Cormac McCarthy – The Road (book review)

The Road is about an anonymous father and son walking through a nameless landscape following an unspecified apocalyptic disaster. They journey south, seeking both warmth and the coast with hope that the once blue sea will bring new opportunity. The environment is relentless and dead of all life besides a handful of people now turned savage in order to survive. Rape, murder and cannibalism are commonplace – the father struggles to shelter his child from these evils.

The book is written with a rambling structure, without chapters or pause. Although initially this seems strange it works well to show how life on the road is a continuous struggle. Sadly, this struggle does become a little repetitive with campfires, cold nights and vacant houses punctuated only occasionally with edgy encounters with other desperate survivors. It also appears the apocalypse has taken all life from the language with it. The overly long sentences are made largely of ‘ands’ and ‘thens’. Although more adventurous vocabulary is used when describing his inner thoughts, it is not a book that uses language to its full potential. There are times where this restrained approach seems to suit the feel of the desolate setting but soon the parched grey palette of both the forests and the writing leaves you wanting some variety.  Once accustomed to this style, the story leads on to its conclusion that is a fitting end to a daring book – one that is the bleakest and strangely most honest depiction of the post-apocalypse genre.

James Cameron – Avatar (2010)

After just 10 minutes of this film you are sucked in and busy admiring the fantastic 3D effects. Detailed environments are rendered in entirely believable textures and layered together to complete the illusion. Past efforts of 3D appeared more like one flat plane in front of another, but the modelling in Avatar is truly realistic. The hype about it being 13 years and £300 million in the making is believable, and well worth it.

The world of Pandora appears to be modelled on James Cameron’s imaginative utopia, beneath which lies a whole heap of a valuable mineral ‘Unobtanium’ (yes, really) that humankind are itching to get at. So, the humanfolk send a disabled marine to take control of an Avatar (alternate being) within Pandora, and set him the task of convincing the People (who appear to be a cross between Noel Fielding and a cat) to simply move along without argument. It is not hard to guess what happens when he experiences not just enhanced mobility but a utopian world, along with an even more predictable romance. It all concludes with a battle to forcibly remove the people of Pandora and the battle scene really is exciting to watch. The obvious outcome of the war is forgiven by faultless animation relying on a seamless blend of real and imagined elements. Like many features of the film, the conflict can easily be read as a statement about the history of our own culture – based largely on exploitation and greed rather than conservation and equality. Although they could have been a little more subtle it is good to see a message underneath and some depth to the film.

The banal predictability of the plot really is its main downfall. At the time you don’t really care as it all looks so shiny. On reflection it really is a tried and tested plot. It begins to feel more like a showcase for the technology rather than a strong film enhanced further by 3D effects which is a great shame. Despite this it did reveal just how immersing the technology can be – animating vivid imagination into something you can almost touch.

Lydia Millet – How The Dead Dream (2008)

Millet has an uncanny knack to invoke tangible, recognizable sensations and memories through her writing. Many of the characters have attitudes or even mannerisms we have all witnessed, which strengthens our belief in them and the surrounding narrative.

The story is led by T. who starts young in his aim to gain great wealth. He cons his neighbour’s into donating to charity, only to stash the notes under his pillow. By his early twenties he moved into developing land and accumulated great wealth, but a deep romance followed sharply by some tragic events in his life to lead him to desire something more ‘real’ than capital. These are only the bare bones of a rich narrative well supported by a variety of secondary characters. It is only really at the end you can see how complete a change T. has been through; beginning as a committed model of consumerism into someone deeply passionate and sensitive to the living world.

Burning Ice – Cape Farewell (2006)

Cape Farewell was an ambitious expedition that took a handful of people with varied backgrounds to the retreating sea ice deep within the arctic circle. The crew’s experiences and creations whilst aboard the Noorderlicht are documented in Cape Farewell – Art & Climate Change.

Of the projects covered in the book it is Alex Hartley’s claiming of an island recently surrendered by the retreating ice that makes a lasting impression. The work now exists in documentary photographs of the landing, and in data compiled during a rough assessment of the island – ‘Roughly a hundred paces long, fifty wide, and fully thirty feet high.’ It has since been charted and submitted for inclusion on future maps. Hartley stands proud, adopting the stance of proud explorer, adorned with climbing ropes and with his back to his vessel. As for the islands ‘use’ Hartley jests – ‘Nothing has yet been ruled out; annexation, independence, tax haven, wild life sanctuary, short let holiday homes or time shares.’ The piece is simple, its execution does not pander nor lecture, and yet the issues that his actions raise run deep. This land has been under the crushing weight of ancient ice for thousands if not millions of years – certainly no human would have ever walked on it. Today however, it is possible to comfortably sail up to and beyond the island – a change initiated by our warming planet.

