Madeline Bunting in today's Guardian: the "quiet powerhouse" that is RSA Arts & Ecology
Madeleine Bunting’s article on the role of arts in changing perceptions about the environment kicks off by looking at Radical Nature’s The Dalston Mill project, and discusses new work Gustav Metzger and new thoughts from Tim Smit and gives a very warmly appreciated nod to the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre’s work.
Something bizarre is happening in the area of Dalston, in London’s Hackney, where I live. As I write, half a dozen men are hunched over planting half-grown wheat on derelict wasteland. Next to them, architects are building a windmill that will generate the energy to power two bread ovens. When it opens on Wednesday, it will host breadmaking, music, theatre and feasts for anyone who wants to step away from the noise of the shops and traffic-clogged nearby streets.
It’s an installation linked to the Radical Nature exhibition, at the Barbican, in London, but it’s evidence of an art that is penetrating some of the least hospitable places, very far from galleries, to open up conversations in unexpected ways around our relationship with land, food and each other. Can we think differently about the way we use land, produce food and relate to each other?
The origins of Dalston’s wheatfield lie thousands of miles away, with Agnes Denes, one of a generation of American land artists who took art out of galleries and away from making objects to be bought and sold. In 1982 she planted wheat on two acres of wasteland on Battery Park, two blocks from Wall Street; her harvest was worth £158, produced on land valued at $4.5bn. The photos of waving golden wheat juxtaposed against the Manhattan skyline became an iconic image of environmental art. With her collaboration, her idea is now being recreated in Hackney.
At a time of growing anxiety about how we feed a crowded earth – food security was discussed at the G8 last week – her image of fertility and sustenance is even more poignant, and no longer outlandish. Such possibilities of food production in the city could be commonplace for our children. Havana, famously, learned to largely feed itself from within its city limits after imported Russian oil dried up in the 1990s.
The point about Denes’s work in Dalston – and the exhibition at the Barbican – is that it raises for a new generation the role art can play in shifting attitudes towards our natural environment. With fortunate timing, Tate Britain also has a retrospective of another land art pioneer of Denes’s generation, Richard Long. Or look north to Manchester’s International Festival and Gustav Metzger’s extraordinary uprooted, upended trees set into concrete. On every side, artists are putting their shoulder to the wheel, trying to prompt the revolution in values and attitudes required to deal with environmental crisis.
The WWF have just published an interesting piece of work on the need for new ways of reaching out to different identity groups (more of that later today), but it’s intersting to see Bunting spotting art’s role in transcending the boundaries of existing interest groups.
R Beau Lotto: The Ecology of Mind
Filed under: Emma Ridgway, Michaela Crimmin, William Shaw
As part of Radical Nature, the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre presented this extraordinary talk Seeing Myself See: the ecology of mind by neuroscientist R Beau Lotto. As he explains, the live demonstrations show that our personal perception of the world reflects our past physical, social and cultural interactions. Look out for the wonderful experiments with the vision of bees towards the end. As someone has since pointed out, one thing the video doesn’t record is the audiences group responses of “ooooh” and “ah ha”!
More information: http://www.lottolab.org/
Video: building The Dalston Mill
EXYZT | The Dalston Mill from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.
Radical Nature curator Francesco Manacorda and EXYZT architect Nicolas Henninger on the site of The Dalston Mill during the installation.
George Orwell: "all art is propaganda"
There are several curators who have been making the running in laying out the territory of arts’ response to environmental issues, from Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna of the excellent Latitudes to Maja and Reuben Fowkes of translocal.org. There’s a good wide-ranging interview with Maja and Ruben Fowkes in Antennae Magazine in which they discuss altermodernism, the macho nature of Land Art, and how in sustainable art, form becomes a matter of ethics. All great stuff. One thing in the interview pulled me up short though:
As curators, can you provide some idea as to how art has been influential or can be more effective in making people more environmentally aware? Should it ?
We do not envisage art to have utility. As soon as art is seen in this way it is connected to the art market and we’re back into the capitalist, market-driven, growth model of production. If the utility of art is understood as a vehicle for advocating social changes or raising environmental consciousness we come to the problem of art as propaganda, which can also be counterproductive, as it undermines the subversive potential of artistic autonomy.
It’s true this view represents an orthodoxy within art – that artists should not be looked to for their “utility” - but Maja and Ruben Fowkes present this orthodoxy in a way that shows up how questionable this notion is.
