Monthly Archives: October 2024

20 songs performed by Americans – for those who “want to make America great again”.

Jenny Scheinman – Will Jesus Wash the Bloodstains from Your Hands

Bob Dylan – Desolation Row

Mary C Carpenter – John Doe no. 24

Shearwater – Rooks

Robin Holcomb – I Tried to Believe

Natalie Merchant – Sister Tilly

Otis Taylor – Ten Million Slaves

Vic Chesnutt – We Are Mean

Patty Griffin – 250,000 Miles

Josh Ritter – The Torch Committee

Anais Mitchell – Young Man in America

Leonard Cohen – The Land of Plenty

Laura Veirs – America

Brown Bird – Wayward Daughter

Buffy Sainte-Marie – Cod’ine

David Crosby – What Are Their Names

Susan Tedeschi – 700 Houses

Grateful Dead – Ship of Fools

Lucinda Williams – Man Without a Soul

Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit – White Man’s World

Carreg Creative at the sixth Wales Real Food and Farming Conference.

I have recently started working as an external reviewer with the bilingual Welsh group Carreg Creative. They are currently planning Wrth Wraidd – At Root for the sixth Wales Real Food and Farming Conference, which is to be held on the 20th-22nd of November at the University of Wales Trinity St David, in Lampeter.

Carreg Creative’s aim is to provide a bilingual space for questions, considerations, mapping and dreaming in the Foyer of the Arts Building. As a starting-point, they are inviting conference attendees to join them at any time, bringing along a small amount of soil or roots from home and/or unanswered/unasked questions from their conference experience. They will also be hosting a reflection session in the Foyer of the Arts Building at the end of each day.

The Carreg Creative bilingual team is somewhat unusual in that it consists of experienced artists, performers and poets with backgrounds in food, farming and the environment. Between them, they work as artists in performance, creative writing, poetry, film, photography, drawing, painting, print-making, and sculpture. However, what particularly interests me about their planned approach is their emphasis on the value of conversation and, in particular, on the importance of prioritising listening as a basis for whatever work they do over the delivery of a pre-determined programme or agenda. I hope to be writing more about their work at the conference in a future post about particular ways in which certain artists are now engaging with issues of land, environment, ecology and farming.

Anne Douglas’ response to my review of “Thinking with the Harrisons”.

In an email exchange responding to my review of her and Chris’ book, Anne Douglas contacted me about the point I’d made about artists today and the “material question”. She writes that:

“this very point was raised by a PhD student from Berlin/Bauhaus Weimar. Her work is excellent on sea level rise and she was very clear that there would be no way she could function in the way the Harrisons had and asked whether that undermined her potential as an artist working on ecological issues. My response at the time was that she was an artist and needed to focus on working within whatever constraints life posed as excellence frequently emerges out of very severe constraints”.

She also notes that when Newton Harrison “addressed Masters students at ECA in Edinburgh, he began by saying that their challenges to be artists in the current world would be much, much greater than his own…” adding that: “then there is Hannah Arendt, ‘We are born unasked into the world” and have no control over the circumstances of our birth. Thereafter we have some and therefore need to invest in thinking for ourselves”. 

She goes on to say taht while her points don’t directly address my thoughts about the economics of the art world and how eco-art practices “can/will be supported when so much of institutional life, not least education in art schools, is fractured. It would make an important book around the kind of judgements artists need to make in how to become recognised…”.

I very much hope someone out there is busy preparing to research and write just such a book, not from the usual “critical Left” position within the art world, but with a clear understanding of the radical shift of mentality needed. One that moves us beyond the myopia imposted by a disciplinary-based education system to a view of life in which creativity is seen as intrinsic to all worthwhile human activity – Joseph Beuys’ notion that “everyone is an artist”. One in which everyone’s practices are understood as located within an ensemble of skills and orientations rather than in specialisms all-too-often linked to exclusive notions of authority and power.

“Thinking with the Harrisons: Re-imagining the Arts in the Global Environmental Crisis” (Leuven University Press, October 9th, 2024) – A Review.

