12/26) Seeing through a glass darkly - towards an aesthetic of uncivilisation

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Seeing through a glass darkly - towards an aesthetic of uncivilisation

by Charlotte Du Cann, originally published by Dark Mountain Project  | TODAY

Laurence Edwards with Creek Man in the Suffolk marshes

"Those people were some kind of solution"
(‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, CF Cavafy)

I’m exploring a territory I have not stepped into before. Maybe none of us have yet. I am not sure if aesthetic is the right word for it, but it’s the one that comes to me as I begin a new role as the arts editor for the next Dark Mountain collection, as the editorial crew sift through the material for a fifth volume in a fifth uncivilised year.

Images form an intrinsic part of the Dark Mountain anthologies – photographs, paintings, drawing and illustration appear in all of them. The books themselves are beautifully and deliberately constructed; handsome hardbacks with covers the colour of damsons and field maple leaves. A physical thing you wouldn’t want to throw away. But what about the look and feel of the Dark Mountain Project that extends beyond its text? Is there an aesthetic we share as writers and artists, makers and thinkers? And if so how can we best showcase it within the pages of a book?

Capitalism Hill by Lucca Benney from The Crisis of Civilisation

The team (that’s Paul Kingsnorth, Dougald Hine, Nick Hunt, Adrienne Odasso and myself) are now looking for new visual work for Dark Mountain 5 and 6, so this post is an invitation to contribute as well as an exploration. I wanted to talk about aesthetics in a wider context, because, even though I have long rejected the words that once earned me a good living in the city – style, design, fashion, taste – I know the look of things, their shape and form, are as important a part of a new narrative as words. The fact that civilisation holds us so tightly in its unkind embrace is not only because it controls what some call ‘industrialised storytelling’, but also because it manufactures the images that powerfully and unconsciously distract and misinform us, keep us endlessly looking at the shiny surfaces of what we feel is our cultural reality,

The Visitors by Rima Staines

I want to ask: what are the arts of uncivilisation? What happens outside the gallery and the multiplex, what are the barbarian images that might liberate our vision, that bring us home? If we live in a culture that is separated from and in control of what is seen, how can we make an unofficial art created within experience to include dimensions our ordinary attention might miss? Behavioural scientists observe that change happens slowly and deliberately over time but artists know it happens in a split second: a chink in the door, a wild unexpected moment that appears before you and for no reason you change lanes. A flash of quicksilver that can transform the dark materials of a whole culture.

When I walked through the trees at the Uncivilisation Festival past sticks arranged in a circle on the ground, people in animal masks, slates hanging from the boughs of a tree, I recognised something that made sense of a long journey I had once made.

A coyote on a television looking across a valley, a hare leaping inside a poem, Rima Staines’ Weed Wife covered in flowers on a sheet of oak, Dougie Strang’s Charnel House for Roadkill, like an archaic Tardis on the steps of the Glasgow Art Gallery.

Charnel House by Dougie Strang (left) door detail (right) underneath the arches

uncivilising the eye

I have to tell you a story about the journey. Because that’s where this exploration begins.

Late ‘80s,walking down Bond Street, my eye is caught by a room full of vast chunks of stone and a pale suit hanging on the wall – an Anthony D’Offay exhibition of Joseph Beuys’ The End of the Twentieth Century. The stones are hewn from basalt, a stone that will form Beuys’ perhaps most famous work, the planting of 7,000 oaks in the city of Kassel in Germany. The suit is made of felt, the material the artist was wrapped in by nomads when his Luftwaffe plane crashed in the snowy wastes of Crimea. Felt and fat saved his life, but they also transformed his life. They became the materials that defined his art. On a video Beuys is telling the world: in the future everyman will be king.

I could say this was the moment I walked out of galleries and stopped writing copy about Bond Street. Because shortly afterwards I left the city whose high culture I had been steeped in for 35 years. The change happens quickly but it sometimes takes years to thrive in the world without those beautiful clever things that shielded and once defined you.

Cairn for Lost Species by Andreas Kornwall; Walk of 7 Cairns by Richard Long

Roland Barthes in his elegant deconstruction of the bourgeois mindset,Mythologies, laments how hard it is to forge a culture unbound from a market economy. He points to a painting of a Dutch interior where a wealthy burgher sits surrounded by his possessions. His library, bolts of cloths, furniture. Shipped from all round the world, the goods set a pattern for material desire that has become the stuff of Sunday colour supplements ever since.

This is the art of civilisation. Globalised goods, fetishisation, possession. This is mine, all mine! Houses, horses, naked women, rich and poor, the painter who paints the canvas and the canvas itself. And even when art has rebelled against the pattern in a hundred dexterous and avant-garde moves the painting (or sculpture, or drawing) is still possessed. It is still property, a commodity in the minds and hands of those who could buy it – once the Church and then the collector and the State museum.

