I've just taken delivery of a wonderful but disturbing portfolio of photographs by the artist Chris Jordan entitled Midway: Message from the Gyre. This set of images of dead albatross chicks is as you would expect macabre but haunting and thought-provoking at the same time.
I chose the work for a number of probably conflicting reasons. Apart from their difficult beauty, I was attracted to having them as a poignant reminder of what happens when runaway consumersim comes face to face with nature, something that I find particularly relevant with my career in advertising.
You can make your own mid up about the work, but the images below are my simple attempt at 'unboxing' to document my first look at the work up close.
portfolio ready to open
first look
artists statement
Midway: Message from the Gyre
These photographs of albatross chicks were made in September, 2009, on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.
To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.
~cj, Seattle, October 2009
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portfolio details
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The full set of images is available on Chris's site as each portfolio contains only a selection of the total number, it's also probably easier to see each image in clearer detail.
If you're familiar with the work of Steve Bell, the satirist and cartoonist in the Guardian then hopefully you'll enjoy this post.
One of the most cutting caricatures Bell created is of Tony Blair, which steadily evolved as he became increasingly more unhinged with each controversial decision. The staring bulging eye, the pointy forehead, the expanding ears and the gnashing teeth with rictus grin in every shot...
It's fascinating to see now a similar evolution of an even more cutting caricature for Blair's natural successor David Cameron. The initial angle that Bell took was to portray Cameron as a jellyfish; he's wobbly, he's spineless, he's transparent. Everyone can be a Conservative these days; when being a Conservative means you stand for nothing!
David Cameron to shed 'cast iron' pledge on Lisbon treaty | From the Guardian
Taking the jellyfish a stage further, we've entered the condom phase. Bell has begun to portray Cameron as a thin protective sheath, providing an acceptable outward face to the world, but hiding all sorts of nastiness inside.
One commentor captured it thus "...I
suspect the condom has two purposes because it both provides him with
an exoskeleton which prevents him from being in a puddle on the floor
and protects the general public from his nasty sting. And it's the kind
of thing a dick wears."
The noble, honest, forthright face of Cameron provides protection to the tainted truth of unreformed Thatcherisim, Euro and climate change skepticism. This is particularly embarrassing for Zac Goldsmith pictured inside the condom below, who as the Conservatives acceptable face of environmentalism; son of Teddy Goldsmith, editor of the Ecologist magazine, author of the well-worth a read book 'The Constant Economy', goes and ruins it all by remaining non-domiciled for tax purposes even as he is standing as prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Richmond.
David Cameron is tutting with the dim and winking at the savvy | From the Guardian
When the Conservatives launched the now infamous airbrushed Cameron poster, not only has it been extensively parodied on the hilarious MyDavidCameron.comhome to a rapidly expanding collection of spoof posters, it was mana-from-heaven for the condom!
Pulled tightly across his face, smoothing out every wrinkle, covering up the hypocrisy and uncomfortable truths. The condom becomes the acceptable face of Conservatism...
Steve Bell: Little by little, the blue seeps through Cameron's silky skin | From the Guardian
What has been created is a vehicle to capture the many contradictory faces of the Cameron. The caring, sharing, compassionate one who is 'against wrongdoing'; the concerned, in-touch, ethical green one changing the ingrained beliefs of a recalcitrant party; the tough fiscal conservative, scourge of bankers, willing to make tough decisions required to bring the deficit back under control.
This flexibility was explored below, when on the same day he was interviewed in the London supporting Boris Johnson's please to support the City and the unfairly put-upon banking community; later that day in Davos for the World Economic Forum he's interviewed instead supporting Obama's call for tighter regulation, taxing of bonuses and reigning in of salaries. Two different messages for the domestic and global audiences, each of them as hollow as each other.
Cameron becomes an empty vessel, ready to accept whatever the message of the day needs to be.
But if that's all too much for you, you can still chuckle at the cycle helmet perched on the tip of his head, a little reminder of cyclegate, when the PR puff of his cycling to work was rather diminished when it was found out he was being followed by a car carrying his papers for the day.
