Getting "with it" on "Earth Day" in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"
Stare at the dot for 10 seconds . . .
. . . then focus on a blank surface!
This is a work of art, titled Earth perspectives, by Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic artist, that invites mass participation "on a global scale" to mark today as Earth Day 2020.
Re:LODE Radio considers this type of "public participation in an art project" questionable on a number of counts, as a valid response to the Earth Day concept.
The project reduces the role of the public to a mass audience of participant observers, primarily functioning to complete the "scenario" for the "idea" to be completed by the audience. Participants thus become part of this particular "art machine", but:
Q. What is the process and what is the outcome?
According to the artist:
People should stare at the dot for 10 seconds and then focus on a blank surface where an after image will appear in different colours. That in effect is our work of art - a new view of the world.
A. So, the process is an experience of an optical effect and the result a limited modification of a conventional representation of the world.
Re:LODE Radio considers that the challenge of our time is not being met in such an artistic enterprise. the challenge is to instigate processes whereby the public, or publics, are enabled to become actors and observant participants, rather than passive participant observers.
On Earth day, April 22, 2020, we will face two crises: One is immediate from a pandemic and the other is slowly building as a disaster for our climate.
We can, will, and must solve both challenges. The world was not prepared for a coronavirus. Leaders ignored hard science and delayed critical actions. We still have time to prepare — in every part of the world — for the climate crisis.
EARTHRISE is how we set a new global standard on Earth Day 2020. We must act together to say that global disaster must never happen again; we must not make the same mistakes twice.
This page has the tools for you to build towards a world-changing Earth Day.
On its 50th anniversary, Earth Day will return to its roots from 1970: Placing environmental progress among the best ways to improve our world.
Thanks to heroic actions around the world, we will overcome and recover from the coronavirus.
Life will return to normal, but we must not allow the return to business as usual.
Our planet — our future — depends on it. Find inspiration here to take action, read other stories, and add your voice to the map. As we overcome this immediate crisis, we will tell the world that we are ready to solve the next one.
Jonathan Watts reports for the Guardian on Greta Thunberg, the climate activist, who on Earth Day 2020 says the Covid-19 outbreak shows how change can happen when we listen to scientists:
Greta Thunberg has urged people around the world to take a new path after the coronavirus pandemic, which she said proved “our society is not sustainable”.
The Swedish climate activist said the strong global response to Covid-19 demonstrated how quickly change could happen when humanity came together and acted on the advice of scientists.
She said the same principles should be applied to the climate crisis.
“Whether we like it or not, the world has changed. It looks completely different now from how it did a few months ago. It may never look the same again. We have to choose a new way forward,” she told a YouTube audience in a virtual meeting to mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.
“If the coronavirus crisis has shown us one thing, it is that our society is not sustainable. If one single virus can destroy economies in a couple of weeks, it shows we are not thinking long-term and taking risks into account.”
The teenage campaigner, who initiated the global school strike movement, was filmed at the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm in digital conversation with Johan Rockström, the earth systems scientist and director of the Potsdam Institute.
Getting "with it" . . .
Perspectives, like frontiers, dissolve in our digital information environment . . .
This recording of a segment of the Our World (1967 TV program)has turned out to be the most famous moment of this groundbreaking event in the history of communication.
Our World was the first live, international, satellite television production, which was broadcast on 25 June 1967. Creative artists, including the Beatles, opera singer Maria Callas, and painter Pablo Picasso – representing nineteen nations – were invited to perform or appear in separate segments featuring their respective countries. The two-and-a-half-hour event had the largest television audience ever up to that date: an estimated 400 to 700 million people around the globe watched the broadcast.
The project was conceived by BBC producer Aubrey Singer. It was transferred to the European Broadcasting Union, but the master control room for the broadcast was still at the BBC in London.
NASA's ATS-1
The satellites used were Intelsat I (known as "Early Bird"), Intelsat 2-2 ("Lani Bird"), Intelsat 2–3 ("Canary Bird"), and NASA's ATS-1.
It took ten months to bring everything together. The Eastern Bloc countries, headed by the Soviet Union, pulled out four days before the broadcast in protest of the Western nations' response to the Six-Day War.
The ground rules included that no politicians or heads of state could participate in the broadcast. In addition, everything had to be "live", so no use of videotape or film was permitted. Ten thousand technicians, producers and interpreters took part in the broadcast. Each country had its own announcers, due to language issues, and interpreters voiced over the original sound when not in a country's native language. Fourteen countries participated in the production, which was transmitted to 24 countries, with an estimated audience of between 400 and 700 million people.
The opening credits were accompanied by the Our World theme sung in 22 different languages by the Vienna Boys' Choir.
For some of you out there, the content of the various programme segments might not seem of particular interest, but that is to miss the whole point of the exercise. It was not the content that was revolutionary, it was the form, the medium, the connection itself, that was the message. Hence the truly wondrous presence, and appropriateness, to see and hear on Canada's CBC Television, Marshall McLuhan being interviewed in a Toronto television control room.
Familiarity breeds content . . .
At 7:17 pm GMT, the show switched to the United States' segment about the Glassboro, New Jersey conference between American president Lyndon Johnson and Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin; since Our World insisted that no politicians be shown, only the house where the conference was being held was televised. National Educational Television's (NET) Dick McCutcheon ended up talking about the impact of the new television technology on a global scale.
The show switched back to Canada at 7:18 pm GMT. Segments that were beamed worldwide were from a Ghost Lake, Alberta ranch, showing a rancher, and his cutting horse, cutting out a herd of cattle. The last Canadian segment was from Kitsilano Beach, located in Vancouver's Point Grey district at 7:19 pm GMT.
At 7:20 pm GMT, the program shifted continents to Asia, with Tokyo, Japan being the next segment. It was 4:20 a.m. local time and NHK showed the construction of the Tokyo subway system.
The equator was crossed for the first time in the program when it switched to the Australian contributions, which was at 5:22 a.m. Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST). This was the most technically complicated point in the broadcast, as both the Japanese and Australian satellite ground stations had to reverse their actions: Tokyo had to go from transmit mode to receive mode, while Melbourne had to switch from receive to transmit mode. The first segment dealt with trams leaving the South Melbourne tram depot with Australian Broadcasting Commission's Brian King explaining that sunrise was many hours away as it was winter there.
Two scientific segments, later on in the broadcast, were also included; one, presented from Canberra by the ABC's Eric Hunter showed experiments being carried out by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) to extend the frequency of cereal crop cycles, while the second dealt with the Parkes Observatory tracking a deep space object.
