Mick Hartley

Disembodied Ideals

And, keeping up the plinth theme, here's a Sunday Times piece, what are the big ideas driving the arts these days? which in the Art section features Marc Quinn, the man responsible for that statue of a pregnant Alison Lapper on the fourth plinth. So, what are the big ideas driving Art these days?

One of the essential things of the moment is tackling embodiment in an age of disembodiment. We live in virtual space as much as we do in real space. It’s to do with using the internet, e-mails and all those forms of communication. A lot of my work explores what it means to be a body living in the world. The Kate Moss sculpture is about disembodiment, because it’s a sculpture not of her as a person, but of her image. We measure our lives against disembodied ideals. This is a human trait, but becomes more prominent with new technology.

He's discovered celebrity, some 40 years after Warhol. 

I’m also interested in how we affect nature. Issues like climate change get refracted through the lens of my flower paintings. The flowers at the florists would never normally grow at the same time and in the same place. Many of them have been flown in. Human desire is shaping nature.

And he's discovered that people change nature, some 10,000 years after the introduction of agriculture.

I think we can infer from this that the big ideas in art nowadays are dressed-up old ideas.

Rethinking Plinths

In a post the other day I mentioned the problematic fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square, and it set me to thinking. The way forward, I believe, is to build some more plinths. I suggest six. These would then be the fifth plinth, the sixth plinth, the seventh plinth, the eighth plinth, the ninth plinth, and the tenth plinth.

To concentrate on the problem of what should go on the fourth plinth, and on the remaining, new, six plinths, is, I think, a distraction. The plinths are enough in themselves. In short, we need to rethink our idea of plinths. We should start by discarding the old prejudice which has it that plinths are only bases on which more prestigious works of art may be displayed. We must reclaim plinths from the condescension of the art world.

Leave the plinths alone then? Is this what I'm suggesting? Stick with bald bare plinths? Not entirely. I believe they would be best celebrated, not with the adornment of concrete works of art, but with the word: with novels or poems. My reasoning, put simply, is that the glory of the plinth lies not so much in its materiality, but in the beauty of the word by which it signifies its plinthness. Without it, a plinth becomes a mere platform, a base - a block of stone. Armed with its rightful name, it becomes something special, something worthy of our honour: to wit, a plinth.

The Mayor of London, instead of commissioning tedious lumps of sculpture from the likes of Antony Gormley, should instead be offering a prize for the best novel titled "The Fourth Plinth". I envisage it as a tightly-plotted murder mystery set in the seamy underworld of the Edwardian West End, but of course I wouldn't want to insist on that. Artistic freedom, plinth-wise, should be paramount.

Perhaps a novel is too much though. Novelists are notoriously difficult to direct, like cats. Poets however, the, um, dogs of the literary world (I'm not sure about this cats-dogs conceit, to be honest), are used to coming up with something on demand, like the poet laureate on the joyous occasion of a royal wedding. You could have a separate competitiion for each plinth. Or could there be a poet, a modern-day Dante or Pound, with the strength of vision to produce a series of plinth poems? "The Fourth Plinth", "The Fifth Plinth", or - more poetical, perhaps? - "Plinth the Fourth", Plinth the Fifth", and so on up to "Plinth the Tenth". What depths, what breadths, what lengths, what widths such a series of poems could aspire to!

The winning poems could be inscribed on the side of the plinths. There would be ceremonial unveilings. Boris Johnson would read them out, as flash bulbs popped. Thus, "The Tenth Plinth":

The blank plinth limns the lines of its conceit
casting the dimmed limp pith of its wealth
into the depth of its brief surcease.
Tenth?
Or can time tempt the tide of perfidy, enough to ask,
what of the ninth?
That it may, by dint of the ceaseless breath of its richness catch,
in the full-moonness of a September night,
the brief purchase of a moment's death
which heralds not the heart's bliss
but,
insistent on the list that kills the sport,
spills the birth of the lisping prince who,
with the first breath of a limpid dawn, 
splits the fourth line, 
and, with the infamous birth of wrath, cries
"filth!"...

Well, just a first draft, you know. My poetic muse has, sadly, rusted over since the heady days of winning the Howe Junior Verse Prize at school. Still, if there's one subject guaranteed to get the poetic juices flowing, surely it's plinths.

On My Bike

Another antidote to depression, I believe (I'm ahead of the psychologists here), is the sight of water. Especially ripply water. And canal boats. With that in mind - for purposes of mood enhancement - here's Old Ford Lock:

Depression Research

Some cheery news about depression. It's been regularly linked to all kinds of health downsides in the past, but according to this latest study it's not so much the biochemical changes associated with depression that do the damage, it's rather the depressives' behaviour, like smoking, not taking exercise, and slitting their wrists:

Whooley studied more than 1,000 patients with heart disease at the VA for nearly five years. The patients filled out regular questionnaires to determine their mood state, and were asked yearly to report on any heart-related events. Researchers took blood and urine samples to measure their levels of omega-3 fatty acids, cortisol and the inflammatory marker C-reactive protein, as well as the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine — all agents that may be involved in both depression and heart disease. In all, about 20% of the participants reported depressive symptoms; over five years, those patients had a 50% higher rate of additional heart problems, compared with their non-depressed peers.

