Arts & Ecology blog

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Superflex: rising levels of discomfort

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My Arts & Ecology colleague William Shaw, editor of our site, interviewed Superflex on the eve of their work opening at the South London Gallery. I went to see their film on Sunday afternoon. It took us, me and my 16-year-old son, well over an hour to get there so we were muttering “it better be worth it” under our breaths as the rain drizzled down...

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Public art & the horse's arse

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If art is dependent on context, what kind of context does the new industrial landscape of Ebbsfleet make? In the art world, the thumbs nay be up for Mark Wallinger's Ebbsfleet horse. Ian Jack has a column in Saturday's Guardian which looks at this from a different persective; what the people who live in the economically uncertain landscape of Ebbsfleet think of Wallinger's horse:

According to Sandra Soder, the secretary of the Gravesend Historical Society, Wallinger's horse has aroused diverse local opinion, with the loudest voice coming from those most opposed, but the general feeling is that the promoters had deemed the people of north Kent "too culturally inept" to have a deciding view on the form Britain's biggest work of art should take. In the words of one Northfleet man, nobody had asked whether or not "they wanted to wake up every morning looking into a giant horse's arse".

The significance of a plastic bag

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MICHAELA CRIMMIN: One of this week’s pleasures – pleasure with a big kick in its tail – was opening the October Gallery’s exhibition of work by Chinese artist Huang Xu, entitled Fragments. Big photographic works featuring plastic bags, tattered and torn and beautiful and fragile. For me these are warnings - plastic bags as a collective memento mori and curiously reminiscent of Dutch seventeenth century paintings of flowers. I’ll never look at a plastic bag in quite the same way. I know they were banned many years ago in Rwanda. How shameful is that? A country recently torn apart and they can think about the environment. And we seem to find that so terribly difficult.

The work in this exhibition refers to economic wreckage as well as environmental wreckage – and the two are anyway, as we know, very closely related indeed. Fragments. Wreckage and waste. We are all pretty much convinced that the consumers amongst us, across the world, are culpable of the most remarkable amount of waste.

There’s huge seduction in wealth as most of us know, and there’s also destruction. It seems entirely appropriate that the artist in his work does what other artists have done before – Huang Xu presents to us beauty in entropy. An integral quality of interesting art is its capacity to hold contradictions and paradoxes, and layers of meaning. This work is not didactic, it’s too complicated and delicate for that, but it leaves me pondering big societal issues which are ultimately of choice.

We are at this unpredictable moment in our history – despite ‘civilization’ – with societies themselves fragile and often fragmented. At the RSA this week we profiled a film on Burma, True Stories: Burma VJ, shot by brave citizens during the 1988 and 2007 uprising against a brutal regime – here’s one example among so many. Chuck in climate change, remember the recent cyclone in Burma, and we are at a moment in the huge sphere of time that will literally determine survival, or not, for future generations.

Another current version of environmental, social and economic melt down at its most literal is in Australia with the graphic, heart rending accounts heard and seen on the media this week. The consequent societal revenge-taking – blame – is mostly being directed at arsonists, rather than at the economics of forestry, or at climate change. So much easier to pin down an 18-year-old spotty pyromaniac than try and understand the bigger picture.

The October Gallery, working in partnership with China Art Projects, say on their website that their interest is the trans-cultural avant-garde. That is to say, the work of artists who, whilst working at the forefront of their own respective cultures, assimilate into their work elements from other cultures as well. Huang Xu’s work is a very good example.

And here perhaps it our salvation: we have an opportunity to join together in tackling the dauntingly enormous challenges by first acknowledging, often through images, the ramifications of what we are creating – the significance of a plastic bag whether you are in Rwanda, China or the U.K. may be ridiculously prosaic but it is also a signifier and an everyday prompt to change our damaging way of living.

Illustration: Fragment No. 1 by Huang Xu, 2007 October Gallery

Hedwig Fijen on the politics behind chosing Murcia as the home of Manifesta 8:

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This week Manifesta announced that Manifesta 8, the latest in the series of European art biennials, was going to be held in 2010 in Murcia in southern Spain. Curator/founder/director Hedwig Fijen gave the reasons to the Spanish press:

"We have chosen Murcia because it is a place of transit and crossing of cultures and because it is a region which has two faces two of the most urgent challenges facing humankind, those of immigration and water."

A little more here.