The Beatles segment of the broadcast was, at heart, a response to the fact that this event was taking place at the height of the Vietnam War. The Beatles were asked to write a song with a positive message. At 8:54 GMT the Beatles topped the event with their debut performance of "All You Need Is Love".
. . . and over half a century later!
Getting "with it"Mick Jagger turns up again!
Lady Gaga getting "with it" with One World . . .
Pop superstar Lady Gaga has launched a historic event, raised millions of dollars for the World Health Organization (WHO), and turned 34 years old in the last three weeks, and on Saturday night she added to that list of milstones when she appeared on One World: Together At Home and wowed us all with a beautiful rendition of "Smile."
"Today
I’m so happy that we are one world, together at home. I feel very
honored to be a part of the World Health Organization and Global Citizen
in the fight against COVID-19 and raising money for the Solidarity
Response Fund," she said.
By now, you’ve probably settled into the “new normal”, perhaps adopting hobbies you hitherto had zero interest in (endless Zoom pub quizzes, baking bread, burning down 5G masts) and watching online gigs. Last night, the biggest of them all so far arrived, as One World: Together At Home arrived like a lockdown Live Aid. Lady Gaga laudably ransacked her contacts book to curate over 100 artists beaming in from their homes across the globe.
Gary Ryan reviews the One World programme with a critical eye and ear. His conclusions include the following valid points:
With a line-up groaning with festival-headlining talent (The Killers, Billie Eilish), part of the novelty was glimpsing behind the velvet rope into megastar’s abodes, like Through The Keyhole meets Glastonbury. Who has the nicest house? Which technological butterfingers has filmed their contribution in portrait as opposed to landscape mode? (Step forward Sir Paul McCartney) Who’s selected the most baffling location to record their effort? That’d be Sir Elton John, belting out ‘I’m Still Standing’ in his garden on a piano incongruously located underneath a basketball hoop.
In the six-hour pre-show, Jameela Jamil promises us “a moment of joy and respite” as we honour our frontline workers, before Cali singer Andra Day launches into an acoustic version of the uplifting gospel soul of ‘Rise Up’, which sets the musical tone for the evening:
earnest odes to overcoming adversity delivered with closed-eyed sincerity. Around hour two, a kind of solemn-warbling snowblindness kicks in.
Unexpectedly, it’s the Rolling Stones and Keith Urban who make best use of technology for showmanship. Charisma-geyser Mick Jagger and co making a joyously creative visual joke about granddads being unable to work Zoom, and Charlie Watts air-drumming to ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. Urban, meanwhile, becomes his own one-man band on a cover of Steve Winwood’s ‘Higher Love’.
The most powerful moments arrive when personal tracks from Billie Joe Armstrong and Taylor Swift are imbued with new contextual resonance. Green Day‘s ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’, written about Armstrong’s father, who died of cancer, is poignantly accompanied by footage of empty streets. Despite vowing never to sing ‘Soon You’ll Get Better’ live because it concerns her mother’s cancer diagnosis, Swift delivers its powerful, vivid lyrics about praying in doctor’s waiting rooms – visibly overcome at points – to devastating effect.
It’s all a tremendous, audacious achievement (and honestly, if it raised $127m, as this did, most people would merrily watch Madonna burping the alphabet from her bathtub – especially as it’s scheduled against All Round To Mrs Brown‘s). But after eight hours, you hope for a cheerful sop of ‘Poker Face’ or ‘Bad Guy’. Perhaps artists refrain from performing fun songs because it might appear as if they’re downplaying the gravity of the situation when, in fact, escapism is what we need right now.
We know everything’s unremittingly terrible – it’s there on the rolling death toll on news network chyrons, in every sleepless night where you worry about relatives classed as key workers, in every conversation where asking “How are you?” is no longer a perfunctory greeting but rather feels like pulling the pin out of a grenade – and what we crave is distraction.
In a night where artists like Lady Gaga socially distanced themselves from their biggest hits, and relentlessly prioritised catharsis and po-faced meaning over disposable and throwaway thrills, One World: Together At Home feels depressing rather than celebratory and life-affirming. Rather than being given permission to smile, it would have been nice to have been offered more reasons to do so.
. . . or is it business as usual in the form of celebrity profile building?
According to the Guardian report by Tim Jonze (Mon 20 April 2020):
Now Damien Hirst has joined the nation’s growing army of artistic children and created his own rainbow to show support for the NHS during the coronavirus crisis.
The work, Butterfly Rainbow, can be downloaded from the British artist’s website for people to display in their windows as a sign of their appreciation of frontline health workers. It’s comprised of bands of coloured butterfly wings, a key motif in Hirst’s work.
“I wanted to do something to pay tribute to the wonderful work NHS staff are doing in hospitals around the country,” said Hirst. “The rainbow is a sign of hope and I think it is brilliant that parents and children are creating their own version and putting them up in the windows of their homes.”
Hirst also plans to raise money for the health service by selling a limited edition of the work, with details to be announced on the artist’s Instagram page.
Celebrities getting "with it" . . .
. . . but would it have been better to complain, during ten years of pointless austerity policy, of the dire impact upon the capacity of the NHS to cope in a crisis?
However, Steve Bell is always "with it" . . .
Steve Bell's cartoon for the Journal pages of the Guardian today (Wednesday 22 April 2020) clearly references the "Conceptual Art" of Damien Hirst, with his sliced sections of dead animals "housed in" transparent tanks of formaldehyde, as in this bisected cow.
This work by Damien Hirst is NOT a "critique" of dairy or beef farming, it is a representation in a re-presentation of a theme "taken" from the "history of art".
Re:LODE Radio is "reading", or "misreading", Steve Bell's artwork as an image of a NHS that has been dissected, butchered, taken apart, and then displayed. Damien Hirst is an artist whose entire work boils down to "display", a nineteenth century invention of Parisian retailers in the commodification of everything, of consumerism and unfulfilled desire. The NHS was butchered by David Cameron and Andrew Lansley in the interests of a bogus free market in the interests of a powerful industrial lobby, during the first years of the Conservative Party's ideologically driven ten years of pointless "austerity politics". Back in 2010, according to Open Democracy:
A week before presenting the hugely unpopular Health & Social Care Bill to Parliament, Lansley spent an hour and a half over lunch at a roundtable event hosted by the free market think tank, Reform, which had done much to champion his plans. The diary doesn’t say who else was round the table, but around that time, Reform was funded by the Association of British Insurers, General Healthcare Group, KPMG, Ernst & Young, Capita, Serco and others with a commercial interest in the reforms.
