What art have I seen?
Don’t go and think about Dalston Mill as a whacky eco retro art project. Think of it as architects working very hard to imagine a future for us all. And bear in mind that they are sleeping in this structure, above the bar cafe, next to the seminar room and adjacent to the toilets.
The bus dropped me on Dalston Lane and I towed my wheelie suitcase over the uneven pavement. Leaving Liverpool Street and the skyscrapers we’d passed through Little Nigeria on Shoreditch High Street. I’d seen the main Radical Nature exhibition at the Barbican a few weeks ago, and Dan Gretton had said this “off-site” project was really worth seeing. I’d caught a glimpse of the mural you are meant to look out for and seen a black painted wooden wall with words hand painted in white saying Dalston Mill, but it looked closed. So thinking that there was another entrance I walked through a yard, caught sight of a scrubby patch of wheat, went through an opening in a builders temporary fence and wandered around. It was 2pm and a few people were casually doing stuff. One guy in a t-shirt and shorts was sweeping up fag butts whilst smoking.
Going to Nils Norman and Michael Cataloi’s University of Trash at the Sculpture Center, my mother’s comment “I saw this in the 70s” is still firmly with me. She’s got a point.
And the answer may lie in the blurb about the show Into The Open currently in Philadelphia. This was the official US representation at the 2008 Venice Bienniale of Architecture. The sixteen groups represented are at the cutting edge of thinking about the urban, the landscape, the recycled and the social. I immediately recognise Center for Land Use Interpretation, Center for Urban Pedagogy, Project Row Houses and Rural Studio as landmark initiatives. I have a collection of CLUI and CUP materials, the book Rural Studio produced on my shelves and I’ve been to Project Row Houses.
The blurb goes:
“Critics noted the exhibition’s unusually sober assessment of the challenges America faces, as well as the inspired attempts by grassroots architects to mitigate these conflicts.”
But I do have a problem, and it was hell of an easy to walk in look around and walk out – to do the artworld strut – and say “seen that”. I did end up talking to the guy clearing up the fag butts and he turned out to be one of the architects. I nearly voluntarily got roped into making dough, and I really should have (no strutting making dough) but in the end they were just getting organised and I was heading for a train. Vidokle does address this so directly and effectively: The Martha Rosler Library as well as the Video Store and the Night School are all about stopping (or tripping) the strut. And I wish the University of Trash and Dalston Mill had, in addition to the events programme, something which when you walk in off the street, sucked you into ‘the sober assessment of the challenges,’ whatever time of day it was.
Because in reality, these architects and artists have created a structure which is lightweight, adaptable, portable, generates energy, supports social activities, addresses questions of food and land use, and therefore embodies some very serious issues. And I loved the scarecrows with milk containers for heads. And I hope that as they take it all to pieces and move on, that they clean up the site, including the archaeological trash from the periphery, which has clearly been there longer than the three weeks of this exercise, and leave the site better than they found it, whether they have left us wiser or not.
Eco-thinking?
Paul Kingsnorth in the Guardian 1 August 2009
Technology and hubris. What is the role of technology in solving the huge challenges that face the world (i.e. all the species living on the planet earth)? Watching the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s slide show of the Trans Alaskan Pipeline in the Radical Nature Show at the Barbican, I was struck by the scale and sophistication of our engineering (technological) capacities. I came away feeling that it was not optional. Yes, I might use the car less, walk more, fly less, use the train more, recycle more, reuse more, eat more vegetables and less meat, grow more potatoes. I might also be political working on projects which raise environmental issues, join the green party, read the latest thinking on green issues. But the idea that we, as unspecialised animals, don’t use technology to solve our problems, is impossible. Kingsnorth rightly highlights the real problem about the application of existing assumptions to the new challenges: they are not ‘wind farms’ they are ‘ wind power stations.’ But pride is a great driver of human development, technological as much as philosophical. How do we apply our technological imaginations and skills with modesty and humility and a respect for all the other lifeforms on the planet?
What Art/Reading?
Chris Biddlecombe’s book when visitors appear produced as part of his work with the Arthur Conan Doyle Richard Lancelyn Green Collection and the Aspex Gallery which resulted in the exhibition Between Worlds, 2009.
Biddlecombe explores his own interests through the cypher of Arthur Conan Doyle and the Richard Lancelyn Green Collection held by Portsmouth City Council.
Conan Doyle’s public persona as author of the Sherlock Holmes stories is entwined with his less well known involvement in Spiritualism. Richard Lancelyn Green obsessively collected anything to do with Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. Biddlecombe has, in turn, obsessively explored this material during an off-site project co-ordinated by the Aspex Gallery.
The book is a juxtaposition of the moments when Holmes and Watson first meet their ‘clients,’ drawn from the stories; and a number of psychic research photographs found in the Richard Lancelyn Green collection. Biddlecombe has made drawings of an almost anthropological or illustrative character from the photographs. Each photograph appears to contain both people and spirits, not always human. Interestingly Biddlecombe’s drawings apply the same mark making techniques to both subjects, and therefore emphasise an equality of reality. The spirits are as real as the sitters.
As is highlighted in the text for the exhibition, trickery does not necessarily preclude truth. Visitors may be the product of the imagination, but that makes them no less significant.
What Art?
The unacceptable face of Britain
Aesthetic of European stag party culture
Blue Cowboys out of Newcastle rebranded to maximise market penetration take Gdansk by storm
Find them on youtube under the name StudioSzkic
Explore Polish bars
Tree climbing, table Squennis, arm wrestling,
begging bankers
Sexercise disco on a streetcorner in NY in PLish
Who is mixing the beats? They should be on iTunes as well.
Resources on the history of climate change and science
A timeline of the development of the science of climate change (1800 to the present), part of a much larger site and educational resource created by Spencer Weart (author of The Discovery of Global Warming) and hosted by the American Institute of Physics.
