Labor Craft above the Clouds

Labor Craft above the Clouds (The Intermediaries of a Time that Governs People to Raise a Barrier to the Comfortable Urban Condition)
2010
263 x 30 x 13 cm
wood, acrylic, varnish, felt

Ανακύκλωση-Επανάχρηση-Οικειοποίηση

Eπιμελεια : Θανάσης Μουτσόπουλος
Καλλιτέχνες: Όπυ Ζούνη, Βλάσης Κανιάρης , Χρύσα Ρωμανού, Βασίλης Σκυλάκος , Άγγελος Αντωνόπουλος , Λάζαρος Ζήκος, Νίκος Τρανός , Κωστής Τριανταφύλλου, Γιώργος Τσακίρης, Πάνος Χαραλάμπους , Γιώργος Χαρβαλιάς, Νίκος Κρυωνίδης, Αντώνης Μιχαηλίδης, Κωστής Βελώνης, Κalos & Κlio, Κατερίνα Παπαζήση

Δημοτική Πινακοθήκη Καλαμάτας
Δεκ.2010 - 31 Μαρτίου 2011

Passe-Montagne

Thierry de Cordier
Passe-Montagne,1983

Writers Cottage

Architects: Jarmund / Vigsn?s AS Architects MNAL
Location: Asker, Norway
Client: Cecilie Enger
Project year: 2007 – 2008
Photographs: Nils Petter Dale
Source :www.archdaily.com

Unbounded Enthusiasms

Bojan Šarčević, World Corner, 1999, bricks, plaster, wallpaper, wood. Installation view, Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin.

“TO WHAT EXTENT SHOULD AN ARTIST understand the implications of his or her findings?” This is the cryptic question that Bojan Šarčević posed to a panel of artists, critics, and curators he’d convened on the occasion of his 2006 two-venue exhibition in Ireland, at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, and the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo. The show debuted a group of works—miniature geometries of brass threads dangling almost imperceptibly against an expanse of elegantly distressed wallpaper—that appeared far from the kind of research-based production his query would seem to address. Yet the seminar, held at the Dublin venue, was no mere discursive supplement. If Šarčević broached the broader topic of meaning in art—as was borne out by the ensuing expansive and open-ended discussion, which took the outcome out of the artist’s hands and offered no easily summarized “findings”—he also answered its own question. And this response was articulated via the creation of a defined structure (in this case, the colloquium form) that serves as an engine of relatively unbounded knowledge production. It’s precisely this kind of generative and multiplicitous rubric that has unified Šarčević’s stylistic shape-shifts, over the past decade or so, through roughhousing architectural interventions, films and videos, delicately filigreed sculptures, and a diversity of photo-based work.

The problem was that, thanks to the presiding doxa of reception, readings of Šarčević’s work had tended to overlook this central strategy. There are understandable reasons for this. Consider, for example, one of Šarčević’s earliest pieces, World Corner, 1999, for which he physically extracted the corner of a room in a condemned apartment building in Amsterdam, cut an equivalent-size corner from a room in Berlin’s Carlier|Gebauer gallery, and fitted the Dutch corner into the German gap. While the new addition sat more or less flush with the venue’s walls and floor, a suture of splattered plasterwork around it made plain that a transplanting process had occurred. And in this sense, World Corner would seem to map onto Šarčević’s peripatetic background: Born in Belgrade, he lived with his family in North Africa for some years, then moved to Sarajevo as a teenager. At the age of seventeen, at the outset of the Bosnian war, he left that city and has since sojourned in Montreal, Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin (where he now lives). So far, so tidy: World Corner’s suggestions of migration and adaptation chime with Šarčević’s Eastern European name and far-flung, war-torn background, offering, in a highly respectable post-Minimal idiom, an allegory of geopolitical instability, nomadic drift, and contingent identity. But while Šarčević is not unconcerned with these issues, this isn’t how his art communicates, where it originates, or how it is internally organized.

Šarčević’s interest, in the case of World Corner (which was shown on two further occasions, in Watou, Belgium and Paris), lay in upending and refocusing the experience of a given space, in creating something at once incongruous and assimilated, in making a collage in three dimensions. He was, he says, inspired by a memory of Jean Eustache’s film Une Sale Histoire (A Dirty Story, 1977), in which a man describes discovering a peephole in a Paris café’s bathroom and fantasizing that this aperture predates the whole city, which grew up around it. When World Corner was plugged into a gallery space, it too seemed paradoxically both a foundation and an empty center. It was evidently older than what surrounded it; figuratively speaking, it might have been the cornerstone on which each structure was built.

Glimmering here is the idea that the conceptual ambit of Šarčević’s art might be disproportionate to its apparent physical restraint. Though his work always seems to be shifting gears in terms of medium and appearance, it consistently demonstrates what multitudes a particle of reality can contain when it is unmoored from its context, and how that untethering might modulate experience on the visual—as opposed to critical or conceptual—plane. We can see this dynamic in other early works—for example, Favorite Clothes Worn While S/He Worked, 2000, for which Šarčević persuaded members of various uniformed professions (including maids and car mechanics) to spend two weeks working in their “best” clothes and then exhibited the stained results in a pseudo-museological display. Here, carried over from World Corner, is an impulse to simultaneously emphasize and normalize incongruities. Favorite Clothes . . . engages other issues as well, e.g., labor’s indignities and its insidious colonizing of the self. But at the same time, these works are rooted in a notion of the material trace as suggestive origin; both prompt viewers to build outward—into a hemisphere of delimited signification—from what is effectively abstract mark-making, as invested in texture and facture as Dieter Roth’s grease stains or Lee Bontecou’s soiled, cut-up conveyor belts.



Bojan Šarčević, Favorite Clothes Worn While S/He Worked, 2000, twenty-seven wardrobe items, MDF tables. Installation view, Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst Bremen, Germany, 2000

Rather than viewing them as determinative, a stable platform on which interpretation can be built, one might see the external references that Šarčević offers in such works as something like the fragments of an old, decaying scroll: They at once serve as points of orientation and imply, materially, the vast expanse of everything that isn’t there to be read. They thus take an audience accustomed to reading works of art, unlocking predetermined content, and treating reception as a form of mastery and set them afloat in endlessly bifurcating realms of signification, inviting them to fill in the blanks themselves. This is especially clear in two works whose references are loaded indeed: Spirit of Versatility and Spirit of Inclusiveness, both 2002, are corner-hugging mimicries of decorative detailing from holy places. The former is a painted-wood, silvery-gray, sci-fi-looking spread of interlocking geometric forms based on muqarnas, the richly niched corbels found in mosques; the latter is a life-size replica, in glowing plates of steel, zinc, brass, and copper, of one of the curved, vaulted corners of Cologne Cathedral. Particularly in the wake of 9/11, this overt counterposing of Christianity and Islam might conjure a nimbus of sociopolitical import and rhetorical intent. But in fact, via its mismatching of aesthetic regimes, the work undoes the kind of neat conceptual symmetry (e.g., Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order [1996]) that would enable such a reading. What both works offer is undeniable and estranged material presence: Here, Šarčević makes Islamic architecture feel startlingly futuristic and allies Christianity with the textures of Minimalism. To the extent that Spirit of Versatility and Spirit of Inclusiveness do contain a political or topical argument, it may consist in the notion that failure of imagination—the kind that posits two religions as a simple binary—is itself an ethical transgression.

In later works, the referential quality becomes ever more oblique, while the work itself seems to move toward formal transparency—as if to delineate a kind of ether in which viewers’ projections of meaning could remain suspended. Keep Illusion for the End, 2005, for instance, is a large, freestanding geometric framework of overlapping and crisscrossing three-dimensional outlines—zigzagging lengths of brass, copper, wood, and concrete recede like afterimages behind an irregular polygon made of slender wooden strips—which, seen from one angle, snap into focus to suggest the flattened silhouette of a house. The airy, diagrammatic whole, an elegant study in form and line and (absence of) volume, has a refined neomodernist feel. But the overly elaborated zigzags, reminiscent of Art Moderne moldings, also suggest decor details such as coving. Like the Spirit of . . . sculptures, this work puts ornament center stage. In a doubly wry inversion, modernism is remade out of what it repressed, and abstraction is made to do the bidding of its former nemesis, figuration.

Yet while all of this usefully lends itself to talking about the work, these projects could perhaps also be recouped as simply the sediment of the artist’s daily life, rather than as Šarčević’s attempt to insert his art into a history of ideas. His creative method, he says, frequently finds him trying to reconstruct and amplify some splinter of the real. While World Corner sprang from his walking the streets of Amsterdam, Šarčević was living in Berlin, surrounded and fascinated by early-modern architecture, when he made Keep Illusion for the End and related pieces, such as the sleek copper stack of inwardly curving, loosely enclosing banister-like forms Wanting Without Needing, Loving Without Leaning, 2005, or “1954,” his 2004 series of black-and-white collages that upend the regimented spatial logic of modernist interiors. And describing these latter works’ ostensible thematics doesn’t, in any case, fully account for their physical or material fundamentality, which is elegant and anorexic, old and new, and suggests that the work doesn’t primarily require interpretation (although it can take it). If we tend to apprehend and remember the world in glancing, indelible details, Šarčević’s approach suggests, then an art that harvests and compounds such fragments ought to be a model of, and a cue for, an upgraded state of awareness, of being in the world—a model that invites surrender to the comparative aphasia of an underinscribed encounter, one that doesn’t come with a predetermined meaning.

