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In What Ways Can Speculative Engagement With The More Than Human World Contradict Human Exceptionalism?

Creating New Narratives Around the Position of Human Beings as Participants of Life During an Age of Mass Extinction.

The following writing was my dissertation submitted for the BA(Hons) Contemporary Art Practice Course at Gray’s School of Art. Please excuse the garbage title. It was fun to write this, but if I was to be self critical, I’m not too sure I really conclude the essay. Anyway, I’m pretty stoked on some of what I had to say, but some of it seems embarrassing already. It’s a long read and pretty tangental. I hope you make it through and find something interesting.

The following dissertation is dedicated with love to my Father.

“A cool wind blows in the city of beans.” - Fergus Connor, Gray’s School of Art Photography Studio Technician.

Introduction

It feels dumb to be hammering at a keyboard after writing the phrase age of mass extinction. I look out of my window and I can see my big, loud neighbour – the industrial structures of the international Port of Aberdeen – invade the personal space of my bigger but quieter neighbours the River Dee and the wild North Sea as a mild early season storm pushes through. The storm is an occasional visitor from whom we all recoil because it has a habit of getting so close that we can feel its breath. Herring Gulls and Common Seals defiantly travel into the bounds of the port, inaccessible to me by force of human law, but no one seems to mind them. There is a world full of life out there that is apparently becoming less and less alive with every passing moment but I am in here, in my little rented abode, that I cannot afford.

Shifting my gaze from window to screen, I question the value of what I am writing in spite of my strange enjoyment of the aggravatingly cortisol spiking activity. I am attempting to convince you that the conclusions I have arrived at after reading a dozen or so books are interesting enough to receive an abstract but quantitative mark of endorsement which may lead to a set of circumstances where I can buy, rather than borrow, a dwelling that I still cannot afford. A promise of more, when I know I want less.

The following words will explore the ways that self-contained attention and being inside (by multiple definitions) can corrupt the potential of our species to participate in living intentionally at the scale of life. The act of speculation will be considered as a mode of attention for accessing the outside, other or more than human world by exploring the activity of birding in relation to the art of Tom Sewell. Speculation will then be augmented by harmony in a discussion of Surfing as a more than human sport demonstrated by it’s connection to Birding as an activity of speculative attention. Surfing experiences will then provide demonstrations of Speculative Realist philosophy and Object Oriented Ontology guided by Steven Shaviro, Eugene Thacker and Timothy Morton in showing how participation with life contradicts human exceptionalism.

The chapter It’s Not The End Of The World will confront my personal difficulty with finding space to write about contemporary art throughout this work. This chapter will assess the place of art in my own life and its role in the wider context of the art world. Interior and exterior modes of thinking and living are questioned in the context of art as life by exploring the work of Marie Angeletti and the philosophical meaning of Roland Barthe’s concept of Studium and Punctum. An argument will be made for art as life as a state of self-contained attention that denies living through its interiority.

The final chapter will go outside by looking at the value of the world outside of art to art itself and how this is echoed by the value of experience and time spent out of doors. This will include a discussion of Emily Strachan’s navigation of employment with a fine art skillset resulting in finding more authenticity for the application of this skillset in the world of gardening rather than the world of art. This will be an examination of how limited funding and a devaluing narrative about the arts is causing artists to retrain and considers the benefits of this skill diversity.

There’s More Than One Way To Clean Your Asshole

I miss Covid-19. Lockdown was the best time of my life. I mean it - no hyperbole. Partying is overrated and busy places overwhelm me. I was a lucky dude. My furlough pay from my employer - warehouse paying minimum wage - was based on my average hours of the previous three months and I had worked 4 – 5 days a week instead of my usual 3-day week for most of that time. My pay to not go to work was more than my usual income, I was just about to become a student again, I was living with my the love of my life and we had almost zero financial obligations.

Does anyone from the UK even remember when the only time outdoors or exercise permitted was one run, walk or cycle a day for one-hour maximum, within five kilometres of where you lived? I do.

My partner, Emily Strachan, and I walked forever, 100% breaking that one-hour time limit rule. We walked slowly, inspired by Hamish Fulton’s Group Walk at Curzon Park, for hours around the ghost town Aberdeen had become. For some reason, a large portion of the population of our city had evacuated and we had both rural and urban areas within our 5km. I recognise our privilege and I know people were suffering. For us though, the pandemic was authentically wonderful.

Fig 1.

Before lockdown, while people were running around in a media-induced panic, buying towers of toilet paper and pasta, we were very scared. It was intimidating to see people flock from out of town to so willingly ransack our local supermarket because theirs were already empty. Their ravenousness eventually inspired our calm. We soon realised that we still had a shower, and that no one was buying the fresh fruit and vegetables. At the risk of sounding crude, we decided that, if it came to it, we did not need toilet paper for survival because there is more than one way to clean your asshole. Water being one of a few glaringly obvious methods, which in Scotland is almost free. Our eating became rich with a variety of nutrition and flavour as we were forced to explore the world of vegetables in more depth than we ever had before. This exposed a gap between the ways that people seem to think things should be, versus the potential for living in radically new ways within the same system.

We were questioning what normal is, in an era of narratives hallmarked by: debating the significance of upsettingly high death tolls, the greed of hoarding household provisions and the scary argument that emerged about how vulnerable people should just accept that Covid-19 may kill them rather than continue to cause inconvenience for everyone else as society grew bored of lockdown rules. The choice was between quote-unquote the new normal; a version of normal that favoured selfishness and a lack of accountability for decisions made allowing people to live in denial of how their extremely limited view of life has resulted in a fundamental change in life itself. Or; if it was not the new normal then there was desperate need to get back to normal as if normal was anything close to satisfying. What has getting back to normal got us? War in Europe for the first time this century, more of all that fun climate stuff (fires, floods, storms, extreme temperature variation etc…), global nuclear war is kind of back on the table (yay!) and at home in Britain all that ever so tasty sewerage flows into the waterways and austerity has done so much damage that strikes are once again commonplace. But, you know, actually we had a cold snap in winter, so things will probably be ok maybe actually.

Fig 2.

Emily and I realised that things could be done differently. Between us, a continuing dialogue has developed around ideas of separating ourselves from the mainstream yet narrow view of life being something oriented by the mediating actions of economy (Latour 2020) where the organisation of the world is limited to human perception as being the highest degree of reality (Shaviro 2016). We seek to free our attention from the limits of containment.

Birds Have Better Lives than Humans

Animals have always fascinated me. Birds in particular excite me in an unusually sincere way. During the planning of this piece of writing, it was unthinkable to me that I would include any evidence of my enthusiasm for birding. In a discussion with my tutor about my research for this dissertation Chris Fremantle said something about birds having better lives than humans. This comment resonated with much of my thinking and revealed to me that my interest in birds was a way to make my own research more accessible to myself.

In late 2019 Emily bought me The Hamlyn Guide To Birds of Britain and Europe. Birding was a mostly secret part of my life that I rarely indulged because my other 20-something year old peers were not that interested, often dismissing it mockingly.

Receiving that book, I realised my partner enjoys and actively participates in the same niche cross-section of interests and lifestyle choices as I do. Together: birding, surfing, watching cartoons, eating plant-based, ignoring texts and walking aimlessly, we lead a life that for the most part is dedicated to the immediacy of our tangible surroundings, enchanted by our “ongoing attention to a world that is also attending to us.” (Ingold 2018 pVI)

Today, I am a straight up birder. I love birding so much because it is boring yet substantially engaging. The feeling of gratification after seeing a bird is similar but more comprehensively fulfilling than time spent using online media. The existential dread of online encounters is pushed aside by an encounter with a bird because the bird encounter pulls my attention into the living world rather than out of it whereby instead of being a spectator of life, I become an active participant (Haladyn 2015). Of course, by my use of the word life here I do not necessarily mean exclusively an individual’s own lived experience but a more expansive idea of life as a whole collective system of processes and entities on Earth (Latour 2020).

Fig 3.

Slough - Tom Sewell; Mixed media sculpture.

Spider crab shell, plastic, willow, paracord, glow stick, shark’s tooth, ammonite, claws, bone, rubber, shells, mushrooms, iron, mermaid’s purse, flint.

Tom Sewell is a British artist who makes work concerned with active participation of life in recognition of the more-than-human world. Pictured; is a sculpture by Sewell titled Slough. This sculpture is constructed out of materials found during immersive walks in unfamiliar landscapes. The process is about giving attention to the living world and participating in being with it. Slough creates a single structure by unifying human-made objects with living and non-living natural entities. It is through this unification that Slough offers the viewer access into experiences of immersion in the landscape of the tangible realm of the outdoors. Sewell invites speculation around the conflict between the internal human-only world and the external more-than–human world. It is through this act of speculation that the viewer of Slough is able to consider life as something beyond individual experience and question the connectivity between humans and nonhumans (Birt, Shin and Clara 2020).‌

I believe the origin of many a birder’s love for the activity lies with a similar type of speculation. Much like the walks of Tom Sewell, the act of birding is an intentional attempt to participate - without interfering - in a world that is other than human. In discussing the importance of speculation in relation to realism, Steven Shaviro references what Eugene Thacker “calls the world-without-us” (Shaviro 2016 p67). A human cannot possibly know what it is like to be a bird from a bird’s perspective (Nagel 2016) but nonetheless the ways in which birds live entice the observation and attention of birders to create a phenomenon that resembles a non-dominative approach to interspecies connectivity.

The human birder has a devotional practice of speculative attention, offering time and thought to birdlife by observing, appreciating and attending to a world (Ingold 2018) that is indifferent to these actions (Tamás 2020). The act of speculation here is directing attention into the external “world-without-us” (Thacker 2011 p6) and in doing so; birders are being outside in both that they leave the internal environment of the human-constructed indoors to be outdoors and that they leave the limited, internal human perspective to actively seek and consider other experiences that are different and external to the human-centric “world-for-us” (Thacker 2011 p6). It is by being outside, out-of-doors and exterior to the human only world that birders become realists because of their recognition of a world without them that is only accessible to them through their speculative practice of attention.

Surfing; A More Than Human Sport

In May 2022, an online Stab Magazine article titled “Surfing’s Dark Secret: Birding” was published. This was another moment where two activities I participate in, surfing and birding, harmonised. In the piece, Paul Evans explains that other activities often paired with surfing such as: golf, MMA fighting and fishing are mismatched. The argument is that surfing is an activity where one engages actively but - and this distinction is important – harmoniously with multiple elemental and cosmic processes. Birding is a harmonious engagement with these processes but the other activities are not. These activities are all dominant, oppressive and contradict what surfing actually is through their violence. Indeed, as Evans points out, golf courses are chemical soaked monocultures that dominate landscapes through their denial of space for other human and nonhuman uses of the land. In Britain for example, there is “more land devoted to golf courses than to housing” (Evans 2022). The violence in MMA fighting is juxtaposed with “surfing ohana” (Evans 2022). Ohana is a Hawaiian word that means family; it is a word for addressing those with whom one has compassion. Surfing originated in Hawaii, where the most important surfing events are held today. Hawaiian cultural customs, including ohana, are still valued highly and respected throughout surfing’s now global following, to such an extent that even the best surfer, hoping to succeed in Hawaii, will not get very far without observing ohana. Both MMA fighting and fishing (when not for survival) are not practices of compassion. Finally, Paul Evans points out the absurdity of fishing for sport as a mode of appreciating nature:

“Fishing is a great one for nature lovers, marine wildlife enthusiasts or folk who just adore the great outdoors. You sense a wild creature swimming around free in the sea, perhaps even for decades, and instinctively think: “I’d love to hook you through the face, stove your fucking skull in with a mallet whilst you suffocate, then share pictures of your corpse.”” (Evans 2022).