Utility isn’t the quality capitalism prizes in art, it’s its lack of utility. Capitalism, the market, call it what you will, drives art forward by seeing art as the ultimate surplus value – as an entity with no purpose.
Jake Chapman is always good on the notion of surplus value in art. This is him discussing George Battaille’s The Accursed Share:
The best argument for a work of art pertaining to that surplus value is that it’s an act of absolute pure capital, pure taste without purpose. I think you could assert that about high modernist art but it’s impossible to say that now, because contemporary art is anthropological, and it’s social.
[Read the full interview by Simon Baker in Papers of Surrealism [PDF 728KB]]
To resist the idea of art having no utility is to resist the market’s attempt to commodify it. I’m with Bob and Roberta Smith on this one; in Hijack Reality Patrick Brill writes about how artists should be happy with the leaden box ticking culture of public commissioning, because at least it is a tangible acknowledgement of a value in art that is non-monetary.
Maja and Reuben Fowkes say:
If the utility of art is understood as a vehicle for advocating social changes or raising environmental consciousness we come to the problem of art as propaganda, which can also be counterproductive, as it undermines the subversive potential of artistic autonomy.
Firstly, there is nothing less endearing about the world of art than art proclaiming its own autonomous subersive potential. Secondly, the idea that propaganda and “subversive potential” are mutually exclusive doesn’t bear close examination.
As George Orwell said, “all art is propaganda”. The importance, he went on, is to distinguish between “good” and “bad” propaganda.
Interestingly, Emma Ridgway’s excellent interview with Gustsv Metzger found him referencing Eric Gill as a major influence. I’ll leave the last word on this to Eric Gill:
Art which is not propaganda is simply aesthetics and is consequently entirely the affair of cultured connoisseurs. It is a studio affair, nothing to do with the common life of men and women, a means of ‘escape.’ Art in the studio becomes simply ’self-expression,’ and that becomes simply self-worship. Charity, the love of God and your neighbour, which, here below, every work of man must exhibit, is lost. If you say art is nothing to do with propaganda, you are saying that it has nothing to do with religion – that it is simply a psychological dope, a sort of cultured drug traffic. I, at any rate, have no use for it. For me, all art is propaganda; and it is high time that modern art became propaganda for social justice instead of propaganda for the flatulent and decadent ideals of bourgeois Capitalism. (excerpt from a letter to The Catholic Herald, 28 October 1934)
The Great Fen Project
I write this as we set off for a meeting in Peterborough which is, wonderfully, interested in the connection between the arts and environmental issues. I had a brilliant taster with respect to the Fens in an extraordinary concert at King’s College, Cambridge in their stunning chapel. This was in support of the Great Fen Project – “the most important conservation project in the UK for 100 years” – www.greatfen.org.uk With Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, the music soaring upwards as the dusk light spread through the building, it seemed anything is possible!
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
The Fourth Plinth: a call to artists
This is my blatant call to artists to use the Fourth Plinth – particularly with respect to bringing fresh ways of exploring social issues in what you could argue is the country’s most central space of debate – Trafalgar Square. I’m not at all sure I want to see myself as the Linda Snell of the RSA but I have a similar yearning for public performance and spectacle – but by artists!
Go to www.oneandother.co.uk and press the “Register your interest” button.
It’s interesting to see that Antony Gormley’s Fourth Plinth project is rapidly becoming a lobbying prospect. The idea of using the plinth as a site for contemporary art was initiated by the RSA , no mean feat as it turned out and we learned a lot about the complexity and the ambiguities of the word “public” with respect to both public space and public art.
William Shaw will shortly be interviewing Bob & Roberta Smith for the website. His idea for the Plinth was shown at the National Gallery last year – very much referencing environmental issues, as does his current work at TATE’s Altermodern exhibition. I went round this yesterday. Bob is having a weekly conversation with the show’s curator Nicholas Bourriard and then makes a new work replacing the previous week’s piece. This latest work addresses climate change and as ever his work debunks – it puts the public into art with no affectation and no patronising – with a directness that is exhilarating.
Collaboration in the face of chill winds
Anne Brodie @ National Glass Centre, Sunderland
This week has brought profound jolts with respect to political and economic predictions on climate change, the first from Rajendra Pachauri, leading the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He seriously doubts that the US will be able to make the pledge needed on carbon reduction. This is frightening given the latest revision on sea levels which has been given wide press coverage this week. Scientists think their rise will be nearly twice as much as they previously reckoned, which would be disastrous for an estimated 600 million people (the UK population was 60.5 million in 2006).
