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?
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
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.
Jeremy Deller: how art "digs into public life"
We have had my brother-in-law staying during Jeremy Deller’s latest project, ‘It is What It Is’. We have been working with Jeremy on the Bat House Project. Both works provide a mechanism, a vehicle (literally in the case of ‘It is What It Is’) to encourage debate and engagement with particular issues.
Dragging a wrecked car from Iraq across the States is simply not art, said my brother-in-law very firmly, fixing his attentions solely on the object rather than the discourse generated.
An alternative to the car being in the States, it could have been on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square instead of Antony Gormley’s forthcoming project. But both works pull us members of the public into art that ultimately is process not product.
Why is it that many people just won’t have it that the purpose of art is to elicit participation from us, to open up thinking, to encourage us to review the human condition and to nudge or provoke a response? Why can’t they relax and just accept that artists can use whatever materials they damn well choose – be that the human body, a urinal, oil paint or bronze or a cork screw to actify that purpose.
The site is still up of the road diary by Nato Thompson that is part of It is What It Is, although the trip ended on 17 April 09. I urge you to read it and see what, as Thompson says, “digging into public life”, has revealed.
Meanwhile off line ‘It is What It Is’ has provoked more conversation in our house than any more conventional piece of art over the past two weeks. This is far more important to me than convincing my brother-in-law that it is art. I did get a rueful smile from David when I noted that having argued for half an hour the night before, he came down to breakfast the next morning wanting to begin all over again. And then seemingly tangentially, we started talking about war.
After all the second part of the work’s title is ‘Conversations about Iraq’.
www.conversationsaboutiraq.com
Artists digging for victory part 2
This is from an article I have in this morning’s Observer magazine:
Flicking through a history of community gardening in America, Amy Franceschini discovered that between 1941 and 1943, 20 million Americans took part in the Victory Gardens programme, an initiative created to feed the nation during wartime.
“I was thinking, when have 20 million Americans ever participated on that scale besides sports – or shopping?” says Amy, nursing a cup of green tea in her studio, an expansive floor of a former warehouse. “And San Francisco was the most successful place for Victory Gardens. They took it on massively here.”
In a local newspaper she found a photo dated 18 April 1943. There, in front of the august neo-classical pillars and dome of the San Francisco City Hall, were row upon row of vegetables. “And I thought, ‘We have to have a garden in front of city hall again.’”[...]
“What artists do is seed things. They plant ideas,” says Michaela Crimmin, head of the RSA Arts and Ecology Centre. Which maybe explains why these cheap, relatively small-scale projects like Franceschini’s can have such an influence.
Harvesting food as art is growing in the UK, too. Patrick Brill – otherwise known as the artist Bob and Roberta Smith – currently features as one of the new generation of “Altermodern” artists at Tate Britain. In 2007, he created a work called The Really Super Market in Middlesbrough. Encouraging local gardeners, schoolchildren and farmers to grow vegetables, they turned the town centre into a giant farmer’s market for a day, an event that culminated in a community cook-in.
The idea took root. This summer, in east London’s Gunpowder Park, artists Amy Plant and Ella Gibbs are running a ramshackle Energy Café, using only renewable resources to cook organic food foraged locally, or supplied from within a six-mile radius.
Turner prize-winner Jeremy Deller initiated a 10-year project in Munster, in Germany, in 2007, giving all the gardeners on a community plot a large leather-bound diary in which to record their notes – whatever they wanted to write. In exchange for their participation, Deller handed each an envelope containing seeds of the dove tree. When planted, the trees should flower for the first time at around the point the project comes to fruition, at which time Deller will collect the diaries and put them in a library. “The gardens are a vernacular art work in their own right,” says Deller. “They’re homemade and made up as they go along. The people that tend them are thinking about colour and form.”
Meanwhile, for the past nine years, the artists Heather and Ivan Morison have been working on a garden and woodland in Wales – originally a community garden plot developed as a conscious echo of Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness. (Jarman, of course, was another artist who helped change the way we think about gardens.)
