Regeneration Nightmares Vol 1

Part of the day job is working with folks who don't get much of a say in how their environment is built and managed.

Part of what we do is host events that are accessible, fun and create a casual atmosphere that enables people to voice their opinions on decisions that will affect their places. We take these opinions and ensure they influence the planning decisions from the beginning of the project.

This is a cartoon I made a while back which we were going to use in a piece of promo that didn't quite come off.

It is, of course, a work of fiction and no resemblance to any real person, living or dead, or any public art project, is intended or implied.

Red Dot or Not

Three and a half easy ways to earn a living as an artist

The Red Dot is the goal of many artists. The Red Dot confers on the artist (after a suitable wait for the gallery to process the payment and remove their commission) almost superhuman powers such as the ability to pay rent or their overdue electricity bill. In quantity the Red Dot can produce a kind of mania and artists who have the Red Dot can be seen in supermarkets spending lavishly on basic food items that are not on special or near their sell-by date. This all sounds great but beware. Artists who have too many Red Dots may be seen by commercial galleries as “product”. Do you really want to be painting the same picture in ten years time? And remember, you’re only as good as your last show.

Then there are artists who shun the Red Dot. For them it is a symbol of a system that forces artists to sell their souls and prostitute their abilities to produce meaningless gewgaws for the bourgeoisie. They are the Cutting Edge, challenging the concepts and conceits of Art and refusing to sell out to the system. They remain true to themselves by competing for official government support in the form of grants and residencies. Filling out application forms and lobbying decision makers can often be time consuming and in many cases these artists see grant applications and social networking as part of their art form.

The third way to earn a living as an artist is to earn a living doing something else. What that might be depends on the artist but it is often wise to choose something that offers flexible hours and does not involve creativity so that can be saved for making art. Administration and hospitality are popular choices. Infantry soldier and trawler fisherman less so. Nightshifts can be handy for artists who prefer to work in daylight. Aside from the ability to eat and pay rent, a big advantage of this method is that it allows artists to experience "real life" which in turn can give their art more "meaning". Experiencing real life, along with a working class background and claiming an indigenous great-grandmother are essential for any artist who wants to be written about in a lifestyle magazine. Being attractive and/or having a nice house can also help.

For artists at the beginning of their "career" (as it’s been called since the 80’s) it should be noted that none of these methods is guaranteed to net financial success. In only a few cases will the Red Dot sales approach make the artist permanently wealthy. Government agendas change often and only artists adept at predicting fashions can rely on grants. The third method is not without danger too. The seductive lure of eating regularly and being able to socialise with friends who have proper jobs can lead to voluntarily taking on more hours until there is little time left for art making. So the “three-and-a-halfth” method, and the most sustainable, is to do all three, in a balance that suits.

A final sober word of caution. Many students at Art School (or “university” as it’s been called since the 90’s) view the idea of doing nothing but make art as a sort of holy grail. When you’re surrounded by other people making art in a social atmosphere it’s easy to imagine doing just that for the rest of your days. The reality is that often art-making is a very solitary occupation and anyone considering being an artist for the rest of their lives should consider how they might balance that with other activities that keep them human. Even if you don’t need the money, maybe that barista job is a good idea.

Breathing New Life into an Old Routine

There’s a new coalition government in the UK and it seems there are commentators in the press who are worried that the ConDem Alliance will somehow fail the country. They worry that a government of two halves will not be able to make timely and accurate decisions, will compromise, fudge issues and fail to deliver on its election pledges. Surely not?

Aside from lobbyists having to work twice as hard with twice the budget it should be business as usual. What the press commentators fail to remember is that England has a long history of such alliances stretching back nearly a century. From Flanagan and Allen through Morecambe and Wise, Cannon and Ball to Reeves and Mortimer, the double act is a tried and tested method for pleasing the punters and should do well in the House of Commons. Here’s what Wikipedia says about it:

“The template for the modern double act began in the British music halls and the American vaudeville scene of the late nineteenth century. Here, the "straight man" was a necessity as he would repeat the lines of the "comic". This was done simply because the audience would be noisy, and repeating the joke gave the audience a fighting chance of hearing the joke and the comedians a fighting chance of getting a good reaction. Soon the dynamic developed so that the "straight man" became a more integral part of the act, setting up jokes that the comic could then deliver the "punchline" to.”

Which one will be the straight man? Who will get the louder laughs? It’s an exciting time in English politics and it’s all still up for grabs.