An untitled 2006 series—of which Šarčević’s inconspicuous sculptures for Dublin were an outrider—found him bending and welding slender lengths of brass and stringing them with threads, like alien harps or sextants, before fixing them to walls that had been partly painted or wallpapered and partly stripped. The linear elements form a set of emphatic, specific, yet opaque formal decisions for the viewer to navigate, mitigated by what has increasingly become a hallmark of Šarčević’s art: a rare, abstract beauty. Once again implying a kind of three-dimensional collage, this procedure morphed across parallel groups of works created the same year. The brass geometries were strung with patterned silk scarves from a Berlin market, in a sensuous conversation between textures. They then found themselves standing like forlorn miniature pylons on complexly planed white cardboard plinths. And this tableau form was adapted (with the brass threads going with it) for Šarčević’s 16-mm film series “Only After Dark,” 2007, and “The Breath Taker Is the Breath Giver,” 2009.




View of Bojan Šarčević, “Only After Dark,” 2007, Centre d’Art Contemporain d'Ivry—le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine, France. Photo: André Morin.

The five films that compose the former series are all less than three minutes long, screened within specially made chambers that underline their quality of rapt hermeticism, and accompanied by downbeat and dilatory improvisations for piano, percussion, guitar, and kora. In each, the camera racks up static views of precise arrangements of shardlike Perspex uprights (L-shaped, like corners); groupings of ragged wood, brass, and curved paper; and origami-like card constructions, miniature stone obelisks, and a hunk of red meat that, at the end of the final film, appears to pulse like a beating heart. The accumulation of different angles on coordinate-free scenarios—expanded, in the four-part “The Breath Taker Is the Breath Giver,” to include miniature wooden architectures festooned with strings and nestling in sand; alien-looking, hair-covered objects resembling Chinese scholars’ rocks; and ravishingly lit alignments of crumpled colored tissue, cardboard, and a hank of blond hair—turns Šarčević’s camera into a proxy for the perplexed but entranced viewer, able neither to fully understand nor to look away.

The editing style, which involves restless cutting among the tableaux, meanwhile imparts to Šarčević’s subjects a quality bordering on animism. (The artist has said that he wanted the sculptural elements to be almost like protagonists, desiring to communicate with one another.) They hover, poised between sentience and dumb objecthood. The film’s liminal objects are echoed in a series of sculptures of surpassing delicacy (“Involuntary Twitch,” 2010), in which horizontal brass plates are held precariously within a system of notched, willowy steel poles. Though they’re composed of hard metals, these assemblies are inestimably fragile—a paradox that conveys itself unnervingly as viewers realize that these scaffolds are literally quivering in the gallery’s air currents. And though they resemble modular shelving systems, they’re resolutely nonfunctional (unless one has, say, a selection of feathers to display). These are near-abstract works haloed by panoplies of cloudy reference—their modernist aspect, for example, is at once present and hard to pin down.

This isn’t mystification for its own sake. For an artist to assign specific meaning to his or her own work—to seek to control “the implications of his or her findings”—is, by Šarčević’s lights, a kind of legislation or moralizing. It’s also deeply limiting, foreclosing the possibility of art’s accessing its profounder registers: where the viewer, rather than decrypting a piety, has a journeying encounter. On that voyage, Šarčević is still a guide but not an autocrat. It is here, one would say, that the tactical élan of Šarčević’s programmatic use of fragments and details might be seen. A sliver of the real, particularly when coaxed into the kind of exquisite obliqueness that he specializes in, is a starting point, asking to be followed through—refusing openness but allowing the viewer to do the completing. The rich specificity of Šarčević’s fragments, their near-Romantic keying to particular places and historical moments, creates spheres of interpretative potentialities, from the aesthetic to the sociopolitical. The artist refutes “meaninglessness,” the perilous obverse of opening up signification—but doesn’t turn the artwork into a cipher.

In 2007, Šarčević produced an artist’s book that juxtaposed images from the whole of his career with texts extracted from a 2004 paper on the transitioning Western Balkans, commissioned by the European Union Institute for Security Studies; he titled the volume Kissing the Back of Your Hand Makes a Sound like a Wounded Bird, densely alloying specific political realities and expansive poetic polysemy. One might consider this a distillation of what Šarčević is asking for: not an outright rejection of the content-driven approach that has dominated the art of recent decades or a wholehearted return to the modernist formalism that preceded it, but a realization that the two models were artificially cleaved all along. Vouchsafed here is a synthetic practice that does not displace experience—looking, feeling—in favor of decoding and that still acknowledges the existence of the outside world. This is an old modernist problem, but one that stalks us still. What we need is neither an erotics nor a hermeneutics of art, Šarčević wordlessly affirms. We need an art that calls for both at once.

Text by Martin Herbert
Source:Artforum , Nov.2010

Passe-Partout

Claire-Fontaine, "Passe-Partout" (Paris 10eme)

"Consumption", Helena Papadopoulos Gallery, Athens
11 November 2010-15 January 2011

Bearing the Light

Rain-diamonds, this winter morning, embellish the tangle of unpruned pear-tree twigs; each solitaire, placed, it appearrs, with considered judgement, bears the light beneath the rifted clouds -- the indivisible shared out in endless abundance.

Denise Levertov

Rotterdam Dialogues: Morality

Witte de With presents a two-day symposium structured around lectures, dialogues and a masterclass by Wendelien van Oldenborgh.


Since the Fall of 2009, the team at Witte de With has been developing a series of exhibitions and events that make visible the gray zones of contemporary morality. This was motivated by our perception that an exponential number of moral attitudes are emerging in the public sphere that reinforce rigid, binary frameworks for thought and action. With this in mind, our aim has been to shed some light on the workings of morality from a range of different perspectives, focusing on the areas where its application is elusive and unstable, culturally specific and politically ambivalent. Our sense is that the question of morality must remain in play but open and undefined.
The purpose of Rotterdam Dialogues: Morality is to forge a constructive discussion around this increasingly ubiquitous but elusive term, transferring the explorations and speculations developed throughout this past year’s exhibitions and events to the discursive field.

With this symposium we wish to shed some light on the fraught encounter between the values that characterize the idea of an open, egalitarian society, and the intolerances articulated in the name of morality. As with previous Acts of the program, the symposium guests have not been asked to specify the meaning of morality, but rather to introduce case studies through which to think constructively about spaces and instances where binary distinctions – good and evil; right and wrong – fall apart. Each guest will share her or his intellectual experience to form a base for concrete discussion.

The participants represent a wide range of disciplines: philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, curating, criticism, art, anthropology and architecture.

Lars Bang Larsen (critic, Barcelona/Copenhagen), Clémentine Deliss (director, Museum de Weltkulturen, Frankfurt), Dessislava Dimova (art historian and freelance curator, Brussels), Felix Ensslin (Professor for Aesthetics and Art Mediation, State Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart), Joseph Grima (director, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York), Nikolaus Hirsch (director, Städelschule, Frankfurt), Candice Hopkins (curator, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), Koyo Kouoh (administrator, curator and critic, Dakar), Mian Mian (author, Shanghai), Matthias Mühling (Head of Department Collections /Exhibitions/ Research, Städtische Galerie im Lembachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich), Wendelien van Oldenborgh (artist, Rotterdam), Adriano Pedrosa (independent curator, editor and writer, Saõ Paulo), Tariq Ramadan (Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University), Aaron Schuster (philosopher, Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin), Tirdad Zolghadr (independent critic and curator, New York, teacher at Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College).
And with New-York-based artist, Rainar Ganahl, as a special respondent from the audience.

Witte de With symposium
19-20 November
Wendelien van Oldenborgh masterclass
21 November

Marx in Arcadia

Kostis Velonis, Memorial to Collective Utopia, 2010, wood, acrylic, watercolour, 141 x 80 x 54 cm

"Marx in Arcadia",AD Gallery, Athens
Opening: Monday 15 November 2010, 8:00 p.m.
Exhibition duration: 15 November – 15 January 2011

Athens Dialogues : Democracy & Politeia

Democracy & Politeia

Athens, where the conference will take place, more than any other city-state of ancient Greece made an acknowledged contribution to the notions of democratic governance. This was both idealistic and realistic, emphasizing the importance of the individual but also the collectivity. The notion of human dignity was repeatedly stressed as was that of equality even though the latter was also severely circumscribed by the different social attitudes of the ancient world towards slavery, women and the rights of semi-citizens or immigrants. The understanding of justice and what purpose it should serve also received nuanced and sophisticated treatment that still informs legal thinking. Similarly pioneering was the realization that in a democracy citizens have duties as well as rights, towards the state but also towards ëeternalí laws, touching the sensitive issue of the permissible limits of civil disobedience.

