In praise of the Boring Milipede
Boring Milipede
Erratic Ant
Hornet Robberfly
Orange Roughy
Elegant Earthstar…
Today I am giddy with the found poetry of the names of endangered British species. A member of the Arts & Ecology ning has posted news of an imaginative new artwork by the Ultimate Holding Company collective in Manchester. extInked starts on November 19 November 12 as an exhibition of drawings of 100 endangered species from the UK. From November 26 tattooists start to ink those drawings onto the skin of 100 volunteers. Each illustrated person then becomes an “ambassador” for the threatened species their body plays host to. The exhibition has been arranged with the support of the Marine Conservation Society, Buglife – the Invertebrate Conservation Trust and the People’s Trust for Endangered Species.
The announcement of the exhibition came with the full list of the 100 species that the artwork was focussing on:
Scarlet Malachite Beetle
Soprano Pipistrelle
Noble Chafer
Wormwood Moonshiner Beetle
Noctule…
We tattoo our skin with the names of our loved ones. This artwork seems to question how much we love these declining species. ExtInct makes me think of the project the writer and journalist Caspar Henderson has been working on, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings – The Anthropocene extinction, human imagination, and what comes next. In his explanation for the project he comes out with a brilliant phrase which has stuck in my head ever since I first read it:
Most real creatures that we think we know embody wonders we have hardly dreamt of.
Read more about extInked., (includes the full list of 100 species.)
Stella Vine protests Gary McKinnon extradition
From The Art Newspaper:
Controversial painter Stella Vine, best known for her headline-hitting depictions of Diana, Princess of Wales, and supermodel Kate Moss, has now turned her artistic gaze to Gary McKinnon (pictured), the Brit accused of hacking into secret US military and Nasa computers. McKinnon has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, prompting Vine to comment: “Dr Temple Grandin, an engineer with autism, said that a really high proportion of people working at NASA have Asperger’s. Perhaps they should be thinking of employing Gary not putting him in prison.” The UK Home Office has agreed to a delay in extradition proceedings for McKinnon. “I find it quite distressing to think of him in this situation,” added Vine.
Jamie Hewlett pictures climate change
“This is the river erosion, showing how the bank has almost been sliced away. You can see the men folk looking at us on our boat – watching us quizzically as to who we are. I liked the idea of putting the paintings on paper and envelopes that were a bit dog-eared, as if they had been dropped in a puddle.”
Jamie Hewlett, creator of Tank Girl and partner in the Gorillaz project, visited Bangladesh with Oxfam to record how climate change is already affecting lives. Prints of his works from the trip are available to buy from Oxfam.
Trafigura, reputation management and the arts
Last week the much-tweeted Trafigura affair collided with the world of art - with ungainly results. It’s not just Trafigura and Carter Ruck’s reputation that have taken a pasting over the last few days on Twitter.
On Friday, Twitterers claimed victory in a freedom of speech issue surrounding the oil trading company Trafigura. At the heart was a report, commissioned by Trafigura themselves into the dumping of slops in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, which Trafigura did not want the public to see. The toxic chemicals are alleged to have caused the deah of up to 18 people and injury to at least 30,0oo more.
When the existence of the report was raised under the privilege of a parliamentary question, the solicitors Carter-Ruck effectively imposed an injunction on The Guardian reporting what was now parliamentary business. At which point the Twitterverse scented a rat and began publicising not only the injunction and its history, but disclosing the full contents of the damning report. Bingo. The company’s efforts to keep the report quiet resulted in it being transmitted around the world to millions of internet users. The result was that a whole swathe of those who had been perhaps a little sceptical about the use of Twitter became converts.
While old media were impotent in the face of the injunction, new media simply swept all this aside. Hurrah for new media.
Well, not quite. It was a little more complicated than that. The Guardian had very cleverly dropped a hint of the injunction on its front page knowing that the unfettered world of new media was likely to pick up and run with it. For all its self-congratulation, it’s not likely that the Twitterverse would have picked up the story on their own. What it should be seen as is an exemplary act of collaboration between old and new.
Anyway, to THE ART BIT.
During Tuesday’s Twitterstorm, an artist called Ivan Pope was amongst those who, googling for stick-like facts to beat Trafigura with, noticed that the company were sponsoring The Trafigura Art art prize as part of the Young Masters exhibition.
As an artist he was quite reasonably shocked to see an arts event associated with a company who were the subject of a damning UN report into the dumping incident. As Pope and others spread news of the prize, the Cynthia Corbett Gallery and exhibition curator Constance Slaughter became the target of the widespread rage against Trafigura. Pope blogged:
OK, so bringing Trafigura and artists together seemed like a good idea.
Except that it is damaging to the artists, the judges, the gallery and the art world generally.
But it is great news for Trafigura, who paid £4,000 for the privilege.
Yes, that’s right. It cost them £4,000 to attach their name to an art world prize.