Chernobyl by Jaime Pitarch 2007. Manifesta 7, Bolzano, Italy

The strange shape of environmental politics

I'm hazarding there are three possible responses to environmental politics:

1) The eco-modernists. (Beloved of big business, progressive bureaucrats and technophiles; believe if we work hard, eco-modernism can save us).
2) The "Keep Calm And Carry On" contingency. (Most people. Suspicious of change, and therfore not keen on the above, or...)
3) The radical alternative-ists. (Loathed by both the above. Broadly utopian and egalitarian and unlikely to have much purchase with category 1) who regard them as a bunch of feckless Luddites.)

These are leaky categories of course and we probably have a bit of each in all of us. Now I'm toying with how to reconcile the above with the Mary Douglas/Michael Thompson/Matthew Taylor ideas of cultural theory, because on first glance they don't fit too snugly. Cultural theory sees society as containing separate cultures that are in constant conflict. Mary Douglas wrote in  A History of Grid and Group Cultural Theory:

In conflict compromise counts as betrayal. Opponents dismiss out of hand evidence from other kinds of institutions. According to CT, their intransigence is neither irrational nor immoral. It expresses their loyalties and moral principles, and their responsibilities to other members of their society.

... which is enough to make anyone who's been involved even glancingly in environmental politics emit a knowing chortle.

CT then proposes you apply a grid to any society to try and identify those cultural loyalties. It suggests you look for four groups - the heirarchical, the egalitarian, the individualist and the fatalist. For a fuller explanation of these groups, look here.

I tie myself in knots trying to apply the theory to the environment issue (though Michael Thompson has attempted it in an essay called Cultural Theory, Climate Change and Clumsiness). To me, the four CT groups don't fit at all neatly with my three categories.

Category 1) contains both the heirarchical and individualist. It would be well represented by Thomas L. Friedman's Hot Flat And Crowded, a book which suggests that American entrepreneurial know-how is the only way to save the planet and which John Gray took apart spectacularly in his review in last Sunday's Observer.

Category 2) contains both the individualist and the fatalist, apparently happily co-existing.

Only category 3) appears to fit as the so-called egalitarian approach, but even that is dubious on closer examination. As right-wing critics of George Monbiot might say with some justification, and as the NUM have said about Climate Camp, there's nothing that egalitarian about much of the green movement. 

If you follow the CT line, I suspect you'd say that the fact that the CT grid group doesn't quite fit my categories is a potentially good thing, as it suggests alliances can be made that form what Michael Thompson calls a "clumsy" solution.

That may be true. I don't know. At the moment the three groups I outlined at the top regard each other with the kind of contempt that would make even the doughtiest anthropologist's toes curl.

Matthew Taylor is willing to explore a great deal of complexity in his understanding of those four paradigms - pointing out the conflicting paradigms at work behind Kyoto, say. I know Mary Douglas herself studied this when looking at environmental groups in the US in Risk and Culture which drew unflattering disctinctions between heirarchical environmental groups like the Sierra Club and righidly egalitarian ones like Friends of the Earth.

For the moment, I'm probably missing something, but I can't really make the CT paradigm sit neatly onto the strange non-traditional shape that environmental politics has thrown up. That does nothing to challenge underlying fundamental insight behind Mary Douglas's work; that problems like this have a crucial cultural dimension that is misunderstood by politicians, behaviouralists and other scientists. For that, take a look at Cultura21.net, which Sacha Kagan and other academics have been working on for the past few years to conceive an inter-disciplinary approach.

Photo: Disrupted Ecosystems: Great Barrier Reef, Belize, by Susannah Sayler 2006. Courtesy of the Canary Project.

7 ways of looking at Altermodernism

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WILLIAM SHAW: Taking a jaunt around some of the discussions thrown up by Nicolas Bourriaud's Altermodern manifesto and exhibition at Tate Britain I found myself constructing a kind of Beaufort Scale of critical responses:

1/. The Thrilled. Kazys Varnelis, Director of the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture is positively inspired:

I've been immersed in writing lately, so this next exhibit slipped under my radar, but Nicolas Bourriaud's latest exhibit, the 2009 Tate Triennial, is called Altermodern. Bourriaud's manifesto can be seen here. Bourriaud's one of the sharpest thinkers around today and this exhibit just cements my decision to explore network culture in my next book. Bourriaud's show marks a break with postmodernism based on a new stage of globalization. As he writes in his Altermodern manifesto: "Multiculturalism and identity is being overtaken by creolisation: Artists are now starting from a globalised state of culture."  

I suppose this is the kick in the pants I need...

