Emma Ridgway on Gustav Metzger
Gustav Metzger with Jeremy Deller: June 5 2009, UN World Environment Day, Whitechapel Gallery, London
Does the fact that an artist like Gustav Metzger, who has been creating politically agressive aggressive works for 60 years, is so much in the spotlight at this late point in his career say anything about what we want of our artists now?
Tomorrow, RSA curator Emma Ridgway talks about the work of Gustav Metzger as part of Gustav Metzger Decades 1959 – 2009, currently at London’s Serpentine Gallery. It’s at 3pm Saturday 7 November at the Serpentine.
If you want a flavour of the talk, Ridgway’s recent interview with Metzger about his appeals to artists over the years, is a vivid demonstration of how passionate he is about art’s need to involve itself in the political sphere:
You were an activist before you were an artist. Was there a particular moment, or was it through Bomberg, that you decided that contemporary politics was going to be a core part of your work?
Yes, my interest in politics was there from the age of around 17. That was in wartime, around 1942 – 43, when I was living in Leeds and there I almost completely converted to the idea of becoming some sort of revolutionary figure –art at that point had no place in my conception of the future. It was only in the late summer of 1944, when I felt I would move away from the ideal of becoming a political activist to becoming an artist. So moving into art was a way of moving forward without giving up the political interest; because I thought one could fuse the political ideal of social change with art. For example, the writing of Eric Gill who was both an artist and a craftsman and politically involved was a kind of inspiration to me. I could see this possibility of using the ideas of social change within art, with art and not simply through political, economic activity.
Sometimes we visit exhibitions together and discuss the work. On a number of occasions you have been disinterested in the work because it lacked any political bite or ethical aspect. Is this something you feel artists work must contain?
Yes, I think that is inescapable and the more the world changes, is changing, in the direction of more speed and more activities. And the more that happens the more necessary it is for people to stand back and, not merely in the art sphere but in every sphere of intellectual activity, to stand back and distance oneself and come up with alternative ways of dealing with reality than going along with a direction that is essentially catastrophic and consuming itself and turning itself into a numbers game. Where the technology, especially the technology of the mobile phones and this endless sound machinery that people force into their biological mechanism, seems to be unstoppable; and the more it goes on, the more we need to stand aside and distance ourselves from this rush towards destruction.
Photograph by Benedict Johnson
Environmentalism: towards civilisation, or "uncivilisation"?
The environment movement is failing because it has only a negative vision of the future. Discuss.
That’s the nub of the argument suggested by Josie Appleton of the Manifesto Club in her essay that we published last week, and one echoed by Emma Ridgway’s recent article for the RETHINK exhibition catalogue. Environmentalism, the argument goes, is about limiting possibilities. It’s about what we shouldn’t do. Appleton believes that art has a visionary role in thinking beyond this drought of possiblity; humanity must instead accept its place as the species that transformed the earth – we must take on that leap of consciousness when we start to think of solutions and not start from the romantic baseline of earth as a wilderness, despoiled by man. We must move forwards, not back.
A radical idea. And the polar opposite to another radical idea proposed recently by poet/writer/activist Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine. For them and their Dark Mountain Project, human civilisation itself is the toxic factor that has plunged the earth into crisis. In the blink of an eye – the five thousand years or so in which humanity has accelerated towards modern civilisation – we have so stamped over the intricacies of nature that the wheel is now flying off the machine. We must prepare our exit from civilisation, for “uncivilisation”. In the visual arts, this has echoes in the recent work of Heather and Ivan Morison, whose How to prosper in the coming bad years discussion takes place in The Black Cloud (see above) next weekend in Bristol.
Art, a place where the imagination can roam to extremes, is an excellent laboratory for ideas. The Dark Mountain Project finds its inspiration in literature, particularly in the poetry of Robinson Jeffers – the Californian who shared a romantic vision of wilderness with environmentalist Edward Abbey, referred to below. It was Jeffers who had first suggested the idea of “inhumanism” that inspired the Dark Mountain Project. Human civilisation was, Jeffers suggested, always too self-centred to understand the complexity and beauty of the world around it. The Dark Mountain Project also plant their flag in the literature of Joseph Conrad and his “heart of darkness”.
