Away from home

+I've been away for a few days attending a conference, which may or may not be described as 'political.' This was an event put on by the Museum Tinguely in Basel to celebrate the life and work of artist Jean Tinguely whose birth centenary it is this year. It was described as an academic conference so perhaps I was a little out of my depth. It was one of those events where you discover that a majority of the rest of the audience are there to make presentations, and where questions from said audience are framed in their background of highly developed academic knowledge. Still, I asked a couple of questions on the basis that if one goes to such an event one should. Anonymity is quite sufficient cover for naivety - if indeed my questions were naive in the absence of any deep historical knowledge. Tinguely's remarkable work doesn't demand an education in classical modernism, but a phrase which stuck in my mind was that his work had 'comic seriousness,' which to me has a Zen-like quality. Much of Tinguely's time on the planet especially back in the 60s through the 80s might have been infected by the influence of Zen. An interesting possibility which wasn't explored related his work to the concept of 'comic seriousness' which tangentially refers (in my view) to the aesthetic of 'Wabi Sabi' which can find beauty in all things, not least in unnoticed or discarded things such as a crack in the concrete or an old bit of rusty machinery (indeed a crack in the concrete was once turned into a deliberate artwork in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern). I think Tinguely found beauty in creating new forms from things we normally consider to be discarded. I doubt he was ever happier than when he was scouring a scrap yard for old new bits. The scrapyard was his palette.

Talking of new things, whilst I was sat at a bar near a roundabout watching the cars going past, it appeared that every one of them had come straight out of a showroom. Basel, or the central bits of what I saw of it appears impossibly clean and well ordered. Even most of the cyclists, of whom there are many were showing lights and didn't feel inclined to ride on the pavements. I know Switzerland is 'well ordered' and in that respect may be an outlier but there could be lessons we could learn from it. Having said which, I spent a short time in the Kunstmuseum Zurich, where an extensive display examined the dark underbelly of Swiss society, through the lense of the Swiss art collector Emil Bürhle, who became Switzerland's richest man, making a multi-billion fortune selling arms to both sides in World War Two. His art collection developed in the 'favourable' market conditions of the period, when inevitably much Jewish owned art was sold or stolen. His art collection is thus controversial in its provenance. Many Swiss I imagine might still prefer to look away from the uglier side of their rich inheritance. At least in the art world some of the veils are being torn aside, although reading on Wikipedia about one curator’s approach to this, the absence of evidence sounds very much like evidence of absence.
 
I began by wondering whether politics was involved in the conference or not. It was, but nobody seemed quite sure how. For example, Tinguely created a series of sculptures called the Baluba series, the Baluba being a tribe in the Congo at the time of the anti-colonial movement and the Congolese fight for independence. Was Tinguely expressing his solidarity with them, or merely, a bit like Picasso discovering new sources of inspiration? I think Tinguely probably was expressing his solidarity with the anti-colonial movement, since he wasn't very keen on capitalism which his art appears to critique. An interesting intervention in this debate came from Samia Halaby, the remarkable Palestinian-born 89 year old woman who is credited with being a pioneer of computer art back in the 1980s. In a discussion about Tinguely's incendiary work Homage to New York, which self-destructed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962, Halaby, who described herself as a Palestinian Marxist, suggested Tinguely had conned 200 rich Americans to pay for a sculpture which then destroyed itself. As simple as that. Perhaps Tinguely predates Banksy by 50 years in this regard, although Tinguely wasn't a 'celebrity artist' at this point. Whatever the truth of the matter, perhaps the politics in art is in the eye of the beholder, especially so in this post-modern period.
 
The breakfast experience in hotels abroad would provide plenty of food for social anthropologists. Some guests like to stand in front of the buffet looking at everything like the proverbial mule that cannot decide what to eat. But unlike the mule, these guests eventually leave with heaving plates piled high. Others insist on stuffing whole baguettes through the toaster machine. At which the queue presents no obstacle. I have noticed that there is a singular, common feature which unites all these people: they're all foreigners.

+Andy Haldene, formerly Chief Economist at the Bank of England and now Chief Executive at the Royal Society of Arts is not looking for a gong. He wrote in a recent supplement in the New Statesman 'As they entered office in mid-2024 one thing was certain about Labour's plan for growth: they did not have one. There was no recipe book, and few raw ingredients for growth were in place. Apart from a shopping list wistfully titled 'securonomics,' the kitchen at No.11 was bare.' On its industrial green strategy Haldene writes 'The government's green paper was a middling-quality undergraduate essay, and without government money as lubricant, the leap from academic words to practical action is large.' Well said. But it's not all pessimism and gloom. In another piece Liam 'there is no money' Byrne MP, seemingly an intellectual heavyweight in Starmer’s Labour, has platitudes aplenty to offer. Tackle the disjointedness of government he proclaims, 'We can't afford this any longer. Which is why the comprehensive spending review needs to deliver a revolution in reinventing government for new times so that the public sector once again becomes an enabler of change.' You guessed it - AI will vaporise disjointedness and it'll be like the UK gets new knee and hip replacements all at once! And of course 'securonomics' - a word I haven't heard Reeves use lately - will get a new relevance with a massive uplift to defence spending, a 'strong, dependable, predictable' source of exports for the UK’ according to Byrne. The reliable, dependable treadmill of austerity will no doubt put the cap on our wonderful growth agenda. It's all worthy of a 2:1 at least. And we’ll keep Israel’s genocide going to boot!

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