2/. The Engaged: The commentators on this post at Moot Blog jump at the mere mention of something post-post-modern, jumping into a debate about Po-mo and A-mo. 

Me thinks The Tate are being somewhat provocative. Although you’re right, there’s some wonderful critiquing and questioning of Post-modernism at the moment. There’s a big buzz around ‘speculative realism’, check out Graham Harman (http://doctorzamalek.wordpress.com/).

Equally, probably one of the most interesting engagements with modernism is the notion of ‘hauntology’— this might be what the Tate is tinkering with. Have a look at this:

(http://splinteringboneashes.blogspot.com/2008/10/when-nothing-ever-happens.html)

But please, no more modernism.

Nicolas Bourriaud is an interesting one. Well worth going to see.

3/. The Thoughtful: Michael L. Radcliffe of Artbizness suggests Bourriaud's heart may be in the right place, he fails to live up to his own rhetoric:

Like all good shows (and it IS a good show) its one that I will need to return to many times, and I may like completely different works for completely different reasons.

But I guess the biggest obstacle of the altermodern idea for me is that if you’re saying that you’ve learned from the postmodernist critique, then why would you exhibit the majority of artists from OECD countries? It’s not exactly a record of the marginalised and at worst smacks of imperialism.  And I suspect the “creolisation” that Bourriaud talks of as a part of altermodernism leaves no room for the poor or marginalised.

4/. The Uncertain:  Dan Cull doesn't know what to make of it but suspects it's a Good Thing.

I am not sure whether this is a new theoretical current or not, and as a fan of post-modernist thinking in a way I am not sure I really care. What I do know is that the Tate have put together a show that I really want to go and see… and this to my mind is a good thing.

5/. The Long Suffering: Laura Cummins in The Observer practically sighs out loud:

It is a dull show in the end, with few exceptions, just as Altermodernism itself is not a very thrilling definition, or redefinition, of where art may be heading.

It is by no means certain, in any case, that any theory of art that can be made to stretch all the way from Tacita Dean to Franz Ackermann is of much ultimate value. Altermodernism does not work as an idea so much as a web of observations, a web with a weaver at its centre. The real hyperlink here is not the art, but Bourriaud himself.

6/. The Arch. Stewart Home. This one doesn't boil down to a neat quote. Agitator/self-publicist Stewart uses quite a lot of space to say he thinks Bourriaud is a fop, a phoney and a figure of fun. He considers the whole Altermodern thing is a hilarious bit of trumpery; but then long ago Stewart championed Neoism, so for both conceptual and practical reasons you are advised to take everything he says as unreliable.

As a taster for their 2009 triennial  ‘curated’ by Nicolas Bourriaud (AKA Boring Ass), Tate Britain hosted a series of talks concluding with one this weekend by the International Necronautical Society (INS).... [it goes on for a fair bit...]

7/. The Very Tediously English Indulging in Ritual Sneering at Frenchmen Who Use Long Words.  Coxsoft Artnews:

If you're a pseudo-intellectual art snob who wants to irritate your gormless friends, tell them that Postmodernism is dead and the new in-thing is Altermodern, a word coined by Nicolas Bourriaud to categorize what Coxsoft Art calls Tripe. It's also the name given to the fourth Tate Triennial, which Nick curated and which will be inflicted on a gullible public at Tate Britain from 3 February to 26 April. The Tate claims the show will offer "the best new contemporary art in Britain". Look at this example! Expect the usual Tripe.

Never, ever trust anyone who uses the word "pseudo-intellectual".

(I'd been aiming for 13 ways... but fell short.)

Photo: Giantbum Nathaniel Mellors at Altermodern courtesy of Régine Debatty

David Cotterrell: Truth in the mundane

MICHAELA CRIMMIN: I went to  a fascinating talk at the weekend by David Cotterrell, whose work is being shown for just one more week as part of the Wellcome Collections’s War + Medicine exhibition, where both complexity and the everyday are tackled through art.

Cotterrell’s video pieces in the exhibition were made in response to being a war artist in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, hosted by the Medical Corps of the British Army and supported by Wellcome. He presents an overwhelming sense of the everyday of war, the small tragedies, the waiting, that never make it to the newspapers. This is the real stuff of war, and neither devoid of beauty nor of humanity. Cotterrell’s work is also being shown at Danielle Arnaud; Aesthetic Distance features a series of visually arresting photographic and further video works. There is one more week left to catch both shows. Go if you are interested in understanding war and in a real account of the complexity and the humdrum of war.

