Sanitation is culture

Mierle Laderman Ukeles (right) talking with
Brooklyn Museum employee Peggy Johnson

Wallace Heim writes:

In New York last week, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, artist in residence since 1977 for the New York City Department of Sanitation, conducted a series of live interviews with Brooklyn Museum's daily maintenance staff, window washers, floor sweepers, security guards, and told them what they do is "the first kind of culture".

In her performance, which also included architects and city planners, she asked each person a series of questions: How do you personally survive? What do you need to do to keep going? What happens to your dreams and your freedom when you do the things you have to do to keep surviving? What keeps New York City alive? What does the city need to do to survive after Sandy?.

Ukeles told the workers, "Here's the museum with all this stuff, and then there's what you do. You are culture, and your work is culture. And the endless hours that will never be done, that's what enable us to be in an institution like this. Mopping up the garbage from yesterday. It's safe. And the things in here are taken care of. That's culture."

Full interview with Ukeles on Gallerist NY.
photo: Carole DeBeer, courtesy Brooklyn Museum.

h/t to ecoartscotland.net

more ...

Hitting the high water mark

Eve Mosher: High Water Line

Wallace Heim writes:

The Talk of the Town in the New Yorker last week was all about Sandy. Elizabeth Kolbert framed her piece on the impossibility of flood protection around an artwork by Eve Mosher.

Using a Heavy Hitter, the machine to make chalk lines on baseball fields, Mosher drew a blue line around the edge of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan ten feet above sea level, the height that waters were expected to rise during a once-in-a-hundred-year flood.

Mosher’s plan with High Water Line was to leave a visual mark and to open up a space for conversation, in 2007.

"I have pictures of where I drew the line and, if you look at the debris line, they’re pretty close", Mosher writes on her blog, continuing, "I never wanted to be right."

more ...

Carbon 13: Ballroom Marfa and Cape Farewell team up

In Marfa, Texas

Kellie Gutman writes:

Marfa is a small town of 2,121 people in western Texas.  In 2003, Virginia Lebermann and Fairfax Dorn converted a former 1927 ballroom into a performance and exhibition space called Ballroom Marfa.  In this intellectual environment, issues and perspectives are explored through film, music, art and performance.

Ballroom Marfa contacted Cape Farewell's David Buckland to curate Carbon 13: From the High Arctic to the High Desert, which runs from 31 August until 20 January 2013.  Eight artists who have traveled with Cape Farewell to the Andes, the Arctic and Scotland's island communities are presenting newly-commissioned works to highlight the effects of climate change.  The exhibit is supported in part by an Artistic Innovation and Collaboration (AIC) Grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

The artists represented are Ackroyd & Harvey, Amy Balkin, Erika Blumenfeld, David Buckland, Adriane Colburn, Antony Gormley, Cynthia Hopkins and Sunand Prasad.

In the online art newspaper, artdaily.org, the reviewer of Carbon 13 wrote:

Ballroom Marfa continues its ambitious mission of presenting art as a transforming media capable of addressing the most pressing issues of our time.

more ...

Plunge by Michael Pinsky

Michael Pinsky's Plunge, on three monuments in London

In a collaboration among LIFT, Artsadmin.and IMAGINE 2020, artist Michael Pinsky was commissioned to create a new work of public art in central London.  Today the project is launched and will remain on view through 4 March. Blue circles of LED lights have been placed on the Seven Dials Sundial Pillar, the Duke of York Column, and the Paternoster Square Column indicating the height of the sea level one thousand years from now, if climate change continues unchecked.

Though thousands of people pass these monuments every day, Pinsky's art allows people to see them in a new (blue) light.

Together, the Plunge monuments create an arc across central London, following the line of a future Thames that has swallowed much of the capital in its wake.

Plunge on Twitter

Plunge on Facebook

Plunge website

more ...

What is it that art could do for the environment?

Photo: Green Alliance

Kellie Payne reports on the Green Alliance's summer debate about the arts and the environment.

