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A colourful revolution

JamieSW — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:15:03 +0000

In Stokes Croft, once dubbed ‘Bristol’s forgotten half mile’, a quiet but colourful revolution is taking place. A loose coalition, the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft (PRSC), is using public art to transform an area that used to be emblematic of urban decline.

For Chris Chalkley, the one-man dynamo behind the scheme, art has the power to give the district a greater sense of community, and turn it into Bristol’s ‘cultural quarter’. ‘It’s possible that groups of people could come together to form an alternative vision for the area,’ Chris enthuses, as he takes us on a whistle-stop tour of a few of the ‘street galleries’ that have sprung up across Stokes Croft.

Shop fronts, walls and even an electricity sub-station have been adorned with striking images by local artists. Almost anything can be turned into a feature of the area, Chris says. Even mundane objects like drainpipes and litter bins can impart a feeling of identity, safety and vibrancy when they have been decorated with eye-catching, unique designs.

The PSRC is funded and organised almost entirely by Chris himself. Having run a china shop for 25 years, he does not think of himself as either an activist or artist, and relies on local artists to donate their time. In April, around 20-30 volunteers painted the inside of a railway tunnel just outside Stokes Croft. In a single weekend, it became a canvas for myriad different designs. There is no doubting the potential of Bristol’s artists, which is only beginning to be harnessed.

Dissatisfaction and blight

The PRSC has grown out of a need to change the face of the area, and dissatisfaction with the council’s response to its problems. Connecting the shopping centre of the city with more affluent areas to the north, Stokes Croft is a mixture of residential buildings and shops that line the main road. While a number of its buildings are listed, about 30 are derelict, such as a three-storey carriage works from the area’s Victorian heyday, which has stood empty since 1979. A further blight on the district’s image in many people’s eyes is the large number of homeless people, many of them suffering from drug problems, who congregate in what is known locally as the ‘bear pit’: a largely tarmac-covered, sunken roundabout at the end of Stokes Croft, connected to the surrounding streets by forbidding, grimy underpasses. The main road also boasts two less-than-subtle brothels.

Chris is adamant that image problems cannot be fixed simply by moving homeless people on or shutting down the massage parlours. You have to ‘work with what you’ve got’, he says. In their effort to discourage rough sleeping and graffiti by providing only single person seats and covering surfaces in anti-graffiti paint, the council has inadvertently made the area unwelcoming for everyone, says Chris. ‘If the policy is to make public space inhospitable to the homeless, then it will become scary to the public.’

While the PRSC has no formal links with any political organisations, it explicitly challenges what it believes has been the council’s approach to urban development. The focus, the group claims, has been exclusively on attracting private investment and big brands, exemplified by the ongoing £500-million Cabot Circus project to rejuvenate Bristol’s retail heart just a few hundred metres away from Stokes Croft. Instead, the PRSC argues, the aim of regeneration should be to create welcoming public spaces and to promote creativity in the face of creeping corporate homogenisation, with public art a cheap way of doing so that can involve the local community.

‘This is the front line of the battle against the encroachment of Cabot Circus,’ Chris warns, ‘so it needs to have a strong identity.’ However, others think that the new shopping hub, currently festooned with cranes, might be beneficial. ‘Cabot Circus has had a good impact,’ says Lisa Blackwood, who works at the nearby Kuumba Arts and Community Centre. ‘Stokes Croft is too close to Cabot Circus not to be developed.’ Yet commercial enterprise is welcomed by the PRSC, so long as it fits with the area’s independent and eclectic feel. ‘If we change the perception of the area, then businesses will come,’ Chris says. Indeed, cafes, grocers, bookshops and t-shirt printers have sprung up, attracted by relatively low rents.

Character appraisal

Bristol council says that it is working with residents and groups such as the PRSC to improve Stokes Croft. In October 2007 it published a detailed ‘character appraisal’ of the area, assessing its aesthetic and social problems, and also acknowledging that the murals that now dot the area are part of its distinctive character.

They have recently undertaken a £1-million renovation of a hostel for homeless people, and a street-drinking ban in 2003 was largely successful in moving on drinkers from a central grassy patch known as ‘Turbo Island’ on the main road (though critics claim that this has done little more than displace them a few hundred metres down the street). But private investment is still central to renewing urban areas, the council argues: ‘The improvements to the image of the area effected by the work of PRSC are one part of the process, but not sustainable on their own – there needs to be commercial investment to back it up.’

One of the council’s biggest problems is getting private owners to preserve the historic character of their buildings and shop fronts. Some property holders simply hang on to derelict buildings, hoping that a lucrative development offer will come along. The council is currently battling to reclaim the towering Westmoreland House building from the developers Comer Homes, who have left it derelict for more than two decades. Seven people have died since the building was damaged by fire and abandoned in 1969.

As our tour of the Republic comes to an end, Chris is keen to stress that he doesn’t think he has all the answers to Stokes Croft’s problems. Most of the works done so far are temporary. ‘The project is constantly evolving. A year ago I was thinking differently, and next year it will have changed again.’

There may be a risk that street art, while visually exciting, will turn the area into an artistic ghetto, and be exclusive of those who are not a part of the graffiti community. Or, if businesses and affluent residents are drawn in, the resulting rent hikes may push out the very artists who are attempting to accelerate urban renewal. The next step planned for the PRSC is to set up as a social business, where donations are exchanged for a say in the future of the project. Whatever direction the PRSC takes next, there can be no doubt that public art created and funded by local artists can be a cost effective way of putting colour and life back into the inner city.

Seeing the bigger picture

tim — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 14:53:12 +0000

This might sound hyperbolic, but it is true: there is no longer any part of the globe that remains “natural” in any meaningful sense. Even the apparently pristine ice-clad poles are contaminated by man-made chemicals, many of which concentrate in the food chain – through fish, whales and seals – making the breastmilk of Inuit women so loaded with poisons as to constitute, in effect, toxic waste. Humanity bestrides the planet in a way no single species has ever achieved before: enough now, according to many scientists, to merit our name being applied to a new geological era, the anthropocene.

The rain that falls anywhere on the planet’s surface is different in its chemical constituents from pre-industrial rain; we have doubled the natural flow of reactive nitrogen through living systems, causing enormous algal blooms, not to mention – at the last count – 405 dead zones in coastal waters around the world. There is now a third more carbon dioxide, double the methane and a whole host of artificially manufactured gases circulating in our atmosphere. We have even managed to make the entire global ocean measurably more acidic, a remarkable achievement by any standard.

Our moral and artistic senses have barely begun to comprehend the scale of what is going on. Yes, it is there in black and white for anyone to read in weighty scientific reports such as the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Some of these reports are reasonably readable. Some even have pictures. But works of art they are not, nor are they intended to be. This has a tangible impact: in cultural terms, we still fondly imagine ourselves to be tiny and insig nificant little creatures, beetling about on a vast planet that is relatively impervious to our presence. We terrify and titillate ourselves with stories of natural disasters – earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis – which seem to prove once again how powerless we are against the “great forces of nature”.

