessness is an astonishing novelty in the modern age. My daughter’s friend says: ‘I keep reaching round the doors expecting to find a light switch.’ Instead, they carry torches or candles to light their way. ‘It’s fun lighting candles,’ says Tomas with a dangerous glint in his eye. I remind him that this building is made of wood.
Electricity fills every corner of a house with light. In contrast, the paraffin lamps on the table light only our faces; it has the miraculous effect of drawing people together into a close, sociable circle. It’s like being in a 17th-century Dutch painting. I am suddenly reminded of the joy of being a boy during the power blackouts of the Seventies.
I step outside. In an exceptionally starry frost, I look in through the windows at the children playing contentedly at the table and feel curiously proud of having provided for them, in a hunter-gatherer-type way. It’s a sentiment that doesn’t strike me much at home.
Image: The Matchmaker by Gerrit van Honthorst (1592-1656)
EDIT:
As viral campaigns go, this one is kind of genius, and shares Caravaggio-type lighting with the painting above. Warning. Don’t watch it if you’re squeamish. Contains grauitous blood and violence.
Antony Gormley and snobbery
Ben Street at Art21 | Blog is among those who sneer at Antony Gormley’s One And Other, the sculpture that will be installed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Squre, London, from July 4. The piece consists of 2400 members of the public standing on the fourth plinth, one at a time. Volunteers submit their names to the One And Other website and have their names chosen, apparently at random. Street sniffs:
Only a culture so profoundly in love, as the UK is, with the process of celebrification could endorse a proposal that equates mere self-expression with art. The project description is full of phrases that are begging for qualifying air quotes: “Participants will be picked at random, chosen from the thousands who enter, to represent the entire population of the UK” [emphasis mine]. Gormley has the temerity to suggest that he has been the victim of press “snobbery”; surely pomposity of that Meatlovian scale is crying out for some leavening criticism. The use of the political buzzword “participant” shows how neatly the rhetoric of contemporary art has, since 1997, dovetailed with the rerouting of political discourse towards an emphasis on “openness,” “transparency,” and “interactivity” while actually being none of those things. The suggestion of the term participant is that the person has an active role in the creation of the work of art, whereas the truth of much participatory contemporary art is that the participant simply becomes the medium for the artist to express whatever it is he or she is expressing (usually a toothless critique of the patron rubber-stamped by same).
For Gormley’s project, as for much contemporary political discourse, language is bent to purpose. That dreaded term empowerment is so beloved of official arts bodies when angling for funding is dragged in, but what does it mean here? And to what extent is this, in Gormley’s words, “about the democratization of art”? It means that after what will certainly be a protracted screening process, members of the public, who have conflated exposure with success, will be allowed to spend an hour of their time gesticulating slightly out of earshot above the tinkling fountains and rumbling buses. Some of them will moon Nelson. Gormley and the subsidizing bodies will feel good about “democratizing” art and “empowering the public.” That all this is happening in the shadow of the National Gallery, one of the world’s best collections of painting (and free to enter), has a ring of embarrassment about it. We get the public art we deserve, I suppose.
Leave aside, for a moment, the much gnawed over question of whether Gormley’s oeuvre is any cop or not, and consider Gormley claim that he’s been the victim of snobbery, as ridiculed here by Ben Street.
The art world’s and the broadsheets’ invective against Gormley – where it exists – has grown in perfect parallel with his popularity. That would suggest either that his work has become worse as his popularity’s grown, or that there is a disagreeable horror of populism in the art world.
Q1. Which of those two propositions above is the more plausible?
Q2. Might the assumption that the British lumpenproletariat are too vulgar to be trusted to behave properly with art, and that when Gormley gives them the opportunity the best they will achieve is to “moon at Nelson”, not be a perfect example of the kind of snobbishness Gormley is complaining about?
Another Place by Antony Gormley photographed by Richard Dutton
PS. I’ve signed up to to be one of the 2,400. In the slim likelihood that I’m picked, I welcome suggestions about how I should spend that hour. No mooning, please.
PPS. Michaela Crimmin, who has been involved in the Fourth Plinth from its inception – it was, lest we forget, an RSA initiative, promises to blog further on the Plinth some time in the next couple of days.
T S Eliot prizewinner Jen Hadfield on RSA Arts & Ecology
I’ve posted an interview with the poet Jen Hadfield up on the main site. I’ll admit I hadn’t even heard of her until she won the T S Eliot Award a few weeks ago, but Nigh-No-Place turns out to be really great for its vivid, unruly, close-up-view poems about life in the back-0f beyond.
