lifeisbrutallyunfair.com

rain and rust

_POSTED_BY admin

Wednesday, 15 October 2008

Instead of buying into the shortlived corporate euphoria and political chest beating over the 'record' market rebound on Monday ( since when have violent mood swings ever been a good indicator of health? ) I was more interested in three other news stories that didnt get so much attention that day, news of Forum of the Future , a UK think tank, setting out three possible scenarios we might wake up to on New Years Day 2030 based on decisions we make or put off making now, news of the David Hume Institute , a respected Economic think tank , preparing a paper on the same subject but looking at where we might be in 2050 and news of the launch of artist Dominique Gonzales Foerster's work TH. 2058 at the Tate Modern in London, a massive installation depicting a bleak dystopian future for Londoners in the 2050's brought about by climate change , cultural decay and societal collapse .

The fact that these three unrelated yet thematically linked stories broke on the same day highlights just how mainstream raising concerns about the environment and encouraging people to consciously think about and actively participate in the way we organise resources and live on the planet has become outside national Government circles. With the UN now in the frontline of organisations calling for urgent international co-operation to tackle global warming one has to wonder when Governments will wake up and start taking action to try to ' bailout' the environment as well .

The Forum of the Future and David Hume Institute initiatives present various outlooks on the future, some optimistic other much bleaker and both touch on the possibility of a greater sense of shared responsibility and community evolving out of tackling environmental problems in the coming years if we take steps to address problems now but it's Gonzales Foersters huge installation TH.2058 at the Tate Modern that brings the issues to life in the most dramatic way.

The Tate Modern is a converted power station ( Dirty coal power into Enlightenment? ) , a collosal space and visitors to the gallery's Turbine Hall are greeted with the following passage written large on the wall above the entrance to the the TH.2058 exhibit.

"It rains incessantly in London – not a day, not an hour without rain, a deluge that has now lasted for years and changed the way people travel, their clothes, leisure activities, imagination and desires. They dream about infinitely dry deserts.

This continual watering has had a strange effect on urban sculptures. As well as erosion and rust, they have started to grow like giant, thirsty tropical plants, to become even more monumental. In order to hold this organic growth in check, it has been decided to store them in the Turbine Hall, surrounded by hundreds of bunks that shelter – day and night – refugees from the rain."

And then you hear the sound of dripping water muffled through the heavy translucent plastic drapes that hang down from the ceiling , the sort of drapes used in industrial cold storage units or between refrigerated areas in butchers shops .Some of the drapes are red as if blood stained and they form an eerie almost sinister barrier visitors must pass through but people seem hesitant to push through them and look to others for cues as there are no signs or directions. Everyone is on their own here until we get to the other side and walk into a damp cramped cold yet strangely womb-like space decked out with empty blue bunk beds each with a book on them. It's a scene that harps back to Londoners seeking out refuge in the deep underground train tunnels beneath the city during WW11 to survive the German bombs raining down from above but a reminder too that London has, like New york , Madrid and many other cities been attacked since then , most recently by suicide bombers who targetted the city's underground network on July 7th 2007, and may well be again at any time.

The sound of the dripping water is loudest in this cramped space but as visitors push forward into the belly of the vast turbine hall the cage-like blue and yellow bunk beds are arranged around replica sculptures taking refuge here too and the bunks stretch out and on and on to the far wall like an emergency crisis centre , each bunk here has a book on it too, as if just left by their missing occupants mid read. People stray between the metal bunks picking up the books to squint at their their titles, 'Fahrenheit 451' , War of the Worlds ' The Drowned World and Hiroshima mon amour to cname but a few . The literature tells the story , the collapse of civilisation and the books , presented like the statues as abandoned and neglected cultural relics, are reminders that the future is our refuge and there is a grave danger we'll end up making these beds to lay in for ourselves if we forget these stories we've always been telling ourselves. . Against the backwall of the turbine hall a huge screen loops what the artist has called 'The Last Film ' showing snippets of apocalyptic , totalitarian and claustrophobic movies like Farenheit 451, Solaris, Soylent Green , Planet of the Apes , Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Zabriskie Point.