Surfing, like birding, is a devotional practice that demands participation in the more than human world. It takes a long time to gain skill in the sport and the more experience a surfer gains, the more auxiliary skills are practiced in developing an understanding of the elemental and cosmic processes that feed and shape the surfing experience. Truly skilled surfers seek not to overpower the ocean, knowing that this is impossible; they try instead to flow with it. Surfing is a cosmic action because of the fugitive endeavour of the participants’ seeking of flow with a singular and fleeting pulse of energy. No ocean wave happens the same twice and for this reason surfing is also elemental. The multitude of ecological and environmental factors that create surfing situations ranging from local bathymetry, to global weather systems and further to the impact of the moon phases upon tidal action must be observed, understood and depended upon. This necessarily demands an awareness of interconnectedness and interdependence in an appreciation of uncertainty. It is this premise that causes me to find connections between surfing and speculative aesthetics. I believe surfing to be a practical demonstration of the claim that the philosophical concept of finitude is about more than simply the limits of knowledge. Exemplified by the following quote from The Universe of Things On Speculative Realism by Steven Shaviro:

“Finitude, therefore, means not only that there are limits to our knowledge of the moon but also – and much more importantly – that there are limits to our independence from the moon.” (Shaviro 2016 p137).

This exact example that Steven Shaviro has chosen to use, the unseen – but definitely there – effects of the moon upon which humans depend, happens to be something that is already widely recognised by surfers. The activity of surfing compels surfers not only to consider their knowledge of the moon but also their dependence upon the actions of the moon in itself, which are autonomously separate to any human knowledge of the moon.

Ok, I am sorry. You, presumably an artist, the reader of this essay, have just read several paragraphs by me, some sporty jock and somehow also an artist, about why my sport is better than other sports. Hopefully I have not lost you yet because here is where things get exciting.

When we (artists) think of sports, we tend to think of the objectivity and rigidity within them. The lack of space for the intrinsically weird (Morton 2021) in sports is probably what makes the relationship between artists and the world of sport an uncomfortable one. Surfing however is uncomfortable with the idea of itself as a sport. All that stuff about Hawaii and Ohana and golf being “a bit Trumpy” (Evan 2022) is more important than the ramblings of just some dude that likes to surf.

Surfing originating in Hawaii and being developed by Native Hawaiians means that this particular sport grew out of something completely isolated from the sports that developed out of western or European agricultural and theistic practices. This is because western colonial contact was first made with Hawaii in 1778, which happens to be after the invention of golf for instance. Obviously, surfing has been colonised, westernised and objectified; so extensively in fact that 2020 saw it becoming an Olympic sport. Yet somehow, surfing has not been completely assimilated into western anthropocentric ideals, it still sits somewhere in the margins, shrouded in something more mysterious than sport.

Surfing seeks flow with a more than human entity through nurturing awareness of unintended consequences between the interaction of wind transferring kinetic energy into bodies of water and that same energy interacting with specifically contoured areas of near-shore sea floor shaped favourably but completely coincidentally by deep-time and geological force. This would make surfing an act of ecological awareness in accordance with Object Oriented Ontology because as Timothy Morton (2021 p16) writes; “Ecological awareness is awareness of unintended consequences”. Furthermore, the seeking of harmony with the cosmic and elemental energy of ocean waves, through surfing, is not an exclusively human desire and act. Many animals have been observed surfing. I personally have seen Dolphins surfing the same stretch of beach as me and many surf films and nature documentaries depict not only Dolphins but also Seals and Penguins engaged in the act of surfing for no apparent reason other than fun. Birds of course, are Earth’s most graceful surfers. They ride the air currents produced by an ocean wave meeting the shore and they engage in much the same ballet-esque performance of stylish manoeuvres upon the wave face as humans aim to do (Evans 2022). Surfing may be the only human sport that nonhuman beings participate in through their own autonomous choice to do so, outside the coercion or force of humans. Although humans do unfortunately, force some animals to surf, such as pet dogs.

It is my position that surfing, emerging from something outside of western anthropocentrism as a harmony with elemental and cosmic processes, is a way to relate to nonhuman beings because it comes from and alludes to an alternative to anthropocentric ideals through both its origins and its unintended consequence of purposeless collaboration with something that is more than and other than human. Or, as Timothy Morton (2021 p37) puts it when referring to art, “a glimpse of living less definitively, in a world comprised almost entirely not of ourselves.” It is this window into the “world-without-us” (Thacker 2011 p6) that surfing shares with birding and with art.

It’s Not The End Of The World

I start to question myself when I feel this uncomfortable about mentioning contemporary art despite being a few thousand words deep into an essay about contemporary art. There is a tension in the relationship between art and sports as in philosophy there is tension between the subjective and objective. Certainly, it is exceptional to be a sponsored athlete and an exhibiting artist.

Art has been central for me since birth as a completion of the whole. It has been ingrained in me that art is paramount to a holistic and healthy navigation of my thoughts, emotions and experiences in pursuit of understanding and peace. And yes, I can confirm that it is indeed traumatic knowing this and growing up in a society that almost entirely rejects this. Art has become something that does not need justification for me. It is a completely essential part of my life, but like essential things in life (such as staying hydrated) it exists in a place that also renders art somewhat banal. I think that this primacy of relating everything through art has contradictorily made art hold a secondary place on account of its obviousness. Art is already. It is necessary but it is not valuable, but it does have worth. Art has something Timothy Morton (2021 p54) calls “alreadiness”. This alreadiness is something we are conditioned to deny in the same way that much of life in global-westernised society conditions humans to exist in denial (Zerzan 2012) of Life with a capital L(Watts and Latour 2020).

“Alreadiness hints at our tuning to something else, which is a dance in which that something else is also, already, tuning to us.” (Morton 2021 p54-55).

What Timothy Morton means is that there are certain experiences in life that upset the grossly-utilitarian, survival before living, paradigm that humans have organised themselves into because these experiences do “something to you” (Morton 2021 p67) and I agree with Morton that art is one of these things. The encouraging and optimistic tone that Timothy Morton uses in their subjunctive writing in All Art Is Ecological is something I value deeply about the book however, due to this, it frames art as some kind of insurmountable and singularly special thing. This is where I have points of my own to add to Morton’s.

In his book – with a contrasting and perhaps unnecessarily extreme tone of pessimism – Future Primitive Revisited, John Zerzan (2012) explains that an art practice emerges out of a lack of earnest connection with the more than human, natural world. For Zerzan, art becomes a placeholder for a sincerely fulfilling life as it expresses the need for an absent interconnectedness and a will to disengage with mainstream narratives of what it means to be alive. Indeed, anecdotally I find this to repeat itself as at least partially true in my own experience.

Personally, I find that the established norm for us artists practicing art, particularly in the academic setting, has very little room for embodied lived experience despite any celebration or encouragement of it. Simply put, art practice demands immobility to some extent and time spent in lifeless indoor, interior environments. I must be sitting down to read, sitting to write this essay or – in the future – writing funding applications of similar density. We are always sitting. Sitting in the crit, sitting through a lecture, sitting for a seminar and sitting to invigilate a gallery. Sitting vacantly, looking interiorly. Staring at a computer screen, the white cube gallery empty of character. Staring at artefacts decontextualized by their museum setting (Haladyn 2015) searching everywhere for the absent, highly coveted contexts to serve our own academic needs. We love our little void, the white washed artist studio, with no windows and the air strong with toxic chemicals accented by the dense energy of passionate thought. Of course, we claim that art has a transformative power over these places and actions that can enchant them and I am inclined to agree but all this sitting still and being indoors is excruciating. As my favourite surf coach Cris Mills (2022) will tell you; sitting destroys mobility and posture. Too much dysfunction in those bodily systems will significantly impair the capacity of a person, named Jess Connor, to do something like surfing.

There is an undeniable vacuous toxicity, literally and figuratively, present in the space that art operates in. All this time spent in empty rooms, filling them up with manifestations of traumatic experience may well lead an artist to believe that it is the end of the world, as some of my peers do. Artists, surrounded by artists in arts environments constantly reflecting back to each other that the interior art world is life, questioning the authenticity of life lived outside the production of art. For me there is no boundary to this circle because I can walk into the photography studio at school at almost any time and talk to my father (who is also staff at Gray’s School of Art) about the exact same things I talk to my tutors about except this room has no natural light, must be mechanically ventilated and the relationship is simultaneously nuclear family and student/teacher. How much further inside the interior can it get than that?

This containment brings to mind the Studium and Punctum of Roland Barthes (1988). David Barker (2014) explains that Studium and Punctum are useful in determining if photographs are worth occupying the viewer’s attention. I find that the Studium and Punctum concept transfers well to assess attention in itself. Studium is “a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment” (Barthes 1988 p26) much like the previously stated interiority of art as a mode of living. It is a humdrum and necessary kind of attention. Art as life is a Studium because it exists within the familiar. Punctum is the disruption of the familiar. Art output can be a Punctum by the enchanting and imaginative productions of its attention. Art as life however, posits art as the exclusive input for art production whereby art operates in substitute for the other inputs of being alive. Exclusivity of input produces self-contained attention or a Studium. David Barker (2014) interprets Studium to mean kitsch, defining kitsch as “the categorical denial of shit.” (Barker 2014). Barker refers to the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera to further develop his definition of kitsch; “Kitsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death.” (Kundera 2004 p196). This definition of Kitsch is then used to define Punctum as “the element of a photograph that forces us to acknowledge the existence of shit, or (since shit is probably used as a metaphor) the inevitability of death.” (Barker 2014).

It is through Barker’s definition of Punctum as the acknowledgement of death that we can deduce kitsch to mean the denial of death through his explanation that kitsch is the denial of shit and that shit is a metaphor for death. If art as life is an interior reflection of itself operating in substitute of other inputs to produce self-contained attention, it is a denial of the exterior. Life is happening elsewhere (Hannula, Suoranta and Vadén 2005) in an outside realm that is unknowable from the inside. An entity operating exclusively in interior to itself can only produce reflections of itself whereby its self-contained attention only serves to deny life through denial of the exterior. Art as life, or art as a Studium becomes a refusal of life because of its interiority to itself. Art as life cannot die because it is not alive and in this way it raises Kundera’s “folding screen” by seeking to be a way of being that escapes death. It is by this reasoning that I find the concept of art as life to be kitsch. It seems as though that for most artists, art as life is something to be leaned into and celebrated as some sort of quantitative indicator of commitment. For me however, art as life is something I seek to escape because of the echo chamber that causes me uneasiness through its interiority to itself.

Studio days and art events feel much the same as doom scrolling. It has something to do with being stuck indoors, it also has something to do with my ADHD but I think it has a lot to do with it being the net effect of scrollers discussing their scrolling. Not that this is unique to artists because everybody scrolls but the agonistic and speculative interrogation of information exists in few domains outside art. The denial of the outside through embracing the closed-circle of niche interest and algorithmic reification creates a separation between human and world. The human becomes less than human and the world becomes unworldly.

“Doom is humanity given over to unhumanity” (Thacker 2015 p20)

It’s not the end of the world. All this reflection inwards removes the human from the position of a participant of life. The process of interiorisation serves to decontextualize and the human becomes a spectator of life (Haladyn 2015).

An online review written by Sean Tatol for The Manhattan Art Review compares two exhibitions, The Painter’s New Tools at Nahmad Contemporary and Manhattan by Claude Balls Int. that happened over the summer of 2022.

