Gustav Metzger: artists "taking moral standpoints"
Forty-eight years ago today, Gustav Metzger took a bottle of hydrochloric acid to the South Bank and set about destroying suspended sheets of nylon in an act of what he called Auto-Destructive painting. For Metzger, whose personal world view was formed in the shadow of World War II, this was an act of protest against war, capitalism and the commodification of the art world. Half a century on he is still making corrosive art. The Manchester International Festival opened yesterday, with Gustav Metzger’s Flailing Trees, 21 literally up-rooted willow trees , as one of its centrepieces. “This project,” he says, “is about brutality, the brutality with which we human beings mistreat nature.”
On the RSA Arts & Ecology site curator Emma Ridgway interviews Metzger about his long career and, in particular, the various “appeals” he has made to artists to become more politically engaged.
Gustav Metzger: In the broadest sense it is a question of artists being part of a much wider community — a world community — and facing up to the world-wide conditions that may make future life impossible. To oppose those world developments that are extremely destructive. Taking moral standpoints and from there moving into political activities, however modest, to affect the world.
Emma Ridgway interviews Gustav Metzger.
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.
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Strange beasts in Shrewsbury
Theo Jansen is unveiling one of his new wind-driven creatures at Shrewsbury’s Shift-Time: A Festival of Ideas this July. This gives us an excuse to show this piece of much-loved video of his “strandbeests”:
STRANDBEESTEN_TRAILER from Alexander Schlichter on Vimeo.
Shift-time is taking its inspiration from the Darwin celebrations this year. It also features a new sound/video work Follow The Voice by the great Marcus Coates:
In a playful echo of Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Marcus Coates’ new film work, Follow the Voice establishes striking parallels between a range of familiar man-made sounds and an equally evocative chorus of animal cries and calls. Chasing pockets of sound around the urban landscape of Shrewsbury, (the ‘beep’ of the supermarket checkout; the siren of a reversing delivery lorry) and by slowing down or speeding up his recordings, Coates reveals an extraordinary likenesses with the natural calls of animal species. Follow the Voice captures the heightened feeling of interconnectedness at the heart of Darwin’s view of the world, and reminds us of the spirit of curiosity and discovery that infuses his ideas.
Follow The Voice premieres on July 11 and is installed in the Unitarian Church where Darwin worshipped as a child.
More on Shift-Time here.
George Monbiot, Franny Armstrong, The Age of Stupid at RSA May 22
As part of the national launch of The Age of Stupid we’re having a special screening here at the RSA on May 22. Afterwards George Monbiot, director Franny Armstrong and Dr Richard Betts of the Climate Impacts research unit at the Met Office will be joining a discussion that will be broadcast via the web to other cinemas around the country. The event is free but you must book. See RSA Arts & Ecology for more details.
EDIT. Unsurprisingly, all tickets for this went within a few hours of us putting up the announcement. Apologies to anyone who didn’t get a ticket.
Manchester: Readers still needed
Amy Balkin still needs people to read the full IPCC report for her Futuresonic performace, May 14-16.
10 YouTube videos from artists responding to the environment
Gemma Lloyd has put together this list of 10 artists responding on the Respond! site, which includes Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, a slightly scratchy talk on Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, film of Aleksandra Mir creating her First Woman On The Moon and this one by Tomas Saraceno:
See the videos here.
Art, religion and shock
Paul Fryer‘s Peita, installed in a cathedral in the French town of Gap has been raising a few eyebrows among church goers. It shows Christ Electocuted, arms semaphored, looking much like a victim of Abu Ghraib. Parishoners have protested, say repoorts. The statue has been robustly defended by the Cathedral’s Bishop Jean-Michel di Falco;
“The scandal is not where one believes it to be. I wanted the provoked shock to make us once again conscious of the scandal of someone being nailed to a cross. “Usually, one does not feel any real emotions in front of something really scandalous: the Crucifixion. If Jesus had been sentenced today, he would have to reckon with the electric chair or other barbaric methods of execution. Scandalous is therefore not Jesus in the electric chair, but the indifference to his crucifixion.”
