Paris, Syria, and Ai Wewei

I have only provocations.  I have no answers.

Last night I was at a diplomatic party - and I met Hilary Benn.  I hadn't really expected to run up against the man who, less than 24 hours before, had won applause in the House of Commons for disagreeing with his party leader and voting to bomb Syria.  It seemed more than a little odd, given what he had said only two weeks before.  Click here and marvel.

The air strikes on Syria are a response of sorts to the killings in Paris, but they are a knee-jerk response.  Like everything David Cameron says or does, the decision to go to war was an unconsidered reaction to a short-term news agenda, playing for what he regards as immediate popularity, rather than looking towards any longer-term plan or future possibility.  I recognise, of course, that we must do something - but an intensification of the conflict Daesh desires is not it.  We are casting ourselves in exactly the Western crusader role they have given us in their apocalyptic narrative. The best analysis I have read of the ISIS / Daesh movement is by Graeme Wood, writing in The Atlantic.  If this article makes one thing clear, it is that the escalation of conflict is exactly what they desire.

So the current response is not only inadequate - it is dangerous.  And this begs the question -  if not by bombing, how should we respond?

On one level, as Diane Abbott and Caroline Lucas articulated very clearly on last night's Question Time, there are diplomatic and economic measures that can be taken.  We could start by stopping arms sales to Saudi Arabia.  You can watch the debate and consider for yourself...

For me, as an artist, the question of response is not so directly political - though of course I recognise that the directly political is central.  The contribution of artists is in the cultural arena, and is to do with interventions in public space that shift the quality of thought.  Cultural activity changes the emotional temperature, the atmosphere.  It allows certain things to become thinkable, and certain things to become unthinkable.  At the moment, the unthinkable is becoming policy - and so the need for cultural response is very real.

I'm not saying that art can "Stop the War".  I'm certainly not saying it can stop Daesh.  What I am saying is that a mature society responds to events on a variety of levels, and that the response of artists is often the most profound - the response that can help others think through matters on a more practical level.  In pre-colonial Ghana, the role of the seprewa player was to provide music in the chief's hut, as a way of enabling him to think through what to do.  In Ancient Greece, the Athenian populace watched the plays of Euripides as preparation for jury service and the legislative process.

So - what music, what theatre do we make at this moment?  How do we counter destruction with creativity?  How can we re-member what was blown apart?  How can we find any sort of beauty to set against the violence?

The day before the Paris massacre, I went to see the Ai Weiwei exhibition at the Royal Academy.  A great deal of this show seems to me to be grappling with precisely the questions that Paris has thrown at us.  His subjects are almost always to do with meaningless oppression, destruction and death.  He makes art from his own imprisonment, from the vandalistic inheritance of the Cultural Revolution, from the bones of Mao's nameless victims.  Most strikingly of all, he memorialises the children who died in the Szechuan earthquake.

Straight is an overwhelming artwork, particularly as shown at the RA, where it is framed by the collected and catalogued names of the children, placed on the walls like a war memorial.  The 150 tons of steel bars that constitute the artwork are taken from the wreckage of the schools where the children died.  The buildings collapsed because these bars buckled so easily - Ai's video in the same room explains the engineering failures, and the huge challenges of gathering the names, finding out what he could about the children, straightening the bent metal.  But it has been straightened, and lies in the RA as a testament to an intense and difficult dedication.  The bars have to be straightened, the artwork says, because their not being straight is the reason 5,000 children died.  To straighten them is a memorial, an act of reparation, a political gesture.

If we can begin to inject something of this depth and emotional intensity into our own cultural space, if we can begin truly to memorialise our lost youth, then perhaps we can begin to move beyond the current simplistic 'eye for an eye', revenge-driven militarism.  Perhaps we can begin to think, and feel, a little differently. We desperately need to.

EcoCentrix and Namatjira

This year's Origins Festival is refusing to go away.  Although the intense period of Festival activity ended on November 3rd, there was a further week of the EcoCentrix exhibition at Bargehouse, and from tonight to Friday, Namatjira plays at the Purcell Room.

EcoCentrix was a very exciting partnership for us: the chance to help present an exhibition curated by Helen Gilbert and her team on the Indigeneity Project, who have been researching indigenous performance and its place in the contemporary world for as long as we have been running the festival.  There were many overlaps in material, of course - work by Marrugeku, Fiona Foley, Rosanna Raymond and Victoria Hunt was in the exhibition as well as the Festival, and Rita Leistner's images from The Edward Curtis Project related to the themes she and Marie Clements had explored at the Origins workshop in 2011 (itself based on the play and images shown in Vancouver the year before…  journeys, journeys…).  But perhaps even more important than this was the way in which EcoCentrix was able to expand the range of what was on show - allowing audiences to look at indigenous performance in relation to its space, land and culture, and to think about the key issue of sustainability in new and surprising ways.