For their summer reception, the environmental think tank Green Alliance hosted an evening of opera and debate at the Royal Opera House. In conjunction with The Opera Group, the evening began with a fifteen minute excerpt of Luke Bedford‘s new opera Seven Angels, is inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost and has environmental degradation as its theme.

Following the opera taster, there was a panel discussion entitled ‘What have the arts ever done for the environment? The panel included a mix of representatives from the worlds of policy, the arts and academia. It was chaired by Julie’s Bicycle’s Alison Tickell, and panellists included: The Southbank Centre artistic director, Jude Kelly, RSA chief executive Matthew Taylor, Arcola Theatre executive director Ben Todd, the sculptor Peter Randall-Page and David Frame, fellow of Oxford University. In her introduction, Tickell indicated that the Seven Angels was one among a crop of new work being made by British artists that addressed nature or the environment among those artists she listed were Antony Gormley, Ian McEwan, Jay Griffiths.

One of the main themes of the evening was an attempt in the discussion to answer the general question of what it is that art can do for the environment. It was generally agreed that one of the strengths of art was that it was well equipped to deal with the complexities that many environmental issues such as climate change raise. Matthew Taylor saying that art should be one of the many interventions required to tackle climate change.

One of the most eloquent responses came from the scholar, David Frame, who highlighted art’s ability to deal with complexity and tension. He felt that as climate change and environmental problems are so complex in nature, with for instance climate change knowledge dispersed amongst many specialists without a graspable whole. He said that the arts community has ‘a unique ability to convey complexity, delicacy, and beauty and among the things you can do is you don’t need to simplify...’

He pointed to the deficits in mediums such as Twitter or the 1,000 word Op Ed piece and contrasted this with the length of a novel or a film where he said ‘the possibilities for the ideas you can upload to people is phenomenal.’ This type of medium he said was also more able to cope with uncertainties. ‘You leave interpretation open which isn’t considered acceptable in other forms and I think that in doing so you can bring out tensions between these parallel values’.

Changing values seemed to be one of the key roles identified for art that emerged from the discussion. Alison said she has observed what she describes as a ‘palpable’ shift in values taking place rapidly and for her ‘the arts do have a role to play in reflecting and shaping and engaging with those values.’ While Matthew didn’t agree with Alison the extent to which values have already changed in the positive direction Alison described. In fact, he warned that during this current time of disturbance there is a clear dissatisfaction with current values but which way public opinion would turn was not decided. He said the dissatisfaction could lead in two ways, and not necessarily in a progressive direction he lamented that ‘it can go in a dangerous direction as well.’

The question of how politics should be addressed raised differing opinions. Jude Kelly began by announcing she ‘didn’t mind a bit of bad art’ provided that art had some sort of message. She went on to say, ‘I don’t think it’s a hanging offence to produce a message’ However if it’s not particularly interesting it might ‘bore me after awhile’. Further, ‘I don’t mind artists having a go. I really dislike the idea that artists shouldn’t be allowed to take centre stage to comment on things.

While Peter conceded that there was ‘nothing wrong with political art’, for him it was less the politics which art was best equipped to address. He was more of the mind that art’s quality was that it didn’t have a direct ‘purpose’ that it was its intrinsic values alone that made art great. He believes that ‘arts are not well placed to (do) issue based lobbying’ contrasting what he finds often to be the pragmatism of the environmental movement with the arts ability to nourish imagination and the spirit in the way the natural world does. ‘I think the role that I feel for the arts in environmentalism is that it... reminds us that we’re not all bad. If we only feel negative it’s impossible for us to move forward and remove this exclusively pragmatic approach to looking after the world.’

Matthew wanted to introduce a third way of thinking about the issue agreeing that art shouldn’t attempt to kick us around the head. However, he felt art could ‘challenge people to live differently and value things in slightly different ways.’ Providing a vision of how ‘a different, deeper kind of understanding about what makes life worth living and what it is society wants to be.’ This task he felt art was ‘incredibly well suited’. That is, ‘art is there to explicitly to get you to think about what the good life is.’ He concluded this thought saying ‘art shouldn’t be ashamed to say that art is here to help you rethink what our values are and I don’t think that requires you to revert to a kind of crude placard waving.’

