{"id":3669,"date":"2023-03-22T15:30:26","date_gmt":"2023-03-22T15:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3669"},"modified":"2023-04-18T15:36:06","modified_gmt":"2023-04-18T15:36:06","slug":"the-sirens-of-overstatement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3669","title":{"rendered":"The sirens of overstatement"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Visiting David Blandy’s installation Atomic Light at John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton, for New Scientist, 22 March 2023<\/a><\/p>\n

The Edge of Forever, one of four short films by Brighton-based video and installation artist David Blandy, opens with an elegaic pan of Cuckmere Haven in Sussex. A less apocalyptic landscape it would be hard to imagine. Cuckmere is one of the most ravishing spots in the Home Counties. Still, the voiceover insists that we contemplate \u201ca ravaged Earth\u201d and \u201cforgotten peoples\u201d as we watch two children exploring their post-human future. The only sign of former human habitation is a deserted observatory (the former Royal Observatory at Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex). The children enter and study the leavings of dead technologies and abandoned ambitions, steeped all the while in refracted sunlight: Claire Barrett\u2019s elegiac camerawork is superb.<\/p>\n

The films in Blandy\u2019s installation \u201cAtomic Light\u201d connect three different kinds of fire: the fire of the sun; the wildfires that break out naturally all over the earth, but which are gathering force and frequency as the Earth\u2019s climate warms; and the atomic blast that consumed the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a personal dimension to all this, beyond Blandy\u2019s vaunted concern for the environment: his grandfather was a prisoner of the Japanese in Singapore during the second World War, and afterwards lived with the knowledge that, had upwards of 100,000 civilians not perished in Hiroshima blast, he almost certainly would not have survived.<\/p>\n

Bringing this lot together is a job of work. In Empire of the Swamp
\na man wanders through the mangrove swamps at the edge of Singapore, while Blandy reads out a short story by playwright Joel Tan. The enviro-political opinions of a postcolonial crocodile are as good a premise for a short story as any, I suppose, but the film isn\u2019t particularly well integrated with the rest of the show.<\/p>\n

Soil, Sinew and Bone, a visually arresting game of digital mirrors composed of rural footage from Screen Archive South East, equates modern agriculture and warfare. That there is an historical connection is undeniable: the chemist Franz Haber received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber\u2013Bosch process, a method of synthesising ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen. That ammonia, a fertiliser, can be used in the manufacture of explosives, is an irony familiar to any GCSE student, though it\u2019s by no means obvious why agriculture should be left morally tainted by it.<\/p>\n

Alas, Blandy can\u2019t resist the sirens of overstatement. We eat, he says \u201cwhile others scratch for existence in the baked earth.\u201d Never mind that since 1970, hunger in the developing world has more than halved, and that China saw its hunger level fall from a quarter of its vast population to less than a tenth by 2016 — all overwhelmingly thanks to Haber-Bosch.<\/p>\n

Defenders of the artist\u2019s right to be miserable in face of history will complain that I am taking \u201cAtomic Light\u201d far to literally — to which I would respond that I\u2019m taking it seriously. Bad faith is bad faith whichever way you cut it. If in your voiceover you dub Walt Disney\u2019s Mickey \u201cthis mouse of empire\u201d, if you describe some poor soul\u2019s carefully tended English garden as the \u201cpursuit of an unnatural perfection wreathed in poisons\u201d, if you use footage of a children\u2019s tea party to hector your audience about wheat and sugar, and if you cut words and images together to suggest that some jobbing farmer out shooting rabbits was a landowner on the lookout for absconding workers, then you are simply piling straws on the camel\u2019s back.<\/p>\n

Thank goodness, then, for Sunspot, Blandy\u2019s fourth, visually much simpler film, that juxtaposes the lives and observations of two real-life solar astronomers, Joseph Hiscox in Los Angeles and Yukiaki Tanaka in Tokyo, who each made drawings of the sun on the day the Hiroshima bomb dropped.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a salutary and saving reminder that, to make art, you\u2019re best off letting the truth speak for itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Visiting David Blandy’s installation Atomic Light at John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton, for New Scientist, 22 March 2023 The Edge of Forever, one of four short films by Brighton-based video and installation artist David Blandy, opens with an elegaic … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[616,78,620,1],"tags":[925,331,232,1054],"class_list":["post-3669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-reviews-and-opinion","category-screen","category-uncategorized","tag-agriculture","tag-environment","tag-new-scientist","tag-nuclear-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3669"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3671,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3669\/revisions\/3671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}