Category Archives: Projects

Activating The Gap

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The artist and water scientist Antony Lyons has just copied me into an email to our mutual friend Simon Read – one of the instigators of the recent Activating The Gap event at Middlesex – an event I’ve written about previously here – that aimed to promote multi-disciplinary and multi-constituency work that includes the arts in environmental contexts. Antony wants, as I would imagine anyone who attended that event would do, to encourage Simon and his partners to build on what they have begun. In particular he urges Simon to make the concept “into something substantial, and enduring”. This is in part animated by an acute sense of how difficult it can be to use the impetus of such events to move things forward. As Antony rightly adds, he and I missed the opportunity to build on the evident energy of the Catchment workshop we put together out of initiatives we were trying to develop with Steven Sodek in Bristol before his resignation from the Council there, and suggests that the Activating The the Gap event “could develop into a London – Bristol – Falmouth nexus”. But, as he also notes, “there are of course lots of ‘players’”. I’m not sure whether this isn’t part of the problem. Although I have an encouraging sense of networks being extended and alliances forged, I worry about where the funding to turn these into a substantial initiative is going to come from.

Obviously I’m very pleased to hear from the eco-artist Cathy Fitzgerald that she has recently met Liz Adamson and Graeme Todd from Polarcap[1] in Ireland, and that she is going to meet Tim Collins and Reiko Goto during a stop-off in Edinburgh on her way to the Invisible Scotland event in Dundee at the beginning of August.. [2] As someone who combines being a doctoral student, a Green Party activist and eco-artist focusing on forests – she manages a small one of her own – she obviously needs to be making these kinds of contacts. We also clearly need more such committed and energetic people. But how is that commitment and energy to be directed so that it has the best possible effect?

I’m aware of just how hard it is for people like Simon, Liz and Graeme to take up the demands of pushing forward in practical ways to develop multi-disciplinary and multi-constituency ecological work that includes the arts in addition to teaching, research, their creative practices and the innumerable demands of everyday life. Artists prepared to work to provide an acceptable face for the shadowy world of the medical techno-science industry have the economic clout of bodies like the Welcome Trust and all the tacit support of various lobbying organizations/”press agencies” behind them. But where is the equivalent support for the multi-disciplinary, multi-constituency thinking that animates the best eco-art?

It’s almost certainly not going to come from the universities themselves, no matter what individual academics are managing to achieve (often despite, rather than with the support of, their institutional managers). As Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Robert Gordon University, has indicated that while universities are supposed to be the prime generators of ‘new knowledge’ in our culture, they are currently among its most reactionary and conservative institutions.[3] This is a situation that he also very properly links to the fact that both their pedagogy and realpolitik (as opposed to their public rhetoric) are almost entirely determined by a professional and academic status quo that is dependent for its power and influence on the perpetuation of disciplinary thinking.[4] Add to that the profoundly reactionary and reductive government interventions provided by the likes of Michael Gove and the struggle to build a serious consensus on the basis of such initiatives as have been begun looks like being very long and hard indeed.

The next gap we need to activate then is that between the potential identified and action initiated by the people mentioned her and others like them and those with the ability to link them to the funds necessary to help develop that potential – an equivalent to the Welcome Trust for the arts and ecological sciences if you like.

[3] von Prondzynski, F http://universitydiary.wordpress.com/about/ (accessed 10/11/2012)

[4] von Prondzynski, F (2010) A post-disciplinary academy? http://universitydiary.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/a-post-disciplinary-academy/ (accessed 10/11/2012)

Leonard Jason’s ‘Principles of Social Change’

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I’m currently briefly in County Durham on holiday – this is ‘our’ river – and am just finishing reading an extraordinary book – Leonard Jason’s “Principles of Social Change” (published 2013 by Oxford University Press). This examines how a five point approach – very briefly: focusing on second-order change, identifying and weakening the power holders, creating coalitions with communities and other activist groups, persistence and long-term engagement, and constantly evaluating and refining strategies and tactics – has served him in a life-time’s engagement in community activism. I’m particularly interested in what he has to say because in many ways it relates to current debates about ‘participatory’ and ‘socially engaged’ art and, additionally, supports and extends what I’ve been saying about the need for externally facing interdisciplinary/multi-constituency arts-led research work, ‘ecosophical’ collaboration, communities of transverse action, and so on.

I met Prof Jason – who directs the Centre for Community Research at DePaul University in Chicago – through helping my wife Natalie and son Josh on their film Voices from the Shadows. I collected them all and drove them across London so they could interview him on his way to a conference. In the book he references Natalie’s book Lost Voices in his discussion of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. He’s an extraordinary man and it’s a very impressive book. It is very simply and directly written, is measured while pulling no punches, and I would highly recommend it.