In the information that accompanies the exhibition are a number of Cotterrell’s diary entries – here’s one:

2 T1’s and a a T4. I assume a T4 is a light injury. I am wrong – T4 means dead. I don’t know what to do. My problems of appropriate behaviour are insignificant compared to the enormity of the events taking place. I find myself feeling clumsy and self-conscious.

This personal response is largely denied to all but celebrity journalists; an intensely subjective account of the confusion of war and its paradoxes and contradictions are of no interest to the broadsheet editors. It’s simply not the stuff of news. What is different about your response as an artist?, asks someone from the audience. Cotterrell responds that as an artist you’re trusted as a sensitive observer. You look at the routine, the banal and the overlooked. This is the stuff of art. Finally it is what artists do with their material that stands them apart from the media. Artists have time to digest. He was quick to say how bewildered he felt on his return to London and that it is only now, a year later, that he has been able to marshall his responses into a work that is nevertheless equivocal.

Another part of Cotterrell’s practice as an artist is in a very different context, the world of planning and architecture. He ended his talk by musing the fact that planners necessarily ignore the reality of the chaos of the street.

We have to be reductive but how much truth is lost along the way? In thinking about the multiplicity of real and potential connections in ecology, you can’t help but grapple with the problematics that come with acknowledging the inevitable complexity of just about everything. At the same time there are so many important findings lost because they seem so boringly everyday. As an example, see a brilliant column by Slavoj Zizek in the Guardian last June:

...Bear in mind the lesson of Donald Rumsfeld's theory of knowledge - as expounded in March 2003, when the then US defence secretary engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophising: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." What Rumsfeld forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the "unknown knowns" - things we don't know that we know, all the unconscious beliefs and prejudices that determine how we perceive reality and intervene in it.

Illustration: Gateway series by David Cotterrell, c-print, 2008, courtesy of Danielle Arnaud contemporary art

Altermodernism at Tate Britain

Off Voice Fly Tip by Bob and Roberta Smith 2009
Courtesy the artist and Hales Gallery. Photo: Tate Photography

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WILLIAM SHAW: I know, like a few people, I start to twitch a little when Tate Triennial curator Nicolas Bourriaud explains his neologism Altermodern as a "dreamcatcher" for ideas about what happens to art after post-modernism - (see the video below) - but I find myself liking it anyway.

The winning thing about his Altermodern concept is that it admits it's an aspiration as much as a piece of rigid critical analysis. In the one corner you have the idea art dealers' idea of "emerging art markets", which is an unpleasantly post-colonial notion at best.  In the other corner Bouriaud's Altermodern at least aims for something better, something more equitable. On the Tate Altermodern site Bourriaud leaves the dreamcatcher aside and explains Altermodernism thusly:  "Altermodern is the cultural answer to what alter-globalisation is, a cluster of singular and local answers to globalisation."

Which is good, no? As such, as an attempt at ethical response to post-modernism, it's bound to stir up the cynics. 

Drowning in information: MMR and climate

WILLIAM SHAW: This morning comes the news that measles is on the rise in the UK, predictably so as MMR vaccination rates dropped. The question is why so many people chose to disregard good information and clung doggedly instead to bad science or anti-establishment dogma and refused to have their children vaccinated.

There's a parallel here with the science of climate change. From reading the media - new and old - you'd never know that the scientific community have reached a broad consensus that climate change is man-made. A Clive Thompson article in this month's Wired talks to Robert Proctor, a science historian at Stanford who coined the word antology to describe the concept of "culturally produced ignorance".

"People always assume," says Proctor, "that if someone doesn't know something it's because they haven't paid attention or haven't figured it out. But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing the truth - or drowning it out - or trying to make it so confusing that people sto caring about what's true or what's not."

The information revolution has led to a civil war of beliefs in which half-truths are brandished indiscriminately. We drown in information; the science is lost. Just as, in the UK, the Daily Mail played a key role in muddying the waters around MMR, now  Christopher Brooker gives faux-legitimacy to climate scepticism in the Daily Telegraph. Brooker's arguments circulate on the web as gospel.

The facts one chooses to see become increasingly an issue of culture, and the danger is that cultures are now digging themselves in increasingly doggedly. Example: Thompson points out that the numbers of Republicans who believe in anthropgenic global warming has declined from 52% to 42%

Image: Still from Sandman by Patricia Piccini 2002, one of the films at Figuring Landscapes at Tate Modern, London from today