This is a false impression: the greatest force of all is we human beings. Our collective footprint now far outreaches anything this planet has naturally produced for tens of millions of years: even the worst imaginable supervolcano would have less of an effect on the biosphere than humble little Homo sapiens so far has.

Artistic representation is integral to us ever developing a true understanding of our new place in the world. Good art bridges the intellectual/ emotional divide, communicating meaning in a way that UN reports cannot. It can help us think about why something hurts that is lost, why any of this matters, and how we might feel differently about it. It can step outside the rationalist discourse of modern scientific environmentalism into a different mental space where freer thinking is allowed and encouraged, and an impressionistic appreciation of changing nature is as valuable as rigorous facts and figures. Art should not be propaganda – but it can change minds. At its best, it is a connecting rather than a dividing force.

This is the difficult and contested territory that a new and visually stunning photographic collection, Vanishing Landscapes, occupies. Some of the images are truly shocking, such as Robert Adams’s pictures of logged redwood trees in the American north-west. No one can flick through these pages and not be appalled at the scale of devastation that humanity has inflicted on the landscape: not only have the trees been cut, but the whole ground has been butchered and vast areas bulldozed over. Stumps the size of houses are upended, thrown together like so much matchwood. In the final picture of the series, Adams’s wife sits hunched against a tree stump, surrounded by discarded branches and rotting timber as if by death itself. The ethereal quality of the images is highlighted by them being printed in black and white, which makes their content all the more stark.

Similarly striking are Edward Burtynsky’s pictures of nickel tailings in Ontario, Canada. Bright red rivers flow through a charred and blackened landscape, reminiscent of volcanic lava flows in both colour and form. Burtynsky puts it well in the introduction: “These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence,” he writes. “We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success.”

But what of landscapes in which the human impact is less obvious? Walter Niedermayr cleverly juxtaposes the human with the natural in his photographs of Alpine glaciers in Austria: on one side of the page fold sits an apparently natural icescape, and on the other people are emerging – their bright clothes the only colour in the grey-whites of the glacial mass – on duckboards from an ice cave. Other pictures in Niedermayr’s series show people sprinkled over the surface of the ice, like flecks of pepper in a salt-pan. Though the figures appear tiny in comparison to the bulk of the ice on which they are walking, they also dominate it with their sheer numbers when spread out. Thomas Struth contributes photos of intact forests, each named Paradise plus a number: an Australian forest is Paradise 03, a tangled Peruvian jungle is Paradise 31. There is no evidence of human impact at all; indeed, the pictures look as primeval and verdant as the Garden of Eden itself, which I suspect they are intended to evoke.

And yet we know that, even in such landscapes as this, all is not what it seems. As the climate scientist John Schellnhuber says in an interview transcribed in the introduction: “As an image of nature, the landscape can no longer be conceived of as independent of humankind but is always something that we ourselves have created.” We may not know it, but the composition of Peru’s forest in Paradise 31 may be subtly different from how it would have been in a world without human beings. That is not to bemoan our presence on this earth: we have as much right to be here as any other element of the biosphere. But the converse also applies: all the species we are busily wiping out – consciously or unconsciously – themselves enjoy inherent rights of existence. If we can understand and appreciate them more, perhaps we can also learn to respect them.

“Vanishing Landscapes” is published by Frances Lincoln on 18 September (£35)

Flipping the Script

tim — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 17:03:48 +0000

It’s been seven years since George Bush dubiously declared ‘War on Terror’. Since then, there have been an estimated 95 thousand civilian deaths (655 thousand by some accounts), 4,730 US military deaths, 288 British deaths and the toll still rises. In July, a Pentagon-commissioned study by Rand Corp admitted that the Bush administration strategy to defeat Al-Qaeda had been ‘unsuccessful’ and condemned the most unpopular foreign war since Vietnam as badly ‘off target’. Psychologically, the conflict has taken a heavy toll on the American people and contributed to a super sized dose of soul-searching, as evidenced by Hollywood’s recent output. When even the caped crusader, Batman, is forced to admit defeat against conductor of chaos, the Joker, it has been a dark night indeed.

So how has the art world responded to this legacy of disasters? Apart from the ICA’s Memorial to The War in Iraq commission last year, why haven’t we seen any major exhibitions tackle the subject? 9 Scripts from a Nation at War at Tate Modern’s Level 2 Gallery (a modest space reserved for media art) attempts to do just that, by exploring the psychology of a nation in conflict. Transcripts, testimonies, interviews, notations and web logs form the ‘scripts’ for this quietly controversial ten-part video installation which interrogates contemporary warfare and citizenship through semantics and academic participatory games.

According to the script accompanying the Scripts, the curators Amy Dickson and Rachel Taylor and artists David Thorne, Ashley Hunt, Sharon Hayes, Andrea Geyer and Katya Sander set out to ‘examine the ways in which war determines scripts and certain roles such as “citizen”, “veteran”, “detainee”, “correspondent”’ and to investigate how written and spoken language affects identity and is fundamental to defining and perpetuating the structures of power. The exhibition is the last in a series of four which set out to ‘explore citizenship through themes of economy, belief, the state and the individual’. All very worthy and public-spirited, it would appear, but this time, at least, the art transcends the blurb.

Not everyone who wanders into this show will recognise the trendy, postmodern techniques employed, such as re-enactment, but most will be familiar with the ubiquitous ‘workshop’ approach. In fact, at times it’s a bit like watching role play exercises at a group therapy or adult education session, but that’s not necessarily a criticism. These experiential techniques generate a healthy climate of debate and ensure the subject matter never gets didactic.

The show opener, Script: Citizen: 248 predictions about what I will do when democracy comes, is the most accessible, but also the weakest. Statements like ‘I will be a hotbed of insurgency’ and ‘I will ignore the dim whispers of the missing’ are chalked up on a blackboard by a group of performers and then immediately erased. The phrases are frustratingly flippant and oblique, but that’s most likely the point. As viewers, aka ‘Citizens’, this is an upfront challenge to reappraise our feelings about the conflicts and reactions to them.

In the main room, we are presented with a choice of listening booths. Dominating the show, in both size and content, is the triptych: Script: Detainee: Please tell me when it’s my turn to speak because I don’t know what’s going on here. This is a documentation of a five hour public reading of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which were conducted at Guantanamo Bay in 2004/5. There are 558 tribunal transcripts like this, each around 100 pages long, invisible to the public on account of the sheer volume of paperwork.

In the tradition of reenactment art (a form popularised by Rod Dickinson with The Milgram Experiment and Jeremy Deller’s Turner Prize-winning The Battle of Orgreave, where events of historical significance are restaged) the subject matter is suitably cryptic. The reconstruction of tribunals enables the participants (both the actors and the audience) to experience the conditions under which the terror suspects were condemned and to witness the injustice (i.e, the inbuilt inflexibility) of the Guantanamo tribunal procedure, where detainees were expected to represent themselves without foreknowledge of the evidence against them or being able to speak directly to witnesses. In the words of detainee, Ashraf Salim, a former schoolteacher:

I know my fate is predetermined by this tribunal. This tribunal is not real. My presence, one defending myself, or not defending myself is of no importance whatsoever…where is the justice here?

