I was at Angela Porter’s Ghost Forest installation outside of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square this afternoon. Brilliant. The 10 Ghanaian tree stumps really made an impression, not easy in such a space. Here are some photos and I’ve copied the official blurb below. Show’s over now but it moves on to Copenhagen in time for COP-15.

[BTW, hit the full screen on the bottom of the player below, they look a lot better that way.]

Ghost Forest is an original and ambitious project by Angela Palmer that seeks to raise public awareness of the connections between deforestation and climate change. It involves taking a series of 10 rainforest tree stumps, most with their buttress roots still attached, from a regulated, commercially logged tropical rainforest in Ghana.

The tree stumps will be presented as a “ghost forest” firstly in Trafalgar Square in London, and then in Copenhagen to coincide with the UN Cop15 Climate Change Conference in December.

Ghost Forest is a carbon neutral project – following input from Climate Care, Ghost Forest’s carbon footprint will be offset, see here for details.

Ghost Forest Art Installation – Trafalgar Square, London, U.K. 16-22 November 2009

Ghost Forest Art Installation – Thorvaldsens Plads, Copenhagen, Denmark 7-18 December 2009

Mark Leckey’s “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore” is a trip down memory lane for anyone who has every got dressed up to go out and regretted it when they’ve seen the photos. And it should be compulsory viewing for 16 year-olds; this is how ridiculous you’re going to look in 10 years.

It’s also a superb work of cultural anthropology as art. From the Guardian music blog:

There’s a loose chronology – northern soul, soul weekenders, casuals, acid house – but the two defining themes of the film are timeless.
Firstly, what deeply strange places nightclubs are; hundreds of strangers, all as high as kites, crammed together in a deliberately disorientating space. And secondly, how much poignancy there is in something ostensibly celebratory; the idea that “the best days of your lives” will be wiped away by a change in fashion.

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (Mark Leckey) from Anon. on Vimeo.

Some photos from the BUNKER at The Centre of the Universe in Dalston last week.

I meant to put link these up last week. Photos from FLAGS. 39 Flags by 41 artists curated by Lewis Ronald, Adam Gibbons and Jesper List Thomsen.

All your Broc are belong to us

What if your food was made by tiny little people with peasant hats and industrial aprons. Who were forced to work 18 hour days in horrible environments. Would your food be as tasty?

Thanks to Inhabitant.com for the link to Matthew Carden’s 350degrees.com. Check it out.

I left out my main point about the significance of the Third Coast. It’s of the moment to report the US has lost its edge. It is declining empire. The current financial crisis and the last eight years of White House led turbulence shore up that easy and lazy argument. The Heartland (Third Coast) project goes someway towards arming us in refuting that claim. It shows the USA is not simply a market. It is a cultural entity.

It can be argued that the original culture wars started the moment the Pilgrims set sail from Europe (more on them soon). And at its heart America is a cultural entity. The current financial events are merely the latest in a series that started with the Boston Tea Party. It’s easy so to get the financial, cultural and political history of the US confused.

And this is the reason, ultimately, that America will continue to matter after China and India fly by it on the IMF and even UNESCO charts. It will matter for its culture; its sport, its academia and its art.

Marjetica Portc

All eyes on the US. The capital of capitalism, the birth place of the biggest economic shock in 80 years and a country at the end of political history. Or something like that.
We Make Money Not Art gives notice of a super project taking place in Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. The Third Coast is that tract of land slap in the middle of the USA, the Heartland.

Heartland roughly follows the Mississippi River, taking in an area from New Orleans up to Minneapolis in the north and including Omaha, Kansas City, Detroit and Chicago. The curatorial team, a collaboration between the Van Abbemuseum and the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, commissioned new pieces and selected existing works by contemporary artists who live in the region or have undertaken residencies there in order to produce new work. The programme includes musical events at the Muziekcentrum Frits Philips, debates, lectures, a photo exhibition, a magazine and publications.

That sounds totally worthy, but the work looks like it stands up, check it, it features projects from Detroit ghetto palms, to New Orleans shotgun houses. News media in Europe writes off the space between US coasts as full of rednecks with bibles and ghettoized minorities. Well art shit ain’t like that.There’s 3,000 miles between New York and LA, it’s good to see some of it exposed, even if one does have to be in Holland to see it.

Sam: I want to take photos of trees.

Lewis: Photos of trees are over. A photographer comes out of the forest with the same photos on film that were in his head on the way in.

Sam’s photos are at Corbridge Crescent, E2, London.

-edit-
Lewis Ronald has been kind enough to clarify exactly what he’s talking about above (from an essay by Andy Grundberg):

This by way of Momus whose article is also very much worth checking out. Good links to different takes on the current difficulties our friendly neighbourhood investment banks are going through.

Mark Boulos, whose two-screen video installation All That Is Solid Melts Into Air pits a Nigerian liberation movement called MEND (Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta) against futures traders at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in a way that suggests they both serve irrational gods.

Only downside is there’s no way to view the installation in question.

What’s the opposite of cheap, easy, global? How about this, a proposed 10,000 year old clock. Lots of background info on http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com. And some big time TED-esque thinking at the Long Term Thinking blog.