This is why increasing numbers of artist and arts organisations are focusing on the Arctic and the Antarctic for their subject matter.
The most recent exhibition relating to the Antarctic is at the National Glass Centre in Sunderland. You have until 29 March to visit it. Anne Brodie has created a chandelier using a huge block of ice from the Antarctic lit not by electricity but by bacteria. It’s creativity and collaboration that we need and Brodie’s work is an exemplar of both, supported as it is by the British Antarctic Survey, Arts Catalyst and Arts Council England as well of course by the National Glass Centre – together presumably with the advice and support of scientists and technicians.
Anthony Giddens wrote in The Guardian on Wednesday 11 March of the “collaboration essential to coping with climate change” (more on this in his new book The Politics of Climate Change which will be available in a week’s time). It’s collaboration – relationships – which makes me sure that the word “ecology” is the right one for our centre here and of which we need so much more. We have a lot to learn on the subject from artists.
What if?… James Lovelock and the five in six
This week James Lovelock was in conversation with the journalist and writer Tim Radford in front of a packed audience at the RSA. His latest book The Vanishing Face of Gaia is currently 22 on Amazon – a remarkable achievement for a book which is not exactly a laugh a page.
In fact both James and Tim were full of humour at the RSA event, so it’s a moment before some of the facts sink in. People next to me suck in their breath at Jim’s prediction of one billion people on earth by the end of the century. We are around six billion at the moment. I join the breath suckers. Five in six of us. I’m pretty sure I heard him say that India will pretty much be gone entirely. If he’s right.
If he’s right – this is left hanging in the air and hanging in the balance.
Today a headline in The Guardian reads “Obama pulls back on early climate change legislation”. I see this just as I’m trying to write a positive statement for the Business Council for Sustainable Development, ten years focusing on the practical implementation of sustainable development values. There’s so much progress that has been made and now is the time to build on that, rather than gloom up on the worst case scenario. But nor should we forget it. Just as apathy had terrible consequences for so many in the Second World War, so could complacency in the face of this century’s challenges.
Note to self, get on WattzOn.com and see how you’re shaping up Crimmin before tub thumping any further.
Photo: Gansu Province, China, 2007 by Susannah Sayler, used courtesy of The Canary Project. Photo taken following the 2006 drought, China’s worst in 50 years. This is the former site of Qin Tu Hu Lake.
Can art lead on carbon reductions?
Matthew Taylor in his blog on Monday sent out a mobilising call for ideas and active engagement by individuals and communities in addressing the absolute imperative of decreasing our carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. At the moment, as Peter Head said recently in this Arts & Ecology interview, despite the talk there’s little sign from central and local government that we’re any closer to moving towards that target.
The arts have to be more involved than we are in responding to this.
Heaven knows, there’s abundant creativity in the arts sector, which is what is massively needed. I believe there’s also the will amongst an increasing number of individuals and organisations. We have some brilliant initiatives afoot that demonstrate this – galleries and theatres from TATE to Arcola are activating energy reducing strategies. Tipping Point, Cape Farewell and Julie’s Bicycle are doing their damnest to get everyone to wake up. Julie’s Bicycle is launching the Green Music Guide next month – an action plan that aims to reduce the London Music Industry’s greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by 2025. Many artists are incredibly carbon light already, Gustav Metzger being a prime example of someone who addresses the underlying issues in his work, someone who has refused to fly for decades and who nobody could accuse of materialism.
But somehow the impetus for fundamental change is still lagging somewhere in the inactive bracket of our collective arts sector behaviour and image. The message isn’t going out that we are fundamentally bothered. What the public sees are the financial successes, Damien Hirst’s auction being a sublime example, that are splashed across the media.
How do we encourage and reveal, far more publicly, the altruism and ideas that are currently under the radar? We are planning an Arts & Ecology month in June which celebrates and encourages altruism and treading lightly on the planet. Please get in touch if you are involved in initiatives that we don’t know about.
Here’s to getting more visibility for positive action!
Image: Still from Whole Earth by Christopher Keller 2006/7. Currently on show as part of the exhibition Moral Imagination: Current Positions Contemporary Art in the Face of Global Warming
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