The Complex Christ

China Power Station | The Old World Is Gone

Organised by the Serpentine Gallery, a group of video artists from China have been given space in and around Battersea Power Station to show their work. It's one of the best shows I've been too for a long time, for a number of reasons.

Primarily, the location is iconic. The power station at Battersea stands overlooking the Thames, the vast wasteland around it criss-crossed by railways. One of those buildings that is so large it is difficult to get perspective on it. The chimneys stand higher than the Statue of Liberty. The turbine halls dwarfing those at London's other converted power station, Tate Modern.

Also, it was just before we started Vaux that the four of us who were about to kick it off stumbled on an 'open day' at there about 8 years ago. No one seemed to know about it, so we were given a guided tour of the wrecked site. It is beautiful in its woundedness. The old world has gone: coal, smoke and ash and brick. Industrial massiveness. It lies abandoned, permanently hung with brick-tint melancholy.

This makes it the perfect place for the work on display. China, the raging economy building coal-fired power stations bigger than this every week... It's artists already critiquing the utopia their leaders think they are building, their visions projected among our industrial wreckage.

The exhibition is only on until 5th November, and tickets are limited, so pre-booking is essential. It's really not to be missed - this is the last time the public will be allowed onto the site before contractors move in and turn the whole place into an arts/commercial complex. There's something about that that makes me sad. Which is why I had to go and take some photos. Thankfully there is a beautiful tea-house that's been constructed (see pictures), serving wonderful tea and Chinese treats.

Technorati Tags: Art, Battersea Power Station, China Power Station, London

Cross' Bridge | Health and Safety | Middle Class Obedience

Some photos of Michael Cross' installation at Dilston Grove - a disused shell of a church on the edge of Southwark Park.

The main body of the church has been filled with a tank of water. As you step out over it, steps appear from the water. They are meant to disappear behind you, leaving you standing in the middle, alone, surrounded by water and light. 'It'll work better in the next one I'm building', said the artist. Apparently in an outdoor lake, which will be stunning.

The piece for me ended up being a meditation not on water and light, but on health and safety, and middle class obedience. We all had to sign disclaimers. Walkers were forced to wear life-jackets, and were guided out by the artist. In case they fell into 60cm of water. No one was allowed near the tank when the artist wasn't in the room. And everyone obeyed sensibly.

It wasn't Cross' fault. 'Insurance purposes.' But somehow it took the trickster element away, and thus a good bit of the artistic merit, leaving something more akin to a challenge on a outdoor pursuits camp.

Technorati Tags: Art, Michael Cross, Obedience

Creation>Preservation>Destruction | Genesis in Reverse?

Part of my timetable this year is teaching some RE. It's been a fascinating change. One of the things I've been covering is the Genesis story with a group of 11 year olds.

Reading through the story and analysing the day-by-day creation, one student commented on the environmental obligation that the text suggested. In the following discussion, the deep symbolism of the story really began to strike me: the pattern of the days rolls from separation of water into sea and rain, the appearance of land, the plants, the animals and finally mankind.

And the way this pattern of the days is creeping into reverse.

Possibly hundreds of species becoming extinct each day, rain-forests decimated... and the sea rising again to take the poisoned land back.

I was talking to someone at dinner at a wedding on Saturday - a research biochemist - and he was explaining his support for Richard Dawkins. His view is the planet will survive, and some new form of life will evolve. We are simply hurrying an inevitable new ice-age.

I'd obviously argue that a key point of the birth of consciousness has been missed - a unique intervention that breaks into this cycle and leaves us with a responsibility to take care of this amazing gift we've been bestowed with.

It's a gift we've been completely trashing. The meeting of the World's Top Polluting Countries is a crisis meeting. Real action has to be taken at inter-governmental level. And what is depressing from the initial conversations is that many are saying 'sorry, our economies have to come first.' We can't afford to save the planet. Money has finally won. Seems Dawkins' 'Selfish Gene' was about right after all.

Technorati Tags: Civilization, Environment, Sustainable Growth, Technology

Three-view Tele | Now That's Community

No doubt about it, Sharp are clever people. They've developed an LCD screen that shows 3 different images, depending on your viewpoint.

As Far East Gizmos put it, "these displays have allowed Sharp to once again create new demand and contribute to the creation of new lifestyles."

Call me a grouch, but is part of that great new lifestyle everyone in the family being able to watch the same screen, but something different? Ahh... those great family evenings! McDonalds for one, KFC for another and curry for the kids. And let's all sit down together and watch something different! Now that's community ;-)

[But wouldn't we just LOVE one for alt.worship. Trinity meditation here we come...]

Technorati Tags: Technology

Double Bind | Should Environmentalists Buy up Gas-Guzzlers?

Our car, a truly horrible beast, has been making strange noises from the engine for about a year. In January our mechanic deemed it a fatal problem: it wasn't worth the cost of fixing, and it might run for 2/20/200/2000 miles.

It did about the 2000. Which got us over the Severn Bridge into Wales late on Friday night before we ground to a halt. It was clearly terminal.
So we get put on the back of a lorry and taken back home, a nice weekend away abandoned.

The question is, what to do now. Someone has given us a car they had just replaced. But the fuel economy is not good. So do we refuse it? Do we let them sell it and buy something more economic ourselves or do without a car at all? We actually drive much less than most - neither of us commute to work, and we deliberately use the trains whenever we can. So refusing this thing and buying something more efficient might end up with us using an efficient car a little, and someone else taking the gas-guzzler and using it much more than we would.

Much of the carbon foot-print of vehicles is obviously their production - the energy to actually manufacture it. So by not buying a new car you are avoiding that energy use.