There have been some interesting responses to the Dark Mountain provocation. In the New Statesman, John Gray responded to the Dark Mountain provocation by demonstrating that literature has in fact been much more successful at showing the catastrophic results of “uncivilisation” than eulolgising it. There is nothing romantic about the crumbling of civil society. Gray too cites Joseph Conrad, to make the point that Conrad, like J G Ballard – shows the genuine horror of what a society in disintegration actually looks like. Both Conrad and Ballard were witness to the atrocities that happen when the crust of civilization is removed.
(On a sidenote, Paul Kingsnorth and I have disagreed elsewhere about whether Cormac MacCarthy’s The Road is a novel primarily about climate change. Gray’s line of argument reminds you that MacCarthy’s book, in which baby-eating survivors scavage the land, displays the awful consequence of uncivilisation.)
But as both suggest, it’s time to rexamine the givens. Environmentalism hasn’t produced the major shift in culture that the global warming era requires. Something radical has to shift. Appleton’s idea is that to save civilisation we need more civilisation, not less:
The anthropocene is here, and there is no way back. To wish that we could retreat is the mythical fantasy of wishing that we never ate the apple or stole the fire. It is a wish that we were children again, back in a former stage of history. We cannot reverse out of the anthropocene but only go forward.
I doubt John Gray would quite see eye to eye with Appleton’s thesis either. Gray’s book Straw Dogs was a vigorous assault on the idea of that idea of human centrality in nature. Appleton’s argument is unashamedly anthropocentric; in fact the very notion of the anthropocene, by definition, is a human-centred concept. Gray follows James Lovelock: such assumptions of human supremacy over nature are fundamentally arrogant and hubristic. Myself, I find the technological postivism of Appleton’s approach hard to embrace. Above all, I don’t believe, as she does, that, ” The climate moves slowly; we have time.”
The Black Cloud by Heather and Ivan Morison (Bristol, 2009)photographed by ac (y su camarófono)
Towards Human Species Consciousness
Guest blog by Josie Appleton: The discussion about climate change is full of sweeping rhetoric – references to “consciousness”, “future generations”, doing “something that matters”. Yet somehow, in practice, climate politics ends up being so banal: it is about targets, carbon calculations, energy bills.
My essay on the RSA Arts and Ecology website The challenge of climate change: Towards human species consciousness is really a thought experiment, to try to look at climate change through a deeper moral/existential frame:
“The first lesson of climate change is that we are living in the anthropocene. Through our actions we have changed the very operations of the atmosphere; we have changed the chemical composition of the Earth. The situation of climate change is an awesome and weighty reminder of how much human powers have increased. This implies a responsibility to use those powers for good, and not to fritter them away or use them destructively.”
I suggest that we need to develop a “human species consciousness” – to act consciously as a species on a planet. What might this look and feel like? How might it affect our views on the future? How would we choose?…
Josie Appleton is a writer, and convenor of the Manifesto Club, which campaigns for freedom against the hyper-regulation of everyday life. She has contributed to a number of publications, including the Spectator, The Times, Times Literary Supplement and Daily Express. She has written The Challenge of Climate Change: Towards human species consciousness for the RSA Arts and Ecology website.
RSA Arts & Ecology Cumbria: seminar
The RSA Fellows met in Cumbria on Friday for an Arts & Ecology seminar. From what I hear, it was a great success. Massive thanks to Judith Friedman for this video:
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.
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.
Should we still be flying for art's sake?
When Emma Thompson joined the protest against the third runway at Heathrow earlier this year, MP Geoff Hoon was scathing. “She’s been in some very good films,” he said. “Love Actually is very good, but I worry about people who I assume travel by air quite a lot and don’t see the logic of their position.”
I remember being extremely disturbed by what he said. Shocked even. Here was a former Defence Minister and Chief Whip, one of the tough guys, publicly coming out in favour of an excruciatingly meandering rom com. One of Richard Curtis’s worst, in fact.
Less surprising was Hoon’s attack on an actress for joining the ranks of the climate protestors. When artists lend their weight to a cause they open themselves to charges of hypocrisy. Who is she, an actress who flies across to Hollywood on a regular basis, to tell us not to fly?
