Help us choose the best art of 2009
Still from Flooded MacDonalds, Superflex, 2009
It has been an extraordinary year for art that responds to issues surrounding the environment. In the (almost) five years since we have been operating, there has never been so much great work being produced. Art never speaks with a single voice, but there has been an increasing cluster of activity around climate change, politics and the enviroment.
It’s time to compile our annual list of the best of the year. We have an embarrassment of riches to chose from. Radical Nature at the Barbican; 100 Days at the Arnolfini; Denmark’s RETHINK; Steve Water’s The Contingency Plan at the Bush Theatre; Artsadmin’s 2 Degrees; Heather and Ivan Morison’s The Black Cloud; Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid, Manchester’s Environment 2.0 at Futuresonic 2009, Superflex’s Flooded McDonalds Petko Dourmana’s Post Global Warming Survival Kit or one of the Yes Men’s interventions – like their one yesterday at COP15 which proved so embarrassing to the Canadians … that’s just dipping our toes in the water.
What were your highlights of the year – and why? What have I criminally overlooked in that above list? What were the best books and stories – the best films? We want to include your comments in the piece which we’ll put up on the main RSA Arts & Ecology Centre website.
Tell us in the comment field below – or email me at william.shaw@rsa.org.uk.
New York's Waterpod; artists of the floating world
When Radical Nature opened, some critics bemoaned the fact that the exhibition was cloistered away from both the environment it discussed, and the audience that it deserved to reach. EXYZT’s wonderful Dalston Mill project was a clear answer to those critics
In New York, The Waterpod – pictured above – has been slowly circumnavigating Manhattan. Conceived by artists Mary Mattingly and Mira Hunter as a literal platform for art, it brings New Yorkers to the water that surrounds their island. Like Dalston Mill it provides not only a space for performaces, artworks and discussions, but it creates a triangulation between food, community and environment. This live-aboard ark grows at least some of its own food and includes its own henhouse.
For a taste of what it’s like to live and work aboard The Waterpod, try this NY Times article, which reveals that the floating pod was built from a variety of donated materials, including metal railings used in a Broadway production of Equus, and foliage print wallpaper recycled from the US soap As The World Turns.
It’s currently moored at Pier 5, Brooklyn Bridge Park but will be moving on to Staten Island after the 17th. Have any readers visited The Waterpod? Did it work?
Photo: thanks to BH301.A7
10 ways of looking at Radical Nature
The critics pass judgement on Radical Nature, at the Barbican and elsewhere:
PERCEPTIVELY Hari Kunzru The Guardian: Nature is in crisis… It’s not even really beautiful any more. It’s a problem, a remnant, something that needs to be conserved and argued for. The chances of being romantically overwhelmed are slim.
PROVOCATIVELY Regine Debatty We make money not art. As long as these artworks do not step out of museums and galleries most people hardly ever visit … , I fear that the impact of their work might be somewhat limited.
NEGATIVELY Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times: The show just doesn’t hang together. “Museums,” said Smithson, “are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.” Forty years on, we’re still in the museum.
POSITIVELY Madeleine Bunting in The Guardian: 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.
ARTISTS SHOULD STICK TO ART-ISHLY Rachel Campell-Johnston, The Times. It’s all very worthy and often delightful… But do artists contribute anything practical?
THOUGHTFULLY Skye Sherwin in The Guardian: Francesco Manacorda, identifies… a dangerous dualism concerning how we think about nature and culture:.. but while many artists here lament the rift or attempt to close the gap, only a few explore its potential…
DEFEATEDLY Christopher Werth: Newsweek: That somewhat defeated tone pervades much of the newer work, which reveals little of the excitement[... ] found in the campaigns of Beuys and Ukeles. Perhaps that’s only natural after 40 years of environmental art, when for most of that time, so few have paid attention to the message.
ENTHUSIASTICALLY Throughstones blog: The Radical Nature project is an extremely important landmark exhibition, and groundbreaking in the degree to which it reaches out to the public and integrates with real life as it is lived. It will for sure have a far-reaching influence for many years to come.
OBTUSELY Rowan Moore The Evening Standard: Saving the planet is more to do with the Chinese changing the way they build power stations, or Americans changing the way they make cars, than anything an artist can do.
LOOK AT US, WE’RE CYNICAL AND ENVIRONMENTALISTS-ARE-ALL -FASCISTS ANYWAY-ISHLY Anorak.co.uk on the Tree Radical parade through central London: One man has painted his face and others are raising their arms in the air, in the manner of Moseley’s mob. The driver tells us that these are the Green Shirts not the fascist Black Shirts. Old Mr A says “same difference”.
Some are thoughtful, some are downright enthusiastic; some seem distinctly rattled, too.
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.
Radical trees: video
Tree Radical: London July 9 2009 from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.
Not exactly Jeremy Deller, but the tourists liked it. www.radicalnature.co.uk
RSA Arts & Ecology is twittering: twitter.com/artsandecology
Radical Nature: 50 trees parade through London today
Press release begins:Radical Nature @ The Barbican reviewed
Skye Sherwin in The Guardian:
Even the remotest hermit knows that the effects of climate change are the greatest threat faced by mankind. So where does that leave artists? Can they contribute anything to debates about the environment? Might the imperatives of environmentalism constrain their freedom to make interesting work? And what do we actually mean when we talk about nature, anyway? Is it polluted oceans or something that occurs closer to home? These are some of the questions answered by Radical Nature, a show with a refreshingly can-do attitude that opens at the Barbican today. Subtitled “art and architecture for a changing planet”, it includes land art, installation, video and sculpture ranging from 1969 to the present day.
This was my own quick look:
Radical Nature | Barbican 2009 from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.
Change and the power of narrative
When it comes to changing perceptions, artist Heather Morison, whose work with Ivan Morison is strongly located in narrative, argues for the importance of story telling in a new interview on the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre website:
One of the things which I find really fascinating is how when you want to tell people about things the best way is through storytelling. Because stories always stick and they move through generations, whereas a lot of information we are getting at the moment about what might happen to us in the future and things you ought to do, it is just information. It just goes in one ear and out the other a lot. Unless it is made easy for you to do things then you don’t really bother. But if you hear a story it can enchant you and you can also tell it to someone else as well. It is very powerful it is part of our folk history really isn’t it? And I think we have really lost it in western culture — we have lost our history in that way, you know, and so stories don’t get told so often.
Heather and Ivan Morison’s I Am So Sorry. Goodbye. (Escape Vehicle No. 4) (2008) will be featured in Radical Nature, opening at the Barbican Centre on June 19.
Read the Heather Morison interivew.
Photo: Tales of Space and Time by Heather and Ivan Morison, Folkestone 2008
RSA Bookshop
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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
- 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