These ideas evolved in the forum and in the gymnasium, during private social gatherings, and through the medium of essays or theatrical dramas and even comedies. The different media used to give them birth themselves became sources of inspiration and imitation as other panels will examine. The ideas of good and bad government were thus to figure prominently in the arts of the Renaissance among others. In short, the notions of the ancient world spread and touched not only lawyers and politicians but also thinkers and creators from all disciplines.

To these eternal topics the ancient Greeks did not always provide the final answers. Indeed, most would agree that these “big questions” are incapable of single or conclusive responses. But the ancient Greek world invariably handled them in insightful but also in a contradictory way which makes the richness of the ancient legacy greater and the need to explore its relevance to today’s unstable and highly materialistic times even more urgent.

Chair: Professor Konstantinos Svolopoulos, Professor of Modern Greek history, President of the Academy of Athens and Professor Anastasios-Ioannis Metaxas (co-chair), Professor Emeritus of Political Science of the University of Athens and Director of the Political Communication Workshop

Main Speakers: Ryan Balot, Angelos Chaniotis, John Dunn, Pierre Delvolvé, John Dunn, Jean-Louis Ferrary, Ljubomir Maksimovic, Anastasios-Ioannis Metaxas (co-chair), Sarah Monoson, Josiah Ober, Claudia Rapp

Onasssis Cultural Centre, 26 Nov.
www.athensdialogues.org

The Contemporary Artist as a Role Model in a Crisis of Competence

In a universe of increasing incompetence, in which amateurism flourishes, the contemporary artist offers an interesting role model. Society can learn much from the ways in which the contemporary artist makes his ignorance effective.

As a profession, contemporary art occupies a special position. Lacking a clear standard of craftsmanship, it is not a real métier: neither technical nor aesthetic criteria exist that can help identify a ‘competent work of art’. In this respect contemporary visual art differs from other art forms, such as music or dance, that still have solid minimum criteria for technique and skill.

Should artists be able to hold a hammer? In contemporary art even insiders rarely agree about criteria of artistic quality. A particular artist’s work may be judged as pathetic wreckage by some and at the same time as a revolutionary new aesthetic by others. This lack of consensus about quality and artistic merit will continue to provide material for Gerrit Komrij to write cynical newspaper columns. It is, however, actually a fascinating characteristic that makes the contemporary artist an unexpected role model in today’s society.

At the moment, we see around us a real, overall crisis of competence. The most distressing examples of this have shown up in the financial sector, with banks, investors and insurance companies (‘The incompetence is baffling,’ according to financial markets supervisor Hans Hoogervorst, last April). Major infrastructural projects that have stranded or failed completely also indicate a fundamental lack of expertise, in this case on the part of government authorities and project developers. ‘When the government stopped building bridges and roads, knowledge and expertise shifted to market players,’ according to the city of Almere's alderman, Adri Duivesteijn (NRC Handelsblad, 12 December 2009). But those market players themselves also seem to be failing. Contractors and subcontractors building the sheet piling for Amsterdam’s new metro line have made tremendous blunders, with well-publicized, disastrous consequences. From other sectors of society, including elementary education and forensic psychiatry, painful cases of incompetence are being reported as well.

Universities, colleges, government bodies and other organizations are meanwhile obsessed by the phantom of ‘excellence’. But the more they repeat this mantra, beating the drum of the knowledge economy, the clearer it becomes that society as a whole finds itself in a crisis of competence.

Incompetence is certainly a thing of every age. The current crisis may be due to the fact that technical, managerial and economic systems have become so complex and intertwined that minor incidents are more likely to have far-reaching consequences. Automation has in any case proven to be no remedy for the unreliable human factor. In fact, it only multiplies the consequences of human failure.

There is also a clear ideological component. Within the neoliberal network economy, knowledge tends to dissolve in a quick succession of temporary projects, causing a loss of focus and concentration. The durable institutional logic of the state, the school or the museum evaporates in an ever more rapid sequence of reorganizations and management trends. To control and innovate the organization itself has become an obsession that is making managers lose sight of more substantial tasks.

In this context, the contemporary artist is an interesting role model. In a universe of increasing incompetence, only artists know how to make their lack of expertise productive. Contemporary artists are professionals without a profession, craftspeople without a craft, dilettantes with infinite potential. Only artists routinely subject the professional content of their discipline to debate, as part of their everyday practice. With each new work they make, artists embrace the crisis of competence instead of shifting it to others, as is the case in most other domains. They accept complete responsibility, in defiance of the neoliberal tendency to delegate and outsource. By definition, the creation of a work of art entails a critical test of the criteria of creative competence and artistic skill. Thus visual art can be considered as a form of societal meta-production: any contemporary work of art is like a condensed re-enactment of the crisis of competence in a public context.

What are the implications for art schools? The ideal visual art curriculum neither denies nor conceals the lack of substance at the heart of the artistic profession, nor does it anxiously try to renew or reconstruct some lost craft. Instead it makes this fundamental condition the focal point of a permanently reflective practice. However paradoxically, the true competence of the artist is the ability to work with his or her own incompetence. Art students have to learn to face the indeterminate nature of their profession, without recourse to generally valid methods and techniques.

In the mundane reality of both politics and business, such critical capacity has been lost. Due to pressure from voters, shareholders, consumers and the media, the fear of making mistakes has overtaken all other concerns. Even if the contemporary artist is not able to come up with a general solution to this dilemma, the artistic attitude in dealing with (in)competence is well worth a closer look. Art education may be the only place where this particular type of ‘competency training’ exists.

Pascal Gielen teaches art sociology and cultural policy at the University of Groningen and is Professor of Arts in Society at the Fontys University of Fine and Performing Arts in Tilburg. Camiel van Winkel is Professor of Visual Art at AKV|St.Joost, Avans University in Den Bosch. They are currently doing a joint research project on the hybridization of contemporary artistic practice.

Translated from the Dutch by Mari Shields.

Source:Metropolis M, 2010 No5 October / November.

Folk Indian Cats

The Book "I Like Cats" emerges from the brushstrokes of the best-known tribal and folk artists of India. Silk screen-printed by hand, this book features an impressive gallery of irresistible felines across a variety of Indian tribal art traditions, and comes with a framable screenprint. Carrying on in the comic verse tradition, the witty and jubilant poetry-tales of Indian writer Anushka Ravishankar are internationally acclaimed, widely translated, and honoured with innumerable awards. Art by various artists from the finest tribal and folk traditions from across India.
Tara Books

Where Are the Great Women Pop Artists?

It's clear that female artists of the '60s were pushed to the margins of art history. But a series of exhibitions showcasing their work reveals how un-Pop many of them were

Western art history has nearly always been constructed as a narrative in which women are viewed through male eyes—as subjects and as objects. From the Venus of Willendorf to Raphael's Madonnas, Rubens's raped Sabines, Picasso's jilted lovers, and de Kooning's man-eating females, the standard gaze was that of the male, and what it gazed upon was the objectified female body.

Suddenly art history (once again) finds itself being turned on its head as another aspect of the past gets unearthed and revised. This time the subject is the supposedly secondary—that is, the unacknowledged, neglected, subservient, auxiliary—role of the women Pop artists who were at work in the pre-Linda Nochlin days, when the textbook-writing ­Jansons and nearly everyone else thought that only men could create masterpieces.

Since the 1960s, when women artists started defining themselves and re-narrating the history, we have slowly become aware of their contributions. Lately museums have gotten into the act. It may be sheer coincidence, but exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and the Kunsthalle Vienna this autumn both focus on the women artists who were identified with Pop art, while an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York tackles a related subject: painting and feminism (with a bit of Jewishness thrown into the mix). These shows complicate the categories of what's Pop and what's not, opening up a slew of new questions.

Curator Angela Stief, in her catalogue introduction to "Power Up: Female Pop Art," at the Kunsthalle Vienna (through February 20), points out that while female Pop artists resemble their male colleagues, oscillating between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, commodity cult and capitalist critique, they remain "militant, critical, and outstanding in their positions as feminist pioneers."


Martha Rosler's photomontage Vacuuming Pop Art, 1967–72, addresses politics and the male gaze.

If Pop art by women artists was hardly ever simply Pop, what was it? The female artists of those years were, willingly or unwittingly, involved in a major change in content, context, and medium. They were concerned with shifting both the objectifying male gaze and the objectified female gaze. As these exhibitions point out, the women whose art skirted around Pop—and can be somewhat misleadingly called Pop—complicate matters, which isn't a bad thing.