Honeyscribe – lightbox installation by Amy Shelton

What do art and aesthetics look like within the frame of collapse? What does photography look like that is not alienated from its subject? How do we love the world in a time of extinction? I look at my own collapse in order to see what that might mean. Because although I was educated in the dominant culture, there were strains of an uncivilised aesthetic that ran counter to everything I was taught, flowing dangerously beneath the surface like the river Styx. I wrote about the one perfect gleaming designer chair but my eye was always caught by rougher stuff that felt it had content and not just form. Like a linguist in search of a lost language, I would sometimes stumble upon its broken vocabularly.

A circle of driftwood in Derek Jarman’s garden, a spiral of stones on a table at Kettles Yard, a path that led through the tundra, walked by Richard Long.

These were the creative salvage years in London where makers like Tom Binns conjured ‘unjewelry’ from keys he found in the Thames foreshore or seaglass from his native Donegal; where welders like Tom Dixon made furniture from scrap metal. Post-punk warehouse years before corporate style had taken hold, when the original cut of your coat, or tribal marking distinguished you. There were chinks everywhere if you looked.

Fish mural, Cayton Bay, Scarborough, by Phlegm

One of those chinks I went through in Bond Street and found myself in Mexico. To liberate yourself from the mindset, you sometimes have to leave the city that bore you, or crash into another territory entirely.

In Mexico I did not go to museums or churches. I watched market squares and mountains, the colours and the vernacular of places. Later I looked at plants and at dreams. For six years I stopped writing and taking photographs, took out a notebook and studied living forms and the shapes of my imagination. I was uncivilising my eyes: shifting my attention, away from an aesthetic moulded by the hard lines of Balenciaga and Mondrian and Diane Arbus. I learned not to be enticed by the siren images, the fairy world of haute couture and Hollywood.

Monkshood shoot by Karl Blossfeld

I learned to wait in the long American afternoons, for the slow and deep and resonant thing to appear.

Architectural details in Karl Blossfeld studies of seeds and leaf; Eliot Porter’sportraits of the boojams and elephant gums in the desert landscape of Baja California.

It was as if I had never paid attention before to the world. These glimpses became the main track: images that were archaic and aboriginal, that spoke of trees and elements and beasts and weather, that linked the people to the dreaming of the planet. The rough beauty of the woodcut, the mythic fairytale, rock and cave painting, the shapes that follow the contours of the earth. The art that invites us to engage and remember, rather than possess and to forget. To ask questions rather than feel superior with our great knowledge of paintings and history.

Although I did not go to exhbitions in these years, I met artists. I met scultors and painters who lived in Bogota and the Arizona desert. I met the Slovenian peformance artist, Marko Modic, on his way back north from Tierra del Fuego where he had travelled alone with a dog and a camera. Marko was an extreme caver and mountaineer and he brought that wildness and strangeness into every room he entered. And that’s when I realised that the buying and showing was not the true function of art. It was the practice of the artist themselves: their capacity to live against the grain, the shape they made, the line they took.

Corn dolly by Anne-Marie Culhane

From them I learned that the ancestors do not look like the gods. That barbarians do not speak in perfect prose. All artists wait for Prometheus to arrive with his firebrand to lighten a darkened world. The best of them know that time is a gift, not a curse, and that waiting is part of the art. That all paths lead inevitably away from Rome.

The artist is the one who can find the chink in the door and allow us to push it open. In a fixed and atrophied world they act as strange attractors bringing chaos and freedom and new life. Their work and their practice break dimensions in time and space, throw wild seeds into monocultures. In a disconnected world they bring connection. And sometimes they bring us back.

Following the track of the coyote

There is a moment of return and that too comes as a surprise.

I am in the Museum of East Anglian Life, at an event called What if . . . . the seas keep rising? As the director of nef and a woman advisor from Natural England talk about climate change and what this might mean to the marshlands and coastline of Suffolk, there is a photograph on the wall that has transfixed me.

It’s by the sculptor, Laurence Edwards. Two men with long poles are taking clay giants on a raft down the river Ore. These are the Creek Men, the beings of these waterlands that have emerged from the landscape, from the artist’s imagination and from his hands. I can’t stop looking at that image. Like an anchor among a babble of voices that I will not remember, it was an image of belonging that made sense of everything.