Reform is a free market think-tank which describes itself as ‘an independent, non-party think-tank whose mission is to set out a better way to deliver public services and economic prosperity’.
They ‘believe that by liberalising the public sector, breaking monopoly and extending choice, high quality services can be made available for everyone.’
Their vision is 'of a Britain with 21st Century healthcare, high standards in schools, a modern and efficient transport system, safe streets, and a free, dynamic and competitive economy'. In a March 2009 presentation Tim Montgomerie and Matthew Elliott described Reform as part of the infrastructure of the conservative movement in Britain.
Anatomy? Fragmentation? Or, cutting the whole into pieces . . .
Anatomyand dissection, fields shared by physicians and artists, with butchers, in Europe from the 1400's. And, by Conservative Party ministers, politicians and a highly successful artist, commercially speaking that is, in the twenty-first century.
Unknown European artist (Italy) from the 1400's
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is a 1632 oil painting on canvas by Rembrandt housed in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, the Netherlands. The painting is regarded as one of Rembrandt's early masterpieces.
And, what is this "history of art"?
To quote the Preface by Nicos Hadjinicolaou to his book, Art History and Class Struggle (translated by Louise Asmal, Pluto Press 1978):
"The present disquieting tendency towards political and social apathy has its counterpart in art history studies in the gradual transformation of art historians into direct or indirect advisers to art merchants."
This was 1978, but despite the huge efforts amongst a number of academics of the 'New Art History?', "art history" "remains embedded in the bourgeois ideology of 'art' and to its variants", especially in the consciousness industry.
The Consciousness Industry is a term coined by author and theorist Hans Magnus Enzensberger, which identifies the mechanisms through which the human mind is reproduced as a social product. Foremost among these mechanisms are the institutions of mass media and education. According to Enzensberger, the mind industry does not produce anything specific; rather, its main business is; to perpetuate the existing order of man's domination over man. Hans Haacke elaborates on the consciousness industry as it applies to the arts in a wider system of production, distribution, and consumption.
Haacke specifically implicates museums as manufacturers of aesthetic perception that fail to acknowledge their intellectual, political, and moral authority: "rather than sponsoring intelligent, critical awareness, museums thus tend to foster appeasement."
Re:LODE Radio considers that the shape of contemporary curatorial practice is heavily deformed by this "culture of appeasement".
Getting "with it" and "conceptual art" . . .
An early example of the use of the transparent tank, cube, as a container is Condensation Cube (1963–65). This piece was amongst Hans Haacke's early installations which focused on systems and processes. Condensation Cube embodies a physical occurrence, of the condensation cycle, in real time. Some of the themes in these early works from the 1960s include the interactions of physical and biological systems, living animals, plants, and the states of water and the wind. Then his work became interventionist and political.
Haacke's interest in real-time systems propelled him into his criticism of social and political systems. In most of his work after the late 1960s, Haacke focused on the art world and the system of exchange between museums and corporations and corporate leaders; he often underlines its effects in site-specific ways.
Haacke has been outspoken throughout his career about demystifying the relationship between museums and businesses and their individual practices.
He writes;
"what we have here is a real exchange of capital: financial capital on the part of the sponsors and symbolic capital on the part of the sponsored".
Using this concept from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Haacke has underlined the idea that corporate sponsorship of art enhances the sponsoring corporations' public reputation, which is of material use to them. Haacke believes, moreover, that both parties are aware of this exchange, and as an artist, Haacke is intent on making this relationship clear to viewers.
In 1970 Hans Haacke proposed a work for the exhibition entitled Information to be held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (an exhibition meant to be an overview of current younger artists), according to which the visitors would be asked to vote on a current socio-political issue. The proposal was accepted, and Haacke prepared his installation, entitled MoMA Poll, but did not hand in the specific question until right before the opening of the show.
His question asked:
"Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon's Indochina Policy be a reason for your not voting for him in November?"
Visitors were asked to deposit their answers in the appropriate one of two transparent Plexiglas ballot boxes. At the end of the exhibition, there were approximately twice as many Yes ballots as No ballots. Haacke's question commented directly on the involvements of a major donor and board member at MOMA, Nelson Rockefeller.
This installation is an early example of what in the art world came to be known as institutional critique.
A version of this work appeared in a 2019 survey of Haacke's work at the New Museum in New York, as a recreation of an "art history" moment, rather than as active piece.
In a review (Oct. 31, 2019) of this exhibition for The New York Times, under the headline and sub heading:
Hans Haacke, at the New Museum, Takes No Prisoners
The godfather of art-as-exposé has his first major survey in America in 30 years. He has some questions to put to you, too
Jason Farago, writes:
I still remember, back when I was an art history student, the class in which I had to stare at a painting for an hour, just looking and describing what I saw within the frame. No interpretation, no contextualization to sully the true experience of art, the professor told us. All that analysis comes later, after the pure encounter between you and the painting.
It is never just you and the painting. So proved Hans Haacke, one of the most consistent and uncompromising figures of American art, who has spent half a century mining the terrain around and behind works of art, and revealing the hidden operations of powerful associations, art museums very much among them. When critics were still sticking up for “art for art’s sake,” when artists were still indulging romantic fantasies of self-expression, Mr. Haacke was one of the first to insist that “art” is actually a complex system of institutions, governed by managers and administrators with their own aims and ideologies.
This image of the exhibition shows part of the installation of the retrospective “Hans Haacke: All Connected” at the New Museum, including “Gift Horse,” a bronze sculpture with stainless steel armature commissioned for London’s Fourth Plinth Program.
On the gallery wall, photographs and maps from “Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971.”
In one of his best-known works, which quickly became an art historical landmark, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, Haacke took on the real-estate holdings of one of New York City's biggest slum landlords. The work exposed, through meticulous documentation and photographs, the questionable transactions of Harry Shapolsky's real-estate business between 1951 and 1971. Haacke's solo show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which was to include this work and which made an issue of the business and personal connections of the museum's trustees, was cancelled on the grounds of artistic impropriety by the museum's director six weeks before the opening. Later, the curator Edward Fry was consequently fired for his support of the work.
Following the abrupt cancellation of his exhibition and the trouble it had caused with the museum, Haacke turned to other galleries, to Europe and his native country, where his work was more often accepted. Ten years later he included the Shapolsky work—by then widely known—at his solo exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, entitled "Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business".