Pop art in the hands and minds of women artists is intricately linked to the rise of feminist art, political and sociological art, art that involves decoration and craft and female sexuality—and thus the subsequent future of 20th-century art. These artists weren't tangential: they were crucial. And what is most interesting about their work can be found in its disparities and divergences from Pop. What women were doing was another kind of art, and to call their work Pop does a disservice to it.

Pop art in the hands of male artists was cartoony, exaggerated, sometimes cynical. Involved with male sexuality, it had to violate something, blowing a cliché so far out of proportion that it could be reconstituted as an aspect of formalism. Pop art was about fast foods, fast babes, fast mechanically reproductive processes such as the silkscreen and the Benday dot, and blatant commercial images and ads. It was about all-American banality. And it was an almost exclusively male movement. Back in the days when Mel Ramos could paint Chiquita Banana pinups, Tom Wesselmann could sex up his still lifes by putting sunburned nudes with pubic hair into them, and Allen Jones could obnoxiously use a lifelike playmate on her knees as a coffee table, Marjorie Strider was making shaped canvases featuring 3-D breasts that were smartly violating the picture plane as if to one-up the men, who never noticed. And Elaine Sturtevant, a few months after Warhol created his first flower paintings in 1964, borrowed Warhol's silkscreens to replicate those paintings and inserted her renditions into group shows—along with her George Segal and Frank Stella look-alikes—to make Pop into something more conceptual, a decade or more before the word "appropriation" would emerge.

Unlike the previous macho AbEx generation, which also counted female artists like Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, Helen Frankenthaler, and Elaine de Kooning, the Pop movement, strictly speaking, did not have high-profile female participation. Marisol, Strider, and Sturtevant were sometimes included in Pop group shows in New York, but they never wholly fit. Pop art was about banality, disaffection, and detachment, and the ideas of the women artists diametrically opposed these themes. Philosophically liberated, they thought for themselves, radicalized their art, and imploded the meaning of Pop.

If Chryssa was Pop because she used neon, does that mean Dan Flavin was too? If Vija Celmins was Pop, wasn't she at the same time a budding photorealist? If Yayoi Kusama was Pop, what do we make of her phallic obsessions and cosmic polka dots? If Niki de Saint Phalle was Pop, where do her big folk-art mamas fit? And if Lee Lozano's pre-conceptual work and Faith Ringgold's pre-quilt paintings can be dragged into the orbit of Pop, we can only throw up our hands and conclude that we desperately need a more descriptive term.

Women's Pop-related art had its own intentions. It could be about obsession, cosmic design, or, in the case of Marisol, folk arts and crafts. Usually it opposed or dissected the male gaze. The male artists may have been content to flirt with post-industrial Minimalism, but back in the days when femininity equaled domesticity, Martha Rosler mailed out a series of narrative recipes. They involved, for example, the dislocations of a Mexican maid who didn't have a clue as to what a peanut butter and jelly sandwich was, and pieced together images of suburban kitchens invaded by the horrors of the Vietnam war. On the other hand, Warhol, whose latent political content went unremarked for years, didn't do decorative camouflage painting until the 1980s.

Now "Power Up: Female Pop Art" makes it quite clear that an idea can be about politics as well as about female sexuality. It ­narrows its scope to nine artists, some of whom—such as the Belgian Evelyne Axell—have remained seriously under-known in New York. The star of this exhibition is Sister Corita Kent, the nun who used signs, slogans, and packaging as a form of political protest.

Twenty-five female artists, including Axell and some other unfamiliar Europeans, are in the Brooklyn Museum's "Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968" (on view through January 9), and it's hard to resist an impertinent question: Would anyone ever dream of titling a show of male Pop artists "Subversive Seducers"? And in an exhibition that includes a number of arguably un-Pop artists, where is Yoko Ono, Lee Bontecou, Carolee Schneemann—or even Colette, who knowingly transformed herself into the objectified object of the male gaze?

The impact of feminist thought permeates works by 27 artists in the Jewish Museum's "Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism" (through January 30). Contributors range from Louise Nevelson, Rosalyn Drexler, and Eva Hesse to Nancy Spero, Hannah Wilke, and Nicole Eisenman. Rosler is oddly absent, but then, conceptual photomontage probably doesn't count as painting per se. But kudos to this exhibition for anointing three token males as honorary feminists: Leon Golub, who was always attuned to power, persecution, and victimhood; Robert Kushner, who made the most of feminized pattern and decoration; and Cary Leibowitz, with his self-deprecating gay Jewish humor.

Unacknowledged or under-­acknowledged at the time, relegated to the margins or forgotten by history, the profound female artists of their time inverted the male gaze and anticipated the future while male Pop artists were getting stuck in their own styles. The tenuous thread that ties them all together is linked to feminism and the contemporary art that was still to come. And now, in these exhibitions in which nearly everyone spills out of the arbitrary category of Pop, what at first may seem curatorial weakness becomes great strength. History is again being distorted, manipulated, and revised, for better and worse, but such are its innate fictions. And we have to conclude that the work by these woman artists doesn't seem nearly as dated as that of their male counterparts. Shifting the gaze, indeed.

Text by Kim Levin
Source: ARTnews, November 2010

Power Up

Dorothy Iannone. The Story of Bern, or Showing Colors, 1970.

"The next great moment in history is ours!" Dorothy Iannone

Rediscovering outstanding women Pop artists, POWER UP fulfills Dorothy Iannone’s combative promise after fifty years. The show aims at the reinterpretation of an art movement that until today has primarily been associated with male protagonists. Plastic, loud colors, reduced forms, and graphic contours – the nine women artists’ works on display resemble those of their male colleagues in many respects. Whereas their works appeal to the taste of the masses, these artists, as pioneers of Feminism, have remained belligerent and critical. They reveal the consumer culture’s superficiality, exposing the commodity myth as an empty shell like Christa Dichgans, ironically transforming everyday objects to oversized kitsch objects like Jann Haworth, or exploring mass media clichés and superstar constructions like Rosalyn Drexler. Like Sister Corita, a committed peace activist, they took a clear stand on the sixties’ social and political events such as the Vietnam
War.

The exhibition pursues its political perspective in those instances where the era’s current notions of what a woman is are revised by different views: Kiki Kogelnik and Marisol describe the corset in which the representation of women by themselves and by others is caught, while Evelyne Axell or Dorothy Iannone provocatively display the nude body, love, and sexuality, and, like Niki de Saint Phalle, attract the viewer’s attention with sophisticated modes of self-presentation.

Evelyne Axell, Sister Corita, Christa Dichgans, Rosalyn Drexler, Jann Haworth, Dorothy Iannone, Kiki Kogelnik, Marisol, Niki de Saint Phalle

Curator: Angela Stief

POWER UP - Female Pop Art
KUNSTHALLE wien,
November 05th, 2010 - February 20th, 2011

Zeroing In

"I am a landscape," he said,
"a landscape and a person walking in that landscape.
There are daunting cliffs there,
and plains glad in their way
of brown monotony. But especially
there are sinkholes, places
of sudden terror, of small circumference
and malevolent depths."
"I know," she said. "When I set forth
to walk in myself, as it might be
on a fine afternoon, forgetting,
sooner or later I come to where sedge
and clumps of white flowers, rue perhaps,
mark the bogland, and I know
there are quagmires there that can pull you
down, and sink you in bubbling mud."
"We had an old dog," he told her, "when I was a boy,
a good dog, friendly. But there was an injured spot
on his head, if you happened
just to touch it he'd jump up yelping
and bite you. He bit a young child,
they had to take him to the vet's and destroy him."
"No one knows where it is," she said,
"and even by accident no one touches it:
It's inside my landscape, and only I, making my way
preoccupied through my life, crossing my hills,
sleeping on green moss of my own woods,
I myself without warning touch it,
and leap up at myself--"
"--or flinch back
just in time"

"Yes, we learn that
It's not terror, it's pain we're talking about:
those places in us, like your dog's bruised head,
that are bruised forever, that time
never assuages, never."


Denise Levertov

Can ecosystem engineering prevent ecological catastrophe?

For over a decade, University of Arizona ecologist Michael Rosenzweig has preached a gospel of what he calls reconciliation ecology: designing everyday landscapes to support as many plants and animals as possible.

He says it’s the only way of averting ecological catastrophe, which standard approaches to preserving nature will only slow. Some conservationists have embraced the idea. Others think it’s rose-tinted dreaming. With a computer program directing the design, reconciliation ecology will get its test in Tucson, Arizona.

“We decided to turn Tucson into a lab of a million people,” said Rosenzweig, who spoke on reconciliation ecology Aug. 3 at the Ecological Society of America meeting in Pittsburgh. “We’re not trying to restore old habitats. We’re trying to invent new ones.”

The project’s roots extend back to 1995, when Rosenzweig wrote a textbook on island biogeography, a field of research describing ecological dynamics on ocean islands. Over the last several decades, the research had been applied to terrestrial islands formed by human development. The findings were discouraging. Ecologists predicted the loss of 40 to 50 percent of all species. After reviewing the literature, Rosenzweig thought they were optimistic. He put the figure at 90 percent.