Some of the other artworks were not as composed, including Peter Clegg & Anthony Gormley’s act of building a cave in the snow that seeks to conform to ‘the absolutes of Euclidian geometry’ a collection of laws concerning the characteristics and relationships of planes and shapes. As this ancient system is based on mathematics its application is intended to indicate a clear difference between man and nature, creating an environment within where this difference can be observed and contemplated. Whilst the concept seems sound, the accompanying photographs and documentation make it look more like an intellectual, or pretentious play in the snow with meaning attached afterwards.

Siobhan Davies conducted a movement in response to the landscape – a solemn walk with 11 other members of the crew, whilst Gautier Deblonde presented its bleak human side with solemn photographs taken on a visit to a largely deserted mining town. Bodies of writing punctuate the imagery, with work summarizing important scientific experiments taken whilst on the boat alongside more creative reflections. Gretel Ehlrich’s journal provides attaches atmosphere far stronger than all the full-bleed photographs, and Dr Valborg Byfield explains the science in good depth, looking honestly into possible consequences.

There is a feeling that it is often trying to self justify the journey and publication, which does raise larger questions about art’s position in the relation to climate change. The book left me feeling art was a number of things – a valuable tool of education, an important document of the times, an outlet of personal fear or frustration. Despite this there is an undeniable acknowledgement of the fact that art can also become a dangerous distraction, a feeling strengthened by work that failed to compete with the science or connect with the reader. This mix of art and science was so liberal the differences between them were quite jarring, and the dire consequences of creeping temperatures and rising sea levels are diluted by the weaker artworks that then appear self-indulgent. This is an issue that is too often skirted by environmental art, but seems to be one that questions the validity of the expanding genre itself.

Cape Farewell

Franny Armstrong – Age of Stupid (2009)

This film has a tough job  – to inform 250 million of its viewers and initiate a positive response to the challenges of climate change. Education and entertainment rarely go together, as Al Gore found to his cost. Armstrong’s approach employed an archivist from 2055 to tell the story of our impending doom, through footage from real news stories and documentary films that look at the problem on a more individual level. There is the engineer trying (and sadly failing) to construct wind-farms against the NIMBY’s shallow protests, the Indian entrepreneur starting the countries first budget airline (prices from 1 rupee!) and a modest mountain guide from Chamonix, who shares his observations of the changing landscape as temperatures rise and glaciers recede. It tries to invoke change through an arsenal of emotional weaponry – from guilt, installing apocalyptic fear or concern for our unborn children, highlighting the financial gain of forward thinking and then a bit more apocalyptic fear. This may be conceived as scaremongering, but the film makers have studied the science and even within recent news a lot of the scenes (a raging fire in Sydney, the flooding of London) are in no way impossible.

If you are aware of the basics of climate science then there is nothing new to be gleaned from the science within the film, but it is presented in an accessible manner, which on the whole manages to inform without becoming condescending and avoids grossly over simplifying the facts. It also goes someway into contextualizing the figures, and also makes the very valid and often ignored fact that 25% of China’s rocketing emissions go into producing (and often disposing of) products for the western world.

It is this issue with accessibility that I feared would be the failing of this film. As the film states, only 40% of the public believe that climate change is the fault of humans (despite 99% of the scientists confirming it) so a film seeking to spark a change has to be accessible, engaging and thought provoking. Equally, it cannot be hypocritical and require a big budget from corporate sponsors spent on carbon intensive travel or extravagant film sets. The total emissions of the its production are therefore easily accessible and are summarised within the film, and it was funded largely through an innovative crowd funding technique which allowed it to be made without pleasing any difficult sponsors.

It is not without its faults – the use of the minority report style computer is clumsy, the ending a little baffling and I think it was lacking a view of the perspective from bulk of the people it was trying to influence – the ‘everyday’ westerner with no direct involvement in climate change. Whilst I feel this would have added further balance, I can’t hold these faults against a film that I feel succeeded in its difficult aim with its authenticity intact.