More about the double act on Wikipedia

The Root of All Evil

I read an article recently about a bicycle "upcycling" (the sexier added-value marketing version of recycling) operation in Daylesford, Victoria where the author claimed that any technology developed after the Stone Age was to blame for the planet being “in a mess”. This sort of woolly thinking is pretty common amongst the rank and file of the environmental movement, and the article finally prompted me to pull some of it apart for closer inspection.

Now, first off, unless the author is citing the Flintstones as his primary source material, the wheel is not a Stone Age technology. The oldest known wheel was built by the Sumerians in 3500 BC. I’ll also skip the fact that double-butted steel tubing, aluminium alloy, and the pneumatic tyre are also considerably more contemporary and, especially in the case of aluminium, hardly enviroguilt-free.

Then there’s the tacit assumption that the world is “in a mess”. It isn’t. Globally we have never been so healthy, wealthy and peaceful. Yes, there is suffering aplenty still going on. There is inequity, repression and violence in some parts of the world, but there are also large parts of it that are stable, reasonably peaceful and allow their citizens more freedom, food and subsidised dentistry than at any time in history. The fact that this is built to an extent on the inequity, repression and violence in other parts of the world is part of this post so stay with me, I’m not finished.

A lot of the world isn’t in a mess. In fact in so-called-developed countries the thought of losing our pleasant lifestyle is part of what makes so many of us afraid of the future. Our lifestyle allows us sufficient leisure time to create and nurture fears and it’s these fears, often stoked by the media and manipulated by the institutions of power, that turn any ring of change into the clanging chimes of catastrophe. The world isn’t in a mess, but it seems there’s always a mess waiting for us just around the corner. There must be, the thinking goes, because it’s nothing less than we deserve for being so comfortable. Sod’s Law.

Climate change may well be upon us. A large majority of climate experts agree that it is, and it seems reasonable to accept that is the case. Regardless of whether the cause is part of a natural cycle or the fact that we left the lights on last night, there’s a probability of some large changes in the world in the next few decades as populations shift, and it’s up to us to figure out ways to accommodate these changes.

Some folks fear change, others embrace it, and these two camps break down in the climate debate into adaptation and mitigation. Change isn’t bad, it’s how the world works whether we like it or not, and large scale change can offer us chances to make things better for many more folks in the world… if we’re smart and can grasp them. In the face of the perceived threat of climate change there’s the potential for unprecedented cooperation between nations, the opportunity to scrutinise and pick apart the iniquitous and exploitative systems that the global economy is built upon (see, I said I'd come back to it), and a million chances to do things better individually, as a community, nationally and globally. And the great thing about making these changes is that, even if climate sceptics are right, the effort won’t have been wasted because our world will be a better place than it was before. Win win.

Now on to the belief that technology is evil. Technology is not to blame for climate change any more than language is to blame for bad diplomacy. Laying blame on abstract concepts like technology which have no inherent will, agenda or direction is woolly thinking at its finest. Merino thinking.

Damning technology as the cause of the world’s ills is as pointless as holding it up to be the saviour of our future. Technology will be with us for as long as we are here, and every new invention will bring associated benefits and costs. Witness sustainable power generation. Solar? Wind? Hydro?Tidal? Flooded valleys, noise pollution, high production costs… nothing is free, nothing is without consequence. It’s up to us to debate and decide which consequences we can live with.

Those who believe in technology as a saviour seek comfort in a consequence-free future of time travel, anti-matter and fusion reactors. Those railing against technology comfort themselves by feeling they are opposing the institutions, governments and corporations that shape the development and deployment of technology. However, railing against technology plays into the hands of the capitalist system, giving producers new avenues to diversify their market, producing so-called “green” or “environmentally friendly” versions of the same product. Put “Eco” in front of the name and you can shift another million units of pretty much any old crap.

Problem or solution, any debate about technology is a distraction from more important questions. Harder questions. We would be better to examine our use of technology. We could examine technology’s unholy relationship with the institutions of power that have shaped the direction technology has taken; we could examine the marketing of technology and the confection of wants. Then we could dig deeper. We could examine our needs and desires. We could question our greed, our sense of fulfilment, our need for status or power. We could ask ourselves which pieces of the technology story, good or bad, we are willing to ignore when we tell it.