An article on the history of Climate Change science from the Guardian in 2007
Reading
Gary Snyder
Endless Streams and Mountains
This web site has the first section of this book length poem, and juxtaposes it with the visual work it refers to – very interesting to see the two together. The poem is a deceptively simple description of the contents of the images.
What Art have I seen?
The University of Trash at the Scultpure Center
Art space become alternative pedagogical space. Quote “I saw enough of this sort of thing in the 70s.”
So are we revisiting the 70s? If so, why? And what is the difference between now and the 70s?
What art have I seen?
Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City.
What sticks in the mind?
Fifty bums raised in the air: yoga in the Park.
A giant doilly suspended in the trees
(Jennifer Cecere, Mom, 2009)
Looking across to Manhattan’s volume.
A series of physical challenges modelled on an exercise assault course
(Risa Puno, The Big Apple Showdown Spectacular, 2009)
A carnival wagon with artefacts displayed
(Dana Sherwood and The Black Forrest Fancies, The Ladies Society of Alchemical Agriculture, 2009)
A black barn of jig-sawed patterns
(Bernard Williams, Socrates Ply- Teck Barn, 2009)
A small garden, the most valuable space for urban-dwellers
(Jeanine Oleson, Retribution, 2009)
Socrates Sculpture Park reinvents itself as a cross-over public space between art and temporary amusement park. Away with formal sculptural concerns: roll up, roll up to the crazy summer Saturday on a field in the sun. Is it New York or is it somewhere in Kansas? Is it Little House On The Prairie or is it socially engaged practice? Even without the specific ‘dialogics’ intended to captivate the art audiences, Socrates is busy.
Rural and city
Martin Wolf in the FT (3 May 2006) summarises Jane Jacobs’ arguments for the importance of cities (not countries) and their role in relation to regions.
Eco thinking?
I like William Boyd’s writing and he highlights something quite accurately, which is inherently problematic about the relationship between the urban and the rural. The assumed dichotomies of creative v traditional, noisy v quiet, dirty v clean, etc need to be challenged.
Furthermore he acknowledges the constructedness of the landscape as a characteristic, but he doesn’t analyse the meaning of constructing landscapes as a human activity.
William Boyd’s It’s all too beautiful in today’s Guardian Review
Re: LANDWORKERS
Whilst working at the University of the Arts Berne, had the opportunity to meet and speak with George Steinmann. His work From-To-Beyond highlights what was missing from the discussion at LANDWORKERS. We heard about wonderful cultural projects in Samiland, in Dogribland and in Scotland. All these places continue to suffer the environmental and social impacts of extraction. Steinmann went to the Kola Peninsula in Russia (part of Samiland) and saw the massive environmental destruction:
“In the autumn of 1995, after thorough preparation, and having contacted scientists in Norway, Finland and Russia, I headed for Murmansk to travel the Kola Peninsula with a Russian Guide. The itinerary included a visit to Severomorsk and the nuclear submarine base there, as well as excursions to the nickel smelting works in Montsegorsk, Apatity, and Nikel, and a trip to Teriberka on the Barents Sea. I have never travelled in a region so scarred. It is one huge pathogenic zone caught between primal nature and industrial exploitation. This vast region is fatally polluted and damaged by the huge amounts of nuclear waste in the Barents Sea and on the island of Novaya Zemlya, and by the gigantic sulphur-dioxide output of the smelting works. “
(p.166, George Steinmann: Blue Notes, Helmhaus Zurich, Verlag fur moderne Kunst Nurnberg, 2007)
There is a real danger in focusing on the art, and the art focusing on aspects of the cultural, and thus missing the real environmental, social and economic dimensions of extraction and pollution in these remote places.
Liam Gillick quotes Peter Fend
“Art is an investigation by human animals into constructable or alterable aspects of the material surroundings. It is prior to technology or the invention of tools. It is therefore a seedbed of economy. Of course this is not how it is usually perceived at least in society today. Which explains how society – that is, modern civilisation – is so unresponsive to its divergence from ecological cycles, or to basic human needs for shelter and food. Any failure in material culture results from a failure to adopt the lessons, the probings, the investigations of art.”
p.38 Gillick, L. Proxemics: Selected Writings (1988-2006) Zurich: JRP Ringler and Dijon: Les Presses du reel
Berne, Switzerland?
Working at the University of the Arts, Berne
Presenting The Artist as Leader and doing a workshop with 2nd Year Graphic Design students.
Two visits. In the first (27 May) I find:
“Calculation and work. Trial and error, first on paper, then as a model, then eventually as a prototype on a scale of one to one, that is the method of the practical scientist Renzo Piano and his people. The design process oscillates between tinkering and totalling, the simplest hand drawn sketches and the most high-tech computer drawings are used. The search party takes side turnings, longer routes, gets itself out of dead ends, but every step takes them closer to an as yet undefined goal. The detours are necessary – they ensure that no short circuits, no apparent short cuts, lead to a rash, un-thought-out result. Anyone who commits himself too soon, locks himself in. Piano’s people approach their task like a team of researchers on thin ice.” p.24 Benedikt Loderer, Monument in Fruchtland in Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Short Guide. Hatje Cantz, 2005.