The Painter’s New Tools showed painting, from a list of artists too long to mention, who did not use exclusively paint but used instead some variation of digital assistance to create paintings. The press release for the show makes bold claims that Sean Tatol argues the show does not meet at all. Claims such as:

“Now is the moment for art that expresses how it feels to be alive now” (Cayre and Kissick 2022)

“We want to show painting that is vital and of the moment.” (Cayre and Kissick 2022)

There are clues in the hyperbolic syntax and the repetitious assertion of newness. Tatol (2022) explains that the show achieved the opposite of the quoted aims precisely because of its use of digital media framed as something new. His key points being that while the technology that the digital field offers is recent, collaboration with it in contemporary art is already dated by a decade. Digital images are so prevalent in life at this moment but the work in the show fails to do anything to sincerely address this and serves instead only to offer reflections or extensions of the alienation of our digital lives in 2022. The show erroneously commits to a gratuitous faith in the idea of technological progress being equal to progress for the lived experiences of human and nonhuman life on Earth in a way that completely denies how unsatisfactory things actually are (Tatol 2022).

“To be sure, you couldn't physically make most of the work without modern technology, so it is literally contemporary, but that doesn't guarantee a new expression of life in 2022.” (Tatol 2022)

“Moreover, this belief in the present is now dated, ironically, because such an attitude has been untenable for nearly a decade and just comes off ridiculous in the face of our manifest reality. Positing the newness of new tools is little more than burying one's head in the sand, a naive willingness to believe in exactly what will never save anyone.” (Tatol 2022)

What Sean Tatol writes of Manhattan is much more encouraging. The ephemeral art works made using old tools were installed at night and shown in a courtyard where Marie Angeletti, one of the exhibiting artists, lived. Sean Tatol praises the work in Manhattan as definitively contemporary, not because of new tools but the new ideas the show has to offer. Much of the show was comprised of found materials and Marie Angeletti’s piece was a pile of broken glass and asphalt displayed under a spotlight that exhibition visitors were allowed to walk on and touch.

Fig 4.

The work put together by Marie Angeletti here shows a willingness to disengage with the production of spectacular but safe artworks that serve to please the conservative tastes of the financial elite (Tatol 2022). She chooses instead to engage with the tangible and immediate surroundings of Manhattan to create work that participates in life through her actions in collecting the materials for the piece. The work then maintains its tangibility through its tactility and lack of collaboration with any new or novel technology. The piece indicates a series of real world interactions between Angeletti and the people and structures of the surrounding Manhattan area in realising the work that the viewer can access through speculation upon the work’s scale and ephemerality (Tatol 2022).

“The realm of virtual fantasies has proved itself to be a hollow simulacrum, and tangible reality has therefore turned back into a new space.” (Tatol 2022).

I find the discordance revealed by Sean Tatol in the comparison of these two exhibitions to be compelling evidence of how art can be used to either look beyond by going outside of what is known or to remain inside of itself and familiar. The Painter’s New Tools straddles the familiar and the interior. It celebrates the interiority of digital media as an exclusivity of input for human thinking and progress by an output that duplicates the already known, human only realm of the digital. The work (output) is stuck in repetition of its input, forcing all momentum of thought into the inside where it can only move further inward. The work assumes the position of art as life through the presentation of its human exceptionalism and therefore becomes kitsch in its denial of life. The Painter’s New Tools is thereby Studium and doom by means of its unhumanity.

The artworks in Manhattan go beyond the interiority of the human and digital to go outside with the world by seeking inputs that are external to art from a life that includes within its scope much more than human survival. Its lack of aesthetic prettiness allows it to operate outside of commercialism (Tatol 2022) by bringing forward “how empty everything we're given to fill our emptiness is.”(Tatol 2022). The work of Marie Angeletti in Manhattan is an example of uncontained attention because it broadens the scope of input by its generation occurring outside, out of doors and in recognition of the external. This break in the eternal interiorisation of art and life becomes an allowance of being alive by producing external outputs through a diversity of input.

Get Out

The world is still there. Out there. I find it too easy to forget. It is also easy to be convinced by others that one should not be out there. When humans cannot go outside of themselves, outside of what is known and into the indifferent space that is other than human and out of doors, it places a restriction upon the scope and sufficiency of thought which becomes sour and decrepit (Tamás 2020).

Emily Strachan (aforementioned bird-book-gifter) is someone who had to get out. A graduate of Contemporary Art Practice at Gray’s School of Art, Emily is a relentless creative maker and a lover of tactility. The way that post-graduate life is set up in regards to art-job-seeking however, is discouraging because the long applications for short-term work are tedious and often the work is much less than what the artist aspires to. For example, as a result of organisations such as Arts Council England increasingly demanding, as a pre-requisite to funding, a perceived benefit to the public (Jones 2020) many paid roles for graduates or emerging artists are often more aligned with teaching, social or care-work. In her research paper The Chance To Dream: Why Fund Individual Artists? Susan Jones (2020) uncovers that there has been a steady trend, since 2003, of declining investment in “no-strings” (Jones 2020 p3) attached funding for artists. The imposing of limitations upon the working methods of artists through funding limits the potential for the production of challenging and rigorous fine art by targeting and undermining the value of the artists work both in itself and within society (Jones 2020). This forces adaptability and enthusiasm that introverted artists, such as Emily and I, often tend not to have. My ability to produce art and my enthusiasm for making has very little or no cross over to helping an after school club make decorations for a Christmas parade. This is something I have been paid to do by an arts organisation in Aberdeen.

So for Emily, freshly graduated and met with the joy of a pandemic, the scope of things looked bleak. Weeks or even months of work go into applications for jobs that only last equally as long. Enthusiasm is expected for the work as if it is the dream of life to be indoors postulating on world improvement with other artists or being a child-minder with a capital ART somewhere in the job title or description. The art world insists an artist is soooooooo lucky to be graced with any such paid opportunity despite that if one were to remove the word “art” from the description, the job would suddenly start to look a lot like something else and much less glamorous. My point being, an art job needs to involve art and not be glamourized by (limited) association to art. Art, discordantly with its own values, follows the rules of commercialism by subscribing to glamour and in doing so objectifies itself (Tatol 2022). It is as if the art world does not believe that art is necessary. Art is in survival mode. Perhaps that is understandable, if the rest of the world is also in survival mode in an era of mass extinction (Morton 2021). Maybe the world in itself does not need to be improved and maybe artists are not saviours? As I have said, the world actually still is out there and out there feels pretty good. Perhaps it is the role of the artist to be out there to show us that there is a world of life to become immersed in (Ingold 2018).

In the end, the art world’s interiority was too disappointing for Emily and she began to look outside for work. In 2021 Emily became a National Trust for Scotland Apprentice Gardner. One of the key determining factors for Emily getting the role, which was one of only two positions available in the region, was her First Class Honours Degree in Contemporary Art Practice because of the skillset it represents. The success of Emily’s interview guaranteed her paid work, all week, every week for the next 2 years. This exposes something tragic about art. The horticulture industry values Emily’s arts-based skillset enough to pay her for her time in an entry-level position with a job title and training included. The same skillset and qualification is so under-valued by arts organisations that it is often not worth a penny or a job title as volunteer positions at the entry-level prevail in the arts industry.

Perhaps it would be to shoot myself in the foot not to consider that the National Trust for Scotland is likely the recipient of a larger wealth of funding than any arts organisation I should choose to criticise. Should organisations receive more funding, it might result in more paid opportunities for graduates. Indeed, funding for the arts has been systematically slashed (Jones 2020) and the fine work of the UK’s Conservative government sees public opinion swayed by a drip feed of rhetoric that consistently undermines the value of art by positing it as a career not even worth pursuing. Rishi Sunak, Britain’s third Conservative Prime Minister of 2022, suggested in 2020 that artists and musicians should retrain (Burgess 2020) amid a backlash against a poster backed by the government depicting a ballet dancer named Fatima with text saying she should retrain in ‘Cyber’ (Bakare 2020). As Tim Burgess (2020) wrote for the Guardian, a career in the arts is treated by the government as a “luxurious, decadent hobby” despite the arts sector generating billions in revenue (Burgess 2020) for the UK economy.

Fig. 5

In any case, the devaluation of art by the British government, reflected by the state of funding, seems to be working. Emily is retraining in horticulture. Fortunately for Emily, it seems to have put her in touch with something more authentically connected to what she was trying to express in her productions of multi-sensory sculpture. Much of her artwork is concerned with seeking a fulfilling sensory engagement with ecology but worked with ecologically harmful materials such as resin and silicon. Perhaps now that she is involved with the production of plant life in the multi-sensory garden of Crathes Castle, she is experiencing a necessary and true evolution in her relationship with ecology and all of her senses. For me however, things look pretty gross. The demands of maintaining a career in the arts within the current state of governmental deterrence (Bakare 2020) and defunding (Jones 2020) do not appeal to me. Will I achieve my Honours in Contemporary Art Practice only to move on and retrain? It remains to be seen. Certainly, it is often that shifts at the warehouse paying minimum wage are preferential to any time spent hustling, networking or filling out applications for work opportunities. All of these activities could be grouped under a singular heading; having to work while I am not at work (Southwood 2011). I should not have to feel pig-headed when I assert that I am somewhat unwilling to compromise my creative practice to meet the needs of funding bodies that seek to put limitations (Jones 2020) upon the scope of my artistic output.

Conclusion

“To exist is to be sensing continuously, consciously or not, our senses are at the forefront of it all and they build our perception of the world.” (Strachan 2019 p22)

In this piece of writing, I wanted to explore how engagement with the wider more than human world, that is external to the realm of human only knowledge and experience, can challenge the human idea that humans are exceptional in their being. To do so, it was crucial to distinguish the difference between internal and external engagement with life. Reframing human-dominant ideology with a more speculative and co-operative approach to the nonhuman is a narrative that opposes the current mainstream position that humans are the stewards of planet Earth. In the questioning of the human world’s interior containment within itself, the importance of how and where humans utilise their capacity for attention becomes imperative to understanding how humans can participate with life exterior to the operations of humanity.

The Covid-19 pandemic and its lockdown of society provided a break in the onward trajectory of human-centric progress to initiate some ideas pertinent to this dissertation. Firstly, that not all bad things are all bad, all of the time. Things are muddy and never this, or that (Morton 2021). In the case of this essay, the bad thing (Covid-19) became a good thing (Lockdown) for the writer (me) because it provided the opportunity to live more vitally and test new ways of living. In it’s horror, it threw the whole of humanity into a more immediate way of being by halting the globalised capitalist economy (Latour 2020). The second idea initiated was that the internal human only world and the external more than human world are not separate. We see this in how a nonhuman being, an unfriendly virus named SARS-coV-2 (Covid-19), forced the world into an emergency position of economic shutdown with the unintended consequence of giving me a better life than I already had, temporarily allowing me to escape the drudgery of employment (Zerzan 2012) to engage in a more fulfilling life oriented around immersive experiences out of doors. In other words, a nonhuman being changed my life and did not grant me agency or control as to how the change emerged.

