Did art help add the sheen to Dubai?
Rem Koolhaas at the Dubai Next exhibition
The party is over in Dubai. It was always based on a boom. And art is always there when there is a boom. It had its foot in the door of the contemporary art fair circuit. Christies had set up shop there. The RSA Arts & Ecology Centre took part in the 8th Sharjah Biennial – leading a major symposium on arts and ecology….
Simon Jenkins excoriates those who took part in what was effectively a massive PR to suggest that Dubai was the city of the future, when its sustainability was always in question. As the debt bubble bursts, does the art world share some of that blame for joining in the party?
New Life Copenhagen: hospitality as art
I am soon to be assigned to a guest house in Copenhagen by the remarkable New Life Copenhagen art project. For five days people I don’t know, who don’t know me, will put me up durng my stay in Copenhagen.
Everything I hear from them, while I wait, makes me more and more admiring of this enterprise.
The Danes feel they have a reputation for being an inhospitable place. New Life Copenhagen has decided to turn this reputation on its head with a phenomenal act of generosity, opening the doors of their homes to 3,000 activists, NGO workers and delegates who are arriving in Denmark over the coming weeks to attend the pivotal COP15 conference. It’s a spirit of openness you can only hoped will be matched by the governmental delegates.
In this act alone, Woloo.org’s Sixten Kai Nielsen and Martin Rosengaard, who created New Life Copenhagen may have already created the most significant artwork to align itself with the COP15 process:
The explain themselves: Instead of inviting artists to contribute art for a traditional museum exhibition, we have chosen to utilize hospitality and the human encounter as an exhibition platform. The purpose of the festival is to create a breeding ground for alternative ways of living together. Individual solutions are not enough. In order to stop climate changes, we have to rethink our way of life collectively.
The artists Superflex, Signa and Marisa Olson are also creating work as part of New Life Copenhagen. Olson will host a live event at Copenhagen’s City Square, Signa are going to produce a guest book in which we can all evaluate each others’ lifestyles, and Superflex are going to ask all of us to commit to a climate-friendly burial in the case that we die during our visit to Copenhagen.
Which is one of those committments I kind of hope I’m not going to have to live up to.
Climate denialism and Žižek's fear of the future
Slavoj Žižek by Hendrik Speck
If there is a star philosophy turn, it’s Slavoj Žižek. Last night he spoke at the RSA to a packed Great Room and justified his star status with constantly dazzling performance, which will be online here soon. As Nigel Warburton, the event’s chair, remarked, what’s thrilling about listening to him talk publicly is the way he develops ideas in mid-sentence. Asides suddenly become new ideas, and even his asides seem to have asides.
One of his asides was a meditation on who would be the figures of the current era who would still be having statues built to them in 100 years time.
Žižek suggested Lee Kuan Yew, the reforming but authoritarian leader of Singapore, who turned the island city-state into one of the wealthiest economies in the world. And who more importantly provided the model for Deng Xiaoping’s modernisation of Communist China.
Why? Here he took an easy kick at Fukuyama’s idea that liberal captitalist democracy was the last word in history, pointing out that the winners in capitalism’s latest race appear to be not the liberal capitalist states, but the authoritarian ones like China. And (I’m writing from memory here) his real fear is that this is the successful model that we’re all heading towards. More authoritarian capitalist states, not fewer.
Every now and again I try and take on a climate denialist. It’s a fairly stupid, self-destructive thing to do, and leads to really, really, really silly arguments about whose scientists have bigger graphs, and talk of hockey sticks and mad petitions, but occasionally I think it’s worth doing to discover if you have any common ground at all, and to try and understand how the thinking behind this weird group of misfits with such extraordinary political power.
One thing that’s obvious. Denialists like James Delingpole and Nigel Lawson really aren’t interested in science. You can’t be interested in science if your method is to seek out the few dozen science names who put up serious arguments against the thousands and thousands who stand behind the conclusions of the 2007 IPCC report.
What denialists are really afraid of is the self-righteous authoritarianism that global warming brings. They are fundamentally libertarians. We may think they’re delusional libertarians, but what really concerns them is a fear of a future that actually looks much like Žižek’s.
Anthony Giddens in The Politics of Climate Change sees it as inevitable that the green-left’s dream of grass roots localisation is not up to the task of reform. Likewise he sees that broad international agreements of the kind that COP15 seek are too easy to fracture. That leaves nation states as the main actors in climate change – and the levers they have are inevitably based around carbon taxes. In Gidden’s world, (though he wouldn’t put it like this) the state will inevitably meddle in our lives more not less in the future.