More island-like preserves and parks wouldn’t fix this, he reasoned. It required a “reconciliation” with nature inside human-dominated biomes that were largely ignored by conservationists, and cover almost every piece of non-tundra, non-desert land.

Rosenzweig pointed to piecemeal examples of this approach, like ecosystems flourishing amidst shade-grown coffee canopies, or the wetlands of southern Czechoslovakia’s fish farms. The strategy took shape in his 2003 Win-Win Ecology: How The Earth’s Species Can Survive In The Midst of Human Enterprise.

Reviews were mixed. There wasn’t much doubt about Rosenzeig’s diagnosis, but his solution was questioned. Wrote then-Conservation International ecologist Thomas Brooks in a review, “I genuinely fear that Michael Rosenzweig’s theories and examples are less broadly applicable than he argues. And yet I want to believe that he is right.”

In the intervening years, Rosenzweig hasn’t backed down. “The attitude we’ve had for 100 years is, let’s save habitats. We’ll have remnant patches and call them national parks and wildlife refuges. That slows extinction down, but it doesn’t change the endpoint,” he said. Mass extinctions won’t be avoided “unless we turn our attention to the habitats we haven’t paid attention to, that we haven’t even called habitats.”

In Tucson, those ignored habitats are backyards, schoolyards and the mosaic of neighbourhoods and businesses typical of America’s suburban sprawl. Rosenzweig wants to arrange their habitats with a program built on a database of life-history characteristics on 300 local plant species, plus natural history records gathered from a century of research on Tumamoc Hill, an 870-acre island of relatively undisturbed desert west of downtown.

People can decide what species they want to have. The algorithms tell them what other species they’ll need. “It calculates what the relationships are, and which need to be maintained in order for species of interest to live,” said Rosenzweig. Calculations are modified according to local soil type and topography.

Rosenzweig plans to do an “alpha test” at sites on Tumamoc Hill. Another is now taking place in the Barrio Kroeger Lane, a poor neighbourhood set in the Santa Cruz River floodplain. Native, rainwater-harvesting Sonoran Desert vegetation is being planted to lessen summer floods. It should also bring back four local hummingbird species.

If that works, other Tucson neighbourhoods could follow suit.

“There is so much potential to harmonise people and nature” in this approach, wrote ecologist Gretchen Daily in an email. As head of Stanford University’s conservation biology centre, she studies how to predict ecological changes in human-directed landscapes, a research branch known as “countryside biogeography.”

“There is a fair amount of scepticism about reconciliation being a viable model, which is why this is an important experiment,” said Madhu Khatti, an urban ecologist at California State University, Fresno.

Rosenzweig envisions the tested program becoming a tool for developers, neighborhood associations, businesses, anybody with a backyard -- first in Tucson, then elsewhere, as other ecologists localise the code.

“I can’t put out a general rule to fit every toon, but I can put out a general method, and program it,” he said. “That’s what we’ve done. This has to be done for every area.”

Of course, computer-aided ecosystem design is far from what John Muir or Edward Abbey had in mind, and old-fashioned preserves are needed for true wilderness. But as Khatti noted, “there’s very few places in the world where humans can be completely removed.”

“If you produce an ecological theatre that meets the animals halfway, they’ll do the rest,” said Rosenzweig.

Text by Brandon Keim, 16 August 2010.
Source: Wired.com

Peasant and Stockbroker

Peasant and Stockbroker, 2010
rock, wood, acrylic

Farming the kibbutz land

Kibbutz workers (Caption: Farming the kibbutz land / Credit: Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem

My parents 'made aliya' soon after World War I. They were to be chalutzim – builders of the land. Wherever work was needed, they would be there. Whatever the work would be, they would do it. They would help create in the Land of Israel a new type of society – one based on equality, cooperation and justice. They joined up with other similarly motivated young Jews. Calling themselves 'G'dudei Ha'Avoda' (Workers' Brigades) they paved roads, drained swamps and undertook other strenuous work. When construction workers were needed in Jerusalem their group moved there and set up camp in an empty lot. My father quickly learned to quarry stone and my mother became a plasterer.

Not long after I was born, the group erected a kibbutz on a lonely hill south of Jerusalem. The kibbutz was called Ramat Rachel because it overlooks the grave of the biblical Rachel.

Tamar Caspi, Kibbutznik

The Marathon of the Marathon Project

The Marathon Marathon Project (hereinafter τουμαραθωνίουmarathonproject), will take place in Athens at the Acropolis Museum on October 31, 2010 under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

The project takes as its point of departure the impressive international array of marathon-format events which are rooted in the concept of superhuman endeavor, in the seemingly impossible but historically real feat of the Battle of Marathon. A particular point of reference was the international event entitled "The Marathon Project," which has been held annually since 2005 as part of the Serpentine Gallery art program in London. Through a marathon series of talks and presentations this project generates an important, unprecedented archive made up of the intricate "path" of thought and expression taken by artists and intellectuals as they explore a central issue or topic (e.g. The Poetry Marathon, the Manifesto Marathon, the Marathon of Maps). In doing so the project has questioned the established ways of presenting art and re-negotiated the concepts of public dialogue and cultural goods.

The apparent tautology in the title of the Athens event comes from the fact that τουμαραθωνίουmarathonproject—the "Marathon of the Marathon"—is being held as part of the celebrations of the 2500th anniversary of the Battle of Marathon and the organization this year of the Golden Marathon.

The reason for putting this project together was the need for a different reading of the anniversary, through the artists' and intellectuals' point of view and , in terms of both the act of commemoration (why we celebrate the anniversary) and the content of what is being commemorated (what it means). This meta-Marathon—the discourse about the Marathon—provides an opportunity to creatively re-link the message of the Marathon not only to its place of origin but also to the numerous places around the world where this message was relayed and multiplied.

The project is being realized at a historical conjuncture which is proving to be decisive for re-shaping the broader features of Greek society and culture. The event explores such topics as the new understanding of humanism that has emerged within contemporary culture, the (re-) interpretation of innovation in a globalized world of hybrid realities, and the role of the arts in the memorization of the past, present and future. Other topics include the renegotiation of the idea of the Other (which comes to the fore in the Battle of Marathon itself and in Aeschylus's Persians) and the symbolic transformation of Pheidippides from soldier to warrior-runner.

Artists, writers and intellectuals from Greece and abroad will take part in τουμαραθωνίουmarathonproject, which is being curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and co-curated by Nadja Argyropoulou. The proceedings will be published in book form and distributed internationally.

The Marathon marathon participants so far are: Etel Adnan,Andreas Angelidakis,Athanasios Argianas (with the participation of Theodore Pistiolas),Nairy Baghramian,Daniel Birnbaum ,Anna Boghiguian,Vlassis Caniaris,Dimitris Dimitriadis,Simon Fujiwara,Fivi Giannisi,Nikolaus Hirsch,Julia Peyton Jones,Jeff Koons, Giorgos Koumendakis (with the participation of Thodoris Patsalidis),Panos Koutrouboussis,Armand Marie Leroi,Antonis Liakos (with the participation of Emilia Salvanou),Natalia Mela,Sarah Morris,Luigi Ontani,Christodoulos Panayiotou (with the participation of Nicolas Stylianos & Eleni Roumpani),Yiannis Papadakis,Angelos Papadimitriou,Maria Papadimitriou,Leda Papaconstantinou,Vassilis Papavassiliou,Huang Yong Ping,Angelo Plessas,Stelios Ramfos,Societe Realiste & Giorgos Papadopoulos,Yorgos Sapountzis,Christiana Soulou,Eva Stefani,Yorgos Tzirtzilakis,Nanos Valaoritis,Yiannis Varelas,Kostis Velonis,Vangelis Vlahos,Iannis Xenakis (recorded interview),Zyranna Zateli (with the participation of Nikos Bakounakis), Elias Zenghelis.

The Marathon Marathon or τουμαραθωνίουmarathonproject is being organized by the non-profit cultural initiative, Saprofyta. It is realized in cooperation with the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art and the Acropolis Museum.

Acropolis Museum
saprofytablog.blogspot.com

Sunday, October 31st 2010, start 16:00, Acropolis Museum

Recycling animal and human dung is the key to sustainable farming

Flushing the water closet is handy, but it wreaks ecological havoc, deprives agricultural soils of essential nutrients and makes food production dependent on fossil fuels.

For 4,000 years, human excrements and urine were considered extremely valuable trade products in China, Korea and Japan. Human dung was transported over specially designed canal networks by boats.

Thanks to the application of human "waste" products as fertilizers to agricultural fields, the East managed to feed a large population without polluting their drinking water. Meanwhile, cities in medieval Europe turned into open sewers. The concept was modernized in late 19th century Holland, with Charles Liernur's sophisticated vacuum sewer system.