Does the fact that they are spoken by a middle-class, white woman make them more or less chilling to an art loving audience? Tate goers were invited to find out for themselves at a live reading which accompanied the exhibition.

Re-enactment is an appropriately ironic technique to use here, as the term ‘enactment’ is used in law to mean decree, edict or dictat and these were extra-legal proceedings. Re-enactment is also a traditional, popular form of learning which dates back to the pageant and the medieval Passion play. What the artists seem to be saying is that in order to understand recent history, we need to experience it emotionally and unfiltered, not as a minor item in an overcrowded news agenda.

The same technique creates a distancing effect in Script: Veteran: I am thinking I should put on my uniform. Here, two retired soldiers prepare a public speech (from a prerecorded interview where they talked about their experiences in Iraq and their subsequent return to civilian life) and then perform it to an empty auditorium. The re-representation of this highly personal material asks the serviceman to re-evaluate their function in this conflict, while at the same time allowing them to reclaim their experiences.

Private Mickiela Montoya gives a harrowing account of how she became pregnant while serving in the National Guard, only to be told she was going to Iraq and then treated as ‘some sort of criminal’ for trying to shirk duty. The stressful experience caused her to miscarry, after which she suffered chronic depression before her deployment in Iraq: one trauma supplanted by another. These are every day stories, not media sensations brought to an audience of millions, but they demonstrate how effectively the military machine erases human identity, dignity and individual experience. In the words of Veteran Corporal Jose Omar Portilla:

the hard fact is you’re just a number … you’re not in charge of yourself anymore … from the moment you wake up to when you eat, sleep or go to the rest room.

In another part of the room, actors perform fragments of texts by the same soldiers and others involved in the war. This dry, staged presentation where the actors attempt to define terms like ‘torture’ and ‘enemy combatant’, reflect how impossible it is to capture the experience of war in words, and how easily the horror can be concealed in paperwork using prescribed terminology. The Lacanian distinction between Speech and Language underpins much of this work. Language is a formal system of signifiers encoding meaning, whereas the act of speaking gives back identity and autonomy to the speakers. The critic is given a face and a voice.

In Script: Correspondent: But you have to tell it in a way that doesn’t lose you your credibility we are reminded that it’s not just the foot soldiers, but journalists who were strong-armed by the war machine. Here correspondents offer their views on the difficulty of maintaining neutrality when reporting from the front line. One Al Jazeera correspondent, Abderrahim Foukara, reflects on his discomfort when there was pressure from the US Defense department to call the invasion a ‘liberation’ or risk being labeled a radical or friend of terrorism. At no time do the journalists interviewed drop their professional, dispassionate demeanour.

Not all the Scripts are equally successful. The re-presentation of web blogs about Iraq by a quasi-teacher figure or the role play exercises of anthropology students talking about the impact of war in the classroom quickly became boring, perhaps because we’ve become immune to the endless flow of user-generated sludge which is peddled as ‘self-expression’.

However, there is a wealth of source material to get lost in here. As the different perspectives piled up – each offering a personal and no less valid version of the war – a horrifyingly holistic picture emerges: that of a nation (the US or the UK) so obsessed with analysis, as events unfold in real time or replay, with self-reflection and navel-gazing that we no longer know how to act. A democratic war is a sit-back spectacle.

The power of 9 Scripts… is that it is confrontational and thought provoking without presenting images of death, destruction, torture and viscera and it manages to avoid political tub-thumping. Similarly, with the ICA’s Memorial to the War in Iraq, the most successful memorial commissions in the earlier show were the ones which took a step back from the politics and looked at how the media dealt with the conflict. Work like Snapshots from Baghdad by the Slovakian artist Roman Ondák, for example: a disposable black camera on a white plinth, which was supposedly meant to contain pictures from a war zone which will never be developed, and, perhaps, should remain undeveloped.

By focusing on the Scripts – words and semantics which can justify, condemn or seal an individual or a nation’s fate – we are forced to interrogate our roles in this conflict and to reassess the position of the Citizen in relation to the State.

Burning Ice

Ellie Keen — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:50:51 +0000

Before me is a wall of glacial ice forty-five metres high, slowly, inextricably moving towards Noorderlicht as we navigate the seas just thirty metres from it, at six o’clock in the morning. Another cold grey day is dawning as I project video from the boat, a series of texts onto the glacier face. At times the image is swallowed up, disappearing through aeons of ice and then as we traverse the glacier it is reflected magically back with an electronic edge that gives the texts a living urgency. ‘Sadness Melts’, ‘The Cold Library of Ice’, ‘Burning Ice’: texts that bring into focus the state we are in, as the glacier continues its accelerated path towards total melt and oblivion.

There have been five Cape Farewell expeditions into the Arctic, on which forty-five artists/creators and fifteen scientists have co-habited, sailed, observed, measured and been inspired. The outcome of this collective effort becomes ever more poignant. In this high Arctic of sea, land and ice are three climatic tipping points of such significance that their demise or alteration promises a global effect on our environment:

• The top end of the Gulf Stream or Norwegian Current. Both Cape Farewell’s and other scientific studies indicate that the current’s health appears robust; however, its temperature has increased. At the parallel 78° north the current travels north twenty metres below the surface and is the size of two Amazon rivers.

• The Greenland Ice Cap. The ice cap is undoubtedly melting with increased tempo. To give scale to this melt, on the Greenland mainland, which has a land mass the size of Europe, the ice is over 3,000 metres thick.

• Ice melt at the North Pole. Most worryingly, in the summer of 2007, 25% of the northern ice cap melted and it is predicted that all the summer ice at the North Pole could disappear within a decade. The consequences of this happening would be a rapidly warming sea due to more absorption of the sun’s power, a change that will accelerate the warming of our planet.

Our onboard scientists, from the National Oceanography Centre and the British Geological Survey, measure, analyse and collect data, which adds to a global scientific effort to establish clarity on climate change and the timescale of that change. Importantly, the Cape Farewell artists can witness and absorb the physicality of the science fieldwork – slow, careful and at times laborious. It is up to the artists to bring back stories and emotions on a human scale of these tangible climatic changes that we ignore at our peril. Our warming planet is affecting the natural Arctic balance, a warming that is caused by how we, as a species, choose to live. Some of our most exciting cultural thinkers and practitioners have added their weight to the Cape Farewell project. The changing climate is largely a cultural problem and we need vision to move us out of the dangerous situation that we are in.

This northern magic, this harsh physical place, these climate impacts have become marked into my very being – the Arctic has become part of my emotional force, powerful and addictive. For me, artistically, this emotional force is best expressed in and by the mercurial nature of ice.

