Saturday 13 March 2010

The Green Mistake

Since my cooling towers project began and it was before we saw photos each day of cooling towers in the broad sheets placed there by lazy picture editors on any article regarding global warming or climate change things have changed. Though my piece was about aesthetics, nostalgia and a perception of the northern skyline, the cooling tower has become no more than the pictures of stranded polar bears on floating ice begs. This caused me to hold the work back to see how the political or nbmore accurately the medias visual presentation of the political climate changed regarding global warming. I have felt that the work would have slipped in to the green debate and been overlooked as some green statement. This isnt where I am coming from. Jeremy Rifkins recent book The Empathic Civilization takes its fundamental premise that our history is one of a struggle between empathy and entropy as polarities. His argument falls down in thinking that human empathy can defeat the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The drive toward our destruction lies not in inter government policy agreements but in the fact that, as a people we will not abandon our energy intensive civlization aligned with our innabillit to hypocritically deprive emerging nations the standard of living we have come to expect. My refusal to exhibit my cooling towers poece, a work about a piece of unused industrial architecture and its symbolism can no longer be expected to be interpreted as anything other than the lazy visual imaginations of broadsheet picture editors. I hope a day comes when this baggage is no longer there and I can show the work free of contemporary assumption. 

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