Also Dream and Reality: Contemporary Art from the Near East. The curatorial concept is very strong comprising firstly, contemporary works; secondly, elements of material culture chosen from an anthropological collection; and thirdly, a selection of works by Paul Klee. But in practice, as an experience, its not very successful. It’s not that the Klee works aren’t relevant. It’s not that the anthropological works aren’t relevant. Some of the contemporary art is very good. But in this category there are too many video works. But let me tell you about the three really good pieces. Firstly The Walid Raad/Atlas Group work that seems to be called either Untitled 1982-2007 by Walid Raad, or We Decided to Let them Say “We Are Convinced” Twice by the Atlas Group. Secondly the series of carpets by xxx variously titled. When you first walk down the stairs you see a collection of four carpets which are not quite hung in the same way as for instance the carpets in the Burrell in Glasgow. Then you start to question what you are looking at and you realise that they are modified, reconstructed into new forms, subtley different from the normal. Finally, the chair. I thought it was simply a chair with a small booklet chained to it which might elucidate one of the videos. The book started with a short text which explained that in both Europe and in Cairo there are lots of plastic garden chairs, but where in Europe, when they break they are thrown out, in Cairo they are repaired. A sequence of approximately 20 images of various repaired plastic garden chairs followed. The text suggested that visitors to the exhibition should treat this chair very roughly because the museum had agreed to repair any broken chair in the same way that the Egyptians were repairing their chairs.
For me this work articulated the potential for the arts to highlight the infection of one culture by another culture, and the potential for that to work in both directions. Asking the museum exhibition, conservation and curatorial staff to firstly assume that a piece of plastic garden furniture is an important cultural object, and then to suggest that it should be repaired in a very explicit way, is just great. Asking the people visiting the exhibition to treat an artwork roughly (though sadly it was not showing any significant signs of wear and tear), is brilliant. Definitely a sort of Fluxus Score or an Allan Kaprow happening, read through a post-colonial distorting mirror.
Kunstmuseum Berne (28 May)
Tracey Emin (I missed it in Edinburgh, so it was great to see it in Berne).
“Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” Guerrilla Girls 1989.
If women are going to be naked in the museum then Emin tells us something about her experience of being a woman.
Walking through the gallery away from a video about being in a band, suddenly I heard screaming, screaming that hit me in the solar plexus. My immediate reaction was that someone in the next gallery was in deep, deep anguish. The pop music and the screaming.
In the sequence of polaroid or photobooth works it seems that Emin is saying “If you are going to look at my body, then you are going to see it as I see it, feel it as I feel it.”
There is a display of small images of early, post art school work that Emin destroyed. The pictures are presented like a collection of family photos. You can see that she has been deeply influenced by Edvard Munch. Someone also mentioned Egon Schiele. There is a work which reminds me strongly of Louise Bourgeois.
Conclusion: it’s a game of consequences – the statement is ‘if’ ‘then.’
Kunsthalle Berne (29 May) Zhang Enli
Second visit to the Zentrum Paul Klee (30 May)
Paul Klee: Carpet of Memory
It didn’t feel like an historical exhibition. It was overwhelming, both in the beauty of the images and in the variety of tactics of the visual. It’s not just a lot of squiggles. The one image which was apparently simply a series of dabs of colour on a dark surface was infact a broadly applied impasto, overlayered with watercolour, and the dark colour was used to heighten the shapes of the watercolour dabs.
Conclusion: he asks which tactic will I apply here?
The sculpture park behind the Zentrum – five works – twisted and beaten coreten steel and cast bronze.
Fred Bushe, RSA OBE
Frederick Bushe. Born 1931 died 17 May 2009.
One of the foremost of a generation of Scottish sculptors, Fred Bushe also founded the Scottish Sculpture Workshop.
Both his drawing and his sculpture were monumental in scale and concerned with the physical of the environment around him. He was a modernist through and through, engaged with material and form and dismissive of the fads in sculpture that came and went. His strong sense composition in three dimensions resulted in work drawing on the industrial as a primary source. You would naturally connect his work with that of Anthony Caro.
In 1979 he had been teaching art teachers at Aberdeen College of Education, and was looking for a studio. He found an old bakery in the village of Lumsden, with a flat above a shop front, and a range of buildings behind. He took these on, establishing the Scottish Sculpture Workshop (SSW) initially under the auspices of WASPS (Workshop Artists Studio Provision Scotland), and later as a ‘client’ of the Scottish Arts Council.
Fred was part of the post-war sculpture symposium movement participating in symposia in eastern europe and in turn hosting a number of international symposia at SSW. This movement was about cultural communication in the context of political division, and Fred played an important role. In the Bothy at SSW there is a big kitchen table, and that probably epitomises his spirit.
Over the fifteen or sixteen years that he ran SSW, more than one generation of young artists found a place to explore their interests in a working studio. At the same time artists from something like 40 countries came to work. When it was good, SSW was a hothouse with artists working and talking, supporting and helping each other. When it was bad, it was freezing cold and very isolated.
Fred also established the Scottish Sculpture Open at Kildrummy Castle. For many years it provided an opportunity to see large scale work by established and emerging artists, again both Scottish and overseas. It is difficult to image the importance of this biennial when there are now so many opportunities for large scale work (temporary and permanent), but at the time it was critical.
Fred had studied at Glasgow School of Art, 1949–53. In 1966–67 he attended the University of Birmingham School of Art, where he gained an Advanced Diploma in Art Education. He was a long standing member of the Royal Scottish Academy and received his OBE in 1997 (I think).
He exhibited in group shows from the Camden Arts Centre in London to the Pier Arts Centre on Orkney, as well as many of the Sculpture Opens, and his works are to be found in various locations in Scotland as well as in odd corners of Eastern Europe.
Hopefully the RSA will put on a good retrospective of his work.
A characteristic large sculpture, “Grave Gate”, in Corten steel and wood, can be found in the Hunterian Sculpture Courtyard.
Other links to images:
Chatham Street North Extension Relief
T-Fold, Highland Council
LANDWORKERS
Twice this week I have been confronted by the importance of thinking about the rural as a thing in itself, rather than by what it is not. The Scottish Government defines the rural in negative terms; it is that which is not urban. But, and it has to be said, sometime around now according to the UN Population Fund humanity is crossing a threshold into (statistically speaking) more than 50% of us living in cities.
And it is precisely at this point that it is increasingly clear that we need to pay attention to the cost of our beliefs, and our belief that the rural is backward, dependent and boring compared to the smooth, fast and creative spaces of our cities is one we need to question.