Conservatives show vulnerability in class battle | The Guardian
It's going to be fascinating to see where Bell takes this through the election and beyond.
We get to watch an idea evolve and unfold before your eyes, as the campaign progresses, the story grows and new stories take shape each day, and have a good laugh along the way.
Finally you can here from Bell himself explaining how 'there's nothing much in there' in this Guardian video. Enjoy.
I’ve been stuck on jury service all week, so far without a case.
Clearly not being able to yet fulfill my civic duty has been frustrating, as all of the disruption of being away from work and stuck in the equivalent of a doctors waiting room for a whole week has so far been for nothing.
Yet one of the benefits that I wasn’t expecting was the joy of being released each day at varying times all at a moments notice, giving me a spare hour or two which I could use to either dash back to the office for meetings, or more interestingly try to sneak off to experience something a little more cultural.
My best catch of the week saw me stumble uninvited into the Icon Minds symposium in the Village Underground just around the corner from the Tea Building. A lovely little event packed with an impressive array of talented architecture and design thinkers. Mr Jones and the Bergers were also attending as well and you can see Matt’s long-hand notes here.
I was most keen on seeing the wonderfully entertaining author Bruce Sterling in conversation with conceptual designers Dunne & Raby, and managed to get there just in time to see things kick off.
I’ve been a fan of Mr Sterling’s writing for a long time and was really looking forward to seeing him in the flesh, and whilst he cuts an unassuming figure quietly sitting composed before the talk began, unfortunately for Dunne & Raby on this occasion he kind of blew them away!
His main critical was around his passion for exploring design through fiction; in particular how writing about design is in many ways a superior practice to the actual creation of objects and artifacts.
He justifies this by drawing attention to the fact that the vast majority of design only ever exists as speculative design;
“patented designs that never get made, vapourware that was never more than some ego driven fantasy, hobbyist objects made individually, impossible designs, frauds, fakes, copies and futuristic objects not yet possible.”
This much larger space made possible through imagined design writing can today take many forms, made possible by the dissolving of boundaries between different forms of design practice;
“scientific experiments, scenario planning of all kinds, consumer observation, story-boarding, brainstorming, extrapolations and his all time favorite mash-ups.”
The importance of each of us incorporating design writing and fiction into our own work is brought home by the need to “design for situations that don’t yet exist”.
Rather than remaining hidebound by such petty concerns as usefulness or usability which are essential elements of design for objects required to serve a purpose here and now, especially as “the reality of actual designed objects is too often a disappointment”, so when the very demands of what we are designing for change literally by the day why not instead indulge in a bit more fantasy and speculation.
He went on for some time more, here are a few choice quotes;
“Steampunk is what happened when goths discovered the colour brown.”
“Most objects are sets of frozen relationships, protagonists of a documented process.”
“Experience design may be the most Imperial of all design practices to date. The first school of design that can encompass literature.”
“How can you write a piece of news, that shall remain a piece of news in 20 years? Which of these will last 20 more years; the EU, NATO, Google, Twitter, Facebook?”
“I’d rather be interesting and broke, than rich and on the verge of suicide.”
A great thought provoking and stimulating talk. If you wanted to look at anything he’s written especially on design you can do a lot worse than start with a copy of his wonderful Shaping Things; "...it’s about created objects and the environment, which is to say, it's about everything."
Also at the very end of the week I finally managed to sneak off to the fantastic Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy. If you haven’t been yet, GO! It lives up to all of the hype.
What I enjoyed most was flitting between the rooms to catch glimpses of the main red wax elements as the mighty double-decker bus sized block slowly meandered along its tracks, or rushing back over to catch the gun fire its shot into the wall, something I missed twice before catching it below...
The tension as people waited for the almighty explosion or otherwise was palpable (which I don’t think the rather amateurish video quite captures). A lovely involving interactive work.
Anyway, back for another week of jury duty next week.
