Charles Clover: "environmentalists are very boring"
How 2009 became the year of the campaign movie from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.
Charles Clover energised the campaign to alert the world to approaching fish stock collapse earlier this year with the film The End of the Line. It was a great example of how a single coordinated attack using the right media can produce a quantum leap in awareness. I spoke to him and the Guardian’s Environment Editor John Vidal about how an imaginative, passionate and above all clever approach can galvanise action and force suppliers and politicians to rethink their strategy.
But he’s scathing about how the broader environment movement has failed to grip the public imagination. Responding to a recent IPPR survey that said the public were “bored” with climate change:
It’s because environmentalists are very boring, he says. They used not to have jobs when I got into this business. They had something very burning and interesting to say which quite a lot of people wanted them not to say, and people tried to shut them up. They were very exciting people to know, and they didn’t have a pension fund. Now they have pension funds and sit around in offices and try and think of something interesting to say, and not a lot of them achieve it.
Has the professionalisation of the climate movement creating a beast that feeds itself? Is that part of the reason the public finds climate activists, in the words of the report “smug”?
Charles Clover and John Vidal were in the house to discuss The End of the Line at a screening organised by RSA Events who run the best public lectures series you’ll find in London – and you don’t have to work here to think that. Follow them on http://twitter.com/RSAEvents
Robert MacFarlane on literature that inspired action
There was a great article on Edward Abbey by Robert MacFarlane in the weekend’s Guardian. [I'm inclined to superlatives here, as MacFarlane generously bigged up the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre and our fellow organisations TippingPoint, The Ashden Directory and Cape Farewell in the article].
Anyhow, to the point.
MacFarlane writes about how Abbey’s gloriously rambunctious novel Monkey Wrench Gang became the inspiration for the Earth First! environmental movement in the US, who set about turning Abbey’s fiction into non-fiction through a series of direct actions. Climate change, suggests MacFarlane, requires not just a technological and political shift but a cultural one too – which is what Abbey’s writing set ablaze for the American conservation movement.
But then MacFarlane starts to ponder where that’s going to come from in relation to climate change. American authors, from Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, Bill McKibben, Gary Snyder, Cormac MacCarthy and others have produced significant passionate works which have indeed had a galvanising impact on environmental movements. But where, he wonders, are the British equivalents? The British equivalents, he suggests, have an emotional distance which doesn’t “kick your arse off the page” in the way that Abbey’s prose does. But there’s something else too:
Perhaps the key ethical principle of British environmental literature has been that making us see differently is an essential precursor to making us act differently. So it is that each new generation of British environmental writers finds itself trying to design the literary equivalent of the “killer app”: the glittering argument or stylistic turn that will produce an epiphany in sceptical readers, and so persuade them to change their behaviour. I used to believe in the possibility of this killer app, both as a reader and a writer. But I’m increasingly unsure of its existence. Or, if it exists, of its worth. At least in my experience, environmental literature in Britain gets read almost exclusively by the converted to the converted, and its meaningful ethical impact is minimal tending to zero. As Vernon Klinkenbourg noted with glum elegance last year, most documents of environmental literature are “minority reports – sometimes a minority of one. The assumptions, the hopes, the arguments [of such literature] are contradicted by the way the vast majority of us live, and by the political and economic structures that determine that lifestyle … sceptical readers so seldom pick up this kind of writing, or submit to its evidence.”
The point is that Abbey’s fiction was in many ways hackneyed, fed by the cliche’s of the western pulp novel, but it was great because of the scope of its passion and the sureness of Abbey’s vision. In comparison, are European artists and writers just trying too hard to be clever? Does this create a kind of parochial vision that hobbles artists, blunting their chance of having the kind of impact Abbey did?
One of the things that I hope Arts for COP15 will be able to produce is some idea of how effective the various events are at doing what they all, presumably, set out to do, which us change minds.
Illustration: Robert Crumb-designed sticker for Edward Abbey’s book (1985).
How the web changes what art will be
I have been spending time in the presence of cyber-dystopians.
On Tuesday I went to great talk by Evgeny Mozorov at the RSA, to hear Mozorov pour scorn on the idea that the internet is the harbinger of a new democratic personal freedom. He suggests that totalitarians and corporate astroturfers alike love it when we unthinkingly accept the internet as a force for good; it makes their work so much easier for them. Institutions are weakened by social media? Bah! It strengthens their hegemony.
Yesterday I went to Art of Digital, hosted by FACT in Liverpool, where a great line up included Andrew Keen rehearsing the thesis he put forward in Cult of the Amateur, namely that the internet is destroying the underpinnings of our culture by making conventional cultural transmission valueless, destroying newspapers and publishers and replacing erudition with Wikipedia. (Actually he’s moved on a little since then – but I’ll come to that in a minute.)