Two things I found intersting: Hadfield is, self-admittedly, a poor reader. Despite a love of language, she finds getting through novels hard. Which is one of the reasons why she graviates towards poetry.
Also, by her own admission again, she doesn’t have a single political bone in her body.
I’m almost alarmingly apolitical, which is something I have anxiety about in the same way as I do about the reading thing. I think that I’m not political is possibly partially about the generation I come from but also to do with me as a person.
But it’s inevitable that anyone with Hadfield’s subject matter becomes political, in the sense that – as Siân Ede was saying – nature is no longer just out there as the ineffable, unstoppable force. “It is tainted. It is sad. It is ending.” It’s something broken, and if you write about it now you are
inevitably writing about catastrophe. Hadfield sees herself as writing from within the ecopoetic tradition, but with that modern knowledge:
It’s not just about people going out into the landscape and looking at it. “Oh how lovely and interesting and possibly sublime!” There’s an anxiety in there as well about how it’s changing and about how we make ourselves at home out there, how we impact on it.
Read the full interview here.
Ceci n'est pas un cafe
Energy Cafe | Gunpowder Park from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.
At Gunpowder Park, Saturday March 21. The Energy Cafe, a project commissioned by the Art of Common Space; and an excuse to try out the Flip Video.
Being there among the woodsmoke and dodgy rock music did make it feel like one was back on the Peace Convoy, and as such it wasn’t the most innovative piece of work, but in the warm spring sunchine it was genial fun all the same.
RSA Design & Behaviour: Ordinary Heroes
I’m stealing this post wholesale from Jamie Young’s RSA Design & Behaviour blog. Let’s call it recycling:
Last year I read a report published by the IPPR that made me think. It was called Warm Words, and analysed the language and discourses used in the media and campaigns to talk about climate change.
The authors identified several discourses at the time of publication (August 2006 – so it’s a bit out of date now) that fell into three main groups; alarmism (we’re doomed), “settlerdom” and “British comic nihilism” (climate change is just too fantastic to be true), and “small actions” (messages that encourage people to beat climate change by doing little actions like turning off lights). I thought this was all fascinating, coming at the same time I was getting slightly power crazy after being exposed to the sort of sneaky public engagement strategy that campaigning organisations use, and the ideas behind social marketing and population segmentation models.
The report suggests most of these discourses are pretty ineffective, and among its recommendations are to improve the way the media uses the small actions discourse:
As mentioned earlier, populist climate change discourse (for example, in magazines) tends to put together alarmist and small-action repertoires, through features such as ‘20 ways to save the planet from destruction’. In bringing together these two repertoires without reconciling them, these articles feed a notion of asymmetry in human agency with regards to climate change.
This, the report says, is pretty disastrous, and makes people think that while their actions are responsible for climate change, they are also powerless to do anything about it. How can turning off my telly make any difference to rising sea levels and ecosystem collapse?
Their conclusion is to create a new discourse which they call “ordinary heroism”, an attempt to create a (very British by the way) language about climate change (more about heroism in another post soon). Their explanation of what makes this unique isn’t entirely clear from the report to be honest, but the examples they quote of early uses of this discourse in the media all have in common that little changes from lots of people add up to be significant.
This is absolutely one of the reasons that technology and the internet is so crucial to helping us change our behaviour. My own energy saving rituals (nothing odd, I promise) seem negligible until I’m connected to everyone else, when I realise that the cumulative effect of my and our small actions are beginning to bring about significant change. This, as well as the competitive and social proofing reasons, is why it’s great that socially-networked energy displays/smart meters are beginning to find their way on to the market.
But what else can we come up with?
Ps. Here’s a couple of other things that do this too:
Manchester Festival announces programme: it's good
The second Manchester International Festival released its 2009 programme this week. It’s turning into the the best multi-platform arts festival in the UK – but then the size of its budget – a whopping £10m this year – probably helps with that. That said, they’re making great artistic decisions. While the Edinburgh International Festival is clearly on the up under Jonathan Mills, Manchester is setting a great standard in new commissions.
And obviously chosing to put an image for Gustav Metzger’s new plea for environmental sanity Flailing Trees, which is one of those commisions, on the cover shows a kind of ethical intent which other festivals need to match.
More about Metzger’s sculpture here.
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