Introduction

Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, authors of this highly significant book and themselves artist researchers, worked closely with Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (1932-2023) – collectively known as the Harrisons or The Harrison Studio – both on particular projects and more generally. Douglas co-produced On the Deep Wealth of this Nation: Scotland and Fremantle produced Greenhouse Britain, Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom. (He is also one of the editors of Eco-art in Action: Activities, Case Studies, and Provocations for Classrooms and Communities, 2022, a field guide that offers practical solutions to critical environmental challenges that includes Newton Harrison). Which is to say they write both as observant participants working from direct first-hand involvement in the Harrisons’ processes, and from a researcher’s concern with rigorous creative ‘thinking with’. Thinking that in the course of their study ranges across the arts, particularly in relation to engagement with environmental concerns, but also across the work of a variety of important scientists, philosophers, and other thinkers.

The result is less an ‘art book’ in the usual sense and more an unusual and highly important text that uses the work of the Harrisons as its focus. A text that for the most part avoids the usual biographical / aesthetic approach to analyse a particular artistic oeuvre by focusing on how the Harrisons’ unfolding process addresses a series of fundamental and pressing ecological questions. That is, it asks, in the face of a deepening and global eco-social crisis, how can:

“…arts practices be reimagined in the face of the escalating number of manifestations of the crisis? How might they help us re-imagine ourselves in the world outside of human exceptionalism and progress, cultural narratives that have dominated the Western world for more than 500 years since the Renaissance? Can the arts offer alternative ways of knowing that counter the authority of ‘techoscience’ to shape Earth as an object for our human convenience”? (p. 11)

These questions are at heart then of a book that takes the intertwining of art with other approaches to the world central to our need for continuing self-education very seriously indeed. A book that can also be read, however, as a substantive refutation of the performance artist Andrea Fraser’s observation about the relationship between art, wealth and politics. That’s to say it proposes how we counter her claim that: “Artists are not part of the solution…We are part of the problem”. (In Sarah Thornton 33 Artists in 3 Acts, p. 376)

In this context it is entirely in keeping with both the Harrisons’ and the authors’ approach that this book: “will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open“.

What colours this review.

Any review is inevitably coloured by the reviewer’s own concerns. I have read this book as someone with a European, and primarily British, cultural background, while keeping in mind that it concerns practices developed by the Harrisons against the background of American culture and economics.  My response to it is also coloured by two related preoccupations. Firstly, by long engagement with the complexities and responsibilities of our senses of place, particularly as these are explored through deep mapping, an approach with some similarities to that of the Harrisons’. Secondly, with a preoccupation shared with the Harrisons, one encapsulated in their understanding that they would: “focus their work on the web of life and the journey that took them on”, one that had “the potential to form a powerful pedagogy”. (p. 208) That is to say, I share their preoccupation with life-long self-education. (Significantly, Helen Mayer Harrison initially worked as a scholar and educationalist).

These two preoccupations are entangled in many working friendships. With, for example, the Irish eco-artist Cathy Fitzgerald, who learned directly from the Harrisons and has now set up the Haumea Ecoversity; with the members of the Welsh collaborative Utopias Bach; and with a 50-year-long friendship with a versatile and intensely practical artist, Simon Read. Simon has pursued a line of work independently of the Harrisons’ influence but, like them, has immersed himself in environmental debates and developed a complex ‘ensemble’ practice informed by interdisciplinary collaboration. One that allows him to make informed interventions in matters primarily relating to estuary landscapes, in particular estuarine salt-marsh. I see these working friendships as active ‘in the spirit of’ the questions this book addresses, as establishing integrated, experimental, creative research networks that connect people so as to engage with and share the concept of change and to support decisions made in relation to the landscapes in which they live. I stress all this because, although in one respect this is very obviously a book about the Harrisons’ work, in another it can be read as celebrating an emerging mentalité of which they are highly significant examples.

Thinking with ….

The book presents the Harrisons’ work as “particularly prescient” in anticipating the orientation of thinkers grounded in scientific and philosophical disciplines who are facilitating convergences of scientific and aesthetic insight. (Examples include Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing). In particular, they draw on Stengers’ account of learning to ‘think with’ the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead. An engagement that helped Stengers to imagine and resist “ready-made” models and to avoid falling into despair at the socio-environmental situation we face. Something the authors clear hope this book will help their readers in doing. Consequently the second chapter of the book, Thinking With’ Whitehead, Stengers and the Harrisons, sets out the authors’ use of key concepts from Whitehead’s writing on process philosophy, seen in turn as prefiguring “ecological thinking in the sense of understanding nature as emergent through a process of deep entanglement”. This provides them with “a point of entry into learning what our responsibility towards the work of the Harrisons might be” since Whitehead, as a scientist and mathematician, worked with “a unified concept that takes into account sensory experience, feelings, and emotions”. (p. 29) The chapter then uses Whitehead’s thinking to discuss the Harrisons’ work between 1971 and 1974 and the process of critically identifying “the collisions and contradictions” that led the artists to conclude that the forms of the work made during this period were “fundamentally flawed”, (p. 35) although essential to the development of The Lagoon Cycle, the focal topic of Chapter 3.

