Making Sense of Sustainability…?
This last weekend (December 6th and 7th), I was invited to another “environmental arts” symposium, this time in Cardiff… Where November’s event at Central School of Speech and Drama, in London, had crammed a huge (slightly exhausting) amount into one day (see November blog posts), the “Environmental Futures” dialogue/network event was sort of the opposite… Spread over two days, there was actually very little formal symposi-fying, in terms of prepared papers etc. In fact, there were no ‘papers’ as such at all (!), which might be regarded as a mercy… The emphasis instead was on a more leisurely pace of debate, with roundtable-type sessions featuring invited participants: e.g. I was on one where the eight contributors all spoke for 3 or 4 minutes in response to a pre-circulated document (the lone female contributor in this session was the ubiquitous – and always worth listening to – Wallace Heim). Other sessions involving facilitated conversation among all the attendees around, well, round tables…
The idea was to facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogue between researchers and practitioners in both the arts and social sciences, and this was achieved up to a point. Still, personally I would have liked to hear from some of the social scientists who were present in a somewhat more structured, sustained way, in order to feel like I’d learned something from them. The problem with open discussion when you don’t share a clear sense of an agreed knowledge base can be that you end up engaging less in dialogue than in a series of intercut monologues (including my own, no doubt)… There was a slight sense of mutual incomprehension between people coming from very different contexts, as well as moments of unexpected understanding.
The highlights of the event were definitely the presentations by the various invited artists. David Harradine, artistic director of Fevered Sleep (and previously a participant in our performance footprint network event in Scotland back in 2011 – see February 2011 blog posts and the ‘David Harradine’ page under ‘Glascove’ in the ‘Documents’ section of this site), presented and talked about his short film It’s the Skin You’re Living In, which you can view here.
This rather wonderful little film, which playfully “brings home” the rather distanced, cliched climate change imagery of stranded polar bears, prompted much discussion. So too did the outdoor Tumbleweed performances by solo artist Claire Blundell Jones (with whom I collaborated on the original, live version of our Red Route corridor performance in Leeds back in 2008 — see under the “Projects” tab on this site). Claire had been invited to revive her signature Tumbleweed piece, last performed 3 years ago, by symposium co-organiser Simon Whitehead (a wonderful artist in his own right, of course), and she could be seen out and about in Cardiff twice on Friday, blowing her lonely tumbleweed along in a laconic presentation of futile, lonely, urban busy-ness — readable on all sorts of levels.
I was invited by symposium co-organiser Carl Lavery to provide an overnight response to David and Claire’s pieces. The result was the following text piece which I presented first thing on the Saturday morning (it also includes an oblique nod to Stefhan Caddick‘s lecture-demo about some of his site-specific environmental sculptures – I was particularly struck by his water-powered light sculpture inspired by the Sex Pistols’ “No Future” anthem from God Save the Queen). My delivery of the text was greeted very positively by those present (more so than I’d expected, to be honest), so here it is for the record…
It makes more sense, of course, if you’ve viewed David’s film… Or indeed if you’ve ever slept in a hotel like the one we stayed in on the Friday night…
Stark (7.12.13)
3.31am
And as so often in these places I’m lying here sleepless
Listening to the whirring and throbbing of the building’s innards
Artificial air flow
Artificial heat
Hermetically sealed exoskeleton
A shield against atmospheric unpredictability
An exquisitely tuned, insomniac’s torture machine
What was ever wrong with just opening a window?
“Unsustainable lives are disconnected, fragmented lives”
Says the briefing document
Perhaps we’re here in this 5 star hotel as an object lesson in such disconnection
A hotel whose lobby hits you with the humidity of a swimming pool as you step out of the endlessly revolving glass bubble that seals it off from the outside
“Be Environmentally Friendly” says the sticker by the switch by the door of my room
But even turning off the lights turns out to be an ingenuity test that has defeated me
Unless I go around individually turning off the wall lamps
And even then there’s a light inside the wardrobe for which there is no discernible switch anywhere
Shafts of golden warmth spilling out beneath its doors,
Eerily lighting the floor
The only way to extinguish it is to remove the card key from the wall plug
Thus killing all electrics in the room
Preventing my smartphone recharging
Disconnected
Fragmented
3.49 am
And I’m thinking about that stark, white landscape in David’s film
Harsh, unwelcoming whiteness
But also about the warmth of that golden light that, elsewhere in the film,
Spills across the exposed chest of the bear-man-man-bear
Evoking for me the eternal late summer sunshine that seems forever to be lighting the way of William Morris’s protagonist in News from Nowhere
Late Victorian utopian vision of reconnecting man with nature
Nature figured permanently as welcoming, warming, climatically temperate
Gorgeously appealing sentimental tosh
Ruthlessly exposed by that
Stark
White
Wind
Snow
Bear
Bear?
Sitting right there
Posing for the camera, centre stage
How did he get the bear to oblige?
Oh, I see, not bear but man
Man in suit
Thin, soft, white suit
Woefully inadequate protection against the inclement environment
Feeble exoskeleton
Modularised in sections
Held away from the body by foam padding and straps
The words ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ scrawled on opposing arm sections
I’m put in mind
of a kind of satire
on Iron Man
Marvel Super Hero
Golden, modularised, metallic exoskeleton
It’s this skin we’re living in
In our dreams
Safe, invulnerable
Internally regulated
Jet boots
Hand blasters
Man as master
Macho malarkey
Robert Downey Junior
Tony
Stark
Industries
4.04am
Split screen
A mountain, cleft in two by vertical dividing line
Two images,
Two locations
side by side
Arctic
Monkey Business
Stark – white – golden
Split screen Andy Warhol superstar
Super hero
Bear in underwear
Part stripped
Wholly exposed
No Future
No Future
No Future
For You
4.12am
Zero Degree Dance
A phrase I heard the other day for the first time
Zero Degree Dance
Befittingly literal description for this bear-man-man-bear
Though in the book it referred to a trend in art gallery installation
In the illustrating photograph
In Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall
A group of semi-naked dancers are huddled together
Dribbling on the floor
While a man in riot police gear sits on horseback marshalling the crowd
In the picture
Just beyond the dancers
An unexplained pool of liquid covers a large expanse of the shiny grey floor
An unexplained pool of liquid which I can only assume
Is horse piss
The revenge of nature on art.
4.18am
In my mind
The man-bear-bear-man
Is walking across the descending side of a curved pedestrian bridge
Straddling a motorway
Noise
Fumes
Concrete curvature
Beneath the soft, white feet of the laughable bear suit
The bare feet of the dancer
Bare feet on cracked tarmac
Bare feet on gravel
Exquisitely simple, human vulnerability
To this world we built for ourselves
As somewhere else
Somewhen else
A young woman in metallic ear defenders
Battles to propel an invasive tumbleweed
With a petrol driven leaf blower
Across an indifferent urban landscape
Lonely
Futile
Sisyphean task
Vulnerable
Noisy
Polluting
Gratuitous
HSS-rented gas-guzzling hand blaster
Its minor unsustainabilities standing in for all those other major unsustainabilities
That we tolerate, enjoy, condone
Every day
In our various metal exoskeletons
Cars, trains, ear defenders, 5 star hotels
Stark
White
Milk
Alkaline
Out of the fridge
On the turn
Off
4.32 am
Still sleepless