Ice is not an object, and it is difficult to view objectively. If you move it, it changes: thousands of hair-line cracks fracture its purity. If you raise its temperature, it ceases to be. If you analyse it, unlike rock it releases its information, its history in an instant; there are no repeats and no reviews. Ice is alive. The wall of ice we engaged with is in the process of dying – 100,000 years of knowledge going, going, gone. It is a non-biological changing force and I can only engage with it subjectively as I would another living form. It has a language that is as clear as words, and understanding it is like dealing with poetry and raw emotion.

Ice is the million-year-old history of our planet. From it we know what the air, temperature and world were like at any given point, just by analysing ice-core samples. Our actions are burning this cold library of ice.

There is no one kind of ice: we have sampled new sea ice, decade-old sea ice, glacier ice, diamond-clear ice, black ice, ice clouds that cause vertical light refractions. There are glaciers that move with speed, whole landscapes on the move, rocks and valleys sculpted by their force, and we have witnessed and nearly been entrapped as the sea froze solid before our eyes. The ice that sits upon waves, causing a sea to perambulate as in a frightening dream: sea and glacial ice that we have had to force a passage through aboard our boat, but which leaves no memory of our passing as it reforms neatly in our wake.

Ice is fascinating to project video onto, and as well as the previously mentioned texts, I have projected a walking, naked and pregnant woman, running feet and a newborn baby. The texts projected onto ice are slogans that appeal for an immediate emotional engagement with climate. The running feet carry urgency whilst the pregnant woman is layered in meaning. I am often surprised just how powerful this image has become and how well it resonates. She epitomises vulnerability and promotes care. She is naked, without the armour and the protection of clothes. Her walk is defiant and in her belly she carries the only possible future for humankind. Her growing baby has a lifespan in front of her/him, yet the image is projected on ice that is disappearing: two future truths colliding in opposing time-planes. If we have it inside us to care for, nurture and protect our children then surely we must also nurture and protect their environment. No other symbol better encapsulates the need for a symbiotic relationship between humans and our habitat.

A Californian artist who has also journeyed with Cape Farewell is Amy Balkin. In the process of making a series of artworks called ‘Public Smog’ she has stated, “We should make our atmosphere into a world heritage site.” We know inherently that to dump waste on a designated world heritage site is wrong. We wouldn’t pollute such a site; but having the same sense of wrong with regard to our atmosphere should be even more of a priority.

Ian McEwan lends his word-craft and wisdom to our BBC film with powerful insights. He also made a ‘word sculpture’, lines of text that were projected onto the outside walls of the Bodleian in Oxford – words physically impressing themselves upon a custodian of our heritage: “The pressure of our numbers, the abundance of our inventions, the blind forces of our desires and needs are generating heat – the hot breath of our civilisation… We are shaped by our history and biology to frame our plans within the short term, within the scale of a single lifetime. Now we are asked to address the well-being of unborn individuals we will never meet and who, contrary to the usual terms of human interaction, will not be returning the favour.”

The sculptor Antony Gormley collaborated with the architect Peter Clegg to produce a triptych of snow constructions on the edge of a frozen Arctic sea. In temperatures of -35°C they toiled for four days to produce Three Made Places. One Made Place came from an idea Clegg had been working on to demonstrate physically the invisible, odourless greenhouse gas CO2. Clegg has written, “One kilogram of CO2 at atmospheric pressure occupies 0.54 of a cubic metre. That is the volume taken up by ourselves and the space immediately around us – it is roughly the volume occupied by a coffin.” In Canada each member of the population produces 23,000kg of CO2 per annum. In the UK it’s 12,000kg per person.

Gormley made another artwork where he cast himself in ice, Marker 1. It stood on the frozen sea of the fjord until spring and ice melt arrived and the sea reclaimed it.

Each artist who has been part of the Cape Farewell expeditions has found a voice that deals in some way with climate change. Each has added uniquely to a new bank of ideas and imagery that brings the subject of climate change into focus on a human scale. The process of the artists developing their Arctic work is recorded by the director David Hinton in a film we were commissioned to make for the BBC. This film, Art from a Changing Arctic, has been shown worldwide and is part of the Cape Farewell exhibition ‘The Ship: The Art of Climate Change’, which was first mounted at London’s Natural History Museum: sixteen works of art that include a whole-whale-skeleton artwork by Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey; a cinema-scale video projection of the demise of an iceberg, The End of Ice; and a work by the choreographer Siobhan Davies entitled Endangered Species in which a virtual dancer dances to extinction in an antique display cabinet. This exhibition is now on a world tour which this year includes Madrid and Tokyo, bringing new and provocative voices and ideas to the issue of climate change.

Science continues to lead our enquiries into climate change. One of the great pleasures for me during the past ten years has been the open dialogue we have with the worldwide climate science community. These are the most rational people I know, and to detect in them a real concern and at times palpable fear that they have for humanity and of irreversible damage being done to our planet is very worrying. They are clear that the window of opportunity for action is short: perhaps just a decade.

Echoing Balkin, the solution is simple: stop polluting our atmosphere with damaging greenhouse gases. But we have a global economy and a lifestyle based on the cheap supply of energy that will require a Herculean effort to reverse. There is, however, the possibility of a cultural shift, as was witnessed in the Age of Enlightenment: a wind of change that embraces all and in doing so secures our, and our children’s future.

Maybe this is the evolving story of Cape Farewell: to rattle the cage and throw some of our best creative minds into the mêlée. To paraphrase McEwan in our film, we’re having to address the needs of people unborn. Even the most idealistic of thinkers on the world stage in the past have only addressed themselves to problems in the present. To bear the weight of the future in this way is both interesting and difficult and runs (probably) counter to our nature.

The Cape Farewell project continues with two expeditions to Greenland in September 2008. A youth expedition carrying 26 students from 8 different countries will be followed by an art/science team furthering the oceanography conducted in the Greenland Sea last autumn. Working alongside the scientists will be an international team of musicians, playwrights, visual artists, architects and academics. It will be possible to track both voyages live on the website and both will be filmed for a forthcoming sequel to Art from a Changing Arctic. www.capefarewell.com

David Buckland is a video artist and Director of the Cape Farewell project. Burning Ice: Art and Climate Change, published by Cape Farewell, is available at £19.99. Tel: +44 (0) 1904 431213 to order a copy.

Mike Marqusee's Top Ten Books

tim — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 11:58:55 +0000

A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Once you get accustomed to the invented prose idiom, the groundedness of this epic takes a grip. The architecture of the trilogy embodies a big (Marxist) picture of historical development, but it’s built out of emotional intimacy and physical immediacy. The conclusion of Sunset Song, the second volume in the trilogy, with its invocation of the sufferings of the first World War, moved me as much as anything I’ve encountered in British fiction.