Gift Horse
A skeletal, riderless horse. Haacke says the sculpture is a tribute to Scottish economist Adam Smith and English painter George Stubbs. The horse is based on an engraving by Stubbs taken from The Anatomy of the Horse published in 1766, an achievement that synthesizes artistic skill, scientific observation and documentation.
Tied to the horse's front leg is an electronic ribbon displaying live the ticker of the London Stock Exchange, completing the link between power, money and history.
George Stubbs was a son of Liverpool. He was born to an artisan, a currier, or leather-dresser, John Stubbs, and his wife Mary.
Stubbs worked at his father's trade until the age of 15 or 16, at which point he told his father that he wished to become a painter. Stubbs approached the Lancashire painter and engraver Hamlet Winstanley to become his mentor, and was briefly engaged by him in a sort of apprenticeship relationship. Stubbs had access to and opportunity to study the collection at Knowsley Hall near Liverpool, the estate where Winstanley was then residing; however, he soon left when he came into conflict with the older artist over exactly which pictures he could work on copying.
Thereafter as an artist he was self-taught. He had had a passion for anatomy from his childhood, and in or around 1744, he moved to York, in the North of England, to pursue his ambition to study the subject under experts. In York, from 1745 to 1753, he worked as a portrait painter, and studied human anatomy under the surgeon Charles Atkinson, at York County Hospital, One of his earliest surviving works is a set of illustrations for a textbook on midwifery by John Burton, Essay towards a Complete New System of Midwifery, published in 1751.
In 1754 Stubbs visited Italy. Forty years later he told Ozias Humphry that his motive for going to Italy was, "to convince himself that nature was and is always superior to art whether Greek or Roman, and having renewed this conviction he immediately resolved upon returning home". In 1756 he rented a farmhouse in the village of Horkstow, Lincolnshire, and spent 18 months dissecting horses, assisted by his common-law wife, Mary Spencer. He moved to London in about 1759 and in 1766 published The anatomy of the Horse. The original drawings are now in the collection of the Royal Academy.
Robin Blake, author of George Stubbs and the Wide Creation (Chatto & Windus), has an article on the Guardian website (Sat 18 Jun 2005), under the headline and subheading:
George Stubbs was much more than just Britain's consummate painter of horses. Robin Blake reveals how his political radicalism was expressed in his art
Robin Blake writes:
So why does Stubbs go out of his way to insist that he despises Greek and Roman art - even in Rome itself, where he did not "make one drawing or model from the antique, either in bas-relief or single figure" - and that he only went there "to convince himself that nature was and is always superior to art, whether Greek or Roman"?
The overt explanation is his belief that art should imitate nature and not other works of art. This is reinforced by Stubbs's credentials as a scientist, a "Liverpool Leonardo" who took his subjects as he found them, as particularities rather than as the ghosts or shadows of idealised forms. So Stubbs's classicism is not the slavish imitation of an established academic perfection, but the identification and capture of classical harmonies in the forms and structures of nature.
Our newly awakened enthusiasm for Stubbs's art can be ascribed to the complex variety of moods that we find are with us still: the optimism of science; the retreat from chaos and change; the competing beauties of the wild and the tamed. It is illuminating that tigers of wrath and horses of instruction, two of the contraries that William Blake considered "necessary to human existence", also represent the poles of Stubbs's artistic vision. That Blake's "Tyger, Tyger" was possibly inspired by Stubbs's image A Royal Tiger only serves to illustrate the cross-currents operating here, because, while Stubbs may once have been a quasi-Catholic, it is hard to see him as a Blakean mystic.
Equally though, to categorize William Blake as a "mystic" effectively marginalizes his radicalism, make Blake's "unpleasantness", a positive quality as far as T.S Eliot was concerned, safe and acceptable enough for bourgeois hypocrisy to cope with.
The
image of the tiger was used by William Blake in his poem and
illustration of his subject, a subject that was about the use of language and forms of representation to demonize the energy he felt was immanent in the emancipatory
desire he saw expressed in the French Revolution. This language was the
language of the "terror", as employed by Edmund Burke in his very
powerful discourse, and that created, or rather, invented, an abiding
image for this crucial historical moment, a feeling about "revolutions"
that still resonates, especially in a "conservative" society.
In
integrating the "sister arts" of poetry and painting into a single
image, he still, nevertheless, produces a deliberate discrepancy, a catachresis.
The poetic language is; bright burning; fire; night; a daring to seize;
dread; a hammer and chain; and terrors clasped; but the tyger is a pussy cat, more Tigger than tiger!
The function of Blake's deliberate discrepancy
is to help us read; and look; and understand; and see what is in front
of our eyes, rather than what is already behind our eyes, our
assumptions, habits of mind, our uncritical attention, or our critical
in-attention.
Blake! and Stubbs! Who would have thought it?
The Classics, it is the Classics! & not Goths nor Monks that Desolate Europe with Wars.
Sacred Truth has pronounced that Greece & Rome as Babylon & Egypt: so far from being parents of Arts & Sciences as they pretend: were destroyers of all Art. Homer Virgil & Ovid confirm this opinion & make us reverence The Word of God, the only light of antiquity that remains unperverted by War.
Virgil in the Eneid Book VI line 848 says Let others study Art:
Rome has somewhat better to do, namely War & Dominion
Rome & Greece swept Art into their maw & destroyd it - a Warlike State never can produce Art. It will Rob & Plunder & accumulate into one place, & Translate & Copy & Buy & Sell & Criticise, but not Make.
Mathematic Form is Eternal in the Reasoning Memory. Living Form is Eternal Existence. Grecian is Mathematic Form Gothic is Living Form
A tribute to Adam Smith . . .
. . . is more problematic!
The invisible hand by Antonia Hirsch is a sculptural installation that wall-mounts domed mirrors to spell out the phrase “the invisible hand” in braille.
Based on Adam Smith’s writing in The Wealth of Nations (1776), this work questions the perception that the conditions of a free-market economy (ie. one without controls) is unbiased and “blind.” In this work, Hirsch juxtaposes the idea of the “blindness” of capitalism, with the technologies of seeing and surveillance (the domed mirror) and communication for the visually impaired (braille) to play with and challenge the various systems of self-regulation and control in everyday society.
Disagreement exists between classical and neoclassical economists about the central message of Adam Smith's most influential work: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Neoclassical economists emphasise Smith'sinvisible hand, a concept mentioned in the middle of his work – Book IV, Chapter II – and classical economists believe that Smith stated his programme for promoting the "wealth of nations" in the first sentences, which attributes the growth of wealth and prosperity to the division of labour.