The innocent looking water closet breaks up a natural cycle in our food supply. Basically, it turns extremely valuable resources into waste products. When we grow crops, we withdraw essential nutrients from the soil: potassium, nitrogen and phosphate, to name but the most important. During the greater part of human history, we recycled these nutrients through our bodies and returned them to the soil, via excreta, food trimmings and the burial of dead. Today, we flush them mostly into the sea



This is problematic and unsustainable, for three main reasons.

To start, dumping sewage in rivers, lakes and seas kills fish and makes fresh water undrinkable. This can only be avoided by extending the water closet and the already very costly sewerage network with an equally expensive infrastructure of sewage stations (which does not completely eliminate the detrimental effect on water life).

Secondly, we need artificial fertilizers to keep our soil fertile. In 2008, almost 160 million tonnes of inorganic fertilizers were used worldwide (1 & 2). Without these, our agricultural soils would lose their fertility in just a few years time, followed by an inevitable collapse of food production and human population. A third problem is that the water closet logically consumes large quantities of fresh water to flush everything "away".

Water closets are energy-intensive

Fresh water production, the construction and maintenance of sewers, the treatment of sewage (and sewage sludge), and the production of inorganic fertilizers are all energy-intensive processes. Nitrogen (which makes up more than half of total fertilizer consumption) is abundantly available in air, but to convert it to a useful form the gas has to be heated and pressurized. The energy for this (polluting) process is delivered by natural gas or (in China) by coal plants.

Potassium and phosphate have to be mined (up to depths of several thousands of feet) and transported. It takes more than 150 million tonnes of phosphate rock to produce our current yearly supply of 37 million tonnes of phosphate fertilizer, and 45 million tonnes of potash ore to produce 25 million tonnes of potassium fertilizer. Both operations are energy intensive and pollute the environment.




Moreover, while potassium is widely distributed and abundantly available (we have enough economically obtainable reserves to last 700 years at our current consumption rate), phosphorus is not. Ninety percent of global phosphate reserves are only found in a handful of countries, and economically recoverable reserves large enough to meet agricultural demand are estimated to last for only 30 to 100 years. Reserves are much larger if mining phosphates from the seabed is included, but this would be extremely energy-intensive, further deterioriating the sustainability of the food and sanitation system.

The only way to get nutrients from sea to land is via marine bird droppings - which is of course in very short supply - or by eating fish or seafood. However, once we have digested our fish and chips, the nutrients filter down to the sea via the sewer network.


A sign of civilization

The existence of the water closet and the accompanying sewer system is seldom questioned. It is viewed as an obvious technology and generally regarded as a sign of civilization - countries that do not have such a system today are considered retarded or backward. The reason for this is because we have been conditioned to believe that the water closet and the sewer system are the only alternatives to stench and disease.

Following the demise of the Roman Empire (with its early sewers and water closets) and right up to the end of the nineteenth century, the concentrated and unorganised distribution of human excrements in groundwater, city canals and rivers brought recurrent deadly epidemics of cholera and typhoid fever throughout the western world. These were caused by drinking water contaminated with faeces. People answered nature's call on the streets or emptied their honey buckets in backyards, open courtyards, badly sealed cesspools or surface waters - methods that were not conducive to healthy living in densely populated cities. Water closet and sewer system have solved this, at least in the rich world, and nobody wants to go back to the miserable hygienic conditions of those times.


Chinese agriculture

However, as obvious as it seems to us today, the water closet is not the only possible answer to the problem of sanitation. There are other, much more sustainable methods to separate human waste from drink water supplies. To start with, the grim sanitary conditions of the Middle Ages and the early Industrial Revolution were a purely western phenomenon. At the turn of the twentieth century in the East, the water in Chinese rivers was safe to drink.




The Chinese were as numerous as the Americans and Europeans at the time, and they had large, densely populated cities, too. The difference was that they maintained an agricultural system that was based on human "waste" as a fertilizer. Stools and urine were collected with care and discipline, and transported over sometimes considerable distances. They were mixed with other organic waste, composted and then spread across the fields (illustration on the right).

That's killing two birds with one stone: no pollution of drinking water, and an agricultural system that could have lasted forever. In fact, it did last 4,000 years, which is considerably longer than even our most abundant resource - potassium, with 700 years of reserves - will allow.

The Chinese agricultural system, which was also applied in Korea and Japan, is extensively described in "Farmers of Forty Centuries", a report of a study trip by the American soil scientist F.H. King. The book was published in 1911, around the time of the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process that would lead to the breakthrough of cheap artificial nitrogen fertilizer. King devoted an entire chapter to the collection and use of human fertilizer by the Asians. Joseph Needham also gives an account of the method, in volume VI:2 of "Science and civilization in China", citing various earlier sources. More recently, Duncan Brown talks about the Chinese system in his book "Feed or Feedback: Agriculture, Population Dynamics and the State of the Planet".

Dung traders

When King visited China, the population was estimated at about 400 million adult inhabitants, compared to some 400 million inhabitants in Europe and 100 million inhabitants in the US. The stools and urine of those 400 million people were collected in terracotta jars, with air-tight seals. The matter was gathered from every home, from the tiny country villages to the great cities. In some cities, special canal networks and boats were constructed for this purpose (picture below). This was the case in Hankow-Wuchang-Hanyang, for example, a city with almost 1.8 million inhabitants living in an area of only 6.5 square kilometres. You could thus argue that the Chinese did have a water carriage sewer network, though the difference to ours is stark.



Around the time of King's visit, every year in China more than 182,000,000 tonnes of human manure was collected in cities and villages - 450 kilogram (900 pounds) per person per year. This was good for a total of 1,160,000 tonnes of nitrogen, 376,000 tonnes of potassium and 150,000 tonnes of phosphate which was returned to the soil. In 1908 Japan, 23,850,295 tonnes of "humanure" was collected and given back to the soil.



Shanghai traded and distributed the yield of its inhabitants over a specially designed canal network using hundreds of boats (see map on the left, click to enlarge), a trade that brought in 100,000s of dollars every year. Human manure was considered a valuable commodity. In 1908, a Chinese business man paid the city 31,000 dollar (this would be more than 700,000 dollars today) to obtain the right to remove 78,000 tonnes of humanure per year from a region of the city to sell it to the farmers on the countryside.

In Japan, which was much more urbanized than China, people paid less rent when they left their landlord better quality excrements. King describes loads of human dung taken from Tokyo and Yokahama "carried on the shoulders of men and on the backs of animals, but most commonly on strong carts drawn by men, bearing six to ten tightly covered wooden containers holding forty, sixty or more pounds each". On the Japanese countryside, it was not unusual to see signs that invited passers-by to please answer nature's call on site. The farmers used the product to manure their fields.

The practice of recycling human dung in Asian countries repelled some foreign visitors. The Portuguese explorer Fernam Mendez Pinto wrote in 1583:

"You must know that in this country there are many of such as make a trade of buying and selling mens Excrements, which is not so mean a commerce among them, but that there are many of them grow rich by it, and are held in good account. They which make a trade of buying it go up and down the streets with certain Clappers, like our Spittle men, whereby they give to understand what they desire without publishing of it otherwise to people, in regard the thing is filthy of itself; whereunto I will adde thus much, that this commodity is so much esteemed among them, and so great a trade driven of it, that into one sea port, sometimes there comes in one tyde two or three hundred Sayls laden with it." (sic)

The 4,000 year old closed-loop system vanished with the arrival of artificial fertilizers, which were imported from the West during the first decades of the twentieth century. Today, China is the largest consumer of inorganic fertilizers with 28 percent of total world consumption. Asia as a whole now uses more than half of the world's artificial fertilizer.

Night soil collection in Europe

The collection of human "waste" also occured in Europe, be it for a much shorter time and on a much smaller scale. The second half of the nineteenth century marked the end of a predominantly agricultural period in Europe; migration to the cities accelerated and the problem of sewage disposal got much worse.

At the same time, health experts started to realize that cholera and typhoid fever were the consequences of drinking contaminated water. Since agriculture was increasingly short of animal manure, it appeared that both problems could be solved at the same time. The first system, which was set up in several countries and cities, is generally known as "night soil" collection and reminds of the Asian method.

Dung and urine were accumulated in movable wooden receptacles beneath the privy seat and mixed with earth, ashes or charcoal to prevent offensive odours. Night soil collectors came by at more or less regular intervals (mostly at night, hence the name) to pick up the merchandise. See picture above (source) and below (source).




This happened either by emptying the full tubs into a cart and giving them back immediately (which meant the cleansing had to be done by the users), or by placing the full tubs in a wagon, switching them for fresh ones (which meant the cleansing had to be done by the scavengers). The empty tubs were replaced under the privy seat, and the cargo was transported via horse and cart to a collection point outside the city. There it was converted into compost for use in agriculture.