Poor Things by Alasdair Gray

A wildly inventive yet in its own way utterly logical fictional confection. What’s great is that the bravura assemblage of voices, styles and narrative gimmicks all tend to a purpose; they’re not only immense fun, they’re fused and directed by Gray’s compassion for aspirant humanity and his contempt for power and hierarchy. This is a wonderfully partisan novel.

Beyond a Boundary by CLR James

This is not only by some way the best book ever written about the sport of cricket, it’s also a wonderful piece of inventive prose artistry, genre-busting in its mix of memoir, history, theory and political polemic. It ranges from colonial Trinidad to industrial Lancashire by way of ancient Greece and Victorian England — all swept along by the radical verve of James’ intelligence. He saw cricket in context, shaped by and giving shape to the conflicts of the world in which it was played. James took cricket seriously — perhaps too seriously — as an art form, and he was demanding in his judgements, which have a terrific elan, even when they’re wrong. Be warned: cricket’s most eminent Marxist has a surprising soft spot for the English public school ethos!

A Wet Afternoon by Sadat Hassan Manto

Toba Tek Singh — set in an asylum for the insane on the newly drawn India-Pakistan border in 1947 — is the great fictional comment on the tragedy of partition. Manto (who was also a screenwriter and journalist) wrote stories in a plain-spoken Urdu about prostitutes, dissolute intellectuals, compromised small businessmen and imprisoned housewives. He’s a sour but compassionate observer, and he leaves the big judgements up to the reader. Even in translation, this jaded epicurean with a stubborn moral core speaks with a distinctive voice. He died in 1955, at the age of 42.

Leon Trotsky trilogy by Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, The Prophet Outcast

You don’t have to be a Trotskyist to derive pleasure and enrichment from Deutscher’s beautifully written biographical trilogy. This is more than Trotsky’s story — which itself is one of the most dramatic, and tragic, of the 20th century — it’s a supple study in the rhythms of political and historical change. It’s clear and fluent and deeply considered and introduces you painlessly to a wide range of people, places, ideas and debates. The Polish-born Deutscher was himself an anti-Stalinist Marxist, a brave and independent intellect, whose essay The Non-Jewish Jew I’d also recommend.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

As Indira Gandhi’s ‘emergency’ grips the country, four characters — a Parsee widow, a middle class student, and two lower caste tailors — find their lives squashed together in a Bombay flat. Among other things, this book is a chronicle of the cruelties of that era, and provides a much sharper commentary on Indian politics than is found in more celebrated novels. The method here is unapologetically, and masterfully, naturalistic. The suffering in this book comes in many forms, is at times unbearable, but is always concrete and credible; so are the moments of hope or relief, buoyed up by the humour and idiosyncracy of the characters.

Out Stealing Horses by Per Pettersen

It’s hard to describe how and why Pettersen’s novel becomes so deeply engrossing. Like his previous works, this one shifts between past trauma and present uncertainties, and accumulates its insights, builds its very tangible world, sentence by sentence. In Out Stealing Horses an old man retires to a cottage in northern Norway and reflects on the events of a summer holiday some fifty years earlier. As the story unwinds, the long-term effects of these events become apparent. Pettersen refuses easy closures. His narrative is mostly close-up, but there are also sidelong glances at Norwegian history, at the Nazi occupation, at class and poverty. Despite the subject matter, and the real sadness, it’s anything but glum. When I read this book, I really felt I was seeing — feeling — the world afresh.

Walden, or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau

In 1845, Thoreau beat a retreat from the polite society of Concord, Massachusetts, to live in the woods by Walden Pond. The book is the record of his experiment: to see how many of the ‘necessities’ of civilisation we can really do without. But it’s more: it embodies an attempt to live fully and deliberately, to find a deep meaning in daily life. He didn’t go the woods just to prove it could be done, but to re-appropriate himself, to live a more authentic life than the one offered us, ready-packaged, off the shelf. Thoreau was one of the first critics of what we now call consumerism, which he sees as destructive of the environment and the human spirit. The book is full of wry humour, as Thoreau mocks himself and his society, and the prose has an un-showy solidity, like skilled carpentry.

King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild

There’s not much in modern history that exceeds the depravity of the ‘Congo Free State’, the vast territory appropriated by the Belgian King in 1885 as a kind of private enterprise free-fire zone. In the end, millions were killed, millions more mutilated, tortured, enslaved, by a small, sophisticated European business coterie. This is the story of that atrocity, but also of the global campaign protesting against it, a forerunner of the modern human rights movement. So among the genocidal villains and amoral rogues are genuine heroes: Hochschild makes sure neither are forgotten.

Complete Writings by William Blake

I take Blake at his own estimation: as a prophet. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a startling act of literary and intellectual insurgency. The conclusion of the epic illustrated book Jerusalem something for which here is no parallel in English poetry. Blake struck deep into me when I was a teenager and I’ve gone back to him repeatedly over the years, each time finding more than I expected. The ‘gentle mystic’ is largely a creation of literary legend; Blake was ferocious: “half friendship is the bitterest enmity.” The revolutionary republican prosecuted a kind of one-man ‘culture war’ for much of his life. Result: poverty and obscurity. Don’t worry about the details of Blake’s weird invented mythology; there’s more than enough that’s arrestingly transparent to compensate for the obscure bits.

My Petition to Gordon Brown

Ellie Keen — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 19:00:00 +0000

The British Prime Minister and the Tate’s Tin of Shit

I have fallen foul of the British Prime Minister, or, to be more accurate, the Prime Minister’s web site, specifically that part of it which allows anyone to post an online petition to Gordon Brown (he, in case you hadn’t noticed, is now the British PM and Tony Blair departed a while ago).

What I want to petition about is the Director of the Tate gallery, Sir Nicholas Serota. I have nothing against him personally—indeed, the contrary. He has been most affable on the whole, when he has encountered the Stuckists art group (which I co-founded) on the steps of Tate Britain, protesting against the Turner Prize each year and displaying a reproduction of my painting, which shows him behind a large pair of red panties, wondering if they are a genuine Tracey Emin artwork worth $20,000 or just a worthless fake.

When a campaign I initiated into the Tate’s purchase of its own trustees’ works resulted in the Charity Commission’s ruling that the gallery had been acting illegally for the last 50 years, Serota said on BBC Radio 4 that the Stuckists had “acted in the public interest in this instance, and they don’t irritate me. I think that as a public servant I should be here at the service of the public, including the Stuckists.” Quite so.

I thought the least I could do was to continue to act in the public interest and communicate to the Prime Minister the widespread public dissatisfaction with Sir Nicholas’s artistic policies at the Tate. The public do after all pay for it, but have never been able to say whether they think they are getting their money’s worth. This, I considered, would be a chance for them to do so.

I carefully read the rules on submission at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk and studied a selection of both rejected petitions and those currently online. So far 29,000 have been submitted, 14,601 rejected, 6,000 finished and 8,500 still live, with a total of 5.8 million signatures from over 3.9 million different email addresses (it’s obviously a hobby for some people).