The poets John Kinsella and Melanie Challenger are currently writing a work for the RSA Arts & Ecology website called Dialogue between the body and the soul, which grew out of both the poets’ decision not to fly to poetry readings. Now, even if every published poet in the world gave up flying it would hardly dent the world’s carbon footprint, but for each of them it is a major decision. Poetry is an endangered species of an artform, and practitioners have to take their audience wherever they find it. For Challenger, who is a new poet starting out, this is the kind of public commitment that could hobble her career for good.
Interestingly, there have been rumblings of unease elsewhere in the art community about the amount of too-ing and fro-ing required by the modern art machine. Two years ago Gustav Metzger initiated Reduce Art Flights; a manifesto contribution to Sculpture Projects Münster that called for artists to go cold turkey on their addiction to international travel.
With full cognisance that it is ‘a drop in the ocean’, the RAF ‘manifesto’ nevertheless invites voluntary abandonment – a fundamental, personal, bodily rejection of technological instrumentalization and a vehement refusal to participate in the mobility increasingly endemic to the globalized art system.
And earlier this year artists Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow invited colleagues to sign a “I will not fly for art“ pledge. Garrett and Catlow are the people behind furtherfield.org and HTTP Gallery. The Geoff Hoon in you might feel tempted to note that both are committed to the ideas of virtual art in networked space. Give up flying? Well, maybe that’s easy for them to say.
The point is there is no one-size-fits-all pledge. That’s the unfairness of Hoon’s jibe. We may accept that air travel has been the UK’s fastest growing emissions sector in this decade, and that carbon emitted by planes in the atmosphere is more damaging than carbon emitted by cars on the ground. We may perfectly reasonably oppose plans for further airport expansion. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want Emma Thompson to fly to the US to make Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang. (OK. Bad example.) Some artforms would disappear without travel. For others it’s more of an indulgence.
As Dialogue between the body and the soul winds to a conclusion, I’m going to use it as an excuse to ask a few writers and artists their thoughts on what they do — and don’t — feel comfortable to publicly commit to. But where do you draw your line? How do you come to your own personal accomodation with this? Are you willing to stick your neck out and risk the Hoonist barbs or does the risk that your campaigning might overshadow your art make you uncomfortable about making such grand gestures?
I’d ask Geoff Hoon himself, but he’s keeping his head down this morning as the latest victim of the Daily Telegraph’s Five Minute Hate.
More on Robin McKie's article from The Observer
Well we have to be doing something right, because McKie’s article got this response from factually wayward Daily Telegraph young fogey James Delingpole, lambasting “eco-luvvies”. It’s a conspiracy! froths Delingpole:
What Cape Farewell does brilliantly, Delingpole fulminates, is breed wave after wave of high profile propagandists for the authorised Al Gore/James Hansen version of man made climate doom.
Um… yes. And? Delingpole (Ed. public school & Oxon), however, clearly thinks using culture to demonstrate things he doesn’t believe in is wrong.
"Global warming is as much a cultural problem as a scientific or political one…"
Robin McKie, science journalist for The Observer, has been to see Steve Waters’ The Contingency Plan, and has noticed that that there is something significant happening across the arts:
Until now, scientists, journalists and politicians have dominated the debate about the threat of greenhouse warming. Many have fought well and brought a proper sense of urgency to the debate. However, it will be our writers, artists and playwrights who will finally delineate the crisis and explore in human terms what lies ahead. Only then can we hope to come to terms with our endangered world….Thus global warming is as much a cultural problem as a scientific or political one and deserves to be addressed through the activities of those who define our culture: our artists and writers.
These individuals will be the ones who reveal to us the kinds of lives we may lead in the near future – not just in physical, but in moral and social terms – as our planet heats up. In other words, we need an Orwell or a Huxley to help us define the terrible issues that confront us – and to judge from the recent efforts of Waters, McCarthy and McEwan we can have a fair amount of confidence that our artists and writers will deliver. Whether or not we choose to listen to them is a different matter.
“Writers and artists are getting warmer” by Robin McKie
Amy Balkin: my 20 minutes reading the IPCC report
I went to Manchester to visit Futuresonic yesterday and joined in Amy Balkin’s artwork Reading the IPCC’s Fourt Assessment on Climate Change outside the Centre for the Urban Built Environment.
Afterwards I spoke to Amy Balkin about her work there:
Amy Balkin | Futuresonic 2009 from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.
With two more days to go you may still find free slots if you check out Amy Balkin’s website.
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