At some point during this contemporary art essay about birding and surfing you may have noticed that I actually did mention some art. When I think about how urgently I feel I need to be presently participating with life in the context of art, I find myself questioning the value of art as a useful form ecological awareness in its current state of underfunding and grandiose spectacle. Recently, I have been painting a lot and I have been selling those paintings. I was consequently told that my creation of art as a commodity object is in conflict with my research around speculation, ecology and nonhumans. I agree, but painting is so easy and money is so useful. I am scared to take the risk of being more rigorous with my work. The realisation is that any art that actually is challenging, exciting and genuinely addresses ideas of ecology to me – such as the work of Tom Sewell and Marie Angeletti – is art that does not look like art to many people in my life who are outsiders to the internal world of art. This is why I look to activities like walking, birding, surfing and gardening as valuable operations of a fine arts skillset, because they all present ways of being a participant of life in a way that utilises all of the senses. When I paint, I find my own work to be a disingenuous realisation of the research presented in this essay because it isolates my thinking from embodiment. When I surf however, I am in a synthesis of thought and embodiment and I am “sensing continuously” (Strachan 2019 p22). In the sea I am literally in somethingthat is more than me and more than any other human, I can touch it, I can taste it, I can smell it, I can hear it and I can see it. I have yet to find this kind of vital, multi-sensory participation of being alive in art. I believe I might not be looking hard enough but the point remains that I cannot find something in art that better fulfils speculative engagement with the nonhuman world than active encounters such as birding or surfing.

The main way contemporary art does seem to be able to earnestly engage with this is in the ways that Tom Sewell and Marie Angeletti do. By collecting things from the tangible world and displaying them as art artefacts as a means of slowing down and looking somewhere that is not a screen with internet access. Yet despite finding value and enjoyment in this form of artwork, something in me feels like this is not enough. It does not have the same vitality as surfing and birding and I am scared that this lack of vitality in some way disconnects this kind of art from the initial immersive experiences that bring it into being.

I need to challenge human exceptionalism because humans scare me more than anything else. If humans are the cause of mass extinction then I need to be a part of something else. When I go outdoors and step outside the human world to see the rest of the world, something happens that puts me at ease. This research is about trying to find that within my arts skillset and the acknowledgement that maybe art needs to look like something other than what art is expected to be before I can find it. Perhaps what Emily Strachan finds in the non-productive garden of Crathes Castle to stimulate a multi-sensory fulfilment of interspecies connectivity is the same as what I find in my own non-productive playful engagements with birds through birding and holistic disengagement with the terrestrial realm through surfing. I want to know what this is within art, but I have reached the end of this essay and I cannot conclusively or definitively confirm that I have found it.

Birding, as a form of immersive experience that encourages interspecies connectivity through its speculative engagement with the lives of nonhuman beings, and the artwork of Tom Sewell reveal that there is scope to participate submissively with the more than human world through giving attention to the “world-without-us” (Thacker 2011 p6). We see this exemplified in sport through Surfing in its similarity to Birding. The harmony of surfing and birding, when compared with other activities, suggest that these activities are unique in the way that they place the human as a participant of life without attempting to dominate the other than human realm. This is related to the world of contemporary art because art, unlike surfing or birding, sways toward the denial of life outside of art. The value held by the art world of art is life subscribes to the glamour culture of the mainstream commercial world by refusing the input of the external and remaining internal to itself resulting in contained attention.

I see a growing emergence in contemporary art to embrace inputs exterior to art in the movement towards making work that opposes the commodification of attention by adopting a quiet, somewhat mundane aesthetic to produce artworks that deny commercial glamour and constant distraction by spectacle. This movement in art towards the exterior more than human world, out of doors and external to the known world of humanity, shows us that the internalisation of life has excluded a diversity of input for humans and artists. Operation exclusively in the interior denies life itself through its containment of attention. In a mass extinction age, a speculative approach to the external more than human world could reframe the position of the human from spectator of life to participant of life, whereby immersive experience could create affirmations of life.

Reference List

BAKARE, L., 2020. Minister Distances Himself from Ballet Dancer Reskilling Ad. The Guardian, 12 Oct [online]. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/12/ballet-dancer-could-reskill-with-job-in-cyber-security-suggests-uk-government-ad [Accessed 16 Dec 2022].

BARKER, D., 2014. Barthes’ Studium and Punctum | Nouspique. [online]. Nouspique.com. Available from: https://nouspique.com/barthes-studium-and-punctum/ [Accessed 31 Oct 2022].

BARTHES, R., 1988. Camera Lucida : Reflections on Photography. New York: The Noonday Press.

BIRT, V., SHIN, S. and CLARA, N., 2020. Well Projects on Instagram: ‘A Talk with Verity Birt, Sarah Shin and Nicolette Clara Iles. Discussing Verity’s New Film “Crossings” and Verity & Nicollette’s Long Distance Collaboration and Shared research’. [online]. Instagram. Well Projects. Available from: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CGYHpTml6oZ/ [Accessed 14 Oct 2022].

BURGESS, T., 2020. The Arts aren’t a Luxurious hobby, Rishi Sunak. They’re a Lifeline for Millions. [online]. the Guardian. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/08/the-arts-rishi-sunak-job-chancellor-hope [Accessed 16 Dec 2022].

CAYRE, E. and KISSICK, D., 2022. The Painter’s New Tools - Organized by Eleanor Cayre and Dean Kissick - Exhibitions - Nahmad Contemporary. [online]. www.nahmadcontemporary.com. Available from: https://www.nahmadcontemporary.com/exhibitions/the-painters-new-tools#slide:0 [Accessed 26 Oct 2022].

EVANS, P., 2022. Surfing’s Dark Secret: Birding. [online]. Stab Mag. Available from: https://stabmag.com/features/surfings-dark-secret-birding/ [Accessed 18 Oct 2022].

HALADYN, J.J., 2015. Boredom and Art : Passions of the Will to Boredom. Winchester: Zero Books.

HANNULA, M., SUORANTA, J. and VADÉN, T., 2005. Artistic research: theories, Methods and Practices. Helsinki, Finland: Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts.

INGOLD, T., 2018. Anthropology between Art and Science: an Essay on the Meaning of Research | FIELD. [online]. Field Journal. Field. Available from: https://field-journal.com/issue-11/anthropology-between-art-and-science-an-essay-on-the-meaning-of-research [Accessed 10 Oct 2022].

JONES, S., 2020. The Chance to Dream: Why Fund Individual Artists? A-N. A-N the Artists Information Company. Available from: https://static.a-n.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Research-papers-The-chance-to-dream-why-fund-individual-artists.pdf [Accessed 8 Dec 2022].

KUNDERA, M., 2004. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. London: Faber and Faber.

LATOUR, B., 2020. What Protective Measures Can You Think of so We don’t Go Back to the pre-crisis Production model? 1. [online]. Bruno Latour. AOC. Available from: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/P-202-AOC-ENGLISH_1.pdf [Accessed 14 Oct 2022].

MILLS, C., 2022. Mobility Drills for More Fluid Surfing. [online]. Surf Strength Coach. Available from: https://surfstrengthcoach.com/mobility-drills-for-more-fluid-surfing/ [Accessed 31 Oct 2022].

MORTON, T., 2021. All Art Is Ecological. S.L.: Penguin Books.

NAGEL, T., 2016. What Is It like to Be a Bat? Stuttgart: Reclam Universal-Bibliothek.

SHAVIRO, S., 2016. The Universe of Things: on Speculative Realism (Posthumanities). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

SOUTHWOOD, I., 2011. Non-stop Inertia. Winchester: Zero Books.

STRACHAN, E., 2019. Are We Living in a State of Hyperaesthesia or Sensory Deprivation. Undergraduate Dissertation.

TAMÁS, R., 2020. Strangers : Essays on the Human and Nonhuman. London: Makina Books.

TATOL, S., 2022. The Painter’s New Tools & Manhattan. [online]. 19933.biz. Available from: http://19933.biz/newtoolsmanhattan.html [Accessed 14 Oct 2022].

THACKER, E., 2011. In the Dust of This Planet. Winchester: Zero Books.

THACKER, E., 2016. Cosmic Pessimism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

WATTS, J. and LATOUR, B., 2020. Bruno Latour: ‘This Is a Global Catastrophe That Has Come from within’. The Guardian, 6 Jun [online]. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/06/bruno-latour-coronavirus-gaia-hypothesis-climate-crisis [Accessed 10 Oct 2022].

ZERZAN, J., 2012. Future Primitive Revisited. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House.

‌List Of Illustrations 

Fig. 1 Screenshot from YouTube video of Hamish Fulton’s group walk at Curzon Park.  GALLERY, I. and FULTON, H., 2012. Hamish Fulton Group Walk, Birmingham. [online]. www.youtube.com. Ikon Gallery. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XaX4ktvQ_0 [Accessed 10 Oct 2022].

Fig. 2 IMAGE: MIDDLE CLASS FANCY, 2022. Middle Class Fancy on Instagram: ‘Haha I know right? It’s winter and it’s cold out? What’s all that about lol’. [online]. Instagram. Middle Class Fancy. Available from: https://www.instagram.com/p/CmjoQvbOgdt/ [Accessed 25 Dec 2022].

Fig. 3 IMAGE: Tom Sewell. SEWELL, T., 2021. Slough – Tom Sewell. [online]. Tom Sewell. Available from: http://www.tomsewell.co.uk/work/slough/ [Accessed 14 Oct 2022].

Fig. 4 IMAGE: Claude Balls Int. 2022. Manhattan Install Views – Claude Balls Int, 2022. [online]. Claude Balls Int. Available from: http://claudeballsint.com/?exhibition=manhattan-install-views [Accessed 2 Nov 2022].

Fig. 5 IMAGE: HM Government. BAKARE, L., 2020. Minister Distances Himself from Ballet Dancer Reskilling Ad. The Guardian, 12 Oct [online]. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/12/ballet-dancer-could-reskill-with-job-in-cyber-security-suggests-uk-government-ad [Accessed 16 Dec 2022].

[sadbirder]

GROUP EGO DEATH YOGA AND MEDITATION - Bora Akinciturk at Screw Gallery

Exhibition Review (From A Distance)

Whenever the artist-run-space Screw Gallery announces a new exhibition, you can know for sure that I will be looking. My relationship with Screw Gallery and the artists they exhibit so far has been entirely online. The gallery in Leeds is a world away from my base of Aberdeen - North-East Scotland’s premier cultural void - and due to being a broke-ass art student up here, I have not yet found the time and resources to make a visit. I am grateful however; that it is possible to engage with what Screw Gallery is doing via the Internet.

Exhibition Poster (image courtesy of Screw Gallery)

From the moment the poster for Bora Akinciturk’s GROUP EGO DEATH YOGA AND MEDITATION solo exhibition appeared on my Instagram feed, I was excited. It was the title that got me, capitalised in its entirety. I knew that despite not knowing any of Akinciturk’s work, it was unlikely to be offering me any sincere guidance into the bare-footed abyss of yuppies condescending their way to spiritual enlightenment. On this basis, I felt an instinctive pull towards the exhibition.

Upon viewing the work, thanks to installation views on Screw Gallery’s website, the voice of Akinciturk’s irreverence towards the caustic and falsely upbeat narrative of purposeful self-discovery can be felt throughout.  The artist acknowledges the emptiness of success in the digital era. Pointing out that this emptiness is often unknown to those who experience it, who instead chase the dragon via ill-informed engagement in spiritual practice corrupted by a perspective which privileges the self and is contradicted by habitual use of party drugs.

Installation View (image courtesy of Screw Gallery)

The work is coming from someone who knows that humans desperately need to connect to something more than power and success but corporate sponsored transcendence has polluted this idea with misguided individualism.  In an interview with Coeval Magazine, in reference to Millennials, Bora Akinciturk said “The only thing that truly describes us as a generation is uncertainty. But also there’s this constant naive utopian hope for everything to work out.” Although this interview is from 4 years ago, it brings me into the artist’s headspace looking at GROUP EGO DEATH YOGA AND MEDITATION dealing with symbolic representation of the self, contextualised by the meaninglessness of the Internet.