Age of Stupid – Available to download at your own price.

Ron Fricke – Baraka (1992)

I’ll admit it, I adore this film.

It’s hard to describe precisely what this film is, as there is no tangible narrative. I once heard it described as a film you could send to some theoretical aliens in order to best give them an idea of what life on earth, in all its forms, is like.

It simply features footage of a diverse range of subjects from 24 countries, all set to a unique soundtrack. The intense beauty and meditative pace of the editing pulls you in gently and settles you, showing you just enough of each topic before contrasting or complimenting it with the next. A monkey sits up to its shoulders in a steaming natural spring, wearing a solemnly thoughtful expression that is uncannily human. The purity of a Buddhist monk precedes the madness of 5th Avenue, the countless yellow cabs stuttering up and down the endless street in accordance with the lights and music. Everything shot is seductively aesthetic with fantastic clarity (owing to its 70mm format) and camera techniques such as time-lapse footage are used to a perfect degree.

Sheer simplicity allows it to present the our troubled relationship to nature without narrative or damning finger pointing. Slow paced editing and exquisite aesthetics let us appreciate beauty (something that seems to have lost its value recently) then later a dramatic score and at times uncomfortable footage reveals how fragile it really is.

Watching it today I cannot help thinking about how it would be filmed differently if it were to be made again. Do these remote, pure tribes deep within the Amazon rainforest still evade modernity, and what new subjects – the Large Hadron Collider? – would now be offered. Have the many relationships covered – man and nature, rich and poor, religion and science, developed, deteriorated or remained the same? It is its ability to provoke and encourage thought that is its real strength, and one that means it can be viewed many times over without tiring – a sure sign of a successful piece of cinema.

IMDB

Joel Sternfeld – When it Changed (2008)

“Future generations are going to wonder about us, the inhabitants of the Earth when the climate began to change. If seas are rising and at the same time drinking water is scarce, they are going to want to know what scientific evidence was before us and what we did in response to it. It is difficult to imagine a time in the past without an image, so I went to Montreal in 2005 to photograph the participants in the eleventh United Nations conference on climate change.”

Joel Sternfeld (2008)

The first page of Sternfeld’s book begins with a statement.

‘CARBON MONOXIDE MAY NOT BE QUICKLY ABSORBED BY OCEANS’ and goes on to give a quote by Roger Revelle, an Oceanographer who states ‘Human Beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor reproduced in the future’. Today, this seems nothing new (in fact I read a recent article on this subject alone, ‘Sea absorbing less CO2’ Guardian website – 12 January 2009) but the astonishing thing is that the statement is from 1957. The following pages give a number of different headlines on the subject, with some summarising text, chronologically up to 2007. The quotes from the media are printed plainly, and Sternfeld places these along side the photographs he took of key delegates from the UNFCCC meeting in Montreal, Canada.

The delegates serve as a cross section of members and emotions at the coneference. The despair of Inuk Leader Naalak Nappaaluk, the frustration of John Brinkman – head of the Japanese commission on Ecology, and the apparent disinterest of ‘an unidentified delegate’, as his head hangs back on his neck, having a quick snooze. It would be humorous if the fact weren’t true that this is the only system in place to seek an alternative to the impending chaotic climate. It does have the slight feeling of shooting suited fish in a bowl, like someone taking pictures of you in the office during a particularly bad day, but more so it puts (often exasperated) emotions to these talks that otherwise seem faceless and entirely separate.

These photographs are particularly relevant today. The 15^th annual meeting by the UNFCCC held in Copenhagen will soon be upon us, and there is so much being written about the almost unilateral assumption that they will be fruitless in the face of their great importance – even Gordon Brown acknowledges that this is a crucial time for the planets fate. The leading nations within the Major Economies Forum (whose emissions amount to 80% of greenhouse emissions) squabble and resist against collusion, placing their own interests and GDP first, whilst developing countries defend their right to use fossil fuel technology in order to reach the same developed state.

The photography is nothing special because it simply does not need to be and although the strange html-like text and symbols that cover and surround the articles is nothing but distracting, it is a thought provoking bookwork that makes its point through simple use of image and found text. Of course it is a construction like any other, but it does simply present the reader with just enough information to grasp the seriousness of the situation.

