Cybernetics (human machine interfaces)
The Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus is a work by Julius von Bismark and Benjamin Maus. It explores the possibilities of drawing as copying, as semantic, as mechanical, as technical, as legal, as durational, etc..
What art/science have I seen?
Ex- at the Zoology Museum, Glasgow University.
First, you have to go and find this gem of a museum in Glasgow University, proper old-fashioned place, not over-interpreted (though not quite sure about the size of containers for the live snakes).
This exhibition is the result of a field trip to Payamino in the Ecuadorian part of the Amazon Rainforest by a group of zoology students accompanied by Kate Foster, environmental artist, and Martin Muir, a photographer. The students were documenting and recording bird and amphibian biodiversity as well as learning about the life, culture and change.
The exhibition includes work by the students as well as Foster and Muir. The students have presented photography and drawing.
Foster’s sketchbooks seem to capture some sense of interconnectedness. Few of the drawings set out to isolate and analyse a single ‘thing’ in a ‘scientific way’. Rather they explore relations, interactions and situations. A small sketch at the back of one book of a ‘luggage jam.’ Tyre marks on the runway. Most pages have text in amongst drawing. Across two pages she has drawn a stream of ants some carrying cut pieces of leaf and others returning for more. The quality of drawing: suggesting movement by lightness of touch, suggesting pattern, suggesting context without providing one.
One of the students raises the issue of value. They are documenting and recording biodiversity under threat from oil extraction, soya farming, etc. What is the value of the biodiversity? And is it measured in monetary terms? This was crystallised for me recently when, on the radio, I heard a spokesperson for Natural England discussing the economic importance of bees. They said bees were worth £200 million to the UK economy. The next item on the news was about the commitment of £4 billion to some aspect of the financial crisis.
We say that we can’t put a price on life, but we are only talking about ourselves. We don’t understand that we can’t put a price on ecosystems, or on biodiversity. NGOs try and get us to make donations by showing us pictures of ‘charismatic mega fauna,’ but, and its horrible to say, the loss of polar bears or tigers will have a limited effect on ecosystems (as I understand it), where worms, bats, ants, small birds and especially bees have dynamic and exchange based roles. Our image of hierarchical food chains makes the big animals look like the most important, but if you begin to think about the other operations taking place at the ‘lower levels’ then your perspective changes.
The student was asking what to do: one answer is to think about what connects Scotland and Ecuador, now economically, and also in the past colonially. Bring forward the connections, make them visible. Make us aware of, not distant jungle lushness, but the ways our lifestyle in Scotland is implicated in the changes taking place there.
Art and Regeneration
Sophie Hope’s sharp questions about artists involved in regeneration projects.
C words at the Arnolfini
Nina Möntmann’s essay for the e-flux journal, (Under)Privileged Spaces: On Martha Rosler’s “If You Lived Here…” is a useful analysis which could almost be written about the C Words show at the Arnolfini. Many of the same issues are raised.
This essay was commissioned on the occasion of “If You Lived Here Still…: An Archive Project by Martha Rosler,” an exhibition of the archives of If You Lived Here… running from August 28 to October 31, 2009, at e-flux in New York.
The essay sets out the context of homelessness in New York in the 80s and 90s (for which we could substitute our own circumstances of climate change in the first decade of the 21st Century). It is precisely the market, as unquestioned driver, which is challenged by both exhibitions.
It discusses the role of the institution, then the Dia and now the Arnolfini, and the decisions leading to this form of work being programmed, concluding by linking this work to wider discussions of ‘institutional critique’ or ‘new institutionalism’.
If You Lived Here… was, like C Words, initiated by an artist/artist group, and drew in work by a number of other artists, through a cluster of linked elements. The character of documentary art raises questions about the role of art in public life, the reference to things that have, or are, taking place outside the gallery, and the questions that need to be raised about presence and absence, about knowledge and the senses.
One of the precursors to If You Lived Here… is evidently Joseph Beuys’ Free International University at Documenta 6 in 1977. In each of these cases, from Honeypump in the Workplace, through the Reading Room as Asylum Seeker’s home, to PLATFORM’s tent/boat/quadricycle, each seek to make the pedagogical space also a visceral, somatic space. Each of these works disrupts the artworld production/exhibition/distribution structure.
“Art that can not shape society and therefore also can not penetrate the heart questions of society, [and] in the end influence the question of capital, is no art.” Joseph Beuys, 1985
Of course the question of time plays a role, and we must be careful not to fall into a narrative structure that values avant gardism, making Beuys the greatest because he is the earliest, and PLATFORM an afterthought, as if it took 30 years for an idea to travel from Kassel, via New York, to Bristol. Furthermore, whilst Möntmann’s essay provides an effective ‘art history’ of a work, it also leaves many questions hanging, such as the inability of members of the ‘artworld’ attending events during If You Lived Here… to do other than sit silently.