Imagery of Jim Carrey in his famous role from the 1994 movie The Mask is repeated on the bottom left corner (to the viewer) of all the larger mixed media works on canvas, featured as inkjet prints. On the piece titled Ego Birth, this image is paired with dried flowers streaming up the canvas, beginning next to a pencil drawing of a sleeping person seen from the foot of a bed with an erection. Fields of whiteness and obscured spray painted flowers and stars surround these elements. This use of space speaks to feelings of emptiness but also to the endlessness of information on the Internet, Ego Birth is simultaneously a busy and minimal painting. This loud and quiet dynamic is repeated throughout the work.

Ego Birth - 100cm x 100cm - Inkjet Print on glossy paper, dried flowers, pencil drawing on paper, spray paint, acrylic and glossy acrylic gel on canvas. (image courtesy of Screw Gallery)

Initially in the film, wearing the mask allows Stanley Ipkiss (Carrey’s character) to break from his typical personality by the emergence of an alter ego. Ipkiss is able to move outside the conventionally accepted behaviour of his world and carry out more extreme and otherworldly actions, affording a perceived increase in his self-belief. The fallout from these actions eventually leaves Ipkiss feeling smothered and endangered by the mask, causing him to reject it and assimilate himself back into societal convention. From a critical perspective, ultimately the story of Ipkiss is futile because he ends up where he started.

Image: (Framegrab) The Mask. 1994. [film]. Directed by Chuck Russell. USA: New Line Cinema

When considering the storyline of The Mask against the artworks by Bora Akinciturk in GROUP EGO DEATH YOGA AND MEDITATION, having read about the artist’s interest in myths, I recall an essay by John Zerzan titled Origins And The Trickster. Zerzan talks of the Trickster character being universal throughout mythology and indeed, the mask in the film is said to contain the spirit of Loki, the Trickster God in Norse mythology. Trickster myths almost ubiquitously suggest that adhering to societal convention must be neutralised by playfulness and disengagement.

GROUP EGO DEATH YOGA AND MEDITATION criticises an establishment of mass ideology that values the denial of the dangerous uncertainty of our times and is obsessed with reflections of the self. Bora Akinciturk combines mythology and pop culture narratives to reveal the unacknowledged emptiness of seeking fulfilment by following the rules laid out by mass ideology. The works in this exhibition are intentionally difficult to interpret, suggesting a need for the elusive and the marginal.

References:

https://www.instagram.com/bora__akinciturk/

https://screw.gallery

https://www.coeval-magazine.com/coeval/bora-akinciturk

https://archive.org/details/JohnZerzanFuturePrimitiveRevisited

[sadbirder]

Precarity In The Art World: Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), The Art Market, Short Term Contracts and the Absurd Pointlessness Of Art As An Industrial Structure, Is It A Joke?

As the Earth rapidly becomes inhospitable due to human actions being at odds with elemental processes, some people are shooting for the moon (literally) while others (me) struggle to see the point in playing the peculiar game of earning a living.

To be clear, I loathe money. I hate working to get money, even when the mode of obtaining currency is selling my art. I enjoy making art, but trying so hard at it to the point of stress? No thanks. Money is ok as well because it gets me things. I like things and stuff.

My hatred of earning money comes from giving up my time. Like most other extremely broke and depressed young people (Hankinson 2017); I am painfully aware that my lifetime may be shorter or significantly more compromised than I had been led to believe when I signed up for my free trial of doing a life. Worse still, this is due to circumstances that I cannot control but indeed very much wish did not exist.

Despite awareness of the futility of my actions and lack of time, I live under pressure to be a successful consumer-citizen (Southwood 2010). I am expected to be grateful for any opportunity to give up 40hours or more each week to exchange my maximum output of physical and emotional labour (Hochschild 2012) to a company offering the minimum possible injection to my bank balance. As it stands, I have no chance of buying a home, I cannot afford my rent and I will probably never retire (Hankinson 2017).

I once lamented about my lack of time and money to my partner’s parents. “I want to earn 6-figures, in one month, working a 3-day week. Then I want to quit and never work again.” They told me that there are not many ways to do that, which are not illegal. The realisation is that selling my artwork very much is a way that I can do that. The catch is, it is extremely unlikely. I will probably have to give up a lot of time, work very hard and hope I get real darn lucky. As artist Larry Poons said, “You do what you can do” (The Price Of Everything 2018).

Before my time studying at Gray’s School of Art, I spent my early 20s practicing and working as an artist. Trying to earn a stable income, as a young artist, is difficult. Art practice is rarely cast within a business as a permanent role. Most opportunities are temporary, offered on a one-off basis through self-employment. The consequence is that the artist is dealing with precarity in work and is constantly looking for a job, “leisure time is turning into labour” (Boyer and Morton 2021 p. 87) and job seeking becomes a job (Southwood 2010). This mode of operation is more akin to the temporary agency worker/jobseeker at a career centre. It is surprising that it is also true to the art world, a place often deemed as cushy and elite (Rafferty 2020). In my Creative Futures module this semester, I was sold the idea that it was a privilege to climb the career ladder in my personal time while holding down a part-time job to make ends meet. It is discomforting to know that, even in the supposedly forward-thinking art world, I am expected to leap at short notice for unpaid roles to boost my CV. To do this while juggling commissions, lengthy applications (I’ve done several longer than this essay) interviews and networking around shifts at my non-art part-time job that actually offers me a monthly wage. This is stressful and leaves me with very little leisure time because I have to work while I am not at work.

As it was presented to me in the course, my success (or lack of) is up to me. I am supposed to be stoked about having a so-called Side Hustle. Any unwillingness to live this way is framed as a personal attitude-problem and shows that the art world has adopted the same rhetoric of self-help/self-blame (Southwood 2010) towards career building that is present in the difficult and stressful world of temporary agency work that Ivor Southwood discusses in his book Non-Stop Inertia.

Capitalism has overtaken everything to the point that it undermines the quality of life on Earth (Jackson 2021). I have less chances for income stability than my parents, as “work is no longer a secure base, but a source of anxiety” (Southwood 2010 p.76).

I looked at ways other artists have made money. I have noticed that some artists possess the ability to eschew the dreadful art-practice-rebranded-as-entrepreneurial side hustle. Furthermore, they are doing so while subverting the pointlessness of seeking a successful career while everything collapses at such an alarming rate that techno-billionaires are racing to colonise planets known to be unable to support life in order to secure continued expansion of the economy (Jackson 2021).  

In his lecture on Digital Readymades, Dr. Jon Pengelly brought to my awareness the existence of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). NFTs are a means to trade and authenticate digital materials, including images. The reason they are critical is because they can be traced infinitely and never duplicated (Hern 2021). This gives them a scarcity that can be proven, which is something that rich people look for when buying or investing. This is particularly true in the art world (The Price Of Everything 2018).

James Ettelson is an Australian artist and surfer, whose work stood out to me recently. I read in Stab (surfing magazine) that he sold $30K worth of images of his work as NFTs in a collection titled “Wallet Talk” during October 2021. It is not specifically that the NFTs he sold are of much interest; it is how and why he did it and the video artwork he created in response to selling his first NFTs that are significant.

Wallet Talk video frame-grab - RANKIN, M., 2021.  In: STAB MAGAZINE, 2021. Stab Magazine. [online]. Australia: Stab. Available from: https://stabmag.com/features/james-ettelson-surf-nft/ [05/12/2021].

As an artist myself, I am sceptical of NFTs from both ecologically conscious and image-conscious standpoints. NFTs have a large carbon footprint, so they are bad for the environment. A single NFT trade has a carbon impact 91 times worse than mailing an art print via airplane across the United States (Davis 2021).

I want to hate NFTs because of climate change and the idea of them is so uncomfortable. Who cares if you have an image in your phone? I agree with Ettelson (2021) who says in the Stab article “Yes, I think it’s tragic at the same time but also exciting,”.

If defining oneself through tangible commodity is an embarrassing display of toxic masculinity. For instance, when the proverbial man with the loud Lamborghini drives past and people on the street start offering suggestions that the oversized vehicle may be disproportionate to his mummified gender binaries. Then, to do so via digital commodity certainly fits the same sort of “dick waving” (Eccles and Saltz 2018) bracket.

I want to love NFTs too though. What a great way to squeeze cash out of the wealthy! Give some corporate bozo a .jpeg of one of my paintings so they can have bragging rights over owning the scarcity of the image I created and I receive a decent wage in return? Sign me up.

I swear if I could make £30k from one .jpeg, then I’d be all set. I think I could make a secure life for myself, I would buy a modest shed, retire from precarity before I’m 30 and humbly work casually making art and selling it without the pressure of chasing short-term art-job applications and funding. Boy, do I hate the endless administration involved in being a self-employed artist. Being a Millennial has its perks. My income is so hilariously low, that I believe I’m resourceful enough to retire at 27 years old on the occasional £30K artwork. Anyway, isn’t that how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos did it?

James Ettelson is a punk. He did what I would love to do. He used his cool-points as “maker of art” to convince some more wealthy/less cool, stiff corpo-types to exchange money for some one-off .jpeg images of his paintings minted as NFTs via the help of a nerdy friend (Smith and Ettelson 2021). The whole thing has the beautiful stench of collaborative DIY-punk-ethos. For better or worse, he made art and then he made money. That is why he sold his art as NFTs. He did it so he does not have to sweat it out in a warehouse, jobsite or office (Smith and Ettelson 2021). So he can surf when he wants and do his best at using his artwork as a means of maintaining a pleasurable life of leisure. There is something very admirable about that.

To return to all the dick-talk, there was a point to it. In an interview in Art Review, Jerry Saltz designated the buying of art in public purely to be seen buying art, a “dick-waving” competition (Eccles and Saltz 2018). Considering this, does that mean that privately owning an artwork, digital or in real life (IRL), is for those who are inclined to an antiquated system of patriarchy-sympathetic-thinking who have something to prove?

RANKIN, M., 2021.  In: STAB MAGAZINE 2021. Stab Magazine. [online]. Australia: Stab. Available from: https://stabmag.com/features/james-ettelson-surf-nft/ [05/12/2021].

It would seem James Ettelson has noticed this. In response to the sale of images of his paintings as NFTs, he constructed the IRL art objects into a sculpture and burned it. As if titling the collection “Wallet Talk” wasn’t enough of a nod to Jerry Saltz’s “dick waving” suggestion, Ettelson filmed the burning of the artwork and cut the clip to the song My Dick by Micky Avalon, claiming that “It’s taking a subtle jab at all the guys flexing,” (Smith and Ettelson 2021). He took the bold move of making money out of a group of people to make fun of them for engaging despite their support. This isn’t the only instance of an artist displaying displeasure towards the sale of art as NFTs. Banksy made a print titled “Morons” in an edition of 500 and sold number 325 as an NFT for £300,000. This edition was burned and similarly was filmed as the token was minted (Hern 2021). Although burning one print out of 500 is not as bold as Ettelson’s burning of all traces of the artwork sold, it similarly points to the humour in placing the value of an artwork upon its scarcity in the digital realm.

BANKSY., 2021.  In: GUARDIAN, 2021. Guardian. [online]. UK: Guardian. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/12/non-fungible-tokens-revolutionising-art-world-theft [05/12/2021].

Dominic Boyer and Timothy Morton in Hyposubjects, a key text presented to me in a lecture from Dr Jen Clarke, also discuss this financial boasting that Ettelson and Banksy have pointed out. They explain that the patriarchal system of buying and owning, will have powerful white men, which they term Hypersubjects, download themselves to the grid, become augmented by artificial intelligence and fly themselves to Mars before they will confront any problems on Earth in earnest. The attitude is: “Once we white guys get our shit worked out, then we’ll be able to help out everyone else.” (Boyer and Morton 2021 p. 70).  That is to say, by conforming to a way of being based on ownership, nothing can ever truly be achieved except acts of selfishness and humanlessness.