Enterprisingly, Paul Fryer’s local paper the Waltham Forest Guardian jumped at the chance of a local angle: “LEYTON: Christ Sculpture Provokes Fury”. But to be fair, it also snagged an interview with the artist in which he expresses gratitude for di Falco’s defense.
Mr Fryer said he was pleased to have the support of the bishop, because his intention behind the piece, which is no larger than a small child and is made of waxwork and human hair, was to evoke pity for someone being persecuted by another.
Mr Fryer said: “The meaning is open to interpretation. But the original meaning of the Latin word Pieta is pity. To take pity is a crucial part of living, human beings taken pity others.
“Today people might be electrocuted or given the lethal injection, but it is all the same thing, someone ending another person’s life.
Art 21 | Blog ran a thread recently called What’s So Shocking About Contemporary Art which wondered if art could shock any more. Clearly it can, but I doubt if it did in this case, whatever the papers say. This isn’t exactly Piss Christ; it’s a work that blurs the line between the historically sacred and the contemporaneously secular, and doesn’t contain much that could possibly shock the modern European’s sense of religion, however devout. The shocking part, as the Bishop points out, is that the electric chair is still at use in the modern world. I wonder if any of the good citzens of Gap were actually shocked by Paul Fryer’s work. I somehow doubt it. This looks much like a French slow news day story.
Photo by Sjoren ten Kate
What is the value of art?
Sometimes it’s worth asking the questions that are so big people people only raise them shortly before last orders. Kudos to Art 21 | blog who have been running a series of what they call “Flash Points” over the last few months. Their topics have included What’s So Shocking About Contemporary Art? and How Can Art Affect Political Change?
They’ve just started a new strand with What Is The Value of Art, introduced by Beth Allen:
The questions of how art is valued and how it is monetized inevitably overlap: artworks perceived as “important” yield high prices at auction; economic development funding goes to out-of-the-way cultural institutions that bring high quality programming and consequently, tourists, to their neighborhoods; exhibitions that push boundaries attract grants from foundations dedicated to promoting free speech; arts education is consistently underfunded… Buried within questions about the economics of art, are assumptions and often, judgments, about its value that beg to be examined: How is the value of an artist’s intellectual versus physical labor calculated? Are collectible works valued differently than ephemeral projects? How does individual “taste” and critical reception affect the value of an artwork, exhibition, or institution? What factors influence the way we value an artistic experience, as individuals and as a society? How do we quantify the intangible benefits that art education provides? How do we talk about the subtle and personal value that art has in our lives?
And, of course, they’re looking for contributors to stir the pot.
Image: Photo of Fear Eats The Soul [date unknown] by Rirkrit Tiravanija taken at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, November 22 2008 by j-No
G20 protests: does the lack of iconography = a lack of vision?
Caleb Klaces: In Everything that rises: a book of convergences, Lawrence Weschler compares graphic imagery used in Communist-controlled Poland’s Solidarity movement with later social justice movements in the US. He argues that the image of an angry crowd facing directly forwards was instrumental in really bringing people together in both cases. In his view, the image was more powerfully drawn in Poland than the US because the movement itself had more vitality.
The image I remember from the ultimately unsuccessful anti-war in Iraq protests in London is of Tony Blair with a tea cup on his head: “Make tea not war”. The British anti-nuclear movement has long had the circular peace sign, and the Greenpeace dove and rainbow.
The peace sign was still the face-paint of choice at last week’s protests in London around the G20. The symbol has arguably lost some of its import by being employed in support of such a broad spectrum of causes. But I haven’t seen a powerful new image or symbol from the Climate Camp and Put People First protests that the discontented could own and rally around.
Has anyone else located a semiotic centre? If not, what could it be?
Caleb Klaces edits the poetry website likestarlings.com; his review of Far North is on the RSA Arts & Ecology website.
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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