The invisible hand . . .
. . . there are many other versions!
Part of Adam Smith's legacy, intended or not, is the invisible hand, an invisible hand that has become transformed into an emblem of the free market, and which is invisible because it really doesn't exist. Joseph E. Stiglitz in his book The Roaring Nineties (2003), an analysis of the boom and bust of the 1990s, says on
the topic: "the reason that the
invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there.". Presented from an insider's point of view, firstly as chair of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors, and later as chief economist of the World Bank, it continues his argument on how misplaced faith in free-market ideology led to the global economic issues of today, with a perceptive focus on US policies.
The invisible hand has become instead a corrupting ideology, used to maintain an economic system that is a stumbling block to the actions required to secure the habitability of the planet for human beings. And, by the way, and has already been explained in a previous post, there is no such thing as a free market.
Sounds like a job for a conceptual artist!
Map of a thirty-six square mile surface area of the Pacific Ocean west of Oahu
We
do not live in the best of all possible worlds. If different decisions
had been taken, the world would have been a different place. Given this,
we need to ask whether the decisions that the rich and the powerful
take are based on sound reasoning and robust evidence. Only when we do
that can we demand right actions from corporations, governments and
international organizations. Without our active economic citizenship, we
will always be the victims of people who have greater ability to make
decisions, who tell us that things happen because they have to and
therefore that there is nothing we can do to alter them, however
unpleasant and unjust they may appear. (p. xvii)
And the first "Thing" he tells the reader is:
Thing 1.
There is no such thing as a free market
What they tell you:
Markets
need to be free. When the government interferes to dictate what market
participants can or cannot do, resources cannot flow to their most
efficient use. If people cannot do the things they find most profitable,
they lose the incentive to invest and innovate. Thus, if the government
puts a cap on house rents, landlords lose the incentive to maintain
their properties or build new ones. Or, if the government restricts the
kinds of financial products that can be sold, two contracting parties
that may both have benefited from innovative transactions that fulfil
their idiosyncratic needs cannot reap the potential gains of free
contract. People must be left 'free to choose', as the title of
free-market visionary Milton Friedman's famous book goes.
What they don't tell you:
The
free market doesn't exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries
that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so
unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see
them. How 'free' a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a
political definition. The usual claim by free-market economists that
they are trying to defend the market from politically motivated
interference by the government is false. Government is always involved
and those free-marketeers are as politically motivated as anyone.
Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined
'free market' is the first step towards understanding capitalism.
Free marketeers
The writings and thinking of Adam Smith, from a particular time in the past, have been re-constructed as a sort of foundation myth for the champions of free market economics, and in the more recent era of neoliberal apologia for the continuation of capitalism, on a global scale, as the only viable economic system. As such, Smith has been celebrated by advocates of free-market policies as the founder of free-market economics, a view reflected in the naming of bodies such as the Adam Smith Institute in London.
This is the case, even though Adam Smith's writings do not fundamentally support this contemporary ideology, as is pointed out in the Wikipedia article on Adam Smith in the section headed "As a symbol of free market economics".
And regarding the emblematic "invisible hand", Noam Chomsky suggests that Smith (and more specifically David Ricardo) sometimes used the phrase to refer to a "home bias" for investing domestically in opposition to offshore outsourcing production and neoliberalism. Chomsky writes:
Rather interestingly, these issues were foreseen by the great founders of modern economics, Adam Smith for example. He recognized and discussed what would happen to Britain if the masters adhered to the rules of sound economics – what's now called neoliberalism. He warned that if British manufacturers, merchants, and investors turned abroad, they might profit but England would suffer. However, he felt that this wouldn't happen because the masters would be guided by a home bias. So as if by an invisible hand England would be spared the ravages of economic rationality. That passage is pretty hard to miss. It's the only occurrence of the famous phrase "invisible hand" in Wealth of Nations, namely in a critique of what we call neoliberalism.
It is even possible to compare the thinking of Adam Smith, the "Father of Capitalism", with Karl Marx and discover that their different approaches to understanding political economy would produce in some instances similar results and conclusions. For example,Eric Toussaint writes (12 June 2009) in A Glance in the Rear View Mirror to Understand the Present (Part 1)that Adam Smith is closer to Karl Marx than those showering praise on Smith today:
In the following citations, we discover that what Adam Smith wrote in the 1770s is not so distant from what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would write 70 years later in the famous Communist Manifesto.
According to Adam Smith: “The labour of a manufacturer adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance, and of his master’s profit.”
In Marxist terms, this means that through their labour workers reproduce part of the constant capital (the quantity of raw materials, energy, percentage of the value of the technical machinery, and so on, that are accounted for in the manufacturing of a given commodity) to which must be added the variable capital corresponding to their wages and the profit made by capitalists, which Karl Marx called surplus value.
Karl Marx and Adam Smith – each in his own time – both considered that it is the workers not the bosses/capitalists who produce value.
Workers create value, then, without in fact costing [their capitalist bosses] anything: “Though the manufacturer (i.e. the worker) has his wages advanced to him by his master, he, in reality, costs him (the capitalist) no expense, the value of those wages being generally restored, together with a profit, in the improved value of the subject upon which his labour is bestowed”. (Adam Smith. 1776. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Book II, Chapter 3)
Adam Smith's championing of the "division of labour" with his famous account of the production capability of an individual pin maker compared to a manufacturing business that employed 10 men:
“One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind, where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day;”
This observation of the phenomenon of the "division of labour" and the nascent formation of capitalist production, as well as "the relationship between humans, plants, and capital had forged
the core ideas of modern manufacturing", had been preceded in the sugar cane fields of Madeira, some 350 years earlier.
Centuries earlier, the manufacture of one of the first capitalist products was sugar.
In the introduction to their book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet,
Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel discuss the impact of the use of wood as
fuel in sugar production upon the great forest of trees covering the
island of Madeira. They write:
In
1419, Portuguese sailors first sighted an island just over 600
kilometres west of the African coast of Morocco. They called the island
Ilha da Madeira, "island of wood." The Venetian traveler and slaver
Alvise da Ca' de Mosto (Cadamosto) reported in 1455 that "there was not a
foot of ground that was not entirely covered with great trees." By the
1530's it was hard to find any wood on the island at all. There were two
phases in the clear-cutting of Madeira. Initially, the trees had been
profitable as lumber for shipbuilding and construction. The denuded
forest became acreage for wheat to be sent to Portugal starting in the
1430s. The second, more dramatic deforestation was driven by the use of
wood as fuel in sugar production.