On Thursday 14th May 2009 the Geddes Institute at the University of Dundee, as part of the Annual Conference of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland held a symposium entitled Landworkers. We were taken on a journey into a space where the indigenous and the vernacular and the rural and the remote were foremost. I have a slight reservation even using the word rural in the context of work around the Great Bear Lake in the North West Territories of Canada, or of Samiland stretching across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Rural suggests the space of western agrarian cultures, not the space of travelling folk and nomads.
So I’d like to start by suggesting several things Scotland can learn from its own rural:
The international Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently reported that Scotland’s rural schools provide the best education in the world.
As noted previously, the result of more than 20 years of community development through the process of land claim on Eigg (amongst other remote Scottish estates) has resulted in the Eigg Trust introducing a renewable energy system which makes the island an exemplar. Moreover the fact that this renewable energy system incorporates a means to limit any individual from taking too much is something to be celebrated. It means that social and environmental justice are manifest in the infrastructure.
Rural Scotland also has the potential to generate 25% of Europe’s wind energy, as well as a very significant proportion of wave and tidal energy. In the context of climate change it is imperative, not that we cover every square mile of the Scottish landscape with wind turbines, but that we develop a robust politics to maximise the production of renewable energy by pushing all the technologies to commercial viability, and by re-designing and re-engineering the grid to support this. The key words for such a policy need to be a mixed economy of means across both technologies and scales – just as rural life is characterised by mixed economies and complex interdependecies.
This moves from the overused word ‘sustainability’ to the more imaginatively rich concept of a ‘stability domain’ as articulated by the eminent ecological artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison. A ‘stability domain’ is a region, whether a watershed, or another geographical entity, which achieves ecological and economic stability. In human terms this means having the necessary interdependencies, structures and limitors embedding social and environmental justice, for life to thrive. It also means ceasing to be dependent on the extraction of, and consuming of, limited resources beyond the carrying capacity of the ecology. We might also want to ask what a cultural stability domain might be?
If we want to challenge beliefs, then we might want to imagine the situation where our energy needs are met from the energies already in movement around the planet, rather than those embedded beneath our feet. I can understand why miners in St Helens in Lancashire are proud of their motto ‘Ex Terra Lucem’ and it’s a wonderfully resonant phrase, but we need a new motto.
These are all pragmatic and practical lessons we can learn from the rural, but we can also learn in a different way, and returning to the Landworkers symposium I want to highlight the cultural things we can learn from the rural.
Four, if not more, presentations focused on vernacular and indigenous projects:
Gavin Renwick working as cultural intermediary for the Dogrib in their land claim negotiations with the Canadian Government, andnow moving on to the process of designing and developing a new vernacular for housing in the new nation.
Juhani Pallasmaa creating a museum of nature and culture with and for the Sami.
Then two wonderful presentations flowing into each other by a process of playing ‘tag’ starting with Arthur Watson, handing on to Will Maclean, handing on to Fergus Purdie, handing back to Will Maclean handing on to Marion Leven.
Watson was talking about Cairn Gorm: Reading a Landscape in which he is collaborating with Maclean and Purdie, amongst others. Maclean then talked about the works Cuimhneachain nan Gaisgeach (Commemoration of our Land Heroes) on Lewis where he is collaborating on the fourth site with Leven.
These projects are more than just art in rural places. They speak to a very specific and different understanding: one the places priority on the vernacular and indigenous. T.S.Eliot and others were quoted on the relationship between tradition and innovation but Renwick provided some of the key phrases that structure thinking this through. The first, probably derived from reading MacDiarmid, in “Being modern in your own language.” The second is the dictum of the Dogrib elders which is to educate young people to understand both Western culture and their own traditional culture: “to be strong like two people”.
The cultural projects all demonstrate that it is absolutely critical in the context of rampant urbanisation to express the value (richness, complexity, duration, immediacy, experimentation and repetition) of the rural. And that the expressions of value and meaning we saw help us understand, if nothing else, that the rural is more than just a lower density of population.
The issue of the vernacular seemed quite opaque in the event. What is vernacular? Is it of the everyday? In relation to architecture it can seem like an aspect of the aesthetic realm or a stylistic device. But it struck me that the terrace I live on with 20 houses the same and two at the end which are larger (for the builder/developer and his family at a guess) also describes a vernacular – yes in the ‘character,’ but also in the economics. There is a real danger that the vernacular is a lifestyle choice rather than an aspect of imagining our ‘stability domain’. It seemed to me that the artists’ projects evidenced a clear operation within a complex idea of vernacular which comes back to Renwick’s ‘modern in our own language’ and ‘strong like two people.’
Scotland's Futures Forum – How to re-perceive our understanding of 'rural Scotland' in the 21st Century?
Willie Roe, Chair, Skills Development Scotland and Highlands and Islands Enterprise, focused this event on an idea of equivalence and interdependence. He drew on the example of Denmark where, in law, the urban and the rural have to be dealt with in equivalent ways. This means that within any planning cycle rolling out services the rural is dealt with in parallel with the urban. The case in point is broadband which has apparently been rolled out in urban Scotland but is still only just reaching the islands. He perhaps highlighted interdependence through the example of very functional ferry services in the Shetlands versus the rest of the western and northern isles ferry services. He observed that in Shetland these had been designed to be the most effective for the islanders by the islanders, whereas the rest seemed to have been designed from the urban centre outwards. He also highlighted the importance of renewable energy in rural Scotland.
It therefore felt a little like the invitation had been made to come to Edinburgh to consider what could be done for rural Scotland which was obviously ‘dependent’ but that by the end the question was quite different: and might end up something like: ‘What are the key priorities where the rural has a specific role to play?’ When we ask these questions we begin to see a different set of answers: certainly renewables, but also education (apparently the OECD recently found that education in rural Scotland is actually the best in the world), probably community development, and I am sure the list goes on. Our priorities would come out looking different: re-engineering our electricity grid from one which distributes from the centre to the periphery, to one which also enables the periphery to distribute to the centre, might be a metaphor for quite a lot of other re-engineering. We would move away from assuming that the ‘rural’ is ‘dependent.’