In Chapter 3 we are introduced to the development of a poetics of dialogue and the visual storytelling that then appeared in the Harrisons’ work. A shift  that enabled them to frankly acknowledge that: “the universe is a multileveled discourse, a conversation in many languages – biological, chemical, physical – most of which we cannot even perceive, much less understand. Within this discourse, every place is bespeaking the story of its own becoming. Everyone is in this conversation, as is everything”. (p. 80)

Chapter 3 is pivotal in setting up the basis for discussion of “the relationship between ‘system’ and ‘improvisation’ and between ‘discourse’ and ‘the political’” as they appear in The Lagoon Cycle and other early works, in identifying central qualities in the Harrisons’ “approach as artists” that are “also potentially powerful” factors “in the development of the arts’ relationship to ecology”. (p. 88) What then follows are three chapters that address the particular and complex nature of the central aspects of the Harrisons’ overall approach. Chapter Four explores their approach to improvisation, Chapter Five to the poetics and aesthetics of systems, and Chapter Six to the political.

Rich in examples drawn from both the Harrisons’ work and that of relevant artists and thinkers as various as the novelist and critic Amitav Ghosh, the free jazz improvisor and philosopher Gary Peters, the musician and writer on the raga tradition of northern India Amit Chaudhuri, visual artists Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, art critic Jack Burnham, and scholars and thinkers Hannah Arendt, Frijof Capra, Julia Kristeva, Brian Massumi, and Morse Peckham, these chapters offer an extraordinary wealth of insight to the reader. As such they invite close and reflective study and I simply cannot summarise these in a review since each would require an essay in itself. It must be sufficient to say that they offer considerable insight, for example, into the intellectual and emotional context in which the development of different aspects of the Harrisons’ eco-social working process is best understood, a valuable analysis of, and warning about, the dangers of eco-fascism, and a clear sense of the “aesthetic tactics” employed by the Harrisons “to woe us as audiences”. (p. 156) A capability predicated on “the refined skill that artworks embody of vivid communication and innovation, making present those experiences for which many of us would otherwise have no words”. (p. 161).       

Chapter Seven pivots on the relationship between Newton Harrison’s interest in the “seemingly obvious questions’ asked by particular artists’ work “that, once asked, become transformative” when viewed in the context of Stengers’ very similar concern to “search for and make meaning, rather than presume that meaning is given”. (p. 177) In addition to a discussion of the importance in this respect to the Harrisons of work of particular artists – for example, Giotto, Rembrandt, Cezanne and Joseph Albers, but also Chaucer and Charles Dickens – this leads to an account of the ways in which the Harrisons engaged in dialogue with other contemporary artists. These include the artist, biologist, and environmental educator Brandon Ballengée, the multifaceted environmental artist Lauren Bon, Tim Collins and Reiko Goto-Collins’ collaborative work investigating the intersection of art, ecology, and the public realm, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens’ radical feminist art, and Ruth Wallen’s work as an interdisciplinary artist and writer dedicated to ecological and social justice. The discussion leads, perhaps inevitably, to a highly significant section entitled Pedagogy: Curriculum Proposals. Highly significant because it addresses a fundamental educational issue identified by Tim Collins in 2023, one largely obscured by the presuppositions of possessive individualism that continue to dominate Western thinking about art. Namely that:

“Artists are unprepared to take a productive role in civic discourse. Students graduate without the tools and bridging experience to allow them to learn the languages and process in the areas of ecology, politics, and sociology, and are therefore unable to enter into effective creative communication … There isn’t a single department in the country with a programme area which addresses the changing meaning of nature, restoration ecology, and bio-technology”. (p.185)

This section is followed by one that focuses on exchanges between the Harrisons  and Ballengée, Lauren Bon, Reiko Goto-Collins and Tim Collins, Sprinkle and Stephens, and Ruth Wallen, and on the ways these artists’ practices have drawn on the Harrisons’ work but also on how they differ. It also references the 2022 Listening to the Web of Life Interdisciplinary Workshop, an event that prompts the authors to set out the mesh of influences that inform the participants’ work and at which an artist like Cathy Fitzgerald felt encouraged to take on something of the mantle of Harrisons’ work. As the authors set out in the final section of the chapter, perhaps the primary stress in any summary of the Harrison’s work must be on: “the fundamental importance of learning, experimentation, and pedagogy in the relationship of art to the environment”. (p. 211). Read in this light the book seems to me to constitute the basis for an in-depth and radical curriculum for contemporary eco-social art education; indeed for art education as a whole.