At the time of writing, the most popular one with 528, 379 signatories is a request for “a new public holiday, the National Remembrance Holiday to commemorate The Fallen and our Nation, with the holiday falling on the second Monday in November each year, the day after Remembrance Sunday.” I noted also that accepted petitions could include opinions. After all, that is what a petition is to start with, so I felt I should express mine. I submitted my petition, which read as follows:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to reassure the public that he will veto any reappointment of Sir Nicholas Serota as Director of the Tate gallery.

Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of the Tate gallery since 1988, has pursued a narrow agenda of new media, namely gimmickry and junk, at the expense of the traditional art of painting. Work he has acquired or promoted includes a radio and coat hangers, a cow cut in half in formaldehyde, a tin of excrement, a light going on and off in an empty room, fun fair slides and a crack in the floor. His belief that his policy on contemporary art and boring videos meets a public demand is a delusion.

The Charity Commission found in 2006 that the Tate had acted illegally in the purchase of its own trustee Chris Ofili’s work, The Upper Room, for £705,000. Trustees are bound by the Nolan Principles, including “selflessness”. This has clearly not been enforced, and is in marked contrast to David Hockney’s donation of his largest ever work, “Bigger Trees Near Warter”.

The Tate trustees will decide by 31 August this year whether to renew Sir Nicholas’s contract, which is with the Prime Minister’s approval.

Just in case there was any doubt as to the validity of the contents, I also appended references to press articles etc. to substantiate my facts. I considered that I had been quite restrained, as the “tin of excrement” is actually called titled, “Artist’s Shit” on the Tate web site.

I sat back happily awaiting its uploading within the time frame specified of 5 days, only to receive within a couple of hours an email telling me it had been rejected as “potentially libellous, false, or defamatory” and inviting me to submit a revised version. I immediately sent an email asking them to inform me exactly which statements were the offending ones. After a day, I didn’t get a reply, so I sent in an ultra-sanitised version to be on the safe side:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to state that he will veto any reappointment of Sir Nicholas Serota as Director of the Tate gallery.

Sir Nicholas Serota was appointed as Director of the Tate gallery in 1988 on a seven year contract, renewed in 1995 and again in 2002. It expires on 31 August 2009, and the appointment of a Director for the next seven years must be decided by 31 August this year. The appointment is made by the Tate Trustees with the Prime Minister’s approval.

In the meantime, the public response had already gratifyingly started. The Times ran a short piece on the rejection, and I immediately received an email from a David Shipley, informing me that he had sent in a petition to have my original petition reinstated. He said, “Being retired and having too much time on my hands, I just read the Times article and wondered what you could have said that would have been defamatory about Sir Nicholas. When I found out from your website that your petition was, as far as I could see, entirely factual (unlike the statements routinely made by politicians) I thought it was an abuse of process for the PM’s office to reject it so it seemed that a meta-petition might be an interesting approach.” I asked him who he was, and he replied, “I’m just a random member of the public who believes that the moral of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ was not that someone should have shut the brat up, and everything would have been fine.”

The next day, I received a further email from David. His petition to allow my petition had been rejected on the basis that his request was “Outside the remit or powers of the Prime Minister and Government.” It seems this is a government that can despatch battalions and jet fighters to far-flung lands at will, but does not have the capability to reinstate a petition on its own web site. Still, I thought, at least my squeaky clean petition was safe – or at least I did for a few seconds, until I noticed with shock another email in the inbox, just below David’s and with the same header, “Your petition has been rejected”. What grounds have they found this time, I wondered. Apparently my request was also “Outside the remit or powers of the Prime Minister and Government.”

It is very strange that it is outside the remit and powers of the Prime Minister and Government, as the Museums and Galleries Act 1992 (c. 44) 1992 CHAPTER 44, Schedule 2: The Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery, states: “3 (1) There shall be a Director of the Tate Gallery who shall be appointed by the Board with the approval of the Prime Minister”. It is somewhat worrying that those acting on the Prime Minister’s behalf do not know what his remit and powers are. I have submitted a new petition quoting the Act. However, I don’t hold out much hope.

Updates will be posted on http://www.stuckism.com

Charles Thomson is co-founder of The Stuckists art group. He can be reached at: stuckism@yahoo.co.uk

The reality of my desires

JamieSW — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 08:24:06 +0000

Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority
Edited by Josh MacPhee & Erik Reuland
Oakland & Edinburgh: AK Press, 2007, 324 pp; £16
Do it Yourself: A Handbook for Changing our World
Edited by the Trapese Collective
London & Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2007
Rebel Alliances: The Means and Ends
of Contemporary British Anarchisms
Benjamin Franks
Oakland & Edinburgh: AK Press, 2006, 480 pp; £15

Two books, both purporting to encourage social change according to the tenets of anarchism, have been published recently. The first of these, Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority, advocates a role for creative practice in prompting questions about how society is constructed and providing alternative models. In contrast to this proactive approach to visual culture, Do it Yourself: A Handbook for Changing our World claims to be a step-by-step guide to changing our immediate surroundings, for developing new communities based on direct democracy and sustainability.

Realizing the Impossible asserts that, while Marxism constrains art to the prevailing economic conditions and capitalism harnesses it to the market system, “anarchism is not a singular political program so much as a thorough commitment to substantive equality and the potential for human liberation,”[1] thereby promoting artistic freedom. On this basis, some fairly tenuous attempts are made to link Modernist artists to anarchism, not least in Patricia Leighten’s unsubstantiated assertion that:

“In pre-World War I France, many modernists – including Pablo Picasso, Maurice Vlaminck and Kees van Dongen – thought anarchist politics to be inherent in the idea of an artistic avant-garde and created new languages of form [...] expressive of their desire to effect revolutionary changes in art and society. [...] Anarchism as a political philosophy was, without question, more influential on turn-of-the-century artists than socialism, in part because anarchist theory specifically called for the participation of artists in social transformation, and in part because anarchism at one end of its spectrum stood for absolute individualism fully compatible with a politicized bohemianism.”[2]

Elsewhere, claims are made that artists associated with anarchism include Pissaro, Tolstoy and Wilde, as well as those who turned to Communism – from Malevich to Picasso [3] – while references are made to the “Situationist-inspired anarchist art movements like the Neoists,”[4] an attribution with which former Neoist and persistent critic of anarchism, Stewart Home, would no doubt take issue.[5]

A transcribed discussion between contemporary printmakers in Realizing the Impossible gives a clue to its ethos and should be restaged by anyone entering arts education, posing questions such as: What do you think about art as a commodity? If you sell your work, how do you decide the price of a piece? What do you think is the role(s) of an artist in society? What role do you think art plays in social change? What roles do you think art plays in our lives?[6] In another section, Cindy Millstein attempts to reconcile some contradictions, asking “Why is anarchist art so often a parody of itself, predictable and uninteresting?”[7]