One of the many things which indigenous cultures are really good at, indeed one of the things which seems to me to define their particular place in the contemporary cultural ecology, is making new things out of old things.  That can be on a really basic level - a bit of packaging becomes a puppet, a discarded pot morphs into a ceremonial drum.  But it can also be on a much more complex level of high culture, where ancient ideas can be adapted and re-contextualised to operate in relation to modernity, losing none of their power in the process.  Indeed, what emerged most strongly in EcoCentrix was the way in which this process leads to a gain in power - the way an idea or image embedded in time and cultural continuity is renewed and regenerated by its being related to modernity.  It doesn't feel obsolete at all, but relevant and immediate.

Namatjira is also about this idea.  A great Aboriginal artist, Albert Namatjira was regarded as fit to sit alongside white Australians (and was the first indigenous person to become a citizen of his own country) because he painted in a style which could be recognised and understood by Europeans.  But that does not undermine the indigenous sensibility in what he did.  If you see his work at the Royal Academy, it leaps out from the European imagery around it, demonstrating a completely distinct approach to landscape, colour and the spiritual life and energy of country.  He stood in a continuum of ancient culture - but made it of the moment when he lived, intersecting with the wider world, utterly new and unique.  I suppose that's the essence of creativity.

Australia

Bliss by Fiona Foley

I was lucky enough to get invited to a preview of the RA's new Australia exhibition last week, and to hear the curator Kathleen Soriano, and indigenous artist Christian Thompson talking about it at the High Commission on Friday night.  As much as anything, it's very exciting that there is so much Australian culture, and so much indigenous Australian culture, on show in London this autumn.  There's even a new dedicated website, called Australian Nexus, which exists to bring them all together. And there is Origins, right in the thick of it.  Fiona Foley, whose Lecture is set to be a Festival highlight, has a video piece called Bliss at the centre of the last, most political section of the RA show: it deals with the way in which Aboriginal workers were turned into opium addicts, paid in drugs rather than cash - and it does it through the disturbing medium of beautiful poppies.  Vernon Ah Kee, the designer of Gudirr Gudirr, also has a piece in the show.  And so it goes on.  There's even an essay in the catalogue by Thomas Keneally - who got us interested in Aboriginal culture in the first place, way back in 2003-4 with Bullie's House.

The show begins stunningly, with an evocation of journeying into landscape: a lone motorbike rider drives into the bush, raising his arms in a crucifix.  And then there's a room of beautiful indigenous art - the traditional art of Dreaming, totem and landscape, although some of it has shifted form and medium to be painted on canvas and hung on walls.  The majesty, colour and sheer energy of these works is so powerful that it is difficult to see how the rest of the show can possibly live up to them - and for the first few rooms of European-style art created after the invasion, it emphatically doesn't.  It takes some time to realise that, in a way, this let-down is almost the point: that the settler art, supposedly more "civilised", more "refined", was in fact simplistic and timid by comparison with that of the indigenous culture.

Where the exhibition really takes off again is in the more modern sections, when white artists begin to engage with the reality of the land, rather than imposing a European sensibility; and when indigenous art becomes engaged with the political encounter between the cultures.  Sidney Nolan's series of Ned Kelly paintings are there - much more vibrant and epic in the flesh than in any reproduction (including the exhibition poster, which washes out the colours quite badly).  Albert Namatjira's watercolours are similar acts of cultural boundary-bursting - he uses that most English of forms to paint a landscape about as far from Surrey as you can imagine - and to fulfil his ancestral Dreaming.  Margaret Preston is one of the first non-Indigenous artists to absorb indigenous influences, and as a result her work seems to speak far more clearly of and to the Australian space - geographical, political and spiritual. Her evocation of Adam and Eve as indigenous people exiled from Eden by a white angel is provocative and visceral.

The show ends with Fiona's work, Vernon's Can't Chant (wegrehere) #2 and other pieces exploring the tensions of an emerging, but far from integrated or complete, cross-cultural, post-colonial reality.  Australia is full of tensions - and that is what makes it so culturally dynamic at the present moment.  It's a vital time to be engaged with what is happening there.