High Water Mark by Laurence Lord (Book 2)

I realise now what grabbed me was something that Mexico taught me years ago. At some point the ancestors return and reclaim the earth. All civilisations which ignore their original blueprint live out the consequences of that defection. And whether you understand ‘the ancestors’ as the primordial forces that govern this planet, or a part of yourself that makes sense of everything, to which you are loyal in spite of your upbringing, they are always here: we just have to see and feel them. Make space for them in paper and stone, in a corner of our tidy lives.

In that journey I understood that artists are the ones that remember the tracks those ancestors made in the beginning. Those shapes and colours appear in dreams and on canvas, and artists follow them, in the cities and on the seashore, walking across the land, reminding all of us who watch them of the way back. And when the rational world seems to make less and less sense, becomes more and more incoherent, so it is that the artists come with their intelligence and their wit, their delicate brushstrokes, the rivermud under their fingernails, their mask and their surprise to push the door.

It is my hope as the new ‘curator’ of the Dark Mountain pages dedicated to visual content, that we will be able to publish some of those uncivilised shapes and colours, lines and images. We are now open for submsissions for original work (paintings, drawing, photography) for the next two volumes (Dark Mountain 5 and 6). We are also actively seeking to commission illustrators for some of the stories and poetry, as well as strong images from the four Uncivilisaition Festivals 2010-2013. Please look at the submission guidelines for details and send submissions to charlotte@dark-mountain.net. Deadline is 2 January.

Poster for Dark Mountain 3 by Mattias Jones (designed Andy Garside)

Images and artists: Laurence Edwards with Creek Man, Butley Creek, Suffolk; Capitalism Hill by Lucca Benney for the documentary, Crisis of Civilisation; The Visitors by Rima Staines; Cayton Bay, Scarbourough by Phlegm; Corn dollies byAnne-Marie Culhane; Cairn by Andreas Korneval‎l (Book 4); Walk of Seven Cairns by Richard Long; High Water Mark by Laurence Lord (Book 2); poster for Dark Mountain 3 launch – cover art by Matthias Jones, design by Andy Garside

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-12-05/seeing-through-a-glass-darkly-towards-an-aesthetic-of-uncivilisation

Animating The Crises

By Lucca Benney 
Animator of The Crisis of Civilization

The animations in the film are a way of striking a balance between metaphoric images and clear explanations of some of the more complicated parts of Nafeez’s thesis. They are like the third character of the film, the other two being Nafeez Ahmed’s interview and the stock footage which makes up most of the images. Together all three hopefully combine in a way that will capture the audiences imagination whilst interrogating the complexities of modern society in an accessible way. It was very exciting to be involved in a project in which I was illustrating the problems with capitalism and contemporary Western ideologies that motivate me to take action in my life, and creating imagery which will hopefully inspire others too.

My main aim with the animations was to represent Nafeez’s words as much as possible so that it would make sense without listening to it. I felt that in contrast to the stock footage it had to be almost obvious. However, the two also had to compliment each other and so it was important to create imaginative and vivid images that really would be characters in their own right. In a film like this the animations are sometimes more real than the rest of footage (except the interview) and I wanted the audience to feel grounded whenever it came back to them.

Throughout the whole process I was experimenting with techniques and there are lots of sequences that ended up discarded and forgotten. This is partly because there was not much time to prepare, we just launched straight into it and suddenly we were making a feature film – and also that this was my first big animation project. I had to get out of my usual mindset when drawing or painting where I can be more fluid and subtle, instead thinking through each sequence meticulously. Firstly, what words and ideas are we communicating? Can it be turned into a short narrative, and are there specific figures/words that need to be brought out of the speech? I would work with Dean to come up with a concept, often creating a character that would personify an element of the crises.

The next part was breaking it down, working out which bits were going to move and creating story boards which usually changed halfway through animating when I realised it wouldn’t work out in reality like I’d imagined. Sometimes, like in the Carbon Credits sequence and the last shot, there was some subtle background movement (the smoke from the factory) which I would do with paint or pencil. In the foreground the movement was usually with cut-outs (the business man waving his carbon credit tickets).

This way I could re-do the backgrounds but didn’t have to re-make the main figures if it went wrong. It also created a specific style for most of the animations which was simple and child-like in some respects but could have quite a lot of detail on the figures themselves. There are however different styles which bring to life different sections,  and I was definitely influenced by the archive films that Dean and I both spent hours watching.

The black and white sequences in International Terrorism were created specifically for that section, using only white paper cut into lots of different smaller shapes which could merge together to create the illusion of movement. I was inspired by the early animations of Lotte Reiniger.

All the stop-frame animating was done by hand with paper, paint, scissors, blue-tack, a light, a camera and a dark room. The photos were then put onto the computer where Dean sped them up to get the timings right, and most importantly coloured them creating really vivid images. Using cut out characters mixed with painted backgrounds was a technique I had experimented with in the music video Dean and I created for The Sound Of Rum earlier in 2010, which was the first time both of us had tried any animation.