The dick waving that Jerry Saltz is referring to, and transcending the grid to which Morton and Boyer are referring are precisely the same kind of cowardice. A symptom of the pandemic of competitive capitalism, is that it is inducing a fear of living with immediacy on Earth so potent that it is literally sending those-who-can on a death-drive into the lifelessness of space with the aim of transcending life on earth (Boyer and Morton 2021). Ironically, those seeking to become more human than human, more alive than life, are doing so outside the only place known in the entire spectrum of all conceivability where the human and living is possible. This turn towards ignorance of living is mirrored in the way that people are setting a preference for consuming art lifelessly in the vacuum of digital space opposed to experiencing art as a visceral and essential (Jackson 2021) part of real life. The twisted hilarity is that this is happening at the expense of life and a habitable ecosystem in the one place it exists.

Undermining the concept of ownership and confronting the role of the art market in discussions of digital being is vital. If people are to find their way out of precarious work and the heinous 5-day week, questioning the value of objects and subverting displays of status via wealth to reflect the meaninglessness of everything, as Ettelson and Banksy have done, is a crucial point of departure. Reflecting upon notions of wealth creation and distribution from an absurdist perspective importantly brings humour and playfulness to the discussion.

When everything gets too serious, as all current things are, lightweight confrontations such as this will play a fundamental role in what Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer (2021 p. 76) call, “dismantle[ing] the apocalypse”. To break apart the dire situations we find ourselves in with humour is to subtly deny the competitiveness that drives the lifeless machine of buying and owning.

Reference list

BOYER, D. and MORTON, T., 2021. Hyposubjects: on Becoming Human. Www.openhumanitiespress.org. Open Humanites Press. Available from: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/hyposubjects/ [Accessed 12 Oct 2021].

DAVIS, E., 2021. The Carbon Footprint of Creating and Selling an NFT Artwork. [online]. Quartz. Available from: https://qz.com/1987590/the-carbon-footprint-of-creating-and-selling-an-nft-artwork/ [Accessed 5 Dec 2021].

ECCLES, T. and SALTZ, J., 2018. Jerry Saltz. [online]. artreview.com. Art Review. Available from: https://artreview.com/jerry-saltz-other-people-and-their-ideas-no-4/ [Accessed 13 Nov 2021].

HANKINSON, A., 2017. The Lost generation: “I’m 30-something and Still Depressed and Broke.” [online]. The Guardian. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/apr/02/the-lost-generation-credit-crunch-thirtysomething-brokebroke [Accessed 6 Dec 2021].

HERN, A., 2021. Non-fungible Tokens Are Revolutionising the Art World – and Art Theft. [online]. The Guardian. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/12/non-fungible-tokens-revolutionising-art-world-theft [Accessed 5 Dec 2021].

HOCHSCHILD, A.R., 2012. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling Kindle Edition. 1st ed. USA: University of California Press. Available from: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Managed-Heart-Commercialization-Human-Feeling-ebook/dp/B007GMRICS/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1638732986&sr=1-1 [Accessed 15 Nov 2021].

JACKSON, T., 2021. Billionaire Space race: the Ultimate Symbol of Capitalism’s Flawed Obsession with Growth. [online]. The Conversation. Available from: https://theconversation.com/billionaire-space-race-the-ultimate-symbol-of-capitalisms-flawed-obsession-with-growth-164511 [Accessed 5 Dec 2021].

RAFFERTY, C., 2020. Art World Elitism in the Contemporary Age. [online]. Reporter. Available from: https://reporter.rit.edu/leisure/art-world-elitism-contemporary-age [Accessed 6 Dec 2021].

RANKIN, M., 2021.  In: STAB MAGAZINE, 2021. Stab Magazine. [online]. Australia: Publisher. Available from: https://stabmag.com/features/james-ettelson-surf-nft/ [Accessed 5 Dec 2021].

SMITH, J. and ETTELSON, J., 2021. Why Did an Australian Artist Burn $30K Worth of Art and What’s It Got to Do with Kelly Slater? [online]. Stab Magazine. Available from: https://stabmag.com/features/james-ettelson-surf-nft/ [Accessed 13 Nov 2021].

SOUTHWOOD, I., 2011. Non-stop Inertia. Winchester, Uk ; Washington: Zero Books.

‌The Price Of Everything., 2018. [film]. Directed by Nathaniel Kahn. USA: YouTube [Accessed 5 Oct 2021].

[sadbirder]

Can Art Change The World?

I do not think that art can change the world.

I think humans need to stop changing the world and leave it alone because Mother Nature and Planet Earth are pretty sick of our shit.

When we talk about the world, we mean people. People think that people are the world. We are referring to the world of human society, and only civilised, agricultural society at that. Primitive, non-agricultural humans didn’t need to change. Humans are/were authentically perfect at this stage, in harmony with the world and nature. With civilisation and agriculture, humans became separate from the world by domesticating it. We consequently developed symbols, culture and art in conjunction with our denial of nature. 

For better or for worse, human impact is always changing the world because we have become obsessed with progress. Our progress obsession led to the civilised world colonising the planet and now humans have very little contact with what it means to be an authentic human as a part of nature. There is an illusion that somehow technological progress will one day satisfy humans as much as nature did. It never will. Every agricultural civilisation that came before our current one of globalised capitalism became swollen and imploded. Today, there is widespread awareness of a pending implosion. It’s scary stuff, so we have all started talking about changing the world. We never talk about leaving it alone.

Artists talk about art changing the world because they are seeing the world change and they consider the role of art within that change. What seems more true to me is that we continue to make art and the world continues to change. Civilised humans seem to find it impossible to control the urge of travelling down routes that end in societal collapse and mass-death. These routes are always mapped out by progress. This pattern has repeated itself over and over for the 10,000 or so years that we have had domesticated agriculture, the marker of the age of civilised human. Pre-agricultural human society sustained itself for almost 2 million years and nobody got nuked.

All humans remember that they are an animal. Collectively, either consciously or unconsciously, there is an awareness of this but it is poorly articulated. It is best reflected in the widespread misery among humans today.

Boris Groys refers to this knowledge when he says:

“Artistic collaboration with technological progress has the goal of stopping this progress.”

Artists confront this awareness. Artists know that there is something about the way humans live that needs to be explored and made sense of.

Civilised society is about control. Agriculture is about control. Humans today are in control of everything but we deny ourselves an authentic existence of leisure and togetherness because of our obsession with work and insistence upon living outside of nature. This can be characterised with dependence and greed, the ugly personality of late-capitalism. In an interesting contrast to this, studies show that in non-agricultural societies where humans live as a part of nature; there is an abundance of time for leisure and the core values of these societies are almost always autonomy and sharing.  Art happens in a theoretical space that is difficult to control and regulate. Perhaps it is no coincidence that many artists value autonomy and authenticity? Artists are searching for a way of life they know they could have but cannot. They know that it is possible to leave each other and everything else alone and enjoy sharing the experience of living authentically in nature as a part of the world.

In Future Primitive Revisited, John Zerzan says that “philosophy is homesickness”. Art is homesickness. Art is created by people who know they are not satisfied with the way they live. Artists know they are not satisfied being the only species that has to pay to live on planet earth. (Yeah, that meme.) My point is, if you are alive and you are human, you are unhappy with the way in which our species does life. Even if you don’t know it, you are. Artists are cursed with knowing it.

Art doesn’t want to change the world. Art is the acknowledgment that we have changed the world and it is the expression of our guilt. 

To reframe this positively, my friend Leya said; 

“Art is hope.” 

So, I’ll say it again. Art is the acknowledgment that we have changed the world and it is the expression of our guilt hope. 

Artists have realised that humans suck, and they know that we can do better.

[sadbirder]

The Creative Industries

Please enjoy a vague essay on what I understand the creative industries to be in the UK.

The first thing that stood out to me was that the definition of the creative industries involved so much reference to intellectual property for the creation of wealth. Straight off the bat, this made me feel like it applied to almost everything else within the realm of creativity but not contemporary art, such as the more commercial aspects including video games, graphic design and fashion. This was immediately compounded by the list of creative industries provided by the UK government, which did not include anything under the heading of visual art or contemporary art. As an artist, I am made uncomfortable by this because I don’t want my art to be a part of mass-consumerism and I am not really interested in living a life where I have to break my back (so to say) by being constantly on show as part of an industry which forces visibility.

I started thinking about industrialisation and the consequences it has had on the wellbeing of humans, nature and the earth as a whole. It is interesting to me that the creative industries are growing most in urban areas while the cultural sector is becoming consumed by economy and industry. To me, this mirrors the historical process of industrialisation as a whole. I found this shocking initially because I am skeptical that the world of hustlers, personal brands and competing aggressively in an emotionally demanding job-market can bring me any happiness whatsoever. I do realise however, that this is the truth of today's art world. I may just have to get on with it and find pleasure in the suffering or miss out on all gathering of any steez I desire as the trendy artist I want everyone to know me to be.

I was excited to learn that visual art was included in the Scottish government’s list of creative industries. I do however feel conflicted by the concept of visual art as an industry. It is almost worse to me that it is included.

I watched a documentary about the art market called The Price Of Everything. I learned that there are a lot of rich people out there looking to undercut the artist to then sell the artwork for an obscene amount of profit. The art is then either destined to live in storage or be seen by very few eyes for the rest of the artists’ living life in some rich person’s apartment in London or Hong Kong or whatever. I believe art is for all people, so to learn that the value of some important artworks have become so high that museums and galleries could never hope to buy the work into their collections unless somebody generously decides to donate the work is a very depressing thought.

Having looked at the figures and statistics of employment within the UK’s creative industries, I had one big question: Do these figures include people who work in the cafes of art galleries, or ticket booths of theatres, cinema ushers and people in roles like that? Are people in those roles counted towards the number of people employed in the wonderfully massive creative industries sector? On yet another personal, anecdotal note. While I have enjoyed a café job in an arts institution and working in an art-house cinema to make ends meet, I don’t think those jobs ever felt like I held an engaging and fulfilling role, expressing myself as a key player in the creative industries. It always felt like I had a stressful, low-wage customer service job. I guess I’m in for a life of disappointment and stress, juggling side-hustles and 4000 word residency proposals around full time work until people start paying millions of schmeckles for my artwork so they can hide it away in their oversized apartment. Perhaps then I will be able to retire from the anxiety-riddled lifestyle of faking my way through an industry that requires me to sell myself as a branded package of young and sexy creativity ready for consumption while simultaneously bending over backwards to spoon-feed a stream of bloated Karens in a café that serves coffee-flavoured burnt milk.

[sadbirder]

Aberdeen: Political Corruption On A Local Scale

Here is an excerpt from the research I carried out for project proposal I wrote in second year and submitted as part of my coursework for my Contemporary Art Practice course. Below, I speculate upon the planned destruction of St Fitticks Park, a natural wetland & ecological heritage site in Torry, in order to build what is being called a “Green Energy Transition Zone” (ETZ). 

 AKA, the city of Aberdeen would like to level a natural habitat and green space of environmental and historical significance into a grey industrial site to fulfil the needs of a greenwashing campaign led by corrupt men, namely Sir Ian Wood, with huge stakes in both Aberdeen’s Big Oil industry and board members strategically placed within Aberdeen City Council. 