The prize is run by suckers who think Trafigura are really ‘the good guys’, and that it’s all media lies.
Yes, the organisers of the prize are giving out great PR for Trafigura. If you know how much Pottinger-Bell type PR costs, you’ll see the value in this prize to them.
On Friday, after four days flak, the Cynthia Corbett Gallery finally announced that they were withdrawing the Trafigura Prize.
OK. Kudos should be given to anyone seeking sponsorship for artists. But.
Sponsorship, as Pope points out, is an exchange. It’s bizarre that no one from the gallery, nor any the judges who had agreed to take part in the prize, nor or any of the artists in the Young Masters exhibition, had bothered to consider whether it was a Good Idea to be involved with Trafigura until Tuesday’s Twitterstorm.
Though some, like the artist Tom Hunter who was one of the prize’s intended judges, publicly disassociated themselves from the prize following the ruckus, it took until Friday for the gallery itself to pull out. That leaves the impression that they only did so when the PR negatives of the association outweighed the positives, not because of any concern with the wider issues.
As public funding decreases in coming years, sponsorship is going to become increasingly central to the long-term health of the arts. But any sponsorship is an act of partnership – a joining of reputations.
There’s no excuse for not knowing about the controversy surrounding Trafigura. Despite the injunctions, the allegations have been in the public domain since 2006. The Ivory Coast dumping was the subject of a major Newsnight investigation in May this year.
Talk about reputation management. This sort of thing leaves the arts looking unengaged, aloof and frankly a bit dim.
Photo of flash mob protest outside the Carter Ruck offices by lewishamdreamer.
Who's in the house? Well, on the house, really. Bat House update
Just had an excited email from the WWT London Wetlands Centre. A bat came and checked out the Bat House. [Background: the Berkeley Bat House is a project envisaged by artist Jeremy Deller and put into action by a partnership of organisations that included the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre].
Yes, that’s it… that dark splodge at the top left. Didn’t actually go inside, but think of it as that first drive-by before it calls the estate agents. It appears to have wee-ed down the wall, which has to be a good sign, don’t you think?
#Trafigura art prize to be announced November 3
It is a struggle for artists to get paid, but surely no artist in their right mind would want to accept a prize from a company with a reputation like Trafigura’s. That would be, ah, toxic to any emerging artist’s career, don’t you think?:
Young Masters will also officially launch an Art Prize which will be continued by the Trafigura Foundation each year. The Art Prize, totaling £4,000, will be awarded to the most talented artist as judged by a panel of highly respected arts professionals. Young Masters is curated by Constance Slaughter and Beth Colocci and is supported by corporate sponsors Trafigura, AXA and Brakes Group.
"Shun the unbeliever": a climate blog for Blog Action Day
When we talk about climate, we are talking about time. Not simply about time that appears to be running out, but about how we, as a species, are so poor about judging our relationship with the future.
On Monday at the Roundhouse in London six musicans performed a version of the score of Jem Finer’s Longplayer. What they played, on 234 Tibetan bowls, was just a fragment of the complete score. Jem Finer may be a musician better known for his three-minute punk-folk masterpieces as musical lynchpin in The Pogues but Longplayer, is no three chord wonder. It is designed to play for a thousand years. You can hear a fragment at Trinity Buoy Wharf in London, where the complete score is gradually being played out, note by slow note, by computer.
In America, The Long Now Foundation measures time in millennia. It was founded, as they say, in 01966 by Stewart Brand and a group of friends who included Brian Eno; (it was Eno who gave the organisation its name). They have built a clock [above right] which struck solemnly twice as the new millenium dawned, and will strike next three times at the dawn of New Year’s Day 3000AD.
In 2005 the artist Betinna Furnee set a time lapse camera up on the East Anglian coast. In eight months she filmed the relentless disappearance of land for her artwork Lines of Defense. Only by condensing that event into just under six minutes, by altering our perspective of time, does the scale of the the erosion become awesome enough to hold our attention.
The paradox of the modern age is that we have been given the power to see for miles and miles, yet most of the time we can only look as far as the end of our nose – or to some apocalyptic future that is beyond our control. For 80,000 human generations we struggled through the Pleistocene era, honing our ability to cope with our immediate needs – food, shelter and sex; in the 500 generations since then we have utterly transformed the planet - first gradually, then over the last dozen or so at a breakneck speed which now puts our own relationship with earth in danger.
Perhaps not a surprise, then, that we are having trouble with the immensity of the paradigm shift we need to get our head around this new era. Maybe those of us who campaign around climate haven’t quite got that paradigm right ourselves yet, either.
I thought about this when I read Matthew Cain’s recent blog, Climate Change: I don’t care enough:
I don’t care enough about climate change. I’m not proud of that. I believe experts when they say that it is the biggest threat to the future of civilisation. I pity the plight of poor farmers in areas of the world vulnerable to changes in the climate (Maldives, Bangladesh spring to mind). And I would like to live a responsible lifestyle, contributing more to society than I take out. But that’s not enough to make me care about climate change.