Unfortunately, the collection and transport of the waste was not as reliable, efficient and sanitary as was the case in China, Korea or Japan. All was good when air-tight containers were used, but this was not always done. When open carts were applied, the transport caused waste and foul smell (see the 19th century cartoon below, source). Sewage was spilled while carrying the tubs down the stairs and while emptying them into the carts. Moreover, the collection did not always happen that frequently, especially in poorer neighbourhoods.

Nevertheless, the wooden tub system was an improvement over the comparitive disorder of nightsoil collection in Europe. Throughout the Middle Ages, so-called dung farmers gathered human and animal excrements from streets, backyards and cesspools and sold these to farmers who applied them to their fields. The problem was that these scavengers needed to collect enough dung before they could sell a cartload. Duncan Brown cites Cipolla, who describes the situation concisely:

"The most pathetically tragic aspect of this business was that of the people, whose poverty was so abject that they collected the manure they found in the streets where they kept it [at their homes] until they had accumulated a sufficient quantity to sell."



There were exceptions, notably in Flanders, where an organized nightsoil collecting system that reminds of the Chinese method was set up as early as the Middle Ages. Around the town of Antwerp, the management of organic wastes (human excrements, dung of city horses, pigeon dung, canal mud and food scraps) had become a significant industry by the 16th century. By the 18th century there were great stores along the river the Schelde where the excrements from Dutch towns were transported by barge.

The vacuum sewers of Charles Liernur

A second collection method was pioneered by Dutch engineer Charles Liernur in 1866 (patent - pdf). His vacuum sewer system combined the comfort of today's water carriage sewer network with the ecological and manurial advantages of the earlier scavenging methods. A closet inside every home was connected to an underground small diameter pipeline infrastructure, and the stools and urine immediately left the house following deposition.

The crucial difference with today's technology, however, was that the Liernur system did not use water but atmospheric pressure as a transport medium. This meant that it avoided the dilution of the manure by the admixture of water, thus preserving its value as a fertilizer - which was Liernur's explicit intention. On the other hand, the vacuum sewer system did away with the need for scavengers to visit every house, lugging around buckets of poo and pee, and disturbing everyone's sleep. It was a clear improvement on the night soil systems, including the one used in Asia.



Several Dutch cities were equipped with the Liernur system: Leiden in 1871, Amsterdam in 1872 and Dordrecht in 1874. Initially, only a couple of thousand homes were connected to the vacuum sewer network, but in Amsterdam the system was expanded substantially. At the end of the nineteenth century, about 90,000 Amsterdam inhabitants were linked to the Liernur sewer network, some 20 percent of the population. In Amsterdam and Leiden, the system remained in operation for almost 40 years. The Liernur system was also introduced on a smaller scale in Prague (Czech republic), Trouville sur Mer (France), Hanau (Germany) and Stansed (England). The system in Trouville, installed in 1892, was operated until 1987 (source, pdf). Today, the method is still being used in ships, trains and airplanes.

The French designed their own version of the Liernur system - the Berlier system. It was introduced in 1880 for a trial period in Lyon, where it successfully removed sewage over a distance of four kilometres (2.5 miles). In 1881, a five kilometre network was introduced for trial in a Paris neighbourhood. The French took the trials very seriously: the sewage was observed by placing glass pipes at various points. The Berlier system, which was technically superior to the Liernur system, worked flawlessly: the thousand soldiers in the barracks of Pépinière, where it was in operation, were the only troops in Paris that were not affected by a serious typhoid epidemic.

The arrival of the water closet

In spite of the technical success, the Berlier system never ascended beyond the experimental stage. The Dutch Health Advisory Board advised a general, national introduction of the Liernur system in 1873, following the successful operation in Amsterdam, but this did not happen either. Liernur designed plans for other cities in Europe (Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Munchen, Stuttgart and Zurich) and in the US (Baltimore), but these were never realised.

There were several reasons why the pneumatic systems did not became the standard sewerage systems of today. Firstly, there was the arrival of the water closet and the waterworks. In the Netherlands, a growing number of people connected a water closet to the Liernur system, diluting the stools and urine in such a matter that their agricultural value declined considerably.

Even before this happened, the sale of the sewage for use as manure did not give the profits that were expected. Health experts advanced that profits should not be the first aim of a sanitary system, but the problem was that Liernur himself had stressed financial profits as an important advantage of his system. This had attracted investors, and they promptly left the technology behind when they started to lose money.

An important problem, not only in the Netherlands but throughout the western world, was the growing size of cities. Both the night soil system and the more sophisticated methods were eventually beaten by the logistics of maintaining the practice in huge cities supported by far away farms. The last blow for the vacuum sewer system was the appearance of inorganic fertilizers after a cheap production method was found in 1910. The shortage of fertilizers in agriculture was "solved".

Because cities had started building water carriage systems for the discharge of storm drain water, the next logical step was to allow the discharge of sewage via the same network. Basically, this was a step backwards: excrements were again drained on surface waters, not necessarily in the immediate surroundings but a few miles further downstream. It took another 70 years before sewage stations became (relatively) common in the rich world.
Only three future possibilities

If we want to restore the natural cycle of our food supply, there are only three technological possibilities. We could develop a modern variant of the scavenging method using composting toilets, in which the stools are collected from individual homes together with other organic waste products. Urine could go to a separate tank that is emptied once a year by a tanker (this method exists in some Dutch and Swedish residential areas where people use so-called urine separation closets). Or, we could develop a modern variant of the Liernur or Berlier system, in which the sewage is collected automatically, but without the use of water.

Vacuum sewer systems have found a limited application in some new housing estates since the 1960s and 1970s. A few hundred systems are in operation in the US, the UK, Australia, Germany, the Maledives, Southern Africa and the Middle East (overview). The installation of a vacuum sewer system is twice as cheap as the construction of a traditional sewer system. A vacuum system is also faster to construct and easier to maintain: it consists of much smaller diameter tubes that have to be laid less deep into the ground - a narrow trench in the road-surface suffices.

There is a third techno-fix, but it is many times more expensive than the other two: using the diluted sewage from our water carriage system as a fertilizer. Basically, this adds another layer of costly infrastructure and complexity on top of an already very costly and complex system. Diluted sewage not only has to be dried, but also purified. This is because sewage sludge does not only contain human waste but also many other (including toxic) waste resources, both from households and factories.

Interestingly, when we remove urine and excrements from the sewer system, we might as well eliminate the water carriage sewer system altogether, further obtaining substantial cost and energy savings. There are workable alternatives for the removal of storm water (basically reducing paved surface) and for the local treatment and re-use of grey water.

Composting

Human faeces and urine can only be used as a fertilizer following further treatment. This was an already known fact by early Chinese agricultural writers, who warned that untreated humanure could "burn and kill plants, rot the shoots and harm human hands and feet". Today we know it also carries more severe health risks. F.H. King and Joseph Needham praise the composting efforts of the early Chinese, who often combined their privy with the family pigsty (see illustration below). However, Duncan Brown is more critical of their composting techniques. The health advantages that the Chinese gained by keeping their drinking water supplies clean, were partly offset by the transmission of diseases via food crops:




"Gastro-intestinal diseases were endemic throughout the region. In Korea and Japan, fluke diseases were common because of the practice of eating raw fish grown in ponds fertilized with human excrement. But those diseases could have been largely avoided with a better understanding of their nature and modes of transmission. If properly used, devices like the relatively modern sceptic tank, the more modern oxidation tank or the so-called composting toilet can avoid the danger of gastro-intestinal diseases previously associated with the use of human excrement as manure."



A process of composting should always come first, and this can happen in two ways. The first - slow composting - is a do-it-yourself technique that is explained in the "Humanure Handbook", an online practical guide by Joseph Jenkins (who coined the term 'humanure'). Slow composting happens at low temperatures and takes about one year in a moderate climate. To be secure, most say the resulting (odourless) compost should only be used for growing crops where there is no direct contact between food and fertilizer (like fruit trees) and for inedible plants (flowers, houseplants).




The second method is composting at high temperatures, which goes much faster and results in a fertilizer that can be applied to any kind of food crop. It is an industrial process, which is being applied successfully in several countries for a number of years. Interestingly, the first step of this process also generates electricity, further improving the sustainability of the whole system. Since 2005, a factory of the Dutch company Orgaworld composts diapers (from babies and elderly) together with many other kinds of organic waste. It is a high-tech process that takes about 6 weeks and results in a high-quality compost, free from pathogens, medicines and hormones. The company has also built two factories in Canada and is building plants in the UK.

Can we feed the world using humanure?

Can we produce enough natural fertilizer to substitute for synthetic nitrogen and mined potassium and phosphates? According to the figures collected by F.H. King, an adult person produces on average 1,135 grams of dung and urine each day. How much nitrogen, potassium and phosphates does this contain? That all depends on the diet.

From the China of 100 years ago, King cites different research results, ranging from 2.9 to 6 kilogram (5.8 to 12 pounds) of nitrogen per person per year, 0.9 to 2 kilogram (1.8 to 4 pounds) of potassium per person per year, and 0.4 to 1.5 kilogram (0.8 to 3 pounds) of phosphates per person per year.

