Ed Miliband's summer reading
Ed Miliband’s summer reading from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.
It was Robert Butler of the Ashden Directory who spotted what Ed Miliband had tucked under his arm as he came to announce the winners of the first TippingPoint Commision awards…
After Darwin: Contemporary Expressions and contemporary neuroscience
After Darwin: Contemporary Expressions has just opened at the Natural History Museum. It’s a lot of fun. Based on Darwin’s book less-known tome The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals it veers into less obvious territories than some of the other Darwin200 events and exhibitions, looking at the relationship between human and animal expressions of emotion. Among the pieces by Bill Viola, Tina Gonsalves, Diana Thater’s video work gorillagorillagorrilla and Ruth Padel’s poems about her great-great-grandfather, it features a mischievous piece of work co-authored by Jeremy Deller; to explain it, though, would be a definite spoiler.
Instead I’ll give you a snatch of a Mark Haddon’s work 24 Emotions; each is a simple short-form short story based on one of the emotions idenitified by Darwin, such as disgust, disdain, anger, hatred, love, high-spirits and joy. This is an extract from Haddon’s work on the emotion “weeping”:
It is one of those horrible, flat days in early January, when all the chocolates have been eaten and there will be no more presents until July. You are seven. Andrew is nine. Driving rain has kept you inside all morning and the two of you are bickering. You call him a pig and he throws Digby onto the open fire. You try to gram him out of the flames but your mother catches you just in time. The fire takes hold of his arm and wraps it in a silky, green flame. His fur goes black and melts. You are crying so hard it hurts your chest. [...] Years later you are parking the car outside an office in east London. You get out and realise that they are burning rubbish in the adjacent lot: tyres, plastic, litter. There is something familiar and terribly sad about the smell. You stand there with tears rolling down your cheeks and have no idea why.
To successfully turn science into art you often only have to play with it, as Deller and Haddon have done. The success of Haddon’s work is underlined in an essay by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who writes about Haddon’s short stories, thus completing the science/art/science circle.
In pointing to the evolutionary roots of emotion, Damasio explains emotions as complex “action programmes”, constructed over millenia. In evolutionary terms, we may share action programmes with animals, as Darwin suggested. The difference between humans is that we have a complex brain – and thus a mind – which reflect on those action programmes. Damasio writes:
We do not know that a certain emotional state is being reconstructed, and yet it is there. That is why, as Mark Haddon so luminously evokes in his story >Weeping<, we can stand there with tears rolling down our cheeks but still have no idea why.
City digs up wildflowers: artist sues, pt2
I’ve had a couple of nice emails from Chapman Kelley thanking us for referring to his legal battle with the Chicago authorities over the removal of his artwork Wildflower Works.
He was pleased to find the site and see discussion about artists like Robert Smithson on the website; back in 1968 Kelley had been a central figure in creating the programme at the Northwood Art School in Dallas, Texas. In 1972, shortly before his death, Smithson had been a guest teacher there. That year he’d also exhibited Newton Harrison’s work in his gallery in Dallas in 1972.
He’s also keen to correct story that Wildflower Works was a Chicago-funded artwork:
I personally funded the installation and was not paid one red penney to do it. In the course of my creating the Wildflower Works it was necessary for me to liquidate a portion of my personal art collection. Some of the items which were sold were: a 1960 Henry Moore bronze divided figure, a 1957 Calder mobile, a 1969 Frank Stella protractor, a 1968 Jules Olitski and three Franz Kline’s. In addition, I sold many of my own paintings…
I would like to emphasize that in addition to its renown as a work of art, the Wildflower Works was wildly successful ecologically. The plants blossomed continuously throughout spring, summer and fall. It thrived solely on rainwater and used no insecticides or fertilizer. Beginning in 1984 and for two decades afterward, a team of dedicated volunteers maintained the Wildflower Works under my direction. William, at the time, it was an excellent example of a private-public partnership between myself, our volunteers and the City of Chicago.
However, at this point William, my advocacy team and I could use–in whatever form–all the help we can get. Perhaps, after reading The Art Newspaper article and your blog, serious artists might step forward to stand up for artists’ rights.
Narrative shift: telling stories about climate
Last weekend, Robert Butler of the Ashden Directory, in associaton with Charlie Kronick of Greenpeace and writer Caspar Henderson invited 15 academics, writers and activists to explore the issue of how we create narratives around climate change. RSA Arts & Ecology blogger Caleb Klaces returned enthused by the debate and the possiblities discussed:
Last Saturday I attended a meeting organised by Robert Butler, Caspar Henderson and Charlie Kronick as part of the 2 Degrees art festival, which brought together people working in diverse disciplines to discuss ‘narratives of displacement and migration’ within the broad topic of “climate change stories”.
Journalist Dan Box has just come back from a trip to the Carteret Islands funded by the Royal Geographical Society. While there he watched the first ship of evacuees depart from their disappearing island to a new mainland home. He told me that just before he arrived the islanders had placed a ban on foreign journalists coming to visit. The 15 or so journalists that had been to investigate have fitted the Carteret islands into a “metanarrative” (Joe Smith talked about journalists “enrolling a body of victims” for stories) of climate change, and Dan said that every islander he spoke to also said that climate change was the reason they were being flooded. The problem the islanders had with journalists was that writing the story as part of this larger issue did not seem to be helping them in their urgent need for a new home.