It’s true we have lived in the age of technological positivism for a little too long. When I freelanced for Wired it seemed almost heretical to suggest that some of the things we were writing about might not actually ever happen. A little corrective to that relentless utopianism is no bad thing. However the new public speaking circuit – something which has blossomed unexpectedly in the virtual age – naturally magnifies the extremes of the argument. You’re more likely to be listened to if you say something is either brilliant or crap.
While it’s true that the internet is altering culture fundamentally, maybe it’s time we started being a little more systematic about finding out exactly what it is that’s really going on. Matthew Taylor said this in his blog yesterday; any change produces results that are likely to be both positive and negative; we need to start understanding what they are. So what does this mean for the arts?
The Art of Digital strand has, naturally, been looking into that. I’ve argued elsewhere that arts institutions don’t fully understand the unfolding changes that are taking place – and the various consultants speaking earlier in the day, who didn’t go much further than describe social media as much more than a particularly whizzy new marketing tool, weren’t doing a great deal to change that outlook.
It was, paradoxically, Andrew Keen who pointed out one silver lining for the arts – and one that is going to be undoubtedly very powerful in years to come. We live in a world in which almost anything can now be copied for free. As the financial value of anything that can be copied disappears, so too the cultural value becomes undermined. For instance, recorded music, one of the greatest forms of the 20th century, is in a major slump from which it will never recover. Sure, there is great music still being made, but it’s a lot harder to get paid for it, and as a consequence, its cultural heft is drifting away. We are unlikely to see a cultural force as strong as, say, The Beatles – whose greatest music was never performed live – ever again.
But – sticking with music – we’re living in a golden age for performing artists. Never have as many people flocked to live concerts. The recession hasn’t even begun to put a kink in box office receipts.
As the value of the reproducible declines, the value of the irreproducible rises. A DVD of a performance is relatively worthless. Actually being there is invaluable. We are becoming a culture that wants the experience, as much as the content itself. Keen’s idea is an extension of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. What we want is the “aura” of the work of art, to use Benjamin’s word – and in the digital age, that aura becomes the uniqueness of a single performance. We want the now. We want the one-off. We want to be able to say we were present.
Not only does this mean that all arts that have that specialness of performance, from music, to live arts, to drama, can expect to thrive, but exisiting art forms seem to be changing too – and in the oddest way. For the last decade anybody who’s written a book knows you’re likely to make more money giving readings of the work than you ever receive in royalties. The literary festival – quite the most ungainly of arts events – has become a monster. Even the most tepid reader of their own work gets a look in. Crowds, who more likely than not haven’t even read the book, pay the price of a new book to hear the author read a small fraction of it. The “aura” becomes all important.
Of course that doesn’t mean that the world won’t still be full of struggling actors…
What is Arts for COP15?
Here’s some information that is being sent out to explain the aims of Arts For COP15.
Please pass it around if you can.
You may not be involved in anything that’s directly relevant, but maybe someone on your networks is.
—————————————————————————-
Arts for COP15 is a web-based network of artists and arts professionals who are producing work in the run up to and during the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 09.
It is a place to:
- Publicise arts events that relate to COP15 both on the site, and through the networks of other artists and organisations
- Avoid duplicating work where possible
- Share knowledge and resources with other artists and arts professionals
- Discuss how arts strategy around climate and social change can evolve
- Discuss how effective we are in passing messages on to our audiences
- Research into the range and success of these projects
- Find COP15-related material to pass on to audiences
- Use arts to increase the noise around COP15
- Encourage artists and arts professionals who are producing work that is about the environment over the next few months to consider using the event as a way of discussing COP15 with their audiences
Please go to www.arts4cop15.org and create your own profile.
If you would like to find out more about Arts For COP15 please email william.shaw@rsa.org.uk. Arts For COP15 is an open network created by the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre. The RSA Arts & Ecology Centre is an RSA initiative in partnership with Arts Council England.
For further information about the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre go to: www.rsaartsandecology.org.uk.
Clearing the "jungle" in Calais
The brilliant Akram Khan’s Bahok is on again at Sadler’s Wells on 25-26 Sept. For a dance piece that’s inspired by the theme of global migration, it is now set against the dark backdrop of the clearance of the so-called “jungle” refugee camp outside Calais, where police moved in this week to clear the 300-odd refugees and asylum seekers who hadn’t already scarpered. To become one of these itinerants, whether justified by circumstance or not, is to put yourself in a limbo as a non-person, preyed on by traffickers. As we know by now, these camps are likely to become a fact of modern life in Northern Europe – as are their periodic clearances.