Moore
and Patel then examine how the biological necessities in the treatment
of the sugarcane impose particular organisational factors:
Humans,
primates, and most mammals love the taste of sugar. Since the discovery
of sugarcane in New Guinea in 6000 BCE, humans have understood the
biological necessities of its treatment. There is a peak time to harvest
the cane, when it is turgid with sweet juice - but then the grass is
thick and difficult to cut. Once chopped, the can can be coaxed to yield
its greatest quantity of sugar for only forty-eight hours. After that
the plant starts to rot.
Moore and Patel
then foreground how the methods employed in the sugar plantations on
Madeira generated the core organizing ideas of modern manufacturing:
In
the 1460s and 1470s, farmers on Madeira stopped growing wheat and
stated growing sugar exclusively. A lot more sugar. The sugar frontier
quickly spread, at first to other islands in the Atlantic, then on a
massive scale to the New World. Like palm and soy monocultures today, it
cleared forests, exhausted soils, and encouraged pests at breakneck
speed.
To
reach such speeds, production had to be reorganized, broken into
smaller, component activities performed by different workers. It simply
isn't possible to get good returns from workers who are exhausted from
cutting cane and then spend the night refining it. New management and
technologies helped move sugar manufacture from edge runner mills (big
pestle and mortar machines) and small holdings to two roller mills and
large-scale slave production in São Tomé. Centuries before Adam Smith
could marvel at the division of labour across a supply chain that made a
pin, the relationship between humans, plants, and capital had forged
the core ideas of modern manufacturing - in cane fields.
The plantation
was the original factory.
And every time the sugar plantation found a new frontier, as in Brazil after São
Tomé and the Caribbean after that, the factory was reinvented - with
new machines and new combinations of plantation and sugar mill.
The invention of the assembly line . . .
The cliché goes that the assembly line was the invention of Henry Ford. But, it wasn't Henry Ford who invented the assembly line, it was Johannes Gutenberg with his invention of movable type, around 1450, in Mainz, Germany. the word cliché itself derives from printing, where cliché was used in France, as printers' jargon, to refer to a stereotype, electrotype, cast plate or block print that could reproduce type or images repeatedly.
The assembly line . . .
In the middle of the nineteenth century great success was achieved with steam-engined cars on the open road. Only the heavy toll-taxes levied by local road authorities discouraged steam engines on the highways. Pneumatic tyres were fitted to a steam car in France in 1887. The American Stanley Steamer began to flourish in 1899. Ford had already built his first car in 1896, and the Ford Motor Company was founded in 1903. It was the electric spark that enabled the gasoline engine to take over from the steam engine. the crossing of electricity, the biological form, with the mechanical form was never to release a greater force.
The car and the assembly line had become the ultimate expression of Gutenberg technology; that is, of uniform and repeatable processes applied to all aspects of work and living.
From Chapter Twenty-Two MOTORCAR - The Mechanical Bride pp. 235-6 of McLuhan's Understanding Media
Getting "with it" with Marshall . . .
In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence": when electronic media replaces visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the global village.
The term is sometimes described as having negative connotations in The Gutenberg Galaxy, but McLuhan was interested in exploring effects, not making value judgments:
Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. ... Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. ...
In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.
Key to McLuhan's argument is the idea that technology has no per se moral bent—it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual's and, by extension, a society's self-conception and realization.
Getting "with it" in Modern times . . .
Modern Times is a 1936 American silent comedy film written and directed by Charlie Chaplin in which his iconic Little Tramp character struggles to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and financial conditions many people faced during the Great Depression — conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization.
This comic strip (May 30, 2012) picks up the story of Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, the book on the causes and consequences of the Great Recession by economist and Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, first published in 2010.
While focusing on the roots of the financial crisis of 2007-08 and the subsequent global economic slowdown, which he claims to find mainly in fiscal policy as conducted during the Bush presidency and decisions made by the Federal Reserve, Stiglitz also talks about the failure to cope with the recession during the months succeeding the Wall Street Crash of 2008. Finally, he sketches various schemes as to the possible future of the American economy, vigorously proposing a profound policy shift.
In compliance with Stiglitz's general attitude towards economic policy, Freefall contains "proposals to tame the banking sector and to foster a more humanistic style of capitalism in the United States and abroad." According to an assessment written by Larry Elliott for The Guardian, the book "reeks of 'I told you so'." because during the years preceding the crisis, Stiglitz had "warned policy makers repeatedly that the United States was headed toward a deep, painful recession if pre-emptive interventions were not made."
Joel Krupa reviewing Freefall for the Oxonian Review(7 June, 2010) under the headlineGuiding the Invisible Hand, writes:
Interestingly, Stiglitz is particularly vehement in his criticism of President Barack Obama. He sees little change from the Republican, far-right days of Obama’s predecessor, the justifiably vilified George W. Bush. Although Obama was elected on the promise of “hope” and “change” and was forced into the midst of an economic crisis from his first days in office, Stiglitz claims that he has taken little restorative action beyond placating Wall Street and maintaining the status quo of the troubled global financial system. He describes how the Obama administration has shown a disturbing ongoing complacency toward bankers and an unambiguous willingness to accede to Wall Street’s increasingly brazen requests. By failing to rein in rogue banking practices, Obama has allowed a resumption of, among other things, high-frequency, high-risk transactions and a culture of outsized bonuses. Additionally, Stiglitz notes that Obama missed a historic opportunity for reform by maintaining a holdover of many of Bush’s core team of advisors, raising questions surrounding the feasibility for change under the new president.
In 2014 Joseph Stiglitz gave this lecture for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings titled:
Thomas Piketty’s recent book has noted large increases in wealth and the wealth/income ratio. But there has not been the associated decline in interest rates or increases in wages that one might have expected. Indeed, in some countries, like the US, there has been wage stagnation. If we take “wealth” to be capital, it leads to a seeming paradox, a strong contradiction to the neoclassical model. At the same time, he suggests that high levels of inequality are a natural aspect of capitalism - with the short period of the few decades before 1980 representing an exception.
This lecture will resolve the seeming paradox, describe the centrifugal and centripetal forces that lead to increased and diminished inequality, show how the balance between these forces has been disturbed since 1980 to lead to a higher equilibrium level of inequality, and explain, however, that this level of inequality is not just the result of market forces, but of policies and politics, some of which have impeded the way that a well-functioning competitive market would have behaved. The final piece of the analysis links this growing inequality to our financial system and the credit-creation process.
