In partnership with the RSA’s Art & Ecology programme and SCAN, The Arts Catalyst presents a forum at the RSA on Friday 28 November (10am to 6pm) exploring the impact of nuclear power in art and culture. Prominent artists, writers and experts will discuss their work and engagement with the issues around nuclear energy, from Hiroshima through the 50s’ ‘white heat of technology’ and the Cold War nuclear tensions to present day energy debates. Speakers include the controversial American ‘nuclear sculptor’ James Acord, whose work caused huge public and media attention as the highlight of The Arts Catalyst’s ATOMIC exhibition in London ten years ago. The RSA, 8 John Adam Street, WC2. Nearest tube Charing Cross/Embankment. Admission is free, please register at admin@artscatalyst.org
Interspecies @ Cornerhouse, Manchester
Artists exploring gray areas: Interspecies at Manchester Cornerhouse until March 22. Four new pieces that attempt to work with animals, not as subjects of their art, but “as equals”. The artists involved include performance artist Kira O’Reilly, whose piece involved 36 hours living, sleeping and eating, with a pig called Delilah. You can read O’Reilly’s blog about the experience on her site here.
It’s not the first time O’Reilly has worked with pigs, though last time it was with a dead one, and the Daily Mail was incensed. “IT’S ART SAYS THE NAKED WOMAN WHO’LL HUG A DEAD PIG ON STAGE” ran the headline to a piece that accompanied her 2006 performance in Newlyn.
Interspecies has been curated by Arts Catalyst, an organisation that works in that strange but sometimes extremely productive space of the Venn diagram between arts and science. They partnered with us to run the Nuclear Forum at the end of last year with Gustav Metzger and James Acord – exploring the depths of another subject that often goes undiscussed.
The power of the subject of Interspecies is the way in which it encounters our increasingly uncomfortable relationship with animals. As any anthropologist will tell you, animals have always been the subject of taboos – which ones you should eat, and which ones you should stroke.
Post-industrial society assumes it’s past such primitive notions as taboos. OK, sex is everywhere in these days, but try asking people when they last saw a dead body? In our society death, as natural a process as sex or birth, has become invisible. Victorians used to hold dinner parties in graveyards; you’d get arrested if you tried that now.
I was talking to the designer Julia Lohmann recently; she is the creator of the cow bench – a single cow’s hide stretched over a wooden skeleton that ends up looking uncomfortably like the animal that surrendered its skin for us. It’s physically uncomfortable to sit on too, but that’s the point. Lohmann is in fact a passionate animal lover. When she returned from a spell working on a farm to London she saw an advertisement for dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets that so disturbed her that she set out on a process that ended with making a sofa that looked like what it really was.
And, as O’Reilly’s work suggests, our relationship with meat has never been stranger.
Nuclear: art and radioactivity
Nice big mention of Arts Catalyst’s installation by Chris Oakley and Simon Hollington & Kypros Kyprianou at the Nicholls & Clarke Building in Spitalfields in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph – and also a good plug for the RSA nuclear debate on the 28th November featuring artists Gustav Metzger and Steve Kurtz, and CND chair Kate Hudson. It’s also one of Time Out’s picks.
The debate’s free, but places are now in very, very short supply. Email for details.
Going nuclear
Nuclear energy is one of the great unresolved issues of climate change. James Lovelock says we can’t do without it. George Monbiot says thanks, but we still don’t need it. Artists are, in theory at least, people who love unresolved spaces, so how will they respond to this? We’re about to find out. Arts Catalyst have commissioned the exhibition NUCLEAR: art and radioactivity features new work by Chris Oakley and Simon Hollington and Kypros Kyprianou. Hollington and Kyprianou have created what sounds as if it is going to be a remarkable “immersive narrative environment” blending fact and fiction, at the Nicholls and Clarke Building, 3-10 Shoreditch High Street, Spitalfields, London E1; it’s open from 14-3- November, admission free. Take a look at the Arts Catalyst site for opening times. 
There is, apparently, trouble at the aging BANG nuclear facility in central London; you are invited to visit. There’s also there’s this talkaoke event on November 14.
And that will be followed by the Nuclear Forum, held in conjunction with RSA Arts & Ecology, featuring an appearance by extraordinary sculptor James L. Acord who spent the 80s and 90s attempting unsuccessfully, and controversially, to secure some material to incorporate in his work. Acord’s collision with the nuclear industry was – in part – the inspiration for James Flint’s novel The Book of Ash. The forum marks ten years since Acord’s last involvement with Arts Catalyst. Details of how to attend below:
Thanks to Tracey for the photo of Dungeness power station
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