It seems we have a talent for filtering self-examination out of issues. Many folks today misuse the Christian New Testament quote when they say “money is the root of all evil”, neatly scapegoating yet another non-deterministic concept. Add back “the love of” to the quote and we have a much more penetrating critique. Let’s do the same for our relationships with technology, with power structures and with each other. Then we can start a conversation that’s going somewhere.

When The Drugs Don't Work

A recent review [i] ordered by the Department of Health in the UK on the use of anti-psychotic drugs on dementia sufferers states that as many as 144,000 people are being given the drugs unnecessarily. The report, authored by Sube Banerjee, professor of mental health and ageing at the institute of psychiatry at King's College London, reveals that excessive use of the medication causes an estimated 1,800 deaths and almost as many strokes among older people every year.

The drugs, used as “chemical restraints”, are given to people with dementia in care homes in order to reduce common behaviour patterns such as wandering, shouting and repeated questioning which make it difficult for staff to maintain an orderly and calm working environment. Anti-psychotics for older people? Like failed anti-histamines that made you too drowsy repositioned in the market as “sleep aids”, could this possibly be a re-branding of a drug based on a market gap rather than efficacy? Surely not! But wait, this isn’t a Big Pharma rant.

The care services minister, Phil Hope, accepted all the recommendations in the review and promised a fundamental change in the treatment of those suffering from dementia, however it seems that the focus will be on monitoring the use of the drugs, rather than real fundamental changes. This is unfortunate and a missed opportunity as the issue here is not more appropriate administration of chemical restraints.

Care homes are often places unlike anything that we have lived in before. Efficiently medical, the environment offers few cues to engagement, fewer clues to the activities we might perform as residents. Small wonder that folks are found to be shouting, questioning and wandering. Where’s the kitchen? Where’s my armchair? Why can't I make myself a cup of tea? The environments do not cause dementia, but I would like to see a study to plot the rate of deterioration in residents versus folks living “on the outside”. Morgan Spurlock, the maker of Super Size Me, should spend a month living in a care home as some residents do and measure his grip on reality. There has to be a movie in there somewhere.

The issue is that the environments we are forced into as we get older contain no emotional meaning for us. Why should that matter when the focus should be on medical care? Emotional meaning is held in a part of the brain that is one of the last to be damaged by dementia. Dr. John Zeisel who runs a care home network in the United States, writes that those living with dementia can still connect to the world around them, and those who love them, through art, music, touch and facial expression. According to Dr. Zeisel building care home environments that support a life with meaning has been proved to be at least as effective at reducing stress and anxiety as the anti-psychotic drugs.

Dr. Zeisel is one of the consultants on the Creative Spaces project. Run by Sensory Trust, the project brings people with dementia back together with members of their community to redesign the outdoor spaces in care homes run by Cornwall Care in the UK. This three year project seeks to create meaningful outdoor, semi-public spaces around care homes and to give residents the chance to reconnect emotionally both with the environments and with the community.

One in three of us will die with some form of dementia, and those with dementia live on average for four and a half years with the condition [ii]. If the creation of more meaningful environments can improve the quality of life for those with dementia, their families, carers and staff, surely that is the fundamental change we should see in care provision?

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[i] http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/nov/12/anti-psychotic-drugs-kill-dementia-patients

[ii]http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSL102289020080111

Sensory Trust's Creative Spaces project

I’m Still Here : A Breakthrough Approach to Understanding Someone Living with Alzheimer's

– John Zeisel

Inquiry by Design – John Zeisel

Alzheimer's statistics

Children, Violence and Pigs

I read recently that, according to the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychological Association, American Academy of Family Physicians and American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, media violence affects children’s behaviour, attitudes and values.

Well, I guess it does. All these heavyweight associations for our well-being agree that our children are exposed to images of violence more than at any time in our history. Apparently it makes them desensitized… but desensitized to what?

I was involved in a project to bring urban children out to farms to learn about where food comes from. These were exactly the sort of desensitized kids everyone imagines: vacant-eyed teenage skells straight out of a Porcupine Tree video, permanently hooked into their iPhones, iPods and X-Boxes. My experience was that when you put one of these desensitized fourteen year olds in front of a pig - in all its aromatic, hairy, snorty, slobbery, muscley, random, inquisitive pigginess – you see just how sensitive they really are. Pretty damn sensitive in my experience.

So, media violence may well desensitize our children to media violence, but certainly not to real live farm animals in search of an apple.