Yeah. It’s a big old yikes.

Friends of St Fitticks Park is an organisation that is trying to save the park from industrialisation and destruction.

I have visited St. Fitticks a lot over the years but I have never checked it out on the map. I was surprised to notice that the entire area where St Fitticks park lies is not coloured green, but grey, on any digital map of the area (above). I thought the visual implication of this was important because it denies the park its status as a green space on the map. If you click zoom out once more the park’s titles do not appear on the map either (below). This means if one was to glance at the map, looking for a new green space nearby, they would not assume that there was one present in this location. (This is an activity I carry out regularly, and I am sure others also do.) I wonder if this is a deliberate action to chastise the park of many visitors.

I felt like I ended up choosing the wrong project. 3 weeks in and I found I couldn’t bare to think about St Fitticks because it makes me feel upset that losing this green space could happen, but fighting the institution and thinking about politics and social issues wears me out emotionally and makes me withdraw myself. I don’t want to research all the messed up backdoor dealings behind this. It’s too negative. I don’t have the energy to be angry about the threat to this park. Equally, I do not want to lose the park but I do not have the will power or the emotional space to continue. I spoke to my mother about this problem and she said there’s nothing I can do against the power of the institution. If they decide the park will go, it will go in the end, fight or no fight. She explained that by fighting and being angry, not only do I waste energy, wear myself out and upset myself, but I also play into the hands of the institution. As mentioned in projects last semester, I believe any negative action contributes to the overall negativity around all things. Even if, my negative reaction is justified by my values, it is not a useful reaction. It creates more negative energy around the already negative area of the potential loss of this park. My mother explained that being angry plays into a predetermined set of check-boxes that the institution will be expecting and it will always, in some way or another, result in the institution having more power to carry out the action. 

The contribution of illustration from artists, and use of collective memory in exploring folklore and stories from conversation with inhabitants of Torry by Thomas White Ogilvie in The Book Of Saint Fittick is what I consider to be a collaborative effort to create this book. I think that in the context of the era, 1901, it is obvious that the well respected, gentleman-scholar input was going to be emphasised and Ogilvie was always going to recieve most or all of the credit. If you scratch beneath the surface of the book just a little, to me it is without question a collaborative effort to create a shared memory of a place which the local people are in love with.

From attending Friends Of Saint Fitticks meetings, it is clear that shared memory and love for their surroundings seems to be a longstanding trait or tradition among the people of Torry that continues today. They treasure the area in which they live and have a lot of respect and passion for the areas of wild habitat and historical significance around them. Over time, these types of places throughout Torry have become reduced and destroyed. Nigg Bay Harbour Development is one of the more recent examples, big business moved in, completely dominating and depriving a community of their beach by destroying it. Fragments of these places do remain and the people of Torry still treasure them.

I have learned that the threat Sir Ian Wood is presenting to St Fittick’s park is a very powerful one, riddled with corruption. He has members of his board high up in the council which means if he wants something, he can get it, seemingly regardless of it not being completely allowed or legal. He has people who can push his plans through in a way that is hidden from scrutiny and public eyes until it is too late. I often wondered over the years why Aberdeen looks like a total shit-hole. Whether in a “nice” area or a so called “bad” area, they all look like totally uninspired and unloved heaps of trash. I have had this thought since moving here at 9 years old and it continues to this day. 

Aberdeen is (Or maybe was, who knew that oil could run out? Just keep drilling baby.) the second wealthiest city in the UK, after London. The average Londoner wouldn’t be able to point to Aberdeen on the map. When I moved to Scotland, I kept getting it confused with Australia. Today I consider this pertinent to living in Aberdeen, it might as well be as far away from London as Australia. Australia seems like an amazing place where I’d love to live, but a large part of it is a desert and it is really far away from everything. My point is, as terrible as London is, it is also filled with culture and is a visually amazing place to be - some of that money is somewhat being put to good use. In Aberdeen, you wouldn’t be able to tell by looking that it is a wealthy place, except from the cars. Where is all the culture? Aberdeen seems to be a cultural desert. Where is all the beautiful amazement around the city that wealth is supposed to bring? Our high street is based almost entirely around addiction and anaethesia. Vape shops, booze shops, phone shops, gambling shops. It’s cheap, it’s impoverished, it’s sad and it’s ugly. Our civic square - Marischal Square - is not a civic square, it is a shopping mall. A failed shopping mall that’s mostly empty. You cannot hang-around our “Civic Square” for long without being harrassed by security and even police. It is hard to be somewhere, for no reason in the city centre of Aberdeen and a good civic square should be a space for just that.  A diverse place with cultural happenings and the freedom to loiter and gather. Instead, we have a city council that considers a nation-wide chain selling garbage food, Tony Macaroni, a high quality local business and an integrated surveillence system throughout the city centre that quickly extinguishes any organic culture that could emerge from gathering.

I spoke to my friend Neil about this and he agreed. We spoke about meeting people from around the world here and they ask things like; 

“Isn’t this the Oil Capital of Europe?” 

Begrudgingly we would respond;  “Yes, and it’s the second wealthiest city in the UK after London.” 

Disappointed, they would say; “It doesn’t look like it.”  

They are right. Where has the money gone?

Neil said to me - “This is what political corruption looks like on a local scale.”

Ian Wood and similar monsters have forced their fingers without consent into many of the things that have contributed to the totally lame approach to culture that this city has. Every time I walk past a steak grill surrounded with people wearing Barbour jackets I want to puke. The faux-luxury of the steak houses of Aberdeen is one of the more grotesque sorts of unacknowledged cannibalism in this world. The blood thirsty herds of Range Rover driving cattle pay good money to engage in the heinous act of grazing upon a mostly raw lump of their Angus bretherin. 

This is frustrating because Aberdeen is a really, really cool place with amazing people. You can walk 40 minutes and be in actual wild habitat, the coastal path (and Saint Fitticks!) to the south, Donmouth to the north and more. Of course there are groups of people trying to bring cultural ideas to the city; Look Again, Peackock Visual Arts, Mood of Collapse, Kekun Studio, Bandit Bakery and Cult of Coffee, to name but a few. One of the best things about Aberdeen for me is that it is the only city in Scotland that has a surfing beach within walking distance. For me, this alone makes Aberdeen the best city in Scotland. My experiences in the more “fringe” places of Aberdeen have been wonderful and prove this place has a potential to be beautiful, cultural and inspiring. To give but a few specific examples: I have conversations about wildlife with strangers along the Don in Seaton Park. Up the Dee path I had a fire while sharing the experience of bird-spotting around a heronry with passing people of all ages stopping with binoculars. Every time I go surfing, a passerby strikes up a friendly conversation with me. I volunteered at Peacock Visual Arts and learned there is a largely unseen by the mainstream but well respected global arts community in Aberdeen. I worked at Foodstory cafe and discovered there are many talented chefs, bakers and baristas in Aberdeen. It’s all here, but it isn’t obvious, and it’s hard to spot. I have a lot of love for Aberdeen and I want it to be better, but I feel powerless against the corruption and the culture-hating centre of this town.

The idea of fighting or exposing the corruption wears me out emotionally. This is not the path I want to take with this project. I feel like issues like this all too often lead to possessiveness, anger and negativity. I do not want to contribute to any of those things within myself or other people. I am going to opt for a perspective rooted in kindness, compassion, sharing and positivity because I believe these are the truest emotional traits of Aberdeen and it feels good for me. I think emphasising these things will ensure there are positive experiences happening in St. Fittick’s park right now. I think ultimately that ensuring people are using and enjoying the park is the best way to oppose the corruption. The action will speak for itself and will expose the selfishness of Ian Wood’s plans. It might fail. At least if it does, people will have definitely enjoyed their time with the park while it is still here and there will be a legacy of collective memory that Ian Wood will not be able to steal or fake with what he might create there.

[sadbirder]

A Comparison Of Contemporary Landscape Photography With Traditional 19th Century Landscape Painting

The aesthetics of both contemporary landscape photography and traditional 19th century landscape painting hold much the same purpose, the objectification of nature as a servant to human kind. Both practices give misguided representations that nature is something which is ours to have. This way of seeing is an anthropocentric hangover that has no place in contemporary aesthetics because the belief that nature is ours to have because it belongs to humans is outdated and no longer practical or realistic in today’s world. 

19th century landscape painting is from a time when all people believed all of everything on Earth was here exclusively for humans to exploit, consume and dominate as they please. There were scientists and thinkers during this century who began to consider that perhaps nature was not here for us. Alfred Russell Wallace wrote in his book, The Malay Archipelago, that he noticed that very large fruits grow on very tall trees throughout the region. He suspected if one of these large fruits should fall on a human from such a height, it would likely kill them. He questioned why and if these plants were truly put there by god with exclusive reference to human kind. I am guessing that at the time, not many Europeans had seen large fruits growing on incredibly lofty trees.

Another figure, who had thoughts like this in the same era, was Henry David Thoreau. His book Walden explores what it is to live off the land without exploiting the land or the creatures on it. He did not hunt or keep animals and he grew a permaculture-esque farm/garden. He did this as capitalism was still growing into the dominant way of living in the western world. It is incredibly compelling to read the experiences of someone rejecting the latest fashion trends, a glamorous life based around financial assets and the need to eat meat on a daily basis in the context of that particular moment on the timeline of human history. The themes central to this book examine the state of the world and the ways in which people live on it and engage with it, the observations Thoreau makes are pertinent to scrutinising how we exist today.

Sunrise - Claude Monet

Landscape painting from this time does not share the same progressive thinking. At least, if it did at all, that is not why the paintings are cherished today. The 3 examples I have chosen, each show a romanticised view of a landscape that has been largely altered by the domineering presence of humans. The views also show people working or give the idea of work. Work is an unnatural process exclusive to humanity, it is the method and process of human domination of nature. In his book, Future Primitive Revisited, John Zerzan refers to this as the division of labour. Zerzan explains that there is a symbiotic relationship between the division of labour and domestication of humanity and nature that perpetuates negative cycles in human social structures.

Monet’s Sunrise shows what is still celebrated today as a beautiful sunrise scene. In reality it is a factory. Based on the era in which it was painted, it is presumably full of workers in poor working conditions. The factory is causing a great smog which is completely altering how the view of the river before it appears. The painting beautifies the cancerous smog as scenic and romanticises the factory as if it is something other than an eyesore, filled with miserable people. By extension, it celebrates the idea that humans and nature are here purely to serve capitalism by being functional workers. Humanity, in this painting, is not shown as a part of nature but as a tool for its subjugation.

The Hay Wain - John Constable

The Hay Wain by John Constable gives us a peaceful view of a man working the landscape of his farm with his horse and his dog. This painting is renowned for its beauty. Constable’s paintings have been so celebrated, that the entire area where they were mostly created is still preserved to this day as the Dedham Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty (ANOB). This so-called beauty is the farmed landscape of south-east England. This area was once, in its entirety; ancient, deciduous woodland but is no longer so due to the consequences of work and human activity.

This molestation of an entire habitat is something the British government seeks to preserve for tourism and capital gain. This is done under the guise of maintaining the lie that the quiet countryside of little England is; A: a reality available for all to attain B: a beautiful thing because it is still in it’s natural state. Again, within a painting celebrated for its beauty in depicting nature, we have ugliness and artificiality. A destroyed habitat, forced animal labour of the horse, a dog breed (Border Collie) selectively bred to exploit obsessive behavioural tendencies and forced to work. Here again, humans, animals and the land represent the means of the domestication of nature in order to create an artificial, human-dominated landscape. This painting tells us that nature only has merit if it has a purpose in serving the functionality of the human world. Nothing about it is natural, or beautiful.