In addition to the discussion about art and politics, the panel also touched on the controversial issue of artists lifestyles and the high carbon footprint of the arts. The general attitude on the panel was that this shouldn’t be paid as much attention as it has been. Jude Kelly saying that this arts requires face-to-face interactions and not allowing artists to fly amounts to a cultural boycott. But Matthew Taylor thought artists should be accountable, and if they want to have influence on others they have to take account of their own actions.
Increased collaboration amongst artists was encouraged, suggesting that the problem of the environment is one that artists should attempt to do together. Arts organisations such as Cape Farewell and Tipping Point were highlighted as doing exceptional work, helping to inform artists of climate change and bringing the topic to their consciousness.

It was edifying to see an organisation such as the Green Alliance, who normally deals with more policy related issues such as building a sustainable economy, investigating climate and energy futures, designing out waste and political leadership to host a conversation with the arts community. A cursory glance over badges of audience members saw representatives from business and policy, including the Department for Energy and Climate Change and The Environment Agency, so the wider these issues can be encountered and discussed the better. It’s time the arts community made it’s voice heard in the conversation about climate change. Peter concluded well, stating that it is artists who need to create metaphors and narratives which make it possible to go into the future.

Pic: The speakers (l-r): Jude Kelly, Matthew Taylor, Dr David Frame, Ben Todd, Peter Randall-Page and Alison Tickell (photo: Paul West) more ...

New metaphors for sustainability: the act of breathing

In the first in our series on New metaphors for sustainability, the artist Ansuman Biswas, whose work moves between music, dance, theatre, visual art and writing, chooses the act of breathing.

I can’t imagine something that sustains forever and the notion of an endpoint isn’t there in the idea of sustainability. We’re talking about something that’s eternal, and I don’t know anything that is eternal. I can’t imagine eternity.

The word itself, sustenir from the Latin, is to hold something up. It's as if there's some magical wish to hold up against gravity. The image I keep coming back to is the image of breath with its inherent balance, and the craziness of trying to breathe in forever. What if I could breathe in forever? What would happen if I just took in more and more and more oxygen, and just kept breathing? As if I wanted to keep growing, more and more - I would burst like a balloon. I would just die.

It's necessary also to let go, to recognise the limits of my ribcage, the limits of my diaphragm and my body to hold any more breath. To recognise at the level of my body where that limit is and to let go. And in letting go, in breathing out, I speak and I sing to the world, and make a contribution that is unique to this body.

That’s the important part of sustainability. What is sustained is the song, is the music. It’s not made just by me and can’t be made if I only grasp at it. It has to be let go of and given. It's that music, that note, which for me sustains.

more ...

four podcasts on culture and climate change now online

A new series of four podcasts on Culture and Climate Change is now online at iTunes U. The discussions bring together artists, writers, film-makers, scientists, academics and journalists with a comedian, a choreographer, a campaigner, and an entrepreneur.

The Mediating Change series is hosted by Quentin Cooper and contributors include Tim Smit, Marcus Brigstocke, Siobhan Davies (see pic), Roger Harrabin, Joe Smith and two of the Ashden Directory's editors, Wallace Heim and Robert Butler.

More details here.

The producer, Vicky Long, says:

Cultural activity in this area is gathering real momentum, with 'Greenland' opening at the National Theatre and 'The Heretic' opening at the Royal Court early next year. We feel it’s vital a critical framework is developed alongside this emerging work.

This series represents a first sustained exploration of culture and climate change in a publicly-available broadcast-quality format.