Žižek’s fears, Gidden’s rationalism, and denialists’ libertarianism all find their way to the same place. So is there an alternative? One that will calm the fears of the less-mad denialists? Does climate change inevitably lead to a more authoritarian state?
RETHINK-ing perspectives: art and climate
Safety Gear for Small Animals, 1994 by Bill Burns, featured in RETHINK
If you haven’t found them yet, the people behind RETHINK, Contemporary Art and Climate Change have set up a number of debate pages on their website at http://www.rethinkclimate.org/.
There is also plenty of extraordinarily rich material on the site to debate. Take this essay from Søren Pold which starts by namechecking Petko Dourmana’s Post Global Warming Survival Kit (mentioned round these parts earlier this year):
Digital media art like Petko Dourmana’s installation offers the opportunity to experience another, new nature, or at least it gives us a new and up-to-date perspective on nature. In addition to being a crisis for the globe and for humanity, the climate crisis is also an epistemological crisis, and we need to change our perception of our environment in order to better understand and deal with it. In other words it is also a cultural, epistemological challenge.
The nature, the weather, that previously we have regarded as something out there simply beyond our reach, as something that was in opposition to culture when we analysed poetry in high school, this has now turned into yet another structure of signs to be read and interpreted. We cannot see the greenhouse gasses or their effects directly with our senses so our understanding of the climate challenges are very much based on climate models, and we must act on this background in our daily lives as well as, obviously, politically and culturally. The climate crisis introduces us to the fact that our immediate surroundings are being mediated by complex visualisations, interfaces, statistics and carbon quotas – thus an imaginary computer interface lurks in the blue sky, even deep in the country with no computers in sight!
This isn’t the point that Pold is trying to make but there is also an inescapbable sense in which our vision has become polluted by the science we now need to understand it.
Impact by Degrees: COP15 art in Washington
Waiting Room, by Justine Cooper, New York 2005
This strangely haunting image is part of a series of photos by interdisciplinary artist Justine Cooper, created during a residency at The American Museum of Natural History om New York. Her work “questions whether we should be relying on advancements in DNA technology to bring extinct species back to life, or whether we need to address the impacts that have led to their disappearance in the first place.”
Waiting Room is one of the works featured in Impact By Degrees currently at the Australian Gallery of the Australian Embassy in Washington DC. It’s an exhibition of art by Australian and Australian-American media artists responding to climate change and it’’s one of the events featured on the Arts For COP15 network.
http://www.impactbydegrees.net/
Roni Horn on water
Art:21 blog have been doing one of their flashpoints on art and the natural world. It includes this miniature gem of the artist Roni Horn, talking about the elusive but fundamental qualities of water, the element that much of her work revolves around. Horn, whose exhibition Roni Horn aka Roni Horn was on at the Tate earlier this year created Vatnasafn/Library of Water in Iceland.
http://blog.art21.org/category/flash-points/how-does-art-respond-to-and-redefine-the-natural-world/
The literature of climate
@climateboom and @ashdenizen have started a thread on Twitter discussing the literature of climate change, using the hashtag #climelit. So far the reading list includes:
David Holmgren’s Future Scenarios
George Monbiot’s Heat
Mark Lynas’s Six Degrees
Clive Hamilton’s Growth Fetish
George Marshall’s Carbon Detox
David Archer’s The Long Thaw
anything by John Houghton
Mann and Kump’s Dire Predictions
Mike Hulme’s Why We Disagree About Climate Change
Debi Glior’s The Trouble with Dragons
Alistair McIntosh’s Hell and High Water
William McDonough & Michael Braungart’s Cradle to Cradle
Robert Butler (@ashdenizen) Christian Hunt (@climateboom) also suggests a second hashtag category, #climefiction, to classify the words of Nigel Lawson, Christopher Booker and presumably Ian Plimer.
EDIT
Also listed now:
Andrew Simm’s Ecological Debt
David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air
Elizabeth Kolbert Field Notes from a Catastrophe
Ghost Forest by Angela Palmer, Trafalgar Square
Ghost Forest – London from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.
It’s an amazing achievement, to unlock this space for this kind of exhibit. The crowds I saw were drawn to the sheer strangeness and hugeness of the shapes of the trees, which are supposed to link the ideas of deforestation and climate change. Angela Palmer has done something remarkable in persuading the Mayor’s office to let her use this space for this work. Its scale and ambition makes the current occupant of the Fourth Plinth look rather irrelevant.