Sitting in a dark room for months, doing nothing else but meticulous cutting out and millimeter movements, is not something I had done before and it sent me stir crazy at times. I started to see everything in reality as an animation, not in fluid movements but like a series of photographs. It is important do things outside in the world too and not get too cut off from what is really going on on your doorstep. I’ve illustrated the ‘crises’ and it’s time to take action!

Lucca Benney‘s work on The Crisis Of Civilization has been her first involvement with a feature film.

http://crisisofcivilization.com/animating-the-crises/

A Zen View Upon the World (Less is More)

by Øyvind Holmstad, originally published by Naturkonservativ  | TODAY

This article is inspired by the Alexandrine pattern 134, Zen View. The pattern states: “The archetypal zen view occurs in a famous Japanese house, which gives this pattern its name.”

Let’s start with listening to the wisdom of A Pattern Language (Please note that the illustrations of the original text are missing):

 A Buddhist monk lived high in the mountains, in a small stone house. Far, far in the distance was the ocean, visible and beautiful from the mountains. But it was not visible from the monk’s house itself, nor from the approach road to the house. However, in front of the house there stood a courtyard surrounded by a thick stone wall. As one came to the house, one passed through a gate into this court, and then diagonally across the court to the front door of the house. On the far side of the courtyard there was a slit in the wall, narrow and diagonal, cut through the thickness of the wall. As a person walked across the court, at one spot, where his position lined up with the slit in the wall, for an instant, he could see the ocean. And then he was past it once again, and went into the house.

What is it that happens in this courtyard? The view of the distant sea is so restrained that it stays alive forever. Who, that has ever seen that view, can ever forget it? Its power will never fade. Even for the man who lives there, coming past that view day after day for fifty years, it will still be alive.

This is the essence of the problem with any view. It is a beautiful thing. One wants to enjoy it and dink it in every day. But the more open it is, the more obvious, the more it shouts, the sooner it will fade. Gradually it will come part of the building, like the wallpaper; and the intensity of its beauty will no longer be accessible for the people who live there. - A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et.al., page 642 – 643

Today, at least in Norway, we have too much of everything, and hence we value nothing. My father said that when he was a child they got an orange for Christmas. This was the only orange they got throughout the year. I can just imagine the intensity they felt of the flavor of this one orange, and how they wanted every bite to last forever. I can imagine how images of distant tropical paradises awoke in their minds. In this way this one orange for the year, enjoyed on Christmas Eve, became a “zen view” of flavors and distant worlds.

Now at the supermarket, oranges are amongst the cheapest of fruits — you can eat as many as you like whenever you want, and you grab and chew an orange without thinking. This once exotic fruit has become as ordinary as snow in wintertime. You don’t notice it. It can be the same with a spoiled view.

Definitely, less is more! Too much of something dulls our senses and reduces quality of life. Over-consumption and consumerism destroy our awareness and appreciation for the ecosystems that surround us. We all become like spoiled children on the Earth.

 Per capita consumption in the United States as measured by gross national product (GNP) has more than doubled since 1969, with little detectable change in people’s self-expressed levels of happiness and satisfaction with life as a whole. - Joshua Farley

Big window panes have become an industrial-modernistic dogma, although Alexander has counter-proved it in pattern 134 and other patterns. Still, they just don’t destroy the view, they also destroy the building.

 Large, plain objects or surfaces disturb the observer by presenting no information — the most disturbing being surfaces of glass or mirrors that prevent the eye from even focusing on them. We instantly look for reference points, either in a form’s interior, or at its edge. We need to comprehend a structure as quickly as possible, to make sure that it poses no threat to us. Large uniform regions with abrupt, ill-defined boundaries generate physiological distress as the instrument (namely, the eye/brain system) seeks visual information that isn’t there, thus frustrating our cognitive process. - The Sensory Necessity for Ornament, by Nikos A. Salingaros

Like it or not, here we are touching one of the major problems with earthships, they often have a front consisting of large surfaces of big window panes, and this way they become alien looking. This is something that should be taken very seriously by the earthship people, as I’m sure that with more focus on our sensory necessities this problem can be solved.

I like to close this article with the conclusion of pattern 134, Zen View:

 If there is a beautiful view, don’t spoil it by building huge windows that gape incessantly at it. Instead, put the windows which look onto the view at places of transition – along paths, in hallways, in entry ways, on stairs, between rooms.

If the view window is correctly placed, people will see a glimpse of the distant view as they come up to the window or pass it: but the view is never visible from the places where people stay. - Christopher Alexander

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-12-05/a-zen-view-upon-the-world-less-is-more