See also: Tipping Point launches first of four discussions
Tim Smit and Marcus Brigstocke join debate on popular culture and climate change

photo: from Endangered Species (2008), choreography by Siobhan Davies.
photo credit: Vicky Long more ...

how he saw war

When propaganda meets art: Picasso's biographer, the art critic John Richardson, describes some of Picasso's works on peace as sentimental, kitsch, crude, simplistic and out-of-date. But not all.

'Jeux de Pages' depicts medieval page boys - their absurdly helmeted leader in spiky armor on a comically caparisoned horse - trying to look warlike. That was how he saw war, Picasso told a group of friends in March 1959: medieval children playing nasty, medieval games. more ...

hockney turns pictures into a performance

The primary focus of this blog, and the website it's attached to, is environmentalism and the performing arts. That has largely excluded painting because a painting isn't a performance: you don't watch it unfold. Or didn't.

But David Hockney's been playing around with his iPad and has discovered it can replay every mark he makes.

'I've realised, I can do performances.' more ...

WWF and others say "culture" has "central importance"

This blog follows on from yesterday's one not bothering to argue with people who don't want to agree with you, better to get on with doing something you like.

Mark Twain understood this kind of persuasion when Tom Sawyer got Huck Finn to help him paint the fence. Aesop also understood it (see pic) with the fable of the wind and the sun, where the heat of the sun succeeds where the force of the wind fails.

In his Guardian column yesterday George Monbiot praises Tom Crompton's Common Cause (pdf) as 'the most interesting report I have read this year'. The report shows (he says) that progressives have been suckers for a myth of human cognition that Crompton "labels the enlightenment model".

Psychological experiments have shown that humans don't behave entirely rationally, they behave in relation to extrinsic or intrinsic values. We hang onto stuff that confirms who we are. We frame discussions in terms of values. And that - of course - is cultural.

For this report, WWF-UK partnered with Climate Outreach and Information Network (COIN), Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), Friends of the Earth (FOE) and Oxfam. None of these is primarily an arts organisation. And yet, the aim was:

to explore the central importance of cultural values in underpinning concern about the issues upon which we each work.

To put this in six simple words, climate change is a cultural issue. Or, to add one more word, the environmental crisis is an aesthetic crisis. more ...

climate change art

In August 1883 the painter Edvard Munch witnessed an unusual blood-red sunset over Oslo. Shaken up by it, he wrote in his diary that he 'felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature'. The incident inspired him to create his most famous work, The Scream.

The sunset he saw that evening followed the eruption of Krakatoa off the coast of Java. more ...

tipping point launches first of four discussions

At this weekend's Tipping Point conference, there’ll be a panel discussion on the first morning at the Examination Schools, Oxford (pic), which will examine 'A History of Cultural Responses to Climate Change'.

The discussion is chaired by Quentin Cooper (presenter of Radio 4’s Material World) and the panel includes Diana Liverman, Nigel Clark, Siobhan Davies and Wallace Heim, the Ashden Directory co-editor, and guest blogger here.

This is the first of four discussions on culture and climate change, organised by Joe Smith and myself. The discussions will be recorded and made available on the Open University iTunesU.

This blog will be reporting on the panel discussion and, more widely, on the two days of the Tipping Point conference. more ...

the ambiguity bomb

The author Tom McCarthy believes car parks should replace theatres because:

Car parks are really fascinating spaces, full of geometry, technology and menace; anything could happen in them.

He also explains the degree to which his work is political:

All art is political inasmuch as it takes place within the space of the polis, and involves language and social relations and the Symbolic Order in general. But I never make work that's polemic, or that has a message. That's not what art's there for. What's genuinely radical about good art is that it detonates a kind of ambiguity-bomb at the heart of the polis. That's true from Aeschylus to Joyce.

(See also Zadie Smith on Two Paths for the Novel.)  more ...

the gift that keeps taking

The New Yorker profile of the billionaire Koch brothers who bankroll climate denial is a must-read.