This mismatch between overarching and local narratives is one of a number of factors, including poverty and poor governance, which makes their successful relocation a huge challenge. (Although it must also be mentioned that Dan suspects the Carteret chief was being canny by emphasising climate change in his community’s plight – because he knew it would gain greater international attention.)
Rhidian Brook spoke about his nine-month journey through the HIV/Aids pandemic and the personal stories he encountered, which again and again connected environmental with social issues – complicating the “information, condoms and money” solution narrative of AIDS.
Benjamin Morris from Cambridge University talked about the “Katrina diaspora”, and how, when volunteering for the Red Cross in the wake of the hurricane, he was told not to refer to the displaced people as “refugees or evacuees”; they had to be “clients”. The more emotive nomenclature would make the Red Cross legally bound to act in ways which they weren’t prepared to.
The Red Cross was particularly concerned with nouns, but Leo Mellor (also from Cambridge University) suggested that his students working at using climate change as a starting point for fiction struggled with adjectives and adverbs – and that these parts of speech are particularly difficult, but necessary to find, now. This new literature might contribute to large and local narratives by offering a new descriptive language. But there is also another role for art, which can help make space by being disruptive of language and norms (there might be a not-too-tenuous analogy here with advertising and behaviour-change practitioners, who talk of communications which will “unfreeze” people from “bad” behaviours, then “refreeze” them with “good” behaviours – see Futerra in particular). It was interesting to hear Charlie Kronick from Greenpeace call the charity’s early disruptive interventions “DaDa”. He went on to note a dismay with the emergence of a technocratic and market-based metanarrative of climate change.
Joe Smith was more optimistic about the level of artist’s response to climate change, especially at the crossover between art and engagement (an example might be Oxfam’s new Blue in the Face video ) – and described his involvement with the impressive BBC and Open University’s ten-year Creative Climate project. It “aims to generate a groundbreaking longitudinal record of how societies learn about, respond to, and learn to live with global environmental change” through the collection of people’s stories.
Part of the importance of the Creative Climate project is offering a shared space and context for narratives to be recorded and emerge. The emotional impact, usefulness or even validity of a narrative can be dependent on its context.
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. He is a guest blogger at the RSA Arts & Ecology Blog, recently contributing this review of The End of The Line.
Animal crackers: the dystopian zoo
Trouble in paradise is an exhibition by Steinbrener/Dempf at Schönbrunn zoo, Vienna, that takes a poke at our romantic idea of the unspoiled natural environment, especially the facade of the natural created for animal enclosures.
Marine Bill: contact your MP
Britain’s coastline has, recent research suggests, become “a desert” from overfishing. Having passed through the Lords, the Marine Bill, designed to protect Britain’s coastline. Conservation organisations and concerned individuals tell us the bill is weak – especially in setting a long deadline of 2020 for the completion of marine reserves. As environment journalist Charles Clover, maker of The End of The Line, says:
The British government pledged to have a network of marine reserves by 2010, but its marine bill says this will actually happen by 2020. There is a curious lack of urgency. I think it is time that citizens spoke to our politicians and told them to get on with it.
Tomorrow the Bill goes back to the Commons. Today is your last chance to demand your MP to back a workable system of Marine reserves.
Radical Nature @ The Barbican reviewed
Skye Sherwin in The Guardian:
Even the remotest hermit knows that the effects of climate change are the greatest threat faced by mankind. So where does that leave artists? Can they contribute anything to debates about the environment? Might the imperatives of environmentalism constrain their freedom to make interesting work? And what do we actually mean when we talk about nature, anyway? Is it polluted oceans or something that occurs closer to home? These are some of the questions answered by Radical Nature, a show with a refreshingly can-do attitude that opens at the Barbican today. Subtitled “art and architecture for a changing planet”, it includes land art, installation, video and sculpture ranging from 1969 to the present day.
This was my own quick look:
Radical Nature | Barbican 2009 from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.
What if women were in charge of cutting carbon?
Caleb Klaces writes: In December this year representatives from 192 countries will meet in Copenhagen for the 15th UN Conference of the Parties (COP15) to discuss international targets for the reduction of CO2 emissions. The roughly 1,500 delegates will mostly be men, as they always have been. During the period 1996–2006 (COP 2–COP 13) the share of women in COP delegations increased slightly (from 20.5 to 28%), while the percentage of female heads of delegation dropped, from 13.5 to 12% (UN Commission on the status of women, 2008).
A new report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), with too many partners to list, argues that there is a ‘causal interrelationship between climate change and gender’ as such: ‘(1) climate change tends to exacerbate existing gender inequalities; (2) gender inequalities lead women to face larger negative impacts’. Approximately 70% of those who live on less than a dollar each day are women, many of them in areas acutely vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The argument goes that because of their gender-defined roles, these and other women are in general more vulnerable to climate impacts, which in turn could make things even more skewed in favour of men.