Significantly, the final chapter of the book, entitled Conclusions, offers the reader no such thing. Instead it consists of a series of questions about the impact and value of the Harrisons’ work. This is entirely in keeping with the authors’ understanding of the Lagoon Cycle as marking the point in the Harrisons’ work where the concern: “shifts from solving a problem” – more specifically one of food production – “to participating in a dialogue with the universe, while coming to terms with the processes of climate change that we have set in motion”. (p. 216)     

The form of the final chapter also begs the question of how to conclude this review. Perhaps simply by saying that I find it profoundly useful and know I will read and reference it again and again. Also that, while it has little relevance to the particular ‘art-making’ aspect of my own ‘ensemble practice’, it is profoundly relevant to pretty much every other aspect of that practice; to work done as a conversationalist committed to critical solicitude, as a writer and mentor, and as somebody participating in a diverse range of eco-social and educational projects and experiments.

Finally, I need to ask whether I have any substantive criticisms, reservations, or concerns about this book? The answer is ‘no’. I do, however, have one very small concern.

The principle market for a book like this is likely to be seen as the USA by its publishers. The Harrisons established themselves as artists in the USA in the 1970s and 1980s. That is to say at a time when its economy, education system, and the taxation breaks given to foundations, provided very substantive financial possibilities in terms of sponsorship for the arts. A context that, in so far as we were aware of it in the UK, suggested something of a ‘golden age’ to those of us setting out on our careers. The Harrisons benefitted in their formative years from both that situation and financial input from Newton’s parents.

On graduating from Yale in 1965, Newton at once obtained an assistant professorship and took up a similar post when the couple moved to California in 1967. In California Helen gained a director’s position in a university extension education program which she later resigned to collaborate more fully with Newton. By 1980 both Harrisons had become tenured professors in the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego. While none of this in any way detracts from their very considerable achievements, this background is relevant, or so it seems to me, to our understanding of the socio-cultural context in which the Harrisons’ achievements as eco-artists who were also educators developed.

As a book with a strong educational orientation, I would have liked the authors to have acknowledged the economic context that framed the Harrisons’ work given that they are in effect offering a model of practical orientation to younger artists. Younger artists today, at least in the European countries I am familiar with, will almost certainly be unable to achieve anything like the level of material security, intellectual support, or net-working opportunities that the Harrisons’ institutional status gave them. It would have been helpful, at least for readers in a European context, if this disparity had been acknowledged, if only tacitly.

As Sarah Thornton’s account of “the world’s most important artists” quoted earlier makes clear, the core criteria of the international art world today are predicated on the mentality of a culture industry that has the primacy of economically-driven entrepreneurship at its heart. A mentality with no interest in the development of the ethics central to any genuine eco-social arts practice. Even those few younger artists fortunate enough to gain the economic security of an academic post today will have nothing like the time and creative freedom available to the Harrisons after 1980. Not only will they be subject to much greater teaching and administrative work loads, but to a State-controlled regime of research audit enforced by economic sanction. As I have already said, none of this in any way detracts from the value of the Harrisons’ achievement or the value of this book but, if it is to become the valuable basis for education it deserves to be, this is an issue that will need to be taken into account when reflecting on eco-social artists’ engagement with the web of life. However, I accept that the authors may have felt that this issue lay outside the brief they set themselves.      

All this said, I believe this is an immensely valuable book that needs to be studied and digested in the widest possible educational context, not simply by those involved in teaching the arts and by students on degree and masters level art and design courses. Whether or not that will happen is obviously an open question. However, if by ill-chance this book does not find its rightful place on college and university reading lists, which are still all-too-often compiled by academics sheltering behind the narrow protectionism inherent in disciplinary specialism, I can only fervently hope that it becomes an ‘underground classic’. One of those books that lively and imaginative individuals and groups will delight in sharing, discussing and acting upon.          