Among many interesting aspects in Jane Mayer's article is the role that major arts institutions play as grateful recipients of their considerable largesse. The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History has the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins which shows how humans evolve by adapting to climate change:

An interactive game in the exhibit suggests that humans will continue to adapt to climate change in the future. People may build “underground cities,” developing “short, compact bodies” or “curved spines,” so that “moving around in tight spaces will be no problem.”

(Koch Industries has been named one of the top ten air polluters in the US.)

Joe Romm writes that the New Yorker profile is:

doubly devastating because the New Yorker remains one of the few major magazines that still fact checks line by line. more ...

beyond paintings

The story so far: On Monday night Tate Britain held a summer party to celebrate 20 years of sponsorship from BP. A letter to the Guardian, signed by 171 artists (including Caryl Churchill) expresses anger that the Tate and other national cultural institutions continue to sidestep the issue of oil sponsorship. On the Today programme former Arts Council chairman Sir Christopher Frayling and Greenpeace's Charlie Kronick come close to violent agreement on the issue. In the Daily Telegraph today however the composer James MacMillan describes the views of the 171 artists as 'luddite, eco-fascist utopianism'.

pic: Guardian graphic shows oil spill bigger than both Wales and Belgium more ...

normalising the tragic

On Tuesday's blog, we noted a new exhibition of photography in New York which argues that there's an environmental aesthetic developing. In this guest post, Wallace Heim asks if these photos "are creating a ‘new environmental aesthetic’ or normalising the tragic?"

The photographs alarm and fascinate. The vast scales of mining, the rubble, the lurid insanity of pollution evoke different emotions to those of photographs of war or sudden disasters. The distance between these images and expectations of what is normal, healthy or right is arresting. There is an uncanny stillness. And in the landscapes where there is no human or animal in the photograph with which to imaginatively connect, looking at it can turn towards self-reflection; that ravaged landscape is a human endeavour, and it feels tragic.

As long as they shock, these photographs generate troubling questions about beauty in art, about the aesthetic appreciation of the environment, about the necessities driving human industry. There is a lot to witness and to photograph. This field of photography could evolve into a genre with predictable similarities in composition, subject matter and technique. That could normalise the ‘content’ of them, strip them of that special quality, in some, which provokes an unresolved disturbance. They may lose their motivating outrage, and render the landscapes themselves, in our aesthetic imagination, mundane.

It may be that these photographs are not only changing our senses of beauty and aesthetics, but changing our sense of the tragic, too.

A co-editor of the Ashden Directory, Wallace Heim also co-edited Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance and discusses theatre and climate change here. more ...

new look

The purpose of The Tragedy of Beauty - its curators say - is to demonstrate that global environmental struggles are creating an aesthetic.

The nine photographers represented at the exhibition are: Edward Burtynsky (Canada); Mitch Epstein (USA); Anthony Hamboussi (USA); Chris Jordan (USA); Christopher LaMarca (USA); Sze Tsung Leong (USA); David Maisel (USA); Susannah Sayler/The Canary Project (USA); Jo Syz (UK). more ...

oil in the mind

Theatre critic and poet Alison Croggon writes:

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is small beer besides the three-decade environmental catastrophe in Nigeria, where equivalent oil-spills occur every year.

Croggon asks:

Shall we continue fiddling as Rome burns? Or are we doing something else?

She continues:

I'm not stupid or vain enough to think art can save the world. But those who denigrate art are even more stupid than those who proclaim its vanities: it is imagination that has created our entire human reality.

The problem is that art's power exists only in its truthfulness, and truthfulness is not the lingua franca of power more ...

art and politics

If politicians were painters, with FDR as Titian and Churchill as Rubens, then Attlee would be the Vermeer of the profession: precise, restrained—and long undervalued. Bill Clinton might aspire to the heights of Salvador Dalí (and believe himself complimented by the comparison), Tony Blair to the standing - and cupidity - of Damien Hirst.

In the arts, moral seriousness speaks to an economy of form and aesthetic restraint ...

Tony Judt, 'Austerity', (NYRB) more ...

the power of the turbine

In this guest post, Wallace Heim, co-editor of the Ashden Directory, examines our assumptions about beauty and how they shape our attitudes to wind turbines.