Ivy Bridge, Devonshire - JMW Turner

Ivy Bridge, Devonshire by JMW Turner is similar to the previously mentioned landscape paintings. The natural landscape is sliced by a bridge being crossed by a horse-drawn cart in an area of England densely littered with ANOBs. I am not certain if each of the artists’ intentions were necessarily to celebrate these altered and artificial landscapes as natural beauty in their works. It is said that Turner wrote a poem of his experiences working on the Devonshire commissions revealing that the landscape raised questions about morality for him. It could be that Turner and the landscape painters of the 19th century were attempting to expose the fakeness of the setup. Nonetheless, the paintings are today incorrectly treasured as depicting the beauty of the world in it’s natural state.

The foundation of the idea that these paintings display to us natural beauty come from the views of people who lived in an era when it was conventional to believe that the Earth and nature were there for humans to sculpt in whatever way they liked. This essentially means that to celebrate these paintings today as natural and beautiful is to celebrate human domination of Earth and the domestication of its people and creatures. This celebration preserves two great lies. The first lie is that the Earth, as manipulated by humans, is in it’s natural state. The second lie; This manipulation, caused by human domination, is beautiful.

Thomas Heaton

All of the contemporary-traditional landscape photographers I have looked at are well known on instagram and each of their posts boast thousands of likes, often in the name of conservation. When I look at their photographs, I feel uninspired. How could this be so? Nature is inspiring. They are technically spectacular photographs of incredible scenery but post-production techniques such as the over-saturation of the colours create an unrealness. This is uncomfortable because it presents nature as having to be more than what it actually is to be considered a sight worthy of seeing. While thousands of people do engage with these photographs online, what does it do now for changing how we intereact with nature? How does it change the fundamental way we see the world and does it seek to change the anthropocentric viewpoint that the world is here for us?

Daniel Kordan

This style of photography has not progressed much since Ansel Adams pioneered it last century. Someone told me that this kind of photography is important because it shows people what we stand to lose if humans continue on this path of domination and extraction of nature. I ask the question then, is this tactic flawed? This method of revealing the beauty of nature in photography is not new. It has been a somewhat ubiquitos model for conservation and widespread awareness of nature in photography since Ansel Adams began his career in the 1920s. While this has achieved some huge successes in protecting wild landscapes, these very landscapes are still under threat.

Ansel Adams, Cathedral Peak and Lake, Yosemite National Park, 1938

Climate change, habitat & biodiversity loss are not known as entities who recognise borders and boundaries. Our activies outside proctected areas affect what is within them. I view this kind of photography as a green-washing activity. Consciously our not, these photographers play into the narrative that the landscape is something to be conquered. This is reflected in the corporate funding these photographers receive to travel the world and take these spectacular shots and then share them online with generic captions such as “Get out there and live it.” 

The consequnece of this tactic inspires swarms of amateur photographers into contributing to destructive tourism practices, not to mention the volume of iphones and camera gear purchased. These tourists flood the landscape and attempt to recreate, often successfully, the style of their favourite landscape photographers’ work. They too can share the images on social media and receive kudos for how in touch with nature they are, compliments are given to their highly technical photography. 

This style of photography ignores at large the impacts of current ways in which the human world engages with nature. These photographers leave the inevitable cigarette-butts, food packaging and other litter spread throughout almost any natural landscape out of frame. They might not even see the trash, it is hard to see human waste in a landscape when you do not want to see it. If photographs dealing with conservation of nature showed us the real way in which we interact with nature, would humans therefore be able to finally see nature?

This raises the question of what makes the professional a more worthy artist than the amateur recreationists? The method is also boring, old fashioned and it does not work. Why is climate change etc. getting worse if the tactic of showing people what we might lose is successful? This is because it is not, truly successful. It creates a narrative that the world is our pretty little thing to look at and this objectifies it. Photographers are asking people to look, but not see. In essence, professional landscape photographers whore out to us 5-second-views of a world that really requires vast amounts of time invested in multi-sensory observation to actually see. This tactic does nothing to push for a fundamental shift in how all humans interact with the more-than-human natural world because it does nothing to ensure that nature is seen. If nature is not even seen, how can we challenge the ways which humans see it and engage with it? The practice of how nature is represented in art must change in order to facilitate a change in the ideological practice of seeing nature.

Psychescape - Terri Loewenthal

Photographers like Terri Loewenthal speculate that perhaps the views of nature offered from art is a gendered issue and that we are too used to male-dominated views of the world. She seeks to reject technically-accurate recreations of landscape through photography by choosing to explore imperfection with her photographic practice. She does this in her Psychescape series of works by using a hand-built optic that manipulates the colours and shapes in a photograph at the moment of shooting. She is changing how her camera sees the world, in order to ask us to change how we see the world. Loewenthal intends to achieve this, unlike Ansel Adams and so many after him, by not keeping the human world out of shot. To show views of nature that include humanity which are beautiful in their coexistence.

Contemporary landscape photography and traditional 19th century landscape painting share a similar view of the world in both aesthetics and ideology. They continue to feed a narrative that the human-world is outside of the natural world, that the two are separate.  The practice of doing so has led to a great un-seeing of nature from humans in art and lived experience. We know that we need to change the ways in which humans live and interact with the world in order to ensure that humans can continue to exist in the world. We know that it is necessary for humans to coexist with nature in order to take steps in dealing with climate change and other such natural world catastrophes of the contemporary era. For a long time, landscape painting and landscape photography has refused to play a role in changing how we see nature by showing human dominated views and misleading interpretations of the way that nature is before us. Artists are now seeking to show that humans and nature are part of the same whole. Rejecting views which celebrate the human domination and domestication of nature by bringing the interconnectedness of humans and nature into aesthetics is key to fundamentally shifting the role of art in shaping how humans see nature.

[sadbirder]

“Second right, second right, first left, repeat.” I took these instructions straight from an article Maisie Ridgway wrote about psychogeography for The Double Negative. I wanted to go for a truly aimless walk. I thought the best way for me to achieve this would be to follow directions that had no relation to my location and to do so without knowing what I’ll pass or where I’ll end up. Honestly, I thought that because these instructions were part of an article about psychogeography, they therefore must be part of the official rules of aimless walking. Rules I had not heard of but naively believed to exist.

I chose what must have been one of the gnarliest days of weather this entire winter to embark on my activity. Why? Well, that’s because when I get an impulse to do something, barely anything else in the world exists to me beyond that impulse. That’s probably a problem, but let’s not unpack that here. I loaded a small shoulder bag with a point-and-shoot 35mm camera, a handmade A6 sketchbook, some pens, and begrudgingly, my iPhone. I put on two jackets, left my house and began following my instructions. I was met with incredibly strong winds and sideways snowfall. It was -7 degrees celsius that day.

At first, I was quite pleased with how my instructions were working for me. I quickly came to a street very near to my home which I had never walked on before. The next turn took me to an alley on that same street, some stairs led to what looked like a house or a church. There was a gate at the top of the stairs which said something about private property and CCTV. I got paranoid and returned the way I came. It was at this point my mood began to shift. I started to focus my attention on the threat the security camera presented.

Allan Gardner explores this in a piece writing for his Expanding And Contracting Barriers residency. He explains that CCTV cameras fitted with bird spikes make no effort to hide the violence they imply and that this type of disembodied threat presents itself as above dialogue. In this writing, he reflects that the people around him were noticeably in discomfort when they saw him photographing the security cameras and fences, yet were comfortable with the presence of cameras that did not have humans attached to them. I often think of these observations by Gardner when I am walking and I encounter any security measures decisively suggesting threat. On this walk, I considered how this implied violence is generally accepted and although it does not hide itself, it remains unseen.

I hate snow. As my mood deteriorated, I remembered I had heard somewhere that snow was used in traditional painting to symbolise a masked ugliness. This became pertinent to the moment as I noticed people sledging and having snowball fights. Enjoying themselves a little bit, having spent winter in a lockdown due to the pandemic. I felt like their enjoyment of the snow was masking the ugliness of what it is to experience a lockdown. There is certainly a truth to this however, I am going to admit that it was me who was the ugliness in that moment. I was feeling extremely bitter and I was projecting those feelings onto the people I saw because I am far too invested in my hatred for snow.  

I think my bitterness came from the fact that the instructions I was following began to feel like an objective. My walk wasn’t aimless at all. I was busy counting rights and lefts trying to make sure I stuck to the plan. I was sore from other physical exertion that week and fatigued from a month or so of not sleeping well. I needed rest. Instead I walked 10km in a blizzard. The instructions became frustrating, so I did away with them.

As I walked without any plan, my camera battery kept freezing due to the cold. I turned my attention to the small sketchbook I brought with me. I wrote a poem while still moving.

It was shit.

I received a phone call from my mother. I was happy to hear from her and felt glad that I had decided to bring my phone with me. We haven’t seen each other for a year and two months because of this stupid virus. I complained about my walking task not going well and she empathised. She was worried that her food supplies would not arrive in time because of the snow affecting the roads. I empathised. By the time the call was over, my walk had taken me to a path in Seaton Park that I knew well.

I really, really needed to pee.

It’s much harder to pee in public during the winter, the trees and bushes provide minimal cover because they have dropped their leaves. Every time I get in this situation, I think about how we’ve constructed a society where it is difficult to be well-hydrated. Basic needs are somewhat secondary to politeness. I understand that the laws on public urination are intended to protect people but it does not stop the practicality being a problem. It is forbidden to urinate anywhere other than a toilet, but all the public toilets are closed and no one is allowed to enter anyone’s home. An adult needs to drink 3 litres of water a day to maintain adequate hydration, more if they are moving a lot. When someone drinks this much (what could be considered the normal amount) they will need to urinate roughly once every hour. My walk was 2 hours and 7 minutes, you do the math. The implication is; do not pee if you cannot access a toilet. The solution is; do not drink enough water. So-called advanced civilisation is deeply flawed if the uncontrollable bodily function of expelling the contents of one’s bladder is prohibited and the means for obedience is to be dehydrated. Basic human needs are not, truly, being met.

I peed in a bush.

I walked under a tree that had fallen across the path. I walk under it often, it’s been a bridge over the path for some years now. It does not fit with the city’s general molestation of natural space to present itself as tidy and for this reason, I have always wondered why it has not been cleared away. I noticed something new about the tree on this walk. This tree, that I had always assumed to be a single tree, was actually two trees. The lower tree had naturally grown across the path in this way, still firmly rooted on the other side of the fence, on the steep bank of the River Don. The upper tree was the fallen tree. It has fallen in such a way that it landed across the tree that grows over the path. The lower, rooted tree now supports the upper, fallen tree and miraculously, this prevents the fallen tree from sliding down the embankment into the Don. The unlikeliness of this scenario is what makes it beautiful. Perhaps the person responsible for keeping Seaton Park’s natural assets tidy also noticed this and felt the same way. I am thankful that the trees have been left as they are.

Evening was approaching and the air had become still. Often the wind dies off completely at dusk in Aberdeen, a weather phenomenon known as temperature inversion. It was silent, I could not hear any birds. I did not notice any for the duration of my walk. Do they also hate the snow? Towards the end of my walk my mood began to improve again. I considered that a key principle of psychogeography is unknowing in order to facilitate discovery, within even the most familiar environments. I found the instructions I chose to follow an inhibiting factor to my aimless walk, although they did lead to some discovery. It was only when I abandoned my plan and followed an unconscious path that I was able to find a flow and an aimlessness in my walk. How could there possibly be a rulebook for this type of activity? I was foolish to think so.