But, if I had a reservation about the event, it was the lack of the use of the word sustainability in relation to the proposed core concept of equivalence. Equivalence could be interpreted in very wasteful ways. Rather I’d like to imagine Scotland in 20 years time being equivalent to Eigg, certainly in relation to energy if not also land ownership. I say this because Eigg is now wholly renewable, but also because there is social and environmental justice built into the system. Eigg does not have an unlimited volume of electricity available, although it is free and not consumed in the process of use. Therefore they have implemented a 5kw limit for households and a 10kw limit for businesses in the form of a trip on the supply. This way noone can take more than their share. To me this is an important model for a sustainable future for the planet, not just one utopian island.
The Artist as Leader
The Artist as Leader programme: I have been Research Associate since 2006 working closely with Professor Anne Douglas, in a partnership between academic research and practice. We have recently published the final report from the first phase of work, and are in the process of developing new initiatives.
See Research and Writing > The Artist as Leader
Climate Change and the Carteret Islands
You need to hear the voices of people on the Carteret Islands, commonly identified as some of the first climate refugees, or people displaced by climate change.
Youtube – Global Warming and the Carteret Islands
Reading
Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
Mark Kurlansky
Originally posted 13 June 2006
What art/reading?
The Martha Rosler Library (and Anton Vidokle‘s talk) at Stills, Edinburgh.
Vidokle, founder of e-flux and Producer (?) of the Martha Rosler Library as an e-flux project, explained the origin of the circulation of the Library. Vidokle described being in Texas, visiting Marfa, seeing Donald Judd’s library (below) of some 10,000 volumes, and not being allowed to pick one off the shelves because everything has to be kept exactly the way Judd had it – a ‘permanent installation’ in his terminology. So Vidokle is talking to Rosler about another project and relates this story. She offers Vidokle her library as a public resource. Vidokle gets excited about the idea. The Martha Rosler Library opens in the e-flux storefront in New York. Stills, Edinburgh, is the last venue, the seventh stop, in what has become the circulation of the Library.
Vidokle referred to the difficulty in thinking about authorship in relation to the Library. It is curated by the venue – obtaining shelves, setting them out, accessorising; it is his idea and he thinks its art; it is Rosler’s Library and she doesn’t think its art; and of course each of the books is authored in the literary sense. We enter a dialectic between form and content. It certainly offers the possibility of a Borgesian treatise, but I think something else is also going on.
Vidokle located his recent projects (unitednationsplaza, Night School, Pawnshop, etc and his involvement in the cancelled Manifesta) in creating an ephemeral/transitory and mobile/ circulating space for attention. He understands contemporary art as constantly drifting into the spectacle whilst striving to ferment political/social change. He noted the underlying current of social change in art going back over 150 years – he referenced Manet and Courbet inheriting the radicalism of the French Revolution. The aesthetic is increasingly a powerful force, whist participation in the political is weakening – Vidokle is concerned with art that can operate differently.
The Martha Rosler Library evidences the importance of politics to some contemporary artists – you will find distinct slabs of literature on marxism, women’s issues, theory, philosophy, architecture, radical history, and so on. But more to the point it would appear that Martha Rosler is an artist who understands reading, thinking, informing, research, theory, intellectualism, radicalism, to be part of what it is to be an artist.
In fact I would go so far as to propose, and I think Vidokle hints at this with the title Martha Rosler Library, that this is like the Presidential Libraries, and in fact Artists’ Libraries should be recognised to be of equal importance and value to the life of nations. We certainly need to recognise the importance of the artist as ‘public intellectual’. To know why this is a bad idea you only have to look at the Artist Placement Group Archive recently bought by the Tate, and now functionally inaccessible. You need to register as a bona fide researcher; make a booking to use the Research Centre, and then you find that because this Archive isn’t catalogued you have to request specific items in advance – how can you request specific items in advance if the archive is uncatalogued? You have to know what you are asking for before you ask for it – the unexpected, the exploratory, the serendipitous is impossible.
But this Library, some 7000 books, is different and does something important, and maybe it does exactly what Vidokle set out to do. It is a spectacle but it draws you into spending time, paying attention and even having conversations. Vidokle has constructed an experience out of a couple of tons of matter, matter which is so fascinating that, more than gold or diamonds, it stops you in your tracks, draws you in, sits you down, and takes you into the heart of what really matters.
Deirdre McKenna and Kirsten Lloyd at Stills both commented on how long people were spending in the Gallery (far more than they would with photography exhibitions). Vidokle said that in Berlin there was a hard core of people who spent 3-4 hours every day in the Library for weeks. Now, of course all Librarians will tell you that people spend hours libraries – some of them old people keeping warm, some doing research, some just hiding. So people coming to the Martha Rosler Library get sucked in, pick up a book, sit down, start reading. Even if they pick up a sci-fi novel (and there is a shelf of them too) they are spending time in a cultural experience. And the same is true of a public library.
This is a particularly good library for those interested in contemporary art and the political – its probably better than most individuals have, and it may be better than most art schools have. Its very clear that it is an individual’s library and has that particular degree of focus. So the person spending time in the Martha Rosler Library might be radicalised. But I suspect most of the people visiting will be arts professionals (just as Vidokle acknowledged that the 50,000 subscribers to e-flux probably amount to a list of those seriously (professionally) involved in contemporary visual arts).
So if this Library does what other libraries do and keeps people for longer, and if it is a radical collection being looked at by people who are by and large au fait with a radical agenda, then why is it important?