Inequality is not just the result of market forces, but of policies and politics . . .
Fiona Harvey Environment correspondent for the Guardian reports (Tue 21 Apr 2020), beginning with this warning:
The coronavirus crisis will push more than a quarter of a billion people to the brink of starvation unless swift action is taken to provide food and humanitarian relief to the most at-risk regions, the UN and other experts have warned.
About 265 million people around the world are forecast to be facing acute food insecurity by the end of this year, a doubling of the 130 million estimated to suffer severe food shortages last year.
“Covid-19 is potentially catastrophic for millions who are already hanging by a thread,” said Dr Arif Husain, chief economist at the World Food Programme.
“It is a hammer blow for millions more who can only eat if they earn a wage. Lockdowns and global economic recession have already decimated their nest eggs. It only takes one more shock – like Covid-19 – to push them over the edge. We must collectively act now to mitigate the impact of this global catastrophe.”
And ending the article with another warning sign:
However, there are signs that international cooperation on the pandemic is under strain. The US refused to sign up to an extensive draft communique by G20 health ministers that bolstered the role of the World Health Organization, preferring a brief version that acknowledged gaps in the world’s preparedness, and president Donald Trump has halted US funding for the WHO.
Fiona Harvey's report also highlights the fact that the World Food Programme estimates that $350m (£280m) will be needed immediately, but only about a quarter of the sum has yet been forthcoming.
She also writes that: "The report finds that already stretched health services in developing countries are likely to be overwhelmed, while a global recession will disrupt food supply chains. There are particular concerns for people working in the informal economy, and the world’s 79 million refugees and displaced people."
The Covid-19 crisis is likely to cause labour shortages as people fall ill, and may put further strain on food production. Protectionist measures may increase food prices, and rising unemployment will also reduce people’s purchasing power, driving more into hunger.
Fiona Harvey reports that "On the plus side, harvest prospects for staple crops are good, but the movement restrictions to contain the spread of the virus will create problems for food distribution."
The background to the coronavirus pandemic includes millions of people whose situation is highly vulnerable. In a crisis it is always the poor and the vulnerable who pay the cost in either misery or death. Fiona Harvey says: "Last year, of the 130 million people suffering acute food insecurity, the majority (77 million) were in countries afflicted by conflict, 34 million were hit by the climate crisis, and 24 million were in areas where there was an economic crisis."
Fiona Harvey's report also highlights the efforts of charities to encourage rich countries to take policy decisions to avert the possible impact of this crisis in the developing counties of the world: "Charities and civil society groups are also calling on rich countries’ governments to take action to help the poorest at risk of starvation."
“The pandemic is a crisis on top of a crisis in parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia,” said Sean Callahan, chief executive of the charity.
“The severe health risks are only part of the outbreak. Lockdowns are hampering people from planting and harvesting crops, working as day labourers and selling products, among other problems. That means less income for desperately hungry people to buy food and less food available, at higher prices.”
A television screen at the Palazzo Chigi in Rome shows a video conference between G20 leaders 26 March 2020
While the G20 leaders were holding their video conference a group of eminent economists, including Joseph Stilglitz, and along with a number of global health experts, were calling on them to provide trillions of dollars to poorer countries to shore up ailing healthcare systems and economies, or face a disaster that will rebound on wealthier states through migration and health crises.
To G20 leaders,
Advanced countries have started now to see the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and there is worse to come for most countries. But delaying emergency measures in emerging and developing economies will lead to unimaginable health and social impacts which will come back to haunt us for decades. The G20 must act now.
As advanced economies struggle to cope with the spread of COVID-19, emerging and developing countries are facing an unprecedented collective threat to human life, social cohesion and economic devastation. The virus is now reaching countries with fragile health systems and weak institutions, with the potential of creating huge numbers of deaths, particularly among the 70 million globally displaced people. Massive economic losses will be incurred as countries desperately try to cope, people will migrate out of fear as the epidemic takes hold leading to social disruption, violence and security issues. Moreover, in the likely case that they fail, the virus could become endemic, producing new waves of destructive outbreaks regionally and around the world.
We have a rapidly closing window to ensure that we give these countries at least a fighting chance to manage the crisis and provide some light at the end of a what could be a long tunnel. Africa, South Asia and Central and South America are still at the very beginning of what could be a long epidemic cycle. As of this writing, 43 out of 54 countries in Africa have registered cases of the virus and there has been a six-fold increase in case numbers over the last 8 days. Yemen and Syria have just joined the list.
Just as governments in richer countries are trying to protect their most vulnerable citizens, they have both an obligation and a self-interest in shielding vulnerable countries. The fight must be waged globally on two fronts: public health and economic policy. On the health front, we must immediately support the World Health Organisation and shore up domestic institutions managing the healthcare response, guarantee logistics and supply chains for health and other essential goods. In parallel we must immediately accelerate the global effort to find vaccines and therapeutics, manufacture and distribute them fairly across the world.
We must also provide emergency resources to countries facing devastating fiscal outlays and massive capital outflows. The economic impact on these countries will be much greater than anything experienced during the global financial crisis. With little fiscal space, high debt levels and little external capital left, their capacity to protect their populations is very limited.
First and foremost, we should ensure that the WHO has sufficient resources to continue leading the global response. The entire UN system and the associated international financial institutions, the World Bank and the IMF, will be tested in a way that they have not been since they were created in the wake of two man-made catastrophes and the Great Depression.
There is an immediate funding gap to be filled for fighting the epidemic. The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board has requested at least $8 billion in emergency funding, including $2 billion to strengthen the WHO’s emergency and preparedness response, $0.75 billion for diagnostics, $3 billion for development, distributed manufacturing and delivery of vaccines, and $2.25 billion for therapeutic drugs to prevent and treat COVID-19.
The efforts to address the economic impact will, of course, require efforts of a completely different magnitude. It has taken 2trn dollars so far to try to fix the US economy – we can only imagine what it will take to fix the countries that are falling apart because of the collapse in commodity prices, tourism and remittances, and to protect those most vulnerable. The World Bank and the IMF have produced welcome quick responses, but what will be needed will be of a different order of magnitude. We need to find new and innovative ways to use the global financial muscle to back up these institutions and the countries affected.