It’s a very honest statement. We may worry about denial buffoons like the Tory MP Douglas Carswell who blogged earlier in the week that the idea of “man-made climate change” was merely the product of the “lunatic consensus” but in truth, they are just the clowns. The real problem is the middle ground… the vaguely sympathetic. The IPPR’s recent report reminds us that there are large numbers of people out there who, far from being energised by the noise we all make on days like today – Blog Action Day, instead feel resentful about being made to feel guilty about their lifestyles. The difference with Matthew Cain is he’s big enough to own up.
We accuse them of being selfish. We pile dung on their driveways. [Don't get me wrong, I'm all for piling dung on Jeremy Clarkson's driveway, but... ] But all too often our grandstanding produces lethargy, not action.
There doesn’t appear to be much that’s self-centered about Matthew Cain – apart from an over-keen interest in his own web stats, perhaps. He’s as interested in social causes and progressive change as the rest of us – more probably. He shares with the rest of us that altruism that we know is encoded in all of us.
So why isn’t he as engaged with climate change?
It’s time to start asking whether that’s our own fault. When I say “our” I mean, us, the true believers… those who think it’s the most pressing social issue of our time.
Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, has a new book out, Why We Disagree About Climate Change. Hulme’s career arc has been a fascinating one. He is the scientist responsible for founding the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. If you’re remotely interested in the science of climate, you’ll know what major players they have been. But recently his place in the unfolding story of climate research has made him more interested in the social response to science than the science itself. He has watched with fascination as the news about impending climate change has been translated into panic, anxiety and inaction. He realises he has seen us handing over our ability to think about the future to people like himself.
Much of the rhetoric here at the RSA has been about allowing individuals to take control of their lives, yet Hulme suggests the narrative of climate change has been about surrendering our mastery of the future to numbers, to politicians and to scientists. Yes, I support the campaign to stabalise atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at 350 parts per million, but what does that really mean? I barely understand the science of it, let alone what it means for the way we will live.
Yes, I want to see significant progress at Copenhagen, but most of the political solutions on the table require a stronger state to enforce carbon reductions. In the Politics of Climate Change Anthony Giddens argues that we must return to an old style command economy. Is this really the future we want? Much of the silent middle ground, left and right wing, sees climate as the excuse the state is using for taking back the power they lost in the second half of the 20th century. And who’s to say they haven’t got a point? If activists like Matthew Cain, who have spent their political lives trying to give people power over the machinery of the state, don’t feel engaged in climate, is that really such a big surprise?
We tend to think those who do not share our need to act to make the future safe are short-sighted. They don’t understand the “long now” those artists have all identified.
But maybe it’s time for climate change campaigners to start thinking more seriously about the future themselves. Shouldn’t what we want our society to be like in the future be a lot more connected to what we want it to be like right now?
The pansy project: art as a commemoration
“I think it’s time we went gay bashing again!” Grovesnor Street, Manchester by Paul Harfleet
I like the bald poignancy of this ongoing work which I just stumbled on. Paul Harfleet at The Pansy Project plants pansies at the sites of homophobic attacks. Each pansy is named after the incident involved. In his online gallery where the memorials are collected together, the simple images of vulnerable bedding plants sit alongside jarring titles like “Let’s kill the Bati-Man” or “Faggot! Pouf! Bender!” The most poignant of all are the ones with names as titles: For Dwan Price, For David Morley.
The Pansy Project will be at Shout Festival, Birmingham in November 2009.
#Trafigura, toxic waste scandals, gagging orders and social media
Anyone who is sceptical about the power of social media should compare this from The Guardian this morning “Guardian gagged from reporting parliament” with the twitter stream for #Trafigura. Trafigura, you will remember, are the company responsible for dumping lethal toxic waste in Ivory Coast. The overwhelming sharing of information about the attempt to gag a newspaper from parliamentary reporting is now online here thanks to The Spectator who no doubt feel empowered by the fact that the genie is already out of the bottle on Twitter.
EDIT: At 1.00pm came this tweet from Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian:
Thanks to all tweeters for fantastic support over past 16 hours! Great victory for free speech. #trafigura
Waste and opportunity: Tristram Stuart on how we could save the world with what we throw away
What we could do with what we waste from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.
Last week at the Birmingham Book Festival I chaired Tristram Stuart talking about his excellent book Waste, an event programmed by the RSA. It is a brilliantly researched piece of work that leaves you horrified at the scale of the developed world’s pointless overconsumption.
Half way through the talk he brought the scale of our wasteage dramatically to life when pulled out a sliced granary loaf that he’d picked out of a bin outside a bakery a few hours earlier and started counting out the slices.
At that point I pretty much gave up chairing and pulled out my little video camera…
Read the book; it’s good.
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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