Apparently, somewhere in the installation on one of the bunks a lone radio quietly plays a 40's bosa nova but I dint see or hear it but then again one of the telltale signs of the collapse of a civilisation or culture is that it stops communicating and runs out of outside help to appeal to or anything remotely self-redeeming to say for itself. Of course Gonzales-Foerster's work could just as easilly be a tongue in cheek call for balance on the issue of global warming , who knows, but the backdrop of the economic chaos taking place just across the water in London's financial centre , encourages the bleaker interpretation.- could this be our future? It's a good question and the honest answer is, yes but it could also be much worse..

TH.2058 lacked a spiritual message though. OK, one may have been deeply embedded in one or two of the books strewn around on the bunks but to me the work related to an almost mechanical universe in which we were all caged in our bunks on a closed and claustrophobic disaster movie set. dwelling on this gaping spiritual hole in the work I visited Southwark Cathderal , just up the river from the Tate Modern and asked one of the guides there if the church had taken any measures to address the current economic crisis. The guide misunderstood and said the church helped fund a homeless night shelter and provided refuge and sanctuary to patients of a large mental instution just up the road – which I had been admitted to myself a few years back. I smiled and put the question more clearly – had the church addressed the current financial crisis bearing in mind the cathedral was located just across the river from the London stock exchange and its financial district and clearly had a lot of finance workers as members of its congregation.

“ Oh she said, some of the priests have talked about greed there is a lack of morality in society, she added ' what's happening is wrong. ”

I asked if she thought the situation, then talked up in the media as the first signs of rebound recovery , would get worse before it got better and if she thought we would emerge from the crisis with a fairer economic system. She said she believed other banks were in trouble, this was before the US Government announced that it was taking a $250 stake in US banks to ensure the market remained ' free' , and that there was worse to come but said she honestly believed that a fairer system would emerge because of the sheer amount of public money being used to bail out the market system.

I wanted to point out that we've also spent hundreds of billions of taxpayers money on two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last few years without much of a say but the guide , an attractive middle aged woman wasnt the Church , she was just an employee so I thanked her for her time and went on my way. There was no literature in the cathedral relating to either global warming or the current economic crisis. This left me feeling like there was a gaping hole in the church's take as well – the material reality plain to see right outside its ancient and grand ornate doors.

Further down the river I visited the Southbank Centre , initially to hook my laptop up to its free Wi Fi system but I ended up looking at two more exhibitions that seemed to plug the gaps I'd encountered at the cathedral and Tate. The first exhibition called ' Disposable People' , was a devastating photographic portrayal of how 200 years after the abolition of the slave trade slavery still persisted under different guises. Staring into the eyes of poor Haitian , Indonesian or Ukranian people trafficked into a world of exploitation , physical beatings and sexual abuse . People sat on bunks staring at the camera . A women on her knees with her back to the viewer slumped weeping on her bed. Young unworldly Asian village girls processed through brutally run ' training centres ' for domestic work in Singapore . The photograph caption says, for every escape from the locked centre the girls are collectively punished and forced to do hundreds of push ups. Aging Koreans who had been used as Comfort Workers by the Japanese stared out from huge portraits, their faces lined with their traumatic experiences and the cruelty we are all capable of doing to one another. I staggered around the exhibition close to tears as here were the missing people , our disposable selves, the selves we never quite have time to consider or to reflect upon, the missing selves our whole way of life is built upon, we know these selves live , struggle and die in the most terrible of circumstances and conditions so that we can live just that little bit better, we know these selves will never be bailed out and will always inhabit a darker corner of the cage of life. We also know that we'll probably be these selves sooner or later and I thought back to Southwark Cathedral where a tribal South African altapiece currently takes pride of place as an exhibit and wondered why works portraying this tragic routine human tale of misery arent on display there as well? The Cross on its own no longer cuts it. Why isnt the church more vocal on how disposable we all are?

Why isnt it rattling the cage of life to remind us how trapped we are within it?

On the way out I stumbled into the SouthBanks Centre's 'Spirit Level' section hosting an exhibition of young offenders art . Again the theme of caged life, of being buried alive , the claustrophobic underground bunks, the disposable people trafficked like cattle under our noses and now kids locked up , some of them for life before ever leaving their teens, creating desperate images of broken connection, identity, regret and sheer fucking powerlessness and behind these self pitiful cries for attention and meaning the silence of the victims of their crimes echoing back in one long chain of neverending rights and wrongs that we are all implicated in.

It rains incessantly - boy does it just!