Maybe its important precisely because it does exactly these things. Because the ‘event ‘ of the Library being in Edinburgh draws people concerned with contemporary art and social issues to spend time paying attention – reading and having conversations with colleagues, acquaintances and strangers you run into. And exactly why is this important?
I think it comes back to ‘elitism’. The more a group develops a common language, a shared set of ideas, an iterative discourse, a cliquish mentality, the more powerful it can become, the more likely it is to change the world, to take over, to mount a coup, to become a junta.
I spent two or three hours in the Library – I read two of Rosler’s book works, an essay by Lawrence Alloway on Feminism. I looked at a text on aesthetic education and on engaged artists in California. I talked to a guy from the Arts Council, Deirdre and Kirsten, Becky, Rachel and watched others. I met lots of people at Vidokle’s talk. It seems to me that art does not have to be something uniquely different: it can be something already well known, but do it with great attention. Why is this art, not just a library? Actually its a library made by an artist for other artists.
Notices on e-flux documenting the circulation of the Martha Rosler Library
Stills (Edinburgh), Site (Liverpool), Institut national d’histoire de l’art (Paris), unitednationsplaza (Berlin), Museum for Contemporary Art (Antwerp), Frankfurter Kunstverein, and at e-flux (New York)
Others thoughts:
Cluster Blog
Letterature di svolta
Artopia – John Perreault’s Art Diary
What am I reading
The World of Perception, Maurice Merleau Ponty, Routledge Classics 2008
What art have I seen?
Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière
Some images at Flickr
Vassiviere is listed on the ISC‘s web site as one of the few sculpture parks in France. It describes itself variously as ‘a centre for art and nature’, ‘art and the counryside’, and ‘a centre for land art’. It has a few internationally known artists (Goldsworthy, Pistoletto and the Kabakovs) and many French artists; I found a work by Brad Goldberg, who collaborated on Place of Origin, and work by Roland Cognet who had worked at SSW and seems to have had a one person show at Vassiviere,
This place is interesting; having come about as a result of a major hydro-electric scheme, it conceptually raises issues of our relationship to our environment and our tendency to manipulate it in order to extract benefit. It has real character, but it suffers from neither owning its history, nor clearly adressing its apparent mission.
It has a mixed bag of sculptures that make up the park – some the result of a sculpture symposium in the early 80s. More recent and jokey post modern works are also incorporated. The gallery seems to work in partnership with some high profile institutions like the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The building by Aldo Rossi is striking.
But there is a lack of clarity – there are cornerstone international works, but I couldn’t discern a curatorial strategy. Likewise I guess that the works by French artists are significant, but I didn’t get a sense of a collection of work of significant French sculptors (or artists working in three dimensions on an outdoor scale). This would be a good project in itself.
The work by Samakh is a good response to a natural event, but the replanting of an area of forest to promote biodiversity is not radical.
Thinking about the work of Littoral in particular, but also of PLATFORM, and others involved in dialogic practices, there are so many ways in which this amazing place could speak of itself. Funnily enough it is Goldsworthy who draws attention to the drowned land, but for instance the larger ecological landscape is not drawn out.
But as it stands it clearly has a history of being a centre for sculpture during the second half of the 20th century, and is trying to redefine itself. Using the gallery to do this is OK, but in the end it remains in conflict with the permanently sited work which speaks of a previous project.
What am I re-reading?
The Ends Of Our Tethers: 13 Stories by Alistair Gray, Canongate Books, Edinburgh, 2003
What am I reading?
Atoms of Delight: an anthology of Scottish haiku and short poems, Edited by Alec Finlay, Pocketbooks, 2000
Distance & Proximity, Thomas A Clark, Pocketbooks, 2000
Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom
Greenhouse Britain: (2006-2008). I had the pleasure and honour to work with Helen Mayer Harrison, Newton Harrison and David Haley, . The project developed new thinking about the impact of climate change on the island of Britain.
Producing and Project Managing > Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom
What am I reading?
Ekow Eshun’s Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa, (Penguin, 2006) lent to me by Anne Douglas.
“When I eventually bought a copy of his book I realized how prophetic DuBois had been. Mannered tones aside, The Souls of Black Folk could have been written at the end of the twentieth century instead of its dawn. With his description of double consciousness, Dubois became the first writer to articulate the sensibility of black people born into the white world. He was also the first to argue that, far from being a drawback, our dual gaze was a blessing. It meant that we regarded life with an acuity white people could never muster. We watched for the bigotry cloaked in humour and the hesitations of speech that betrayed hostility. We used double consciousness to survive, and ultimately thrive, in the white world.”
p. 214-215
“The images had faded over time, so that, on one plate, only a pair of eyes was visible.”
p. 123
What art have I seen?
Art About‘s WHAT HAPPENED HERE. I went into the Carnegie Library in Ayr on Friday afternoon and the entrance hall was covered in pictures with hand written comments. Very different from the Ayr Photographic Society’s annual exhibition in the Reference Section. This was clearly improvised and ad hoc. Rachel and Pamela have taken a selection of views of Ayr and photocopied them adding a question under the picture “What Happened Here?” You can add your name and contact details at the bottom.
Walking around the entrance hall people from Ayr have talked about where they have had ice cream and sun burn, where they have fights and kisses. Some talk about the historical significance of sites.
This is preparatory to some planned ‘public art’ event to take place during the Burns an’ a’ that Festival in May. Its interesting because I had just seen the Caravan Club at GI in Glasgow, with their post cards of various graffiti written and derelict sites around the UK. Rachel and Pamela approach is interesting because they are building an audience for the Festival work by getting people involved at this stage. More later.
What art have I seen?
Gavin Renwick‘s Home Office at the Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee.
Gavin invited me to participate in the last discussion in the series.
What am I reading?
Participation, Ed. Claire Bishop, Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2007
Larry Brilliant
“I used to teach my students that their schemes wouldn’t be successful until two things happened: that they would be able to run without you, and that you knew the names of the grandchildren of the people you started the project with: that’s because it takes a generation.”