Whooley's team studied the depressed group further. Researchers systematically adjusted for each potential risk factor to figure out whether it was mediating the link between depression and heart disease. Physiological factors, such as serotonin levels or CRP, for example, appeared not to have much impact. But when researchers adjusted for physical activity — that is, when they analyzed the data by assuming identical levels of exercise in both depressed and non-depressed patients — the difference in heart disease risk between the groups disappeared. Indeed, inactivity among the depressed patients gave them a 44% greater risk of having a heart event than people who were not depressed, accounting for nearly all of the depressed patients' 50% higher risk. Picking up the remainder of the increased risk was cigarette smoking.

The findings suggest that the effect of depression on heart health may have less to do with changes in hormones or other biochemical pathways, and more to do with behavior. Compared with other people, notes Whooley, the depressed are less healthy overall — they're less likely to exercise or take their heart medications, and are more likely to smoke. The relationship also feeds back on itself; previous studies show that exercise not only improves cardiovascular health, but also elevates mood and can ease depression.

It always seemed so unfair that sufferers from depression were burdened with these research findings about how, just by being depressed, they were slowly but surely killing themselves. As if life wasn't bad enough anyway, being depressed and all. Depressives can now take heart, as it were, from these findings. What goes around comes around: medical research takes away control of our lives, but then, occasionally, gives it back again. We should celebrate such moments.

Feeling down? Get on yer bike.

Inspired by Yiddish

There's a lovely short audio slideshow here at the BBC, with Zalmen Mlotek, Artistic Director of New York's last surviving professional Yiddish theatre, the Folksbiene, talking - and singing - about the influence of Yiddish on 20th Century American culture via luminaries such as Cab Calloway and George Gershwin.

(Via A&L Daily)

To Preserve the Purity of Our Girls

In advance of Channel 4's Unreported World, Nigeria: Child Brides, Broken Lives tonight, here's Ramita Navai in today's Times:

Northern Nigeria has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world: nearly half of all girls here are married by the age of 15.

The consequences have been devastating. Nigeria has the highest maternal mortality rate in Africa and one of the world’s highest rates of fistula, a condition that can occur when the pressure of childbirth tears a hole between the vagina and the bladder or rectum. Many women are left incontinent for life. Up to 800,000 women suffer from fistula in Nigeria.

“They marry young, they get pregnant young, they deliver young and they pick up the fistula,” said Kees Waaldijk, the chief consultant surgeon at the Babbar Ruga hospital, the world’s largest fistula clinic, in the northern state of Katsina.

Most cases happen to young girls during their first pregnancy, and nearly half the patients at Babbar Ruga are under 16....

The Nigerian federal Government has attempted to outlaw child marriage. In 2003 it passed the Child Rights Act, prohibiting marriage under the age of 18. In the Muslim northern states, though, there has been fierce resistance to the Act, with many people portraying it as antiIslamic. “Child marriage in Islam is permissible. In the Koran there is no specific age of marriage,” said Imam Sani, a liberal cleric in the northern state of Kaduna. He said that this was the root cause of the opposition among the more hardline mullahs, who believe that matters of Islamic “personal” law - marriage, divorce and inheritance - must be governed by the Koran, not the state.

“The Muslim clerics have a problem with this Child Rights Act and they decried it, they castigate it, they reject it and they don’t want it introduced in Nigeria,” Mr Sani said....

Half of Nigeria’s 36 states have passed the Act, but it has been adopted by only one of the dozen Muslim states - and even that one made a crucial amendment substituting the age of 18 for the term “puberty”....

Other vocal opponents to the Act include village heads and elders - almost all men - highlighting the tribal and cultural constraints that hamper attempts to stamp out child marriage.

“It is important we have the right to marry our girls young so there is no risk of pregnancy outside marriage. It is to preserve the purity of our girls,” said Usman, an 84-year-old man from the village of Yammaw Fulani, who married a 14-year-old girl four years ago. “We will never accept this law,” he said.

 

Waste Sculpture

Talking of art and sewage (below), these old bits of plumbing are on the Greenway, which runs along the top of Joseph Bazalgette's 19th Century northern outflow pipe, taking north London's waste down to the Beckton Sewage Treatment Works and thence to the Thames Estuary. 

 

 

The second one I've featured already, but it's worth a second look. You can check how the graffiti have changed over the past couple of years (not a lot, as it happens). Clean 'em up (though obviously they'd need to keep that wonderful pink) and they'd make much better public art than most of what currently graces London's open spaces. A spot on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square, maybe? 

The Art Museum Toilet Museum

But what would Duchamp say? (via)

Maintaining Good Relations

The Chinese are not happy:

China says it had "no choice but to postpone" a summit with the EU because of the French stance on the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader.