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that media violence does “affect children’s behaviour, attitudes and values” in a way that is permanent and undesirable. What should we do? The answer that we should somehow ban these images or prevent children from being exposed to them seems obvious. But here’s my argument: children today are not over-stimulated and desensitized. Children today are not more sophisticated than in the past. Compared to previous generations, children today - and I’m talking about western-urban children - live a thin, beige, flavourless existence where most of what they experience is vicarious and pre-packaged by media companies, global restaurant chains, and indoor leisure facilities. Their experience of the world outside their homes begins with the ballroom at Ikea and ends with the bus shelter opposite McDonalds. Their desensitization is not due to over-stimulation but to the terminal blandness of their immediate environment.

Children live an imprisoned life because of the fears their parents acquire from sensationalist media reportage. Perhaps desensitization to media violence is some sort of reaction to their parent’s fear. Perhaps it’s a preparation for going out into the world that they believe is just like the one the media report.

Creating communities and environments where children are free to roam outdoors, to experience things for themselves, to fall out of trees, to ride bikes, make mud pies, encounter strangers (shock!) and be home for dinner is the best antidote to media images of violence. And, because these images occur through television and the internet, if kids are outdoors finding out what the world is really like, they aren’t indoors watching them.

When I hear the word culture…

The sky is falling! The oceans are rising! We're doomed Captain Mannering! We urgently need to either:

1. Change our light bulbs

or

2. Give up everything and buy a goat and a gun

None of the visions offered by climate change enthusiasts is compelling because none of them offers us anything inspirational. I like goats, but even so there's just not enough va-va-voom to get me going. The goals are survivalist and the messages are the sort of apocalyptic ones that so many people get off on... the frisson of excitement that we're all stuffed.

What we need is an inspirational goal to work towards.

Culture is the only mechanism by which we can envision the future in any sort of positive way. It is also the glue which holds our society together. Cultural philosopher and writer Roger Scruton argues that absence of culture results in dysfunctional societies, citing as an example the collapse of Islamic culture and the corresponding rise of fundamentalism to fill the void.

In my experience folks sometimes bristle at the word “culture” ("when I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun"*), and usually in those cases the word seems synonymous with “the ballet and the opera”, with its attendant whiff of elitism and pretention. Luckily we now avoid the issue by using the phrase “cultural capital” instead which gives culture the free-market seal of approval as something that can be weighed, measured, valued and sold.

It’s fashionable to dismiss high culture – Dead White Male culture – as irrelevant, as of no further use, as somehow anti-democratic. But works of culture can give us a collective insight into the sublime, the beautiful, the utopian. They imagine other ways of being and lay them out for us in stories, pictures and music. Culture presents alternatives; neither as something to vote for, nor as something to go to war for, but as something we’re free to take to our hearts or dismiss. Of course, the truth is that our reactions are usually somewhere in between, and culture accommodates this too. It is rarely black or white, and you can put an X in every box if you like. Culture understands and embraces duality.

Culture helps us ask the right questions. Tolstoy’s question, “what shall we do and how shall we live?” has been the touchstone for Russian literature for decades and remains the fundamental question for us all. At its best, culture strips away the flim-flam that obscures the basic questions we need to ask. One of the criticisms often levelled at culture is that it’s not part of the so-called real world. Far from being a weakness, this is its central strength. Culture dispenses with budgetary constraints and political policy, skips over contemporary mores, dodges fashion and gets to the heart of the matter.

The ability of cultural activity to illuminate fundamental questions and to propose answers might well be the sole measure of its value. Using this measure we can see that the community art project that asks questions about the future of our village and illuminates the past is of value. War and Peace is of value. Elegy to the Spanish Republic is of value. The open mic night at the local pub is of value. The latest Europop song, Strictly Come Dancing or CSI, while entertaining, are less so.

We cannot envision any sort of sustainable, enjoyable future for ourselves without understanding and supporting cultural activity. The great thing about culture is that it is a dialogue that has been going on for millennia. We are each free to make our own contributions to the dialogue, in whatever form we choose (even if we’re not old enough to vote, or live in a country where we can't vote). If we fail to acknowledge culture as central to how we move into the future then we will be forced to rely, as we have been in the past, on the reactionary visions of politicians, religious leaders, multinational corporations, and prophets of doom. Pick one.

*often wrongly (but compellingly) attributed to Goebbels. The actual quote is a line from the 1933 play Schlageter by Hanns Johst, a Nazi propagandist and Poet Laureat. "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!" "Whenever I hear of culture... I release the safety catch of my Browning!" Not quite as snappy, but then brevity is the soul of wit.