No Flowers on the Psych Ward
Thanks to Tanya Geis for highlighting this article.
No Flowers on the Psych Ward – Amelia Rachel Hokule’a Borofsky – The Atlantic.
Launching Greens Continuous Cover Forest policy at Irish Forestry Show
Main points of the Irish Green Party Forestry policy (2013-16):
- To promote a graduated adoption to Close to Nature-Continuous Cover permanent forestry silvicultural systems and management (without clear felling), thus (i) ultimately creating permanent biodiverse forests containing trees of all ages, (ii) providing a more sustainable flow of products once the system is in place and (iii) maintaining the “capital” of mature and diverse forests to resist the threat and risks associated with climate change, such as new pests and diseases.
- The planting of 10,000 ha (preferably 15,000 ha– double what was planted in 2011) trees per annum until 2035, of which broadleaves should be well over the 38% planted in 2010. 15,000 ha would give 490 direct sustainable jobs per year, plus downstream employment, mostly in rural areas. (This would still leave Ireland with well below the European average of 43% forestry cover.)
- The retention of hedgerows and…
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Provocation for ArtWorks blog
You have in front of you a typewritten text. It could be poetry. It is an invitation to action, but not exactly an instruction. It reads:
planting a square of turf
amid grass like it
planting another
amid grass a little less green
planting four more squares
in places progressively drier
planting a square of dry turf
amid grass like it
planting another
amid grass a little less dry
planting four more squares
in places progressively greener
This is an artwork by Allan Kaprow, a score in his terminology. Kaprow wasn’t a musician, and in using the term score he was borrowing the terminology of music.
Reading the ArtWorks’ programme’s International Next Practice Review by Chrissie Tiller and in particular the Participation Spectrum proposed by the James Irvine Foundation, it strikes us that this work could operate at any point along the passive to active audience spectrum proposed. It could simply be read by an audience, or at the other end of the spectrum, made by them. A group of artists and researchers from Gray’s School of Art took this score as a starting point to make new work. We called that Calendar Variations. Were we artists or audience? Were we performing Kaprow’s score?
But what was Kaprow doing? Would he have defined his practice as participatory?
We’d like to suggest that Kaprow is breaking out of the norms of being an artist. The score was a prototype for a co-creative relationship. Kaprow authored the score, but other people played it.
Perhaps Kaprow simply thought that music benefited from having three different roles of composer, performer and audience, where in visual art there might be understood to be only artist and audience. Of course the performer could be many things: composer; professional performer, hired to perform the work; or member of the audience who goes home and performs the work themselves. Is the person who whistles the melody also more than passive audience?
But it could also be another composer who creates new work in response to the original, or a painter who makes something in another form. The more improvisational you get, the more that the role of the composer recedes and the role of the performer comes forward. Kaprow’s Calendar Activity is something with which to improvise. As soon as you set out to perform it, you realise that you have to interpret it.
Having done a series of projects on social practices, we have recently been working on improvisation, looking to understand the aesthetics of social practice.
Currently we are exploring participatory and co-creative practices across art, design and architecture.
Professor Paul Harris, Professor Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle
Gray’s School of Art
This was just published as a provocation on the ArtWorks blog and is an element of a wider programme of work on participation and co-creation across art, design and architecture.
My responses to Calendar can be found here.
What art have I seen?
David Batchelor at the Fruitmarket and Ian Hamilton Finlay at Ingleby Gallery with ECA Art, Space and Nature
What art have I seen?
Reposted from www.publicartscotland.com
It’s common place to see elements of exhibitions spilling out of galleries (so-called off-site projects, and don’t get me started on that terminology). But artists who work in public sometimes spill into galleries (although documentation of sited work doesn’t always make for good exhibitions).
Culture Hijack, curated by Peter McCaughey of GSA, and Ben Parry, PhD candidate at UWS, takes on this most slippery subject extremely well. The artists in this show are pranksters and activists from across the world (including Japan, India, the US, Canada and a fair bit of Europe).
These artists take on the city, the streets, regeneration, consumerism, bureaucracy, capitalism, neo-liberalism: politics. They’re at home in a pedagogical space concerned with urbanism and inhabitation. And it’s therefore very apt that it’s in the Architecture Association and also all over the city. The issues raised are the issues that embroil architects and planners as much as cultural theorists and artists.
Photo: Ben Parry, 2013, temporary intervention Bedford Square, London, for Culture Hijack Exhibition
And the exhibition points the spotlight at the blurred, constantly moving, shape of these practices. Right outside on Bedford Square there’s an installation by Tatzu Nishi that has the formal elegance of sculpture and sometimes turns into the absurdity of a good happening. He captures the circularity of the building industry: tearing down and piling up.
Inside, in an installation that borrows it’s language from outdoor exhibitions and temporary conferences, are a lot of videos, one of the best being by Tushar Joag, who spoke at the CCA in Glasgow last week. In his piece a bunch of wide-boy London window cleaners join Tushar (in hisUnicell Public Works Cell boiler suit) to perform the cleaning of the Olympic landscape. A bunch of trained performance artists could not have got into the spirit of ‘cleaning’ the vistas of the east end with more energy and sense of the dance of life.
Video: Tushar Joag collaborating with Gaze a Glaze.
In another space, created by scaffolding tubing and banner fabric, a solitary figure on a handcar travels the train tracks of a German city (Matthias Wermke & Mischa Leinkauf’ In Between). It’s a beautiful moment of living on the edge, not angry, not ironic, just playful.
On the same day at the Barbican was the official launch of the evaluation report on the Cultural Olympiad, saying that some 43 million people had experienced this four year cultural programme leading up to the Games and that it had succeeded in raising Britain from 5th to 4th on the list of nations as desirable brands.
As the international-sporting-event-with-cultural-programme bandwagon moves on towards Glasgow we need to make sure that we question it, poke fun at it and make sure it doesn’t bulldoze anything that really matters (like a community or an allotment).
Culture Hijack is at the Architectural Association, Bedford Square, London and around the city 26 April – 25 May 2013
Chris Fremantle
CHRIS FREMANTLE 
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