Looking for a Sign (for Wanda Zyborska)

A while ago I came across an advertisement for a book called Looking for a Sign: Contemporary Art, Magic and Language (2024), published in Ireland by Durty Books. In a fit of curiosity, and because I’ve a long-time interest in old songs and recent theories that relate to what, broadly speaking, might be called ‘magical understandings’, I bought a copy. Perhaps, before I go on, I need to say a little more about why I would do that. In 2018 I presented an illustrated talk to art students at the University of Dundee called Un-disciplining practices: some paradoxes and possibilities. Part of the introduction goes as follows.

“Increasingly, the assumptions that underwrite disciplinarity are being questioned. Isabelle Stengers is a Belgian professor of philosophy. She trained as a chemist and has won international acclaim for her work in the philosophy of science. Starhawk is an American writer, teacher, activist and leading exponent of feminist neopaganism and ecofeminism – or, as she might say, a witch. From the perspective of academic disciplinarity, these two women are separated by an unbridgeable divide. Yet in Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, Stengers and her co-author Philippe Pignarre present Starhawk as somebody reclaiming an art of participation that deals directly with pragmatic concerns about effects and consequences”.

Put bluntly, Stengers and Pignarre’s book insists that we take witches seriously. I suppose I had hoped that Looking for a Sign might take up and extend the thinking that underpins that argument. And, if one understands that the point that Pignarre and Stengers want to make by references people like Starhawk and the practices they have developed is that they are ways of communicating with what Stengers describes as the ‘unknowns’ of modernity – with all that it fails to adequately address – then perhaps to a very small extent it does.

Andrew Gojfey is the translator of Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. What follows is in part a free paraphrase of points made in his introduction to that book: On the Witch’s Broomstick. To help explain its orientation he asks whether it’s possible to take seriously somebody who claims to have been attacked by a sorcerer? The answer, he insists with the book’s authors, should be “yes”. But  on the condition that we understand that the modern approach that frames such questions, namely that of psychoanalysis, is predicated on an unjustifiable pretension. Namely, that as a discipline it has scientific authority to make universally valid pronouncements about ‘the unconscious’. Stengers points out, however, that psychoanalysis fails to acknowledge what it does when it claims to explain its curative effects through quasi-scientific notions like ‘transference’. Stengers argument is that therapeutic practitioners in non-modern cultures are ‘technicians of the cure’ who adopt culturally specific approaches that are effective in their own context and, significantly, don’t make “scientific” claims regarding universal authority as does psychoanalysis.

Gojfey goes on to point out that one consequence of Stengers’ argument regarding the therapeutic practices of  non-modern therapeutic ‘technicians of the cure’ is that it requires us to set aside any notion of their hierarchical subordination to science. A point that returns him to witches again, persons whose technique cannot be explained by science and so is, from a modern point of view, simply another artefact. However, if we refuse to ‘privilege episteme over techne, not only is artefactuality not necessarily a criticism, but the idea that there is something to be learned from the neo-pagans becomes a more credible claim – because a central element of what would otherwise allow what they do to be explained (away) is removed’ (p. xix).

Pignarre and Stengers, drawing on Guattari, consider  the techniques of non-violent protest and ritual used by contemporary witches as an effective form of ‘existential catalysis’. Stengers notes that: ‘to take the efficacy of a technique seriously imposes the need to understand it as being addressed to something more powerful than the technician’ and that for witches such as Starhawk this is the immanent Goddess who, in turn, becomes the ground for  cultivating ‘a sensibility and disposition to think and act’ otherwise (p.xx). For Pignarre and Stengers, then,  the artifices of witchcraft are a means to cultivate an active thinking that is not framed by the presuppositions of modernity and, as such, returns us to  the need to insist that alternatives to it are possible. Or, as Starhawk puts it: “Systems don’t change easily. Systems try to maintain themselves, and seek equilibrium. To change a system, you need to shake it up, disrupt the equilibrium. That often requires conflict. …To me, conflict is a deeply spiritual place. It’s the high-energy place where power meets power, where change and transformation can occur.”

It may be that the artists whose thinking and work make up Looking for a Sign: Contemporary Art, Magic and Language would be in agreement with this, although there s no evidence that any of them are aware of the arguments in Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. All I can say is that I am more taken by the work of Crone Cast, a feminist art collective that explores the conditions of the pandemic, climate change, and societal and ecosystem collapse, and that reimagines the crone as noticed, seen, and heard so as to engage with ageing, power, identity, eccentricity and merging with the more-than-human as a process of becoming, in symbiosis with the precariousness of our times.

Images provided by Wanda Zyborska