The Guardian’s series of photographs of wind turbines, The Beauty of Wind Power, purports to show the aesthetic value of turbines in their beauty and awe-inspiring visual qualities. To back this up with use-value, the paper gives the numbers of households provided with electricity, ranging from 80,000 at Burbo Bank at the mouth of the Mersey to 145,000 in Manawatu, Tararua in New Zealand.

The photographs do show striking silhouettes, the sensuous and almost animate curves of the blades and landscapes that seem to fold around the pristine and elegant machinery. The photographs are well composed, like picture post cards, and it’s this conventional representation that makes me wonder whether the wind turbines are beautiful, or whether it is more the case that it is the photographs as images that are most pleasing.

It is these conventional, or unchallenged assumptions about beauty that are of interest, rather than an argument about photographic representation, because they seem to be operating on both sides of the wind farm debates.

To generalise, when the opponents of wind farms extol the beauty of a landscape which will be destroyed by ugly or intrusive turbines, the counter-argument is often that those views of a landscape are historically contingent or do not take into account the industrialised character of the British landscape. That very sense of what is beautiful is reacted to as being simplistic, unchanging, too readily accepting of the bucolic as ‘right’, and needing to be preserved.

Images like the Guardian’s photographs are open to a similar criticism. They are readily, too-easily, seen as pleasing if not beautiful. Their aesthetic, as well, reflects views of composition, lighting and the relation of viewer to landscape which can be critiqued as historically contingent, over-simplified, so familiar from popular media that it appears as a ‘normal’ or an unquestioned image of beauty. This may be a strategy in trying to persuade the public of the aesthetic value of turbines, but it doesn’t go far enough into questioning what is or can be seen as the beauty of these machines.

Rather than settling on pleasing images or familiar vistas as justifications for or against wind farms, it can be the unsettling disjunction between the conventionally beautiful representation and the landscape as experienced that may open up debate about what is beautiful, what causes beauty and what is intolerable. The inclusion of wind turbines on land and seascapes could be changing what is considered beautiful or awe-inspiring, in ways that aren’t yet articulated, and in ways that the previous notions of beauty can’t configure.

Another way to make an argument that wind power has aesthetic value is to take it into the gallery, and let that space do its work of turning industry into art.

Alec Finlay’s installation sky-wheels, at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, was part of the AV10 Festival. On the walls are the words: ‘all art is, is rhythm’; ‘every form heals’. Sixteen small wooden turbines painted in variations of blue sit on a blue plinth. The blades don’t turn, but on each is printed words, metaphorically conveying the motion of wind: ‘turning – toward – living’; ‘turn – still – sails’; ‘what - changes – change’. It is as if the turbines camouflaged by the blue can express a deeper poetic to their function.

A series of recordings of whooshes, swishes, motor hums, and sharper, cricket-like metallic sounds is at first soothing and intriguing. But it begins to feel quickly as if the rich irregularities of waves or winds had been stripped down to a too regular noise. The manipulation into a sound work makes the sound too small, too easy to dissect. Although it was working with a different aesthetic to the photographs, it also was not doing the work of turning these structures into appreciable art. Something of the scale, the awe, the experience was missing. Even so, the installation is an appreciation of wind power, and possibly too-literal in that for some.

Driving back from Newcastle, I stopped at the turbines by Junction 37 on the M6, the crossroads with the road between Sedbergh and Kendal. The five monumental structures sit on high ground between the Howgills, and the undulating slopes down to the River Kent valley and the high fells to the west. It’s a favourite picnic spot for locals during the day, and a place for lovers in the evenings. The light was fading, and the wind was low, westerly, giving the blades a gentle, breath-like cadence. The presence of those structures and their enveloping sound kept a half dozen people there, just being there, until the sun set.

Photo: wind turbines on Fehmarn Island in north Germany.
Photo by Karl-Heinz Haenel/Corbis

more ...