What art have I seen?
C Words: carbon, climate, capital, culture, How did you get here and where are we going?
Arnolfini, Bristol
The collaborative practice PLATFORM articulate their work as research, campaigning, education and art. As a result of their long-term project Unravelling the Carbon Web (2000-) PLATFORM have been quoted in the financial and environmental sections of newspapers on subjects including hydrocarbon legislation in Iraq, and Shell’s role in the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa. At the same time their opera And While London Burns… (2007) was widely reviewed and they are currently the subject (perhaps) of a major retrospective at the Arnolfini.
But this is not a solo show. PLATFORM have, in microcosm, demonstrated the Movement of Movements: simultaneously inhabiting the Arnolfini (at their invitation) are Ackroyd & Harvey, African Writers Abroad, Hollington & Kyprianou with Spinwatch, the Institute for the Art & Practice of Dissent at Home, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, the Trapese Collective, and Virtual Migrants. Plus Amelia’s Magazine, Art Not Oil, Carbon Trade Watch, The Corner House, Feral Trade, FERN, Greenpeace, Live Art Development Agency, new economics foundation & Clare Patey, Sustrans – Art & the Travelling Landscape, Ultimate Holding Company and others. In parallel Ursula Biemann’s Black Sea Files, Peter Fend and Barbara Steveni are also exhibiting.
The PLATFORM aspect touches on several key points in 25 years of work – the walls have been lined with recycled timber and this frames a tent, a boat, a quadicycle, an image of a strategy game on a burning world stage, and a discussion. There are a lot of words in the Arnolfini at the moment, but this is an exhibition, not just a pile of documentation. This is activism brought into the gallery, but it is as animated as activism. There are events going on regularly, and between the many different contributors and the team of co-realizers, I don’t think you can just walk into the gallery, walk around and say “Seen it” without someone engaging you. It fights against being objectified, whilst still acknowledging the need for something aesthetic to engage with.
At the Friday afternoon Critical Tea Party there was an interesting discussion about combative art. Is this exhibition trying to tell you what to think? Is it propaganda for a leftist agenda? It certainly wants to say: you are complicit in all of this. Do you the world to be like this? Just because you are comfortable, is it ok that everything goes to hell and damnation? Is this what you call justice?
Underlying PLATFORM’s work is a deep understanding of radical educational theory. Yes, shock tactics are applied, but to the end of making each of us think for ourselves. Propaganda is about one truth, and there isn’t one truth here. Here there is one question: what future?
But we can also ask the question “Where is the art?” For me, I can’t answer this by saying that the installation of the boat, with the chairs placed next to it like a bow wave, is the art, though that has formal aesthetic elegance (and I do like a bit of formal aesthetic elegance). Of course the art has been taking place in public over the past 25 years, and this is a gallery. The danger is that all you can put in the gallery is the evidence of something that happened somewhere else. So, for me, it is important that what is in the gallery is something which is present, here and now.
And is this a PLATFORM show? Or a group show? Are PLATFORM curators? Is their work the most important?
And what about the education, research and campaigning? To discount them from the aesthetic of the practice is to fail to understand its roots in the work of Joseph Beuys. His idea of social sculpture is central here.
Or to put it another way, Hal Foster says that there is a fault line travelling through the term ‘art history’ because he says that art is judged on its own terms, not, as with history, enmeshed in the world. If we accept that art is only judged on its own terms (some strange connoisseur’s estimation of PLATFORM vs Beuys vs Kaprow vs APG) then we dismiss the world. Whereas PLATFORM want us to understand that life can be art and art life.
So we are left with more questions, but they are in sharp focus.
What art have I seen?
Fleming Collection exhibition from Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
What Art have I seen?
Ed Ruscha, On The Road: An Artist Book of the Classic Novel by Jack Kerouac, Gagosian Gallery, Davies Street, London
Beautiful. Needs careful reading to see the relationship between the images and the text. More info at Yummy Ink.
Did also see Glenn Brown.
Reading
Nat Tate, An American Artist: 1928-1960 by William Boyd, 21 Publishing, 1998
Turtle Island by Gary Snyder, New Directions, 1974
…
aimless executions and slaughterings
are not the work of wolves and eagles
but the work of hysterical sheep
The Demonic must be devoured!
Self-serving must be
……………………. cut down
Anger must be
……………………. plowed back
Fearlessness, humor, detachment, is power
…
from SPEL AGAINST DEMONS
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