Arts4COP15.org: Join the network
Our network Arts for COP15 is now up and functioning. Please come and join us there, especially if you are involved in an arts-based event in the lead up to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December. The site acts as a single portal for all the arts stuff that’s going on globally.
It’s a place where we can not only publicise what we’re doing around COP15, but where we can share experiences and resources and discuss whether we’re reaching audiences effectively. It also gives us a chance to measure how much is going on and work out how well it’s working.
There are already several events listed, and more to go up. You’re free to go and add your own. There’s also an open blog and a forum. Please go and get stuck in.
Is something missing from Maya Lin's What Is Missing?
Maya Lin, the artist most famous for creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, a piece of public work that cut deep in the American psyche, unveiled another memorial last week in San Francisco. What is missing? is a homage to extinct species.
In her artists’ statement she says:
What is missing? is a wake up call and a call to action, showing what is being done throughout the field of conservation and also what individuals can do in their everyday lives to make a difference in habitat and species protection.
What is missing? will make the critical link between global warming concerns and habitat protection: if 20% of global warming emissions are caused by deforestation then What is missing? will integrally connect these issues, asking the question:
Can we save two birds with one tree?
I’m sorry. It may be that last coy bon mot that pushed me over the line but… if any piece of work epitomises something Michaela Crimmin was talking about recently when she wrote, “Art is not going to combat climate change by didacticism of preaching”, it’s Lin’s giant speaking tube.
Perhaps the piece doesn’t have the right impact when viewed via YouTube, but to my eyes, Lin’s work does the opposite of creating connections between environment and global warming, as she claims. Instead, Lin’s megaphone appears to reduce the natural world to something exotic and far-away at the pointy end of a tube.
I’m right, aren’t I?
www.maylin.com
www.whatismissing.net
EDIT. I’ve just noticed in a review of the work in the SF Chronicle that children can enter the tube – if they take their shoes off. That makes it even worse, somehow.
Did #pm2un Tweet make Gordon to go to Copenhagen?
I was blogging last week in response to green.tv’s suggestion that there were too many climate campaigns. My view was that it wasn’t that there were too many, but that maybe they weren’t reaching the right people.
Last week the website BeThatChange.com were pushing hard on a campaign on Twitter, #pm2un, trying to persuade Gordon Brown to commit to go to the COP15 Climate Conference in Copenhagen. At the time this seemed like a great example of a well-targeted campaign.
Though it’s not that unusual for leaders not to commit to attending this sort of conference until the last moment, BeThatChange had cleverly spotted an opportunity there. It looks rubbish for Brown to be claiming to be leading the agenda at Copenhagen when he’s not even committed to going himself. A couple of days after BeThatChange cranked up the heat with their #pm2un campaign, @EdMilibandMP tweeted a survey on his Ed’s Pledge site, asking visitors what their priorities for Copenhagen were. Miliband offered the following options to chose from:
1) the Prime Minister attending Copenhagen to help deliver a deal
2) doing more to provide home insulation in the UK
3) more government support to create green jobs
Whatever you think about the yeas and nays of deliberative democracy, when I looked on Friday, “the Prime Minster attending Copenhagen to help deliver a deal” had received 93% of the vote. How much of that was due to the BeThatChange.com campaign is hard to calculate, but I suspect that the question was even on Miliband’s poll suggests that the original #pm2un campaign was bang on.
If anything, I suppose it’s possible the Labour Party saw how potentially embarrassing such a campaign could be if it gained much more momentum, and instead turned it to their advantage. Either way the news came through late last night, less than 48 hours before BeThatChange’s next #pm2un twitterstorm:
Gordon Brown urges world leaders to attend climate change talk
Whatever did happen behind closed doors, it was nice work all round, really.
Avaaaz/tcktcktck Global Wake Up Call today
Bruce Nauman: Leave the land alone
According to Mammut magazine, Bruce Nauman’s sky-writing artwork Leave The Land Alone, was first proposed in 1969 after he was invited to submit a piece of Land Art (or Earth Art) to an exhibition. The letter which floated the idea of creating a message in the sky – rather than the earth – has never been found, so it remained a mythical theoretical rejoinder to the more macho, earth-shifting side of Land Art. Until Sept 12 this year; that’s when it was finally brought to life over Pasadena, an event instigated by curatator Andrew Beradini of Pasadena’s Armory Centre for the Arts.
Read the ecoartspace blog about the history of the work and its place in American Land Art.
Had it been created in 1969, its meaning would have been considerably more innocent. These days, when artists question the necessity of flying, the context the work sits in seems, well, less simple.
Hat tip CSPA.
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