I have now added a summary/review of this book on a separate page.

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In my presentation at this event I spelled out something that it seems to me we need increasingly to understand and act on, as follows:

“Recently the Irish artist Pauline O’Connell described herself, in a barely ironic tone of voice, as a ‘composite cur’. She was referring to the unexpected abilities needed to complete her Drawing the Water project – abilities that far exceeded those conventionally identified with art practice. We know that dogs range from ‘best of breed’ – the product of an economics of exclusivity – through to ‘composite curs’, sometimes valued for their adaptive intelligence and multiple skills. ‘Best of breed’ dogs exist to exemplify a rarefied category set up by the Kennel Club and might serve as an allegory for our hyper-specialized disciplinary culture. ‘Composite curs’ don’t exemplify anything. They thrive on responding to contingency, perhaps reminding us that, in Geraldine Finn’s words: ‘we are always both more and less than the categories that name and divide us’. My assumption here is that, as with dogs, so with people”.

I very much enjoyed working with the group of people selected by Simon Read, Ralf Nuhn, Sue Tapsell, Simon McCarthy (Middlesex) and Chris Wainwright (University of the Arts), since we all had a real interest in the way in which the arts might be used to engage the public more effectively with issues of flooding and climate change more generally. By helping to bring people in the arts into a practically-focused dialogue with hydro-social issues, the organisers have now created a more practical and productive relationship between water professionals, academics engaged in water studies, and appropriate artists.

The event was very positive, with internationally-established artists like Lillian Ball, Tim Collins & Reiko Goto, and Simon Read providing examples of art-led engagement with environmental issues in general and hydro-social issues in particular. It was vital to the event that the attendees were from across the spectrum of possible interested parties – ranging from Tim O’Riordan (Emeritus Professor of Environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia), David Cross (of Cornford and Cross), Heather Shepherd from the National Floods Forum, Julie Steward (an artist working on local waterways), the geographer Caitlin DeSilvey, Antony Lyons (an artist and scientist who formally worked with the Environment Agency), and Fanshawe (an artist and environmentalist working with BirdLife International), in addition to academics and people from relevant national bodies.

It is already clear that some of the links formed are likely to be practically productive and, in addition, reinforce and extend previously existing links in this field created by the PLaCE  water seminar I organised with Steven Sodek – at that time in charge of flood policy for bristol City Council – Mel Shearsmith, and Victoria Walters here in Bristol in 2011.

 

Activating the Gap between Knowledge and Imagination – 1

I am about to spend three days in London at a series of invitation-only workshops looking at: “the potential for the arts to enter into partnerships with scientists and flood risk and environmental management communities, social science and cultural geography communities, local, regional and national government organisations towards the development of both sustainable policy and practical application”.  This event is organised in part by my old friend Simon Read, along with Ralf Nuhn, Sue Tapsell and Simon McCarthy from Middlesex University and Chris Wainwright at Chelsea School of Art. There are overlaps in core concerns with the Polar Cap conference in Edinburgh where I gave a keynote recently and it will be interesting to see how this London event compares. I have the greatest respect for Simon as an artist and environmental campaigner and an innate suspicion of the London art education world, so will be trying to see past my own presuppositions and see whether there are any real possibilities for ‘transversality’ to develop.

My own short presentation is deliberately slightly provocative – a shorter and less nuanced version of the ‘ecosophical collaboration’ presentation I did in Edinburgh – and begins by picking up on Pauline O’Connell’s wonderful description of herself as a “composite cur”. Given that the original seems to have been very well received it will be interesting to see how the same approach goes down in the South East.

Field work

I am going out to walk along part of the Severn estuary with Antony Lyons today to look at potential material for a film we are making on transgression (in the geological sense). This fits into Antony’s on-going work around water, climate change and sea levels, and the whole issue of time and change, ecologically speaking. Walking and talking is also always a good means of reflecting on, sifting through, and generally sharing and digesting thinking material. Today’s trip has a particular feel to it because my friend the artist David Walker-Barker has just agreed to send me a clip of something that provided perhaps the most extraordinary experience of the complexity of geological time I’ve every had. While we were talking in his studio in Yorkshire one evening, David handed me a very large quartz crystal and told me to watch it carefully as I tipped it from side to side. Almost miraculously, as I did so I saw a small bubble of gas move in its liquid heart, much like the bubble in a spirit level. The paradoxical tension between the age and solidity of the crystal and that movement has always remained with me, as mysterious as the viral matter – inert but with the latent potential for life – that makes up part of the DNA of every human being.