I think the best thing we could do is take the car and never use it. Reduce our car travel to zero. That's never quite going to happen, but we'll do our best. We could convert to LPG, but there's an issue with capital there. Capital we need to save to replace the boiler in the house with a high-efficiency condensing system. All donations accepted ;-)

Any better ideas?

Technorati Tags: Environment, Technology

The FlowMarket™

Thanks to Saga for this [link]

All products available from The Flowmarket™

Technorati Tags: Art, Consumption, Design, Flow Market

Shortcuts | Dirt | Journeys

I watched a student at school take a shortcut today. And then watched as they were followed by countless others, taking a few quick steps on a worn brambly path, while a few others took the concrete slab route round and about.

I'm guessing that eventually the school will give in to the inevitable, and formalize this route with proper paving. But for now it remains a dirty path.

The evolution of such short cuts tells us something about cities, about dirt, about our innate journeying. While the planners can spend millions trying to formalize the routes they want us to take, if they don't suit us, we will find shortcuts. Cut throughs, through hedges, or over small walls. Rather than being planned, these paths emerge, and tend to show us the way people really want to go. But, being informal, and unpaved, they tend to be dirty. Brambles might scratch, or mud get on the shoes. But we'd rather that than have to follow the official line. Sometimes the destination is the thing, and the journey adapts.

Perhaps this emerging movement is one example of an ecclesiastic shortcut. The official line, the routes we were meant to take, were dreary, and took us around the houses. So a new path emerged. Muddy. Messy. Unkempt. Useful.

I guess someone will come along and pave it one day. And we'll keep our shoes clean then. Our feet won't have to touch the earth.

Technorati Tags: Emergence, Environment, London, Religion, Urban Planning

Chill Out | Air [Con]

The stats are simply astounding.

The US has approximately 5% of the world's population. And uses 25% of the world's electricity. And fully one third of that goes on air conditioning.

That's 8% of the world's electricity on keeping you guys cool.

7 billion gallons of petrol a year are used in US car air-con systems - equivalent to the total oil consumption of Indonesia, population 240 million.

What's more, the Chinese haven't even got started. Every ten days another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China big enough to serve all the households in Dallas. The Chinese already use more coal than the US, the EU and Japan combined. And they are getting the air-con bug: the market has grown by 70% each year.

The cultural effects have already taken their toll. Air con has made the Central/Southern American siesta redundant. The rise of the internet means warehouses of servers that need to be kept at low ambient temperatures - this alone was cited as a major reason for the rolling blackouts in California this summer. And the major problem is that air con is a con: it creates a positive feedback loop whereby the heat ejected raises the temperature for everyone else, and so more and more people end up getting them, which raises the temperature even more.

So what do we do? Turn it down. Chill out. Slow down. Take a bath. Have a siesta. Before we all fry.

//Check out the full article in Prospect [here]//

Technorati Tags: Environment, air conditioning

Morning Rush | Art Therapy | Dirt Boundaries

On a school trip to the (excellent, and oft neglected) Museum of London a couple of months back I was struck in the foyer by an exhibition which included this work 'Morning Rush'. Having a while to look through their shop after the tour - a compulsory part of any trip with kids, I can tell you - I noticed (hot tip for interesting gifts) that the museum allows you to browse and order prints from their huge archive of London photography/print.

Not being able to find this particular work, I emailed the museum about the possibility of buying it and was put in touch with one of their external programmes staff. She told me it had been produced by one of the prisoners involved in their art programmes. I won't mention his name here, but it became clear through the negotiations about buying the piece that he was inside for some pretty terrible crimes. And that he was being moved to a high security, long term gaol with no art facilities what-so-ever. It ended up that we made a cheque out to the Governor of this place, and the purchase may go some way to resourcing the beginnings of an art department.

I don't want this to sound like some do-gooder story. And you may hate the piece anyway. But it is background to some difficult questions I was left with to do with beauty. Can hands that have done such violence create rich beauty? If we can agree they can in a physical, material sense, then we have to allow them to have 'beautiful minds' tucked away somewhere. Minds that were troubled into evil acts. Minds that can be renewed. Minds like ours.

So this piece now stands at the bottom of our stairs by the front door. And reminds me each time I step out of the house to try not to stand in judgement on this beautiful/ugly city that is just over the doorstep. But to try to encourage the beauty in each thing. Somehow.

It's not easy.

Technorati Tags: Art, London

Off to Soliton | Nomadic Faith | Spiritual Cartography | Vx 'Suicide'

Off tomorrow to Ventura, CA, for the Solition Sessions. Big thanks to the generous guys there for offering to fly me over. What with being off there and other recent trips, it's felt like a bit of a busy, travelling summer. But it was great to catch up properly with Nic the other night.

One of the things we got talking about was Ben Edson's post about rites of passage and the 'Vaux Suicide'. He had rightly picked up on research linking high levels of adolescent male suicide with the lack of rites of passage. Denied any well-trodden paths into adulthood, they struggled to find their own way. Ben had then suggested that this might have some bearing on the lack of longevity in alt.worship groups, and that the Vaux suicide was a good case in point.

It's a great thought, and may well hold some truth, but Nic and I both agreed that a better understanding would actually be to see our ending of Vaux as precisely such a rite of passage: to hold on to that manifestation would be to remain adolescent. This reminded me of the video I'd created for the very end of the last service before our ending meal - a piece that I suppose stands as a suicide note. Part of the text:

Technorati Tags: Art, Bede, Cartography, Merton, Mofokeng, Race, Soliton, suicide