But, being honest, I’m not sure it works that well, either as a polemic or as art; I’m not sure it left people convinced. Palmer had originally envisaged the stumps as standing straight up, which would have made it easier to understand them as the leavings of human greed, rather than the lumber they look like. I’m guessing that it simply wasn’t practical to display the stumps like that. And the huge text billboards seemed to be as much about Palmer’s struggle to realise the work, with Antony Gormley saying “the project can’t be done”, as they were about the issue of deforestation and simply added a level of Fitzcaraldo-in-reverse hubris. (This is like dragging the rainforest to the opera-house rather than vice versa).
When artists create events like this why don’t they let the art speak for itself and instead work closely with an NGO who can make the polemic explicit on site, and far more effectively?
Anyway, please disagree with me.
Steve Waters' Contingency Plan and the Rubik's Cube of climate change
Resilience, one of the two plays that form The Contingency Plan by Steve Waters
Given that theatre presents itself as a form that is profoundly engaged in the politics of the present, that we’re a country that produced David Hare, David Edgar, Howard Brenton and Harold Pinter, why has there been so little theatre about the most central political issue of the time?
Last night I was at one of the events put on by the Cultures of Climate Change group at the University of Cambridge; Time To Act: The Theatre of Climate Change. The blogger/journalist Robert Butler was interviewing playwright Steve Waters about his play The Contingency Plan. The Contingency Plan at The Bush Theatre earlier this year was the first time someone has pulled off a really intelligent piece of theatre about climate change. Even the critics agreed. Set in the very near future, it involves events – personal and political – leading up at a major storm surge that appears to be about to flood a significant section of the East Anglian coast. (Rob mentioned a great moment at the press night for the play when the Daily Telegraph’s reviewer turned to him at the interval and said, aghast, “Robert, tell me all this isn’t true?” Robert had to break the news to him).
Waters made the point that he was initially taken aback that no one else had written a play that dealt directly and successfully with the subject. He also became very conscious at the time of writing that the British theatre establishment wasn’t really looking a play on the topic.
Partly this is because theatre acknowleges something we all understand. The complex, slowly unfolding narrative of climate change is one that’s incredibly inconvenient for artists. It is not, we tend to assume, particularly dramatic in itself. Robert Butler discussed this in a review of The Contingency Plan in Intelligent Life magazine earlier this year:
Climate change is a difficult subject for dramatists. Three years ago Caryl Churchill, a playwright, introduced a talk by two leading environmental scientists by stressing that their work raises an essential dramatic problem: one of distance.To transport science to the stage, a playwright must not only clarify complicated ideas for laypeople, but also evoke the tension of cause and effect. The problem with climate change is that what happens in one place often ends up affecting people in an entirely different place, and at a remote time. The two worlds can seem unrelated. Where’s the catalyst for drama?
As Butler went on to say, Waters succeeds in closing that gap by a having two plays within the single work – and as Peter Gingold of Tippingpoint mentioned on the way out, by being very clever indeed. Having written it though, Waters is also aware that the UK theatre establishment was probably only looking for one play on climate change.
In response to that thought Butler mentioned a discussion he’d heard on Radio 4’s The World Tonight the night before, in which Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, said we have made life difficult for ourselves by the way we’ve approached the issue of climate change:
One of the arguments I make about Copenhagen, says Hulme, is that we’ve stitched together so many concerns – quite serious and real concerns – under one umbrella [namely, the reduction of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere]. It’s a bit like the Rubik’s Cube that came out some years ago. There are so many different combinations that I could never solve it. And this is what we’ve created with Climate Change. A Rubik’s Cube that we can’t solve. Whereas if we begin to tease out the various elements of the problem – the problems of development, the problems of adaptation, the problems of short-lived greenhouse gasses like methane or black soot, separate those out from the problems of long-lived CO2, we could find a much easier set of pathways.
It was a great discussion; Butler did a brilliant job of throwing new thoughts into the ring for Waters to bat back. I’m still trying to work out whether I agree with what Hume says as a political way to approach climate change, but artistically that makes a lot of sense. Even if , hypothetically speaking, Steve Waters has written THE play about climate change, there is huge scope still to pull the Rubik’s Cube apart to allow us to make profounder sense of climate change.
Thanks to Benjamin Morris and Bradon Smith for the event.
Steve mentioned that the The Contingency Plan will be aired by the BBC on Dec 13 to coincide with COP15. I’ll keep you posted with the details.
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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
- 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
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - The Wavewatcher's Companion October 5, 2010