Publisher

Gregory Crewdson – Beneath the Roses (2008)

I was keen to see how Crewdson has progressed following his successful body of work Twilight (2002), shown last year in the V&A show with the same name. The press release begins by stating that these new photographs show a greater awareness of atmosphere and setting. Viewing the photographs in the first room, I struggled to see it. Each showed the same highly constructed vision of an ephemeral but mystically sedate narrative. All characters wear an expression that lies somewhere between contemplative and dumbstruck, a look that for me has become his trademark, as they gaze skywards for answers.

I found a little more improvement downstairs where he shows a more mature and considered structure, but they still stuck far too closely to his fail safe formula that worked so well in the past. The ticklist seems to be : a character or two lit softly by unseen bulbs, a tatty american car (preferably in Bronze) and some degree of urban greenery, all placed in a Massachusettes suburb with a limply suggested narrative. They strive to produce this feeling to intrigue and subtle discomfort, but soon get tiresome, and when placed side by side in this one man show, the repeated strategy is all too clear.

I left with the feeling that he had stayed thoroughly within his comfort zone, and to progress I feel he needs to try something new – something relying less on a large budget and talented lighting team.

Gregory Crewdson at the White Cube

Barbican Art Gallery – Radical Nature (2009)

Radical Nature looks at Environmental art and architecture to explore how both past work and that of contemporary practitioners has approached the subject as its urgency has increased.

There is no set path or order to view the work which I much prefer to a typical linear layout, and the first piece I viewed was by A12 called Green Room. You step up a simple wooden structure to see that the whole of the floor is covered in plants, and the walls are entirely mirrored. Whilst the illusion of infinite greenery does work, I couldn’t help feeling I was stood within a particularly cramped changing room. It is overshadowed by Henrik Hakansson’s piece Fallen Forest – in which a 16-meter-squared area of rainforest is constructed at a right angle to the floor. Growing out of the wall the trees appear to be surrendering at the viewers feet and remind us of our complicated relationship with nature. The disturbing angle at which they protrude from the wall and seem to bow down in submission remind us of our intense responsibility, whilst the lush green tones remind us that nature is a resilient force certain to outlive our own species unless we acknowledge its importance.

Beside this work stands Anya Gallaccio’s butchered beech, that has been sawn into pieces and then reconstructed with wire cables and crude nuts and bolts. The visual contrasts between the textures and subtle shapes of the branches and the stark, piercing lines of the machined additions are fantastic, and seem to form an uncomfortable vision of the possible dangers of misguided reparations with nature. Wolf Hilbertz provides a positive example of technology providing part of a solution to one outcome of global warming. Through using passing a small current through seawater, minerals build up into solid forms around a structure, providing an artificial coral reef that is soon adopted by the sea life and develops and supports a life system of its own. Its proximity to Smithson’s groundbreaking Spiral Jetty leaves the early piece of land art looking selfish and self-centred, although the accompanying video is mesmerising (if slightly nauseating) as the 70s helicopter makes passes over the artist as he traces his work.

There are a few interesting examples of work enlisted under the title of art or architecture that actively seeks to improve the environment or raise awareness instead of simply commenting on it. Agnes Denes act of planting a two-acre field of wheat on Manhattan island highlight misplaced priorities, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s work Waste Flow Video documented her shaking hands with all 8,500 garbage guys in the New York district. Whilst it is only the documentation that stands, the work retains a freshness of activism that most of the other work lacks – and retrospectively enforces the sense of urgency these issues demand. Of the show the more memorable piece for me was essentially the simplest. Tue Greenfort constructs crude, elemental camera traps from MDF and disposable cameras, and left over night in carious green spaces. As an unsuspecting fox tries to make off with a piece of frankfurter, the flash is triggered, and the wide-eyed scavenger normally so elusive is captured in harsh detail. Joseph Beuy’s contribution to an exhibition of this subject is a given, but sadly I found Honeypump at the Workplace too intensely personal to engage me fully.

Efforts to be minimise the shows environmental impact such as printing on the back of old posters and reusing material for furniture is severely contradicted by greater efforts to make money – some entirely useless plastic ants are considered the perfect accompany to a picnic, some strange ‘fashion gloves’ imported from Japan and a huge, ‘designer’ chicken pen made from moulded plastic seemed to undermine their initially commendable intentions.

Radical Nature at the Barbican

First Post.

Thought I’d get a blog largely for personal use, to encourage me to keep writing and thinking. Some of the material is from my website, where I have lots of personal work on show, but I will use this blog largely for thoughts and reviews.