At present, the world population is estimated at 6,800,000,000 people. Let's assume they all have a similar diet as the early 20th century Chinese and that the highest figures given by King more closely resemble today's diets (reliable present-day figures are hard to find). This would mean that the total world population could produce 40.8 million tonnes of nitrogen, 14 million tonnes of potassium and 10.4 million of phosphates. Is that enough to eliminate the need for artificial fertilizers? At first sight, no. Today's artificial fertilizer production is:

* 99.9 million tonnes of nitrogen, or more than double the amount that all people could possibly produce (40.8 million tonnes)
* 37 million tonnes of phosphates, almost 4 times the amount that all people could produce (14 million tonnes)
* 25.8 million tonnes of potassium, or more than 1.8 times the amount that all people could produce (10.4 million tonnes)

Livestock

However, we humans have "outsourced" a considerable amount of dung production to farm animals. A large amount of artificial fertilizer is used to produce livestock feed. These animals produce much more manure than all the people on the planet. Livestock excreta in 2004 were estimated to contain 125 million tonnes of nitrogen and 58 million tonnes of phosphates (there are no figures for potassium, which we will further ignore). That's 3 times more nitrogen and 6 times more phosphates than can be found in humanure.

Animals played a minor role in the Chinese humanure-based agricultural economy, but the European farmers in the Middle Ages relied heavily upon livestock for manure, which was their main fertilizer. Animal manure was never wasted. Joseph Needham cites Fussell:

"European farmers of the 15th to 17th centuries, both high and low, had one main worry, manure. They dared not neglect any source of supply, however minute, for the success of every crop they grew depended largely on the amount they could accumulate for use. They were willing to undertake the labours of Hercules to build a sufficient dunghill".



There are many good reasons to cut back on meat consumption, both for our health and for the environment - livestock production is also the main driver of deforestation (in its turn a major driver of soil degradation).

However, if we don't want to give up our high meat consumption, the least we should do is "to undertake the labours of Hercules to build a sufficient dunghill".

It would not only save us the effort to produce an ever increasing amount of artificial fertilizers, but it would also stop the devastating ecological consequences of dumping 91 million tonnes of nitrogen and 49 million tonnes of phosphates into the environment every year. Most of this is discharged without any treatment, illegally, or legally by overdosing it on fields near cities as a cost-effective waste management practice.

Food scraps & management techniques

There is another source of natural fertilizer material that is being wasted - food scraps. In this case, too, we turn a valuable resource into a waste product. Food scraps could be fed to animals like pigs, greatly improving the sustainability of meat production. But, instead, we feed them grain. Of all the food scraps produced in the US, only 3 percent is currently being recycled. The rest ends up in landfills, producing large amounts of greenhouse gases.

There is also a large potential to lower demand - one of the main problems with today's fertilizer use is overconsumption. Artificial fertilizers are cheap and as a result farmers prefer to dose their crops with too much fertilizer, instead of risking not using enough and lowering their yields. This means that more nutrients are lost through soil erosion, runoff and leaching - which also pollutes groundwater, rivers and seas, because these nutrients do not pass through sewage stations.

Things were very different in the early Chinese agricultural system and during the European Middle Ages. There was never a surplus of fertilizer, so farmers applied it thoughtfully. With more careful techniques, today's farmers could get the same yields with the use of much less fertilizer. The use of crop rotation, intercropping and green manure, all historically important techniques which are still being applied in today's organic agriculture, could further reduce the demand for fertilizers.

Nutrient balance

Pareja Let's digest all this information for a second. On the one hand, we have livestock and people, who together produce 166 million tonnes of nitrogen and 72 million tonnes of phosphates. Almost all of this is wasted, wreaking ecological havoc.

At the same time, our factories produce 99.9 million tonnes of artificial nitrogen fertilizer and 37 million tonnes of phosphates. A completely superfluous operation that further increases pollution and consumes vast amounts of energy. With the expected human (and livestock) population growth, not to mention the rise of energy crops to make biofuels, both biological and artificial production will rise even further, making everything only worse.

We have more than likely already passed the stage where humanity could be sustained without inorganic fertilizers. It is, after all, artificial fertilizers that caused the population boom of the 20th century. However, this should not be a problem. The large amounts of human and animal dung include nutrients which originate from inorganic fertilizers, since we all eat food that is largely grown by means of inorganic fertilizers. It is estimated that humans have already doubled the amount of nutrients in the global ecosystem. Thus, the main problem is not that we produce inorganic fertilizers it's that we don't recycle them.




Logistic challenge

Even if we only consider livestock manure, there is enough natural fertilizer available to sustain almost 7 billion people. There is also no taboo when it comes to utilising animal manure, so why don't we use it? Nutrients recovered as animal manure and applied to agricultural lands were estimated globally at a mere 34 million tonnes of nitrogen (28 percent of total) and 8.8 million tonnes of phosphates (15 percent) in 1996. The amount wasted thus equals (for nitrogen) or surpasses (for phosphates) artificial fertilizer production.

This is the consequence of an industrial and intensive meat and dairy production system that is operating on a global scale. In many countries cattle eats fodder that is produced on the other side of the world. So, in order to close the loop, we would have to ship the manure back to where the fodder comes from. The FAO writes (pdf):

"Even if livestock is raised on the same continent as where its feed is grown, the scale and geographical concentration of industrial feedstock production causes gross imbalances that hamper manure recycling options. High labour and transport costs often limit the use of manure as organic fertilizer to the direct vicinity of the production facilities."


Of course, the same can be said of human manure. Just like livstock, humans are geographically concentrated in large cities with no farmland in sight. Just like livestock, we eat food that is often produced far away from where we live. This means that if we choose to collect humanure, we have to ship it back from the place of food consumption to the place of food production. Consequently, recycling nutrient elements would bring along a massive logistic system consisting of trucks, trains and ships transporting dung (or pipelines transporting sewage) all over the world.




We are not saying that every ounce of dung should be sent back to the place where the food was grown - this is impossible and ridiculous. What counts is that there is a balance between import and export of nutrients. Countries that export food should also choose to import (other) food, instead of dung, yielding the same result and increasing the dietary variety. All we would essentially need is a sophisticated nutrient accounting system.

Decentralisation of the human population

The fundamental solution, of course, is to produce food more locally. This would not only do away with the shipping of manure, but also with the shipping of food. If livestock production would be geographically more diversified and mixed with cropland, all the animal manure could be used and artificial fertilizers would not be needed.

If cities were smaller and distributed more uniformly throughout farming country, the logistics of returning humanure to farmland would be greatly simplified. Of course, this 'decentralisation' of the human population goes against the notion that densely populated cities are more sustainable than a more uniformly distributed population. The challenge may not be to abandon Suburbia, but to make it more self-sufficient.

© Kris De Decker (edited by Shameez Joubert)

© Illustrations in red & black: ddidak for low-tech magazine.

Many Thanks to Sietz Leeflang, inventor of the Nonolet (an urban composting toilet - building plans), who spent two years convincing me to write this epos on shit, and referred me to most documents listed below. Sietz also inspired me to write about oven stoves (which took considerably less effort).

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Sources

* "Farmers of Forty Centuries", F.H. King (1911) -- dung recycling in china, korea and japan
* "Science and civilization in China", Vol VI:2, Joseph Needham (1984) -- idem
* "De geschiedenis van de techniek in Nederland - de wording van een moderne samenleving 1800 - 1890, deel 2", H.W. Lindsen (1993) -- the liernur system (in Dutch)
* "Feed or Feedback: Agriculture, Population Dynamics and the State of the Planet", Duncan Brown, 2003 -- the nutrient cycle and how to restore it (great book!)
* "The history of sanitary sewers" (website) -- the liernur system and other early sewer systems
* "Proposed plan for a sewerage system, and for the disposal of sewage", PDF, Samuel M. Gray (1884) -- the technical options at the end of the 19th century
* "Humanure Handbook", Joseph Jenkins (2005 - third edition) -- diy
* "The nitrogen dilemma: is America fertilizing disaster?", Tom Philpott, Grist (2010) - inorganic fertilizers
* "Livestock's long shadow", PDF, Food and Agriculture Organisation (2006) - figures of livestock dung production
* "Production and use of potassium", PDF (1998)
* "Inorganic phosphorus and potassium production and reserves", PDF, T.L. Roberts and W.M. Stewart, in "Better Crops" (2002)
* "Environmental aspects of phosphate and potash mining", PDF, UNEP (2001)
* "Peak Phosphorus", James Elser & Stuart White, Foreign Policy (2010)
* "Scientists warn of lack of vita phosphorus as biofuels raise demand", Times Online, June 23, 2008
* "The voyages and adventures of Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, a Portugal, during his travels for the space of one and 20 years in the kingdom of Ethiopia, China, Tartaria, etcetera", Ferdinand Mendez Pinto (1583).


Source : Low-tech Magazine, 15 september 2010.