Quoted in The Guardian 2 February 2008
Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty threatened
Some of the many histories of Spiral Jetty
One
20 years ago a massive campaign led by Nancy Holt, and supported by cultural activists across the world, saved Spiral Jetty from a plans to pump oil from under the Great Salt Lake. Arguing that Spiral Jetty and its context were of international importance, a swift and successful international action was mounted. The UN declared Spiral Jetty a World Heritage Site, putting it in the same category as Machu Pichu and the Great Pyramid of Giza. On the back of this campaign, the Dia Foundation secured donations in excess of $1 billion. With this funding they were able to secure land around all the major Land Art sites – De Maria’s Lightning Field, Heizer’s Double Negative and Holt’s Sun Tunnels. They joined these parcels up to create Entropy Park which now forms a complete ring around the State of Utah. Arguments continue to rage amongst art historians and critical theorists.
Two
20 years ago a spoof email and web site initiated one of those brief flurries that characterised the early 21st century internet. The email suggested that Spiral Jetty was endangered by a proposed energy development which would involve pumping oil from beneath the Salt Lake. Although it did not come from Nancy Holt, it intimated her involvement in a campaign. The net result was that Jonathan Jemming, a Planning Official in Utah State, received approximately 1,500 emails within a one week period. These emails, from artists and academics, museum directors and critical theorists, were in turn abusive, erudite, impenetrable, passionate, and in every case objected to a planning application that did not exist. In fact Jonathan Jemming had never heard of Robert Smithson or Spiral Jetty. Meantime arguments raged amongst art historians and critical theorists.
Three
20 years ago, despite protests by Nancy Holt and others, they started pumping oil from under the Great Salt Lake in Utah, near Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Unfortunately no one realised that, due to a lack of maintenance, pressure would build up in the underground pipes and explode on July 20th 2033. The blast made a crater nearly a kilometre across and caused a tidal wave to travel across the lake. No one was killed. Spiral Jetty ceased to exist. This caused outrage in the art world. The Dia Foundation secured donations of $1 billion to reconstruct the work as well as undisclosed damages from the ExMoBphell conglomerate operating the installation. In the past 5 years no work has been done to reconstruct Spiral Jetty. The Dia Foundation have bought additional parcels of land encompassing the whole of the crater and its surroundings. They have designated this Entropy Park. Arguments continue to rage amongst art historians and critical theorists.
What have I been doing recently?
Deutsche Telekom AG Q1 2007 Earnings Call Transcript
Mr. Chris Fremantle from Morgan Stanley, may you ask your question please?
Chris Fremantle – Morgan Stanley
Yes, thanks very much. Two questions. First of all, for Dr. Eick, on what he just said about the unions, could you just clarify that you’re able also to make the reductions in wages without the union’s approval. And also, whether or not you’ve considered taking a different tack, which would be to offer generous redundancy terms rather than reduced wages to the Telekom workers?
And then secondly a question really for Mr. Obermann, on the mobile side, not as much as the (inaudible) but also on the mobile side, there appeared to be a cost problem. In (inaudible), the margins are only two percentage points higher than E Plus, a company which is just over a third of the size.
And obviously in the UK the margin fell nine percentage points versus Q4, even though the net ads were similar. What is your perspective on the costs issues within T-Mobile and how those are going to be addressed?
What art have I seen
Half-Life by NVA and the National Theatre of Scotland
What am I reading?
The Paradox of Plenty, T L Karl University of California Press, 1997
As I understand it so far, the resource curse is an articulation of the problems faced by those parts of the developing world apparently blessed by an abundance of raw materials – in particular oil. In these parts of the world, the Niger Delta being a good example, the population consistently suffers.
Terry Lynn Karl’s The Paradox of Plenty articulates a chain of consequences taking the oil boom of 1973-74 as a starting point. This runs (very roughly) as follows:
1. Context – Oil is property of State – results in lack of distinction between State political role and State economic role.
2. Context – Oil sector is unpredictable – prices fluctuate.
3. Price of petroleum quadruples and then doubles again in 1979-80.
4. Action – This results in a massive increase in government expenditure attempting to make a ‘great leap forward’ – ambitious and expensive, state financed and focused on industrial development.
5. Thinking – Reserves are understood to be limited and its necessary to move quickly.
6. Thinking – Assumption that value of oil would appreciate if left in ground.
7. Action – Increased foreign borrowing to facilitate the ‘great leap forward’.(by 1980 key capital deficient oil exporters combined debt $100 billion, rising to $275 billion in 1994).
8. Consequences – Expands jurisdiction of State including into industrial production.
9. Consequences – Increases private sector investment funded by increased credit and money supply.
10. Consequences – Wage levels increase beyond increase in productivity
11. Consequences – Influx of foreign workers and other demographic changes including urbanisation.
12. Consequences – Massive imports of luxury goods – domestic production cannot keep up with demand.
13. Consequences – Improved public welfare – middle class grows quickly.
14. Context – Skewed relationship between the regulatory, extractive and distributive functions of the State. Spending has become the primary mechanism of Stateness, as money increasingly us substituted for authority. There is a consistent lack of development of a tax regime and fiscal relationship with the public.
15. Consequences – economy overheats, State expenditure surpasses oil revenues (example the combined current accounts of the cluster of ‘capital deficient oil exporters’ went from 1974 $24 billion surplus to 1978 $14 billion deficit).
16. Consequences – Budget deficits.
17. Consequences – Exchange rates appreciate – currencies are overvalued on the basis of the oil sector. Cheapens imports, undermines local production, leads to dependency.
18. Consequences – Public sector becomes inefficient through overloaded infrastructure. Macro industrial projects overrun, are postponed and cancelled.