At its most convincing, Realizing the Impossible ignores the market-driven contemporary art world; when it does engage, it does so uncritically. Gee Vaucher – who notoriously designed graphics for punk band Crass – goes on record with the misguided confession “I’ve shown in 96 Gillespie in London several times, and although it is a private gallery, it has the feel of a public space, probably due to the fact that is [sic] opposite the old Arsenal football ground and on home-weekends you’d have several thousands [sic] fans peering into the show. I’ve also had a good experience showing at Gavin Brown’s in New York. I’m liking the mixture of art worlds at the moment.”[8] This laisez faire attitude to the commercial art world – a microcosm of capitalism and a pervasive influence on creativity – is repeated throughout the volume. This is consistent with co-editor Josh MacPhee’s defeatist stance: “Unfortunately, we live in a society where the dominant economic model is one where the value of things is defined by how much you can sell them for. This isn’t a good thing, but I’m not a purist. I sell art because I don’t know how else to survive while making it.”[9]

Two articles that stand out for further consideration are a lyrical account of the rise and fall of stencil art on the streets of Argentina, and a pragmatic treatment of the capitalist nature of much ostensibly anti-corporate activism. The first of these begins with a consideration of financial meltdown in Argentina in December 2001, during which the government’s IMF debt and adherence to free market neoliberalism caused capital flight (the large-scale withdrawal of international funds from banks for fear the country would default on its external debt) and the subsequent implementation of restrictions:

“...what was so remarkable about the protests in Argentina at that time was that upper and middle class people were active participants in the street protest and direct democracy. The ahorristas, or savers, were a movement of more or less affluent people who had lost their life’s savings to the government restrictions on money withdrawal from banks. Weekly protests of these upper class folks were black bloc protest-reels of smashed windows and spray-painted bank facades – only carried out in broad daylight without masks by men with suits and briefcases or women in heels.”[10]

In the austerity years that followed, neighbourhood committees met to discuss practicalities such as the provision of basic healthcare, the production and distribution of alternative media and, on a more ideological level, the desire to end all political parties. This period also spawned a massive increase in street art in Buenos Aires, some of it political, some playful. Erick Lyle delivers a thoughtful portrait of his personal encounters with stencil artists, from the avowedly political Nico from Vomito Attack [11] – who has consistently refused to appear in stencil art exhibitions sponsored by the state, preferring to organise his own illegal events – to Cucusita,[12] the twenty-nine year old skateboarder who began stencilling before the crisis and confines his work to a suburban hospital car park.

When Nestor Kirchner was elected President on a low turnout and with a narrow majority in May 2003, he immediately defaulted on Argentina’s IMF loan, which has now been paid in full by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez,[13] and, while worker-owned and managed businesses still exist, the unprecedented neighbourhood assemblies have largely been dissolved. An interview with the members of Buenos Aires (BsAs) Stencil [14] – who exhibited their work at the Centro Cultural Borges, took part in 2004 ArteBA contemporary art fair and happily discuss future prospects for commercial merchandise – prompts Lyle to consider:

“...in this new era, four years removed from the economic crisis that gave it birth, the stencil in Buenos Aires is one step away from BECOMING advertising. If so, advertising for what? The “new freedom”? “The Revolution” [...]? Stencils represented the participation people wanted, and pop culture images represented the products they will get. The stencil was the aesthetic of a new participation that had long faded.”[15]

The ill-considered nature of many supposedly subversive creative ventures into state- and corporate-controlled space is consolidated in the theoretical section which concludes the same anthology. Anne Elizabeth Moore delivers an incisive critique of culture jamming, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the boycott and a misidentification of parody and satire with political change. To illustrate the point, Moore considers the tactics of the Reverend Billy from the Church of Stop Shopping, typically centred on ubiquitous branded coffee houses. Rather than launching attacks that prove damaging to the targeted corporation, Moore argues, these activities actually increase the brand recognition on which any successful company depends:

“...parody and satire, used to fight the meme war or as strategies in their own right, rely on representing the very subjects ridiculed. Culture jamming, adbusting, and parody in general, not only reassert the icons they half-heartedly attempt to dismantle, they encourage their continued survival. [...] As a method of political action, culture jamming, because of its central reliance on parody and satire as politically effective strategies, has already failed. That is, because it reproduces the exact messages it claims to want to upend, culture jamming is necessarily ineffective.”[16]

By and large, then, culture jamming does nothing to undermine the actual mechanisms of profit or the products being traded. Instead, Moore concludes, genuinely critical responses to consumer culture are needed, to end the tyranny of brands and the dogmas they represent and enable us to conceive of something uncontrolled.

The Handbook for Changing our World claims to enable us to actually achieve something uncontrolled on the basis that “the networks of people that are working for Earth and societal repair, linked by the internet and a million small agreements to work together, are emerging to form the world’s greatest, most important, new global superpower.”[17] Predicated on imminent peak oil and environmental catastrophe, eighteen chapters provide information about the process of achieving individual and community-based change, including an illustrated guide to the appropriate hand gestures to make during meetings. Again, its principles “largely follow anarchist/autonomist thought. Anarchism, from the Greek ‘without government’, is a belief that people can organise society for themselves without formalised government. It argues that the best way to organise is through voluntary arrangements where people are likely to co-operate more.”[18] This is entry-level activism, the kind of thing you could give to a benign aunt to introduce her to the widely-known horrors perpetrated by Nestlé and Dow Chemical. As such, it belongs in every community library, readily accessible to those wishing to try out the experiments detailed therein. For those already familiar with its arguments, however, the Handbook conjures notions of a selective Arcadia, with the privileged echelons of society cultivating their own vegetables on reclaimed land and powering their houses with sustainable energy while the Morlocks of the malls are forced to abandon their fossil-fuelled livelihoods with no contingencies in place.

Interestingly, the Handbook for Changing our World also mentions Argentina in terms of a ‘popular uprising that is still going on today’, contrary to Erick Lyle’s first-hand experience of the era of mass participation having almost disappeared. It also dedicates a celebratory chapter to culture jamming, from the perspective of a recruit to the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (convened in time for the G8 protests at Gleneagles in 2005). Acknowledging media theorist Geert Lovink’s scepticism – that “...culture jamming is useless fun. That’s exactly why you should do it. Commit senseless acts of beauty. But don’t think they are effective, or subversive, for that matter. The real purpose of [a] corporation cannot be revealed by media activism. That can only be done by years [of] long, painstakingly slow, investigative journalism. Brand damage has never proven enough. What we need is research, thinking, brainstorming, and then action”[19] – the book nonetheless embraces media activism as “crucially changing both idea space and public space from a corporate or party political monologue to a dialogue where people are speaking for themselves,”[20] offering uncritical praise of the impotent activities of the Rev. Billy and the like. The one exception among the examples cited, according to the terms established by Anne Elizabeth Moore – having allegedly caused share prices to plummet – would seem to be the televised admission of liability made on behalf of Dow Chemical by a representative of the Yes Men.