So women are at a disadvantage in their ability to influence policy on climate change, and in the severity of its effects.
Putting aside the question of how that inequality might and should change, I wondered if there was any evidence that we would have greater cause for hope for stronger emissions reduction targets – targets that might give us a better than 50% chance of not passing the crucial 2C rise in global temperatures – if most of the COP15 delegates were women?
An unscientific survey for this blog, looking at the gender of leaders of countries with strong environmental legislation, draws no firm correlation between green policies and women heads of state. That is partly because it’s a small and eclectic groups of countries: arguably the UK (David Milliband pushed through the impressive Climate Change Bill), Germany (female Chancellor), Sweden (male Prime Minister), Iceland (male President, female Prime Minister), Costa Rica (male President) and the Maldives (male President). Around the same ratio (30%) as the women in delegations at COP13.
A better source is DEFRA’s 2008 Framework for Pro-Environmental Behaviours’ which uses social research to divide the UK population into 7 segments according to their opinions towards environmental issues and then ability and willingness to act on them. Most of the segments are only very slightly more likely to be more male or female, but it is noteworthy that the groups more willing to accept responsibility for climate change were more also more likely (just) to be female. Also, the segment described as having “one of the most negative ecological worldviews” was 7% more likely to be male above average. This “honestly disengaged” segment is characterised by an indifference towards environmental issues and a belief that climate change is too far in the future to worry about.
It’s unlikely that any of the COP15 delegates will fit into the “honestly disengaged’”segment. More telling is what other studies show – that men tend to trust in technical solutions for energy-saving, while women tend to opt for behavioural or lifestyle changes (Gender CC). So a female-biased COP15 might believe that we can significantly reduce emissions right now through “soft”measures, like campaigns to change habits, rather than depending on a single future technological innovation.
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. He is a guest blogger at the RSA Arts & Ecology Blog, recently contributing this review of The End of The Line.
City digs up wildflowers: artist sues
Reported widely as a “but-is-it-art” case, Chapman Kelley’s decision to sue the city of Chicago for ripping up half of his wildflower artwork is a fascinating one. At first glance you might think it shows how powerless artists are in the face of bureaucracy. In fact it shows the exact opposite; how much power artists currently have in the public sphere should they chose to weild it.
To explain: in 1984 artist Chapman Kelley was commissioned to create a work in Grant Park, Chicago, that was, the artist says, “a pilot study in ecologically sound, low maintenance public landscaping.” Called Wildflower Works, the piece was made up of 47 species of wildflower, 200,000 specimens in all, planted over 1.5 acres. Over the years, Kelley and his friends maintained this striking piece of urban ecological/artistic intervention. Then, five years ago in 2004, the Chicago Department halved the size of the artwork without consulting Kelley, surrounding it with a hedge, replacing the rooted up area with “a water-guzzling lawn”.
Kelley sued them under US legislation that protects public artworks, claiming that he had not been given sufficient time to prepare legal action or to ensure proper removal of the works. He lost the initial case. To quote from the Art Newspaper:
To qualify for artists’ rights protection under Vara [the Visual Artists Rights Act 1990], a work must be “original” enough to be eligible for basic US copyright protection. In September 2008, to the upset of many who support artists’ rights, a federal district court in Chicago said that Kelley’s Wildflower Works lacked this required originality. It is this ruling that Kelley is now seeking to overturn.
Setting aside for a second the danger of legislation like Vara turning the world into an ever-growing art museum, the idea of a court having to decide what is art and what isn’t in this way has interesting implications for environmental and Land Art projects. The confluence of art and ecology often means that today’s artists deliberately insert art into the landscape to protect and enhance the local environment. Think of New York’s High Line project, featuring work by artists such as Fritz Haeg; think of Victory Gardens, San Francisco, by Amy Franceschini, or The Bat House project, initiated by Jeremy Deller, soon to be completed at the London Wetlands Centre. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty appears to have been considered worthy enough to save after it was recently threatened by nearby oil drilling, but Kelley’s case lays bare intentions at the heart of much of the art featured in this blog.
These are all interventions that are, of their nature, political. They consist of using the power they have as artists to effect a transformation on their environment. That power is rarely granted to other members of society; if the eliptical beds of wildflowers had been laid out by a landscape architect there would be no legal case.
How that political battle plays out is going to play out in Chicago remains to be seen. Kelley lost the initial case but he’s appealing on the grounds that Wildflower Works clearly is an artwork, arguing that the eliptical forms he employed in the gardens are part of his artistic vision. His appeal insists that work was “as carefully controlled in design, time and colour transition as a pointillist painting”.
Importantly, Kelley also says that the court was wrong in following a decision by the federal appeals court in Massachusetts, which held that Vara does not protect “site-specific” art. In that decision, sculptor, David Phillips, lost his case to prevent the removal of specially themed works from a Boston harbour-side park. The sculptor lost the argument that moving the art would destroy it, by removing its context. Kelley’s could, in theory, reverse that precedent.
Win or lose – and win would be good – it’s a remarkable case. One conclusion you could draw is that, given the heft artists currently have in domains like this, shouldn’t they be using it more?
Hat tip to Eco Art Blog for mentioning this case.
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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