19. Consequences – Inflation although high is not as high as other developing countries.
20. Action – To counteract increased reliance on imported food, price controls and import restrictions on, in particular, the agricultural sector.
21. Action – Increased subsidy for low income groups and unprofitable firms.
22. Thinking – Politically impossible to reduce subsidy on economic downturn.
Corruption, one of the persistent issues, occurs because of the tendency to use the buy support using the resource rather than winning it through the achievement of programmes benefiting the population.
What is interesting about the ‘resource curse’ is that it is clearly created by the developed world’s massive demand for, in particular, oil, and other specific raw materials. This has one obvious and one more discrete consequence.
The obvious consequence is that it directly links our actions in the UK and other developed countries with the state of affairs in, for instance the Niger Delta. They would not be ‘cursed’ if we did not have an unlimited appetite for their raw materials.
The second and slightly more discrete aspect of the linkage is that the exploitation of resources in places like the Niger Delta by international corporations is wholly directed towards the efficient extraction and transportation of those resources away. The resource curse basically means that corporations in the developed world only operate in places like the Niger Delta in order to extract oil and ship it to customers in the ‘West’. They have no customers, and therefore no concern with the populations in places like the Delta. All the skilled staff, all the shareholders – all their key publics – are elsewhere. Inevitably therefore anyone who isn’t a customer doesn’t exist.
Nature and purpose of art
“You see in this country for instance (Britain) writers are not involved in the sort of things I’m doing, because it’s a much more settled society, writers write to entertain, they raise questions of individual existence, the angst of the individual. But for a Nigerian writer in my position you can’t go into that. Literature has to be combative, you cannot have art for art’s sake. The art must do something to transform the lives of a community, of a nation, and for that reason you see literature has a different purpose altogether in that sort of society – completely different from here….
And a writer doesn’t earn money in Nigeria, because although you have a 100 million people, most of them cannot read and write there, so literature has a different purpose. So here I am, I’ve written 22 books, I’ve produced 150 episodes of a T.V. programme which everybody enjoys, but I’m poor!
But that is of no interest to me. What is of interest to me is that my art should be able to alter the lives of a large number of people, of a whole community, of an entire country, so that my literature has to be completely different, the stories I tell must have a different sort of purpose from the artist in the western world. And it’s not now an ego trip, it is serious, it is politics, it is economics, it’s everything, and art in that instance becomes so meaningful, both to the artist and to the consumers of that art.”
Ken Saro-Wiwa from ‘Without Walls’ Interview
What am I reading?
Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People, Heinemann
“As I stood in one corner of the vast tumult waiting for the arrival of the Minister I felt intense bitterness welling up in my mouth. Here were silly, ignorant villagers dancing themselves lame and waiting to blow off their gunpowder in honour of one of those who had started the country off down the slopes of inflation. I wished for a miracle, for a voice of thunder, to hush this ridiculous festival and tell the poor contemptible people one or two truths. But of course it would be quite useless. They were not only ignorant but cynical. ” p2
The economics and geopolitics of the abolition
The wider historical context of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade by Hakim Adi and published on Pambazuka
This essay provides and alternative analysis for the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in 1807 It addresses the role of Africans and working class people, and re-describes the history highlighting economic and geopolitical motivations of the ruling classes in Britain.
Sol LeWitt
born September 9, 1928; died April 8, 2007
Sol Lewitt at MassMOCA until 2033
Collaboration
Oren Lieberman, at a dinner during Wendy Gunn’s Making Places workshops in 2002-03, offered an interesting analysis of collaboration. I was reminded of this and encouraged to actually note it down by Tony Beckwith (from Gunpowder Park) phoning up and asking me to remind him about it – I had offered Oren’s thought up during the Bright Sparks Seminar (9 March 2007).
So back to the point, Oren’s analysis of collaboration. He said there is Multi-disciplinary practice. This might be characterised by a group of different disciplines (architects, engineers, planners, perhaps even artists, sitting around a table, each addressing their area of responsibility within a project. Having them round the table is useful, but collaboration is functional. Then you have Interdisciplinary practice. I would understand this to be when the people around that table are interested in understanding each others roles, skills and tasks. I might further suggest that they draw on each others roles skills and tasks through interest. Finally Oren offered Transdisciplinary practice – when people change roles and start doing each other’s jobs. I would offer Michael Singer and Linea Glatt’s 27th Avenue Waste Transfer Station project in Phoenix Arizona as an example – as I understand it they had been employed as artists to decorate the building, found their were decorating a basically bad building and persuaded the commissioner to allow them to redesign the building as a public space which in the documentation, looks like the hanging gardens of Babylon (case study at publicartonline).
The first thing to say about Oren’s analysis is that it is not an increasing scale of good: Trans- is not better than Inter- which is not better than Multi-. They are different. Trans- is more difficult than Inter- which is more difficult than Multi-.
Given that they are more difficult, and probably in the context of any form of collaboration, we need to think about how to achieve collaboration. To achieve collaboration you cannot start around a table in an office. You can only do it by constructing shared experiences, relevant to the project and characterised by conviviality.
Here I would point at John Maine’s tactics at the beginning of Place of Origin (for more on this project follow this link). He insisted that we (himself, Brad Goldberg and Glen Onwin and myself) go on a road trip. We went to Lewis, via Clava Cairns and Assynt. Ostensibly we went to look at the interpretation centre at Callanish, but in fact we went to get to know each other and to develop a shared visual language. Interestingly, though John and I had been to Kemnay Quarry on a number of occasions, this road trip happened before either Brad or Glen saw the site. I suspect the result was that when they saw the site, at the end of the road trip, we all had a shared experience to interrogate it from. What was averted was each artist arriving at the site and immediately going into a singular “what do I do here?” and instead, what occurred was “what do we do here?”. I think this latter point may be very important – it certainly resulted in an amazing collaboration over 10 years.
CHRIS FREMANTLE 
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