We, as 20 engaged healthcare professionals and economists representing our professions, are now urging you, the leaders of the G20, to urgently provide the necessary resources to reduce the losses in human life and back up those most vulnerable. The required investment is minute compared to the social and economic costs of inaction. History will judge us harshly if we do not get this right.
Signatories
Kaushik Basu, former WB Chief Economist and President of International Economic Association; professor, Cornell Erik Berglof, former EBRD Chief Economist; professor, LSE Tim Besley, former President of the International Economic Association; professor, LSE Victor Dzau, President, National Academy of Medicine Jeremy Farrar, Director, Wellcome Trust Ahmed Galal, former Finance Minister, Egypt Sergei Guriev, former EBRD Chief Economist; professor, Sciences Po Bengt Holmstrom, Nobel Laureate; professor, MIT Anne Krueger, former World Bank Chief Economist; professor, Johns Hopkins Justin Yifu Lin, former WB Chief Economist; professor, Beijing University Nora Lustig, former President of Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association; professor, Tulane Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Managing Director, World Bank; and finance minister, Nigeria. Christopher Pissarides, Nobel Laureate, professor, LSE. Dani Rodrik, Incoming President, International Economic Association, professor, Harvard Michael Spence, Nobel Laureate; professor, New York University Nick Stern, former WB and EBRD Chief Economist; professor, LSE Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate and former WB Chief Economist, professor, Columbia Andrés Velasco, former finance minister, Chile; Dean. LSE School of Public Policy Leonard Wantchekon, founder African School of Economics; professor, Princeton Shangjin Wei, former ADB Chief Economist; professor, Columbia
Rainbow . . .
In February 2017, and in celebration of The National Art Center of Tokyo‘s 10th anniversary, French architect Emmanuelle Moureaux was commissioned to fill the institution’s 6500 square foot exhibition space with her vision of the decade to come. Unsurprisingly, Moureaux, whose practice often involves layering color within space, decided to transform the white cube into a rainbow forest filled with more than 60,000 multi-colored numbers arranged in three dimensional grids.
Rainbows in art and cultures . . .
Rainbows occur frequently in mythology, and have been used in the arts.
One of the earliest literary occurrences of a rainbow is in the Book of Genesis chapter 9, as part of the flood story of Noah, where it is a sign of God's covenant to never destroy all life on earth with a global flood again.
In Norse mythology, the rainbow bridge Bifröst connects the world of men (Midgard) and the realm of the gods (Asgard).
Cuchavira was the god of the rainbow for the Muisca in present-day Colombia and when the regular rains on the Bogotá savanna were over, the people thanked him offering gold, snails and small emeralds.
The Irish leprechaun's secret hiding place for his pot of gold is usually said to be at the end of the rainbow. This place is appropriately impossible to reach, because the rainbow is an optical effect which cannot be approached.
Rainbow flags have been used for centuries. It was a symbol of the Cooperative movement in the German Peasants' War in the 16th century, of peace in Italy, and of gay pride and LGBT social movements since the 1970s.
In 1994, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and President Nelson Mandela described newly democratic post-apartheid South Africa as the rainbow nation.
The rainbow has also been used in technology product logos, including the Apple computer logo.
Many political alliances spanning multiple political parties have called themselves a "Rainbow Coalition".
A symbol of hope . . .
As a meteorological phenomenon, a rainbow is caused by reflection, refraction and dispersion of light in water droplets resulting in a spectrum of light appearing in the sky.
As a natural phenomenon, part of our experience of weather, a connection of the atmosphere and the biosphere is a relatively easy one to make.
The cultural connection to the rainbow, as a sign of hope, is currently being mobilized in the stressful conditions everyone is going through during the coronavirus pandemic.
This may also be the case in the context of the climate emergency, and the hope of Re:LODE Radio that the present global health crisis does not completely overshadow the even more serious challenge of global heating.
What can art, and artists do to get "with it"?
A few days before Hans Haacke's "Gift Horse" was unveiled, as part of the Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth programme, on 5 March 2015, he discussed the work in an interview with Guardian journalist Nicholas Wroe. The article finishes with Hans Haacke talking about his hopes for the work making a difference, and influencing the discourse:
“A work is usually more to do with the context, both in terms of the space in which something is put and the general social and political environment at the moment. I am a newspaper addict. The New York Times is my breakfast entertainment and so I do have a range of references to draw on. And sometimes my work has been criticised for being too much like journalism. But inevitably if you engage with the world and you respond to what is coming at you over the transom then it is a natural outcome.”
So how does he feel when a museum, or institution, or the fourth plinth committee, accepts his work? “Sometimes people think that thereby the whole thing is smothered, and doesn’t rub any more. But that’s not how I understand it. For better or worse, museums and institutions are the channel through which you can reach, even in a superficial way, very large audiences. And that can also be picked up by the press and others, and then it has a chance to become part of the public discourse. So in a very indirect way, you can play a part in shaping what people think and talk about and even who is going to be running the government. Not that politics is everything. And I have no delusions of grandeur. This is just one small stone in a large mosaic. But that one little stone? It really can change the colour and look of the whole mosaic.”
In a similar way, Re:LODE Radio aims to contribute to the discourse . .
. . . and getting "with it" on Earth Day
The after-image is a kind of “ice breaker” for bigger conversations, Eliasson said.
“Maybe it is not the planet which is in danger. It is in fact us, the human race, making itself extinct. The planet will be fine. Give it a few thousand years after the humans have fucked up everything and the Earth will thrive and be green and be wonderful.”
The nine images of Earth will be shown with different places at their centre. They include the Mariana Trench in the Pacific ocean, which at 11,000 metres, is the deepest trench on Earth yet still a place where human-made plastics have been found.
Other locations are the Great Barrier Reef, the Ganges river in India, the Greenland ice sheet, and the Simien mountains in Ethiopia and Ecuador “because they are so unbelievably progressive on the rights of nature”, said Eliasson.
There is also Chernobyl in Ukraine, a fascinating story according to Eliasson in that it was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history yet is now a place where rare and endangered wildlife thrives.
Eliasson said the project was about looking at the Earth from a distance, taking a step back to reconsider and redesign it.
He said he did not want to suggest how people should respond because “it will always end up excluding someone who is very likely smarter than me.”
In integrating the "sister arts" of poetry and painting into a single image, he still, nevertheless, produces a deliberate discrepancy, a catachresis. The poetic language is; bright burning; fire; night; a daring to seize; dread; a hammer and chain; and terrors clasped; but the tyger is a pussy cat, more Tigger than tiger!
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