China's foreign ministry said French President Nicolas Sarkozy's plans to meet the Dalai Lama had "deprived the summit of a good atmosphere".

Mr Sarkozy has said he will meet the Dalai Lama in Poland on 6 December.

France - holder of the EU's rotating presidency - was to have hosted the EU-China summit on 1 December.

"To maintain good relations with France and the European Union, China has told France time and again to properly handle the Tibet issue, so as to create necessary conditions for the China-EU summit," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said.

"Regrettably, the French side has not actively responded to [these] efforts, so that the summit cannot be held in a good atmosphere, nor achieve its expected goals."

Mr Qin added: "In China we have a saying, 'Whoever causes the problem should solve the problem'. It is not China that caused the present situation."

Of course not.

Some analysis here:

"This is an unusually strong way of sending a signal," said Robbie Barnett, professor of Tibetan studies at Columbia University in New York.

"The Dalai Lama has been visiting Western capitals since 1987 but there has not been a response to this degree -- the cancellation of a multilateral summit."

China has in the past called off visits or talks with foreign officials -- Germany's finance minister, for example, was forced to cancel a trip to China in December last year after Chancellor Angela Merkel met with the Dalai Lama.

China has insisted for many years that it opposes foreign leaders meeting the Tibetan spiritual leader, who it maintains is trying to win independence for his Himalayan homeland that has been under Chinese rule since 1951.

"But this is unprecedented, it's serious, China has never before cancelled summits," said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a professor of political science at Hong Kong Baptist University.

"China feels much more powerful than before and wants to impose its rules on the rest of the world."

The decision to cancel the summit comes amid an accumulation of irritants between the EU and China, Cabestan said, culminating in a number of actions planned in Europe for December that were bound to anger Beijing.

These included the Dalai Lama's visit to several countries in the EU, his meeting with Sarkozy on December 6, and the European Parliament's formal awarding of the Sakharov Prize to jailed Chinese dissident Hu Jia on the 17th.

Xing Hua, head of the Europe research centre of the Chinese government's China Institute of International Studies, said Beijing's response was borne out of genuine frustration.

"China was forced to do this, as it cannot continue to tolerate heads of state recognising so lightly the head of a secessionist movement," Xing said.

But more than a simple diplomatic signal, some analysts said this could be a deliberate attempt by China to try and split nations within the EU.

"There are internal divisions among the EU powers, and this is a squeeze to try and see who will stick to their principles and who believes they mustn't upset China... it's a high-stakes game," said Barnett.

He cited several recent high profile U-turns in Europe, including the refusal by Germany's foreign minister to meet the Dalai Lama in May after Merkel's talks with the Buddhist spiritual leader caused diplomatic problems.

The Pope also refused to meet him last year, despite having held discussions with him before.

"These are spectacular successes for pressure politics on the Tibet issue," said Barnett...."This is more than a chess play, this is diplomatic hard ball."

Rivers of Pus

Here's former Ampleforth schoolboy Anthony Green, now Abdul Rahim Green, and, as you'll hear, he just hasn't been able to shake those Catholic obsessions:

The hellfire is a place of the most extreme suffering, the most extreme pain of every level that you can imagine – physical, mental, and spiritual pain and suffering and torment. It is a place where Allah will burn the skins of the people, and then he will recreate their skins, and burn the skins again, so that the people in there will taste the punishment. It is a place of heat, a place of pain, a place of suffering. The people will cry in agony for water. They will cry for a drink – something to cool them – and they will be given water, they will be given a drink, but it is boiling water that will scald their faces and burn their insides.

They will drink from a river, a river that is made from the pus that flows out of the wounds of the people of the hellfire. The wounds of the people of the hellfire will ooze pus, and this pus will gather together to form a river, and this is all they will have to drink. And their food will be the tree of Zakum, a tree the fruits of which are like the heads of devils. This tree is so bitter that if the people try to eat it, they can’t eat it. But they will force themselves, because there is nothing else to eat in the hellfire – a place where the people will neither live, nor will they die, a place where the people will fall into despair, arguing with each other, admonishing each other, criticizing each other. The fire will surround them in every place. The smallest punishment of the hellfire is that a person will wear a pair of sandals of fire, and their brain will boil....

Well, you get the picture. I like that this is broadcast on Peace TV - the "24 Hour Islamic Spiritual Edutainment Satellite TV Channel".

What they say about Green:

• He was educated at a famous Roman Catholic Monastic School called Ampleforth College and went on to study history in the London University. However, he left his education unfinished.
• He was dissatisfied with Christianity since the age of eight.
• He was practising Buddhism for nearly three years though he never formally embraced it.

I think I can understand why Buddhism may not have appealed. And I can believe this:

He is well known for his efforts at the renowned "Speaker’s Corner" in London’s Hyde Park.

We've come across the founder and president of Peace TV, Dr Zakir Naik, before. That video's no longer available, but here he is, on the subject of 9/11, explaining how "it is a blatant, open secret that this attack on the Twin Towers was done by George Bush himself".