One way of evaluating the relative successes of these two titles is to measure them according to the anarchist criteria against which they seek to be judged. A recent attempt by Benjamin Franks to formulate an ‘ideal type’ anarchist – Rebel Alliances: The Means and Ends of Contemporary British Anarchisms – is premised on a complete rejection of capitalism and state power, an egalitarian concern for the interests and freedoms of others and a recognition that means have to prefigure ends. In Franks’ schema, the revolutionary agent of change is the subject of oppression herself and, as oppression has more than one source, her identity is flexible and not confined to traditional Leninist definitions of the working class – which fits well with Lyle’s account of Argentina. Accordingly, Franks’ ideal type of class-struggle libertarians respond to their own oppression, without the need for vanguard intervention, and their actions are synecdochic – that is, part of a larger visualisation of societal change. This serves as a useful benchmark against which different approaches may be tested.

While neither Realizing the Impossible nor the Handbook for Changing our World attempts any definition of the particular branch of anarchism they claim to represent and as many stances are offered as there are authors, the former title veers dangerously close to what Franks dismisses as liberal, or lifestyle, anarchism, whereby “anarchists have a view of the individual which is fixed and conforms to the criteria of rational egoism associated with capitalism.”[21] By advocating creative people as revolutionary subjects, it begs questions about the extent to which artists in the western world really are oppressed and, by offering hierarchical collectives such as the Bread and Puppet group [22] as models, it undermines Franks’ ideal type. Further, the creative activities outlined largely rely on raising awareness of problems, rather than tackling them directly, and depend on mediation, rendering them examples of symbolic, as opposed to direct, action – a derided tactic according to anarchist logic.

By contrast, the Handbook for Changing our World would appear to adhere more closely to ideal type anarchism, encouraging local groups working together to improve their environments, on the basis that micro-political change will lead to something more substantial: “Alternatives to the current system of decision making in our society exist. We need to extend these spheres of free action and mutual aid until they make up most of society. It is the myriad of [sic] small groups organising for social change that will, when connected to each other, transform society.”[23] While the extent of these groups’ oppression would seem to rest on a notion of the majority being oppressed under capitalism, Franks also advocates détournement and culture jamming as consistent with the tactics employed by anarchists, inadvertently consolidating the ethos of the Handbook for Changing our World.

Ultimately, both Realizing the Impossible and the Handbook for Changing our World are grounded in localist tactics and nationalist perspectives – from the US and the UK respectively – with any attempt to represent the creative dissent of other cultures (Argentina, Denmark) in the former being undertaken by US writers. Herein lays one of the main pitfalls of anarchist analysis, what Stewart Home refers to as a fetishisation of the state.[24] While Franks’ successful attempt to unravel the multifarious factions within British anarchism could serve as the historical basis for parodies of the fragmented Left, like Tariq Ali’s first novel, Redemption – and Franks’ glee in distinguishing anarchism from Leninism is palpable – capitalism benefits from an overwhelming consensus in every area of Anglo-American society, from the state and the media to the general populace, with no respect for national boundaries. Any further erosion of the (albeit capitalist) state during this final phase of advanced capitalism runs the risk of removing the last vestiges of corporate accountability and leaving the world and its citizens at the mercy of rampant neoliberalism. Rather than waiting for micro-attempts at change to cohere, it is time for all those declaring themselves loyal to anarchism, or Leninism, or any faction of the Left – and all those joining the anti-capitalist movement but unbeholden to any specific ideology – to unite in the immediate task of developing strategies for the abolition of capitalism. It is only through wholesale change that we will be able to fully consider how future society will be constructed, which of the models being developed now will be sustainable and what the role of creativity will be.

With thanks to 100% Proof.

Notes:

1. Josh MacPhee & Eric Reuland, ‘Introduction: Towards Anarchist Art Theories’, Realizing the Impossible, op. cit, p. 4.
2. Patricia Leighten, ‘Reveille Anarchiste: Salon Painting, Political Satire, Modernist Art’, Realizing the Impossible, op. cit, p. 27.
3. David Graeber, ‘The Twilight of Vanguardism’, Realizing the Impossible, op. cit, p. 252.
4. Kyle Harris, ‘Beyond Authenticity: Aesthetic Strategies and an Anarchist Media’, Realizing the Impossible, op. cit, p. 211.
5. See Stewart Home, ‘Bolt on Neoism for Psychogeographical Wanderers Everywhere, or The Return of Three-Sided Football Part IX’, Bubonic Plagiarism: Stewart Home on Art, Politics and Appropriation, (London: Sabotage Editions, 2005), pp. 24-33.
6. Meredith Stern, ‘Subversive Multiples: A Conversation between Contemporary Printmakers’, Realizing the Impossible, op. cit, pp. 104-119.
7. Cindy Millstein, ‘Reappropriate the Imagination’, Realizing the Impossible, op. cit, p. 297
8. Erik Reuland, ‘Gee Vaucher: Crass Art’, Realizing the Impossible, op. cit, p. 75.
9. Josh MacPhee cited in Stern, op. cit. p. 106.
10. Erick Lyle, ‘Shadows in the Streets: The Stencil Art of the New Argentina’, Realizing the Impossible, op. cit, p. 79. [Italics in original.]
11. www.vomitoattack.org
12. www.assholeco.com.ar
13. In December 1998, after a sustained period of civil unrest, former Air Force officer Hugo Chávez was elected president of his country and renamed it the Bolívarian Republic of Venezuela. Inspired by the example of Simón Bolívar, who fought for independence from the Spanish Empire in the eighteenth century, Chávez reinstated calls for a federation of the Latin American countries against the new Empire of the United States.
14. www.bsasstencil.com.ar
15. Lyle, op. cit. p. 87.
16. Anne Elizabeth Moore, ‘Branding Anti-Consumerism: The Capitalist Nature of Anti-Corporate Activism’, Realizing the Impossible, op. cit, pp. 292 & 294.
17. Andy Goldring, ‘Why we need holistic solutions for a world in crisis’, Do it Yourself: A Handbook for Changing our World, Edited by the Trapese Collective, (London & Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2007), p. 26.
18. The Trapese Collective, ‘Introduction’, A Handbook for Changing our World, op. cit, p. 4.
19. Jennifer Verson, ‘Why we need cultural activism’, A Handbook for Changing our World, op. cit, p. 178.
20. Ibid. p. 179.
21. Benjamin Franks, ‘Introduction’, Rebel Alliances: The Means and Ends of Contemporary British Anarchisms, (Oakland & Edinburgh: AK Press, 2006), p. 16.
22. Morgan Andrews, ‘When Magic Confronts Authority: The Rise of Protest Puppetry in N. America’, Realizing the Impossible, op. cit, pp. 180-209.
23. The Seeds for Change Collective, ‘Why do it without leaders?’ A Handbook for Changing our World, op. cit, p. 55.
24. See Stewart Home, ‘Anarchist Integralism: Aesthetics, Politics and the Après-Garde’, 1997 (http://stewarthomesociety.org/ai.htm)