The rest is here.
Blog round up
Bruce Sterling at Wired blogs on a Grist post about Austin, Texas, announcing it’s going to create a “smart grid” – the radical resource-saving electricity grid championed by people like Thomas Friedman here.
Jeremy Deller’s Palais Tokio blog, about his Palais de Tokio Carte Blanche show (on until Jan 19) has a great, joyous video Deller video on it. Audio stuff coming soon.
Eco Art Blog is amused by the number of greenwashing ads in a magazine he picks up:
eco-friendly spark plug.” I once again cringe at my use of “eco” in the
name for this blog, but I guess this company couldn’t come up with
anything better either.
Expose Maximum has some photographs of some of the installations from the 48oC Festival taking place in New Delhi. (Michaela Crimmin of RSA Arts and Ecology is there to deliver a talk/provocation this weekend and has just sent an email saying it’s an “incredible initiative”). Delhi Greens is blogging it.
The Ashden Directory blog references our David Lan interview to say: “David Lan gets it“.
Free Soil lists this symposium on bioart, guerilla and avant-gardening taking place in Rotterdam on 19th December, run by The Institute for the Unstable Media. It’ll be live streamed.
Finally RealClimate writes one of those essays we love to read on an early-20th Century scientific dispute, The case of the midwife toad, when Lamarkians gained a boost from a scientist whose work appeared to overturn Darwin’s model. The eagerness with which maverick scientist Paul Kammer’s theories were received by the public and the press has interesting parallels with the way climate change deniers are given oxygen in the popular media.
Digging for victory
Fritz Haeg, Edible Estates regional prototype garden #2: Lakewood, CA, 2006, owners: Foti Family, produced in collaboration with Millard Sheets Gallery for the exhibition Fair Exchange and Machine Project, Los Angeles
There’s a fascinating article by Berin Golonu on artist Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates and other similar initiatives online at Art Papers. Haeg famously believes in tearing up people’s front lawns to create something less dull and water-greedy and more productive from them. He created an intervention last year at the Tate’s Turbine Hall along these lines.
The greening of suburban American has become a major issue in the US, as Peter Head mentioned in this recent Arts and Ecology interview. Art Papers also points to the work of John Bela’s collabration with the US Slow Food Nation on San Francisco’s wonderful Civic Center Victory Garden, which in turn drew inspiration from Amy Franceschini and the Futurefarmers organisation she founded. The article also namechecks NY architecture practice Work.ac and their ideas of the Public Farm.
Golonu gnaws briefly over the but-is-it-still-art question:
Victor Margolin considers this question in his catalog essay for the exhibition Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art.
“How do we think about art that moves from discourse to action, art whose intent is to produce a useful result,” he writes,
and by what criteria do we evaluate this work?… In the never-ending
debates on the difference between art and design, the distinction
usually comes down to the primacy of discourse in artistic practice….
But when artists want to achieve social results without identifying
themselves as designers, how should the critical community respond?
“Once artists enter a realm of action,” he continues, “it is difficult
to characterize their projects differently from those of other actors
such as landscape designers or even architects… the discursive has
spilled over into the practical, and the practical has become more
discursive…”
… but without getting anywhere much. The point isn’t whether it’s art or not, but the fact that it’s happening and as a movment appears to be reaching a kind of critical mass.
EDIT:
In addition to the above, Michaela Crimmin reminds me of Jeremy Deller’s work on allotments in Berlin, which fits into the same picture… and looking at David Barrie’s most recent blog post, there’s also the example of Dott07’s City Farming project in Middlesborough:
In the project, people grew food in vacant public places across the town, took cookery classes in neighbourhood centres and then, come the final harvest, cooked a ‘town meal’, in an event attended by over 8000 people and curated by artist Bob and Roberta Smith.
RSA Bookshop
The RSA Bookshop, in partnership with Blackwell's the UK's leading academic bookseller, offers Fellows and friends an opportunity to purchase books and to explore our speakers’ ideas in greater detail. Visit the RSA Bookshop.
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