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Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent @ the Whitechapel Gallery

‘Visual attempts to dissect the newspeak that bombards us’
(Peter Kennard in an article about his photomontages)

Chances are you’ve seen one or more of Peter Kennard’s iconic photomontages, particularly during his heyday in the 1980s when the reign of Mrs Thatcher provided the perfect background for his brand of aggressively radical, satirical photomontages, published in a wide variety of left-leaning magazines and newspapers.

‘Protest and Survive’ by Peter Kennard (1980) Tate: Purchased from the artist

Throughout Thatcher’s premiership, and fired by her close partnership with Rocking Ronnie Reagan, there was widespread paranoia on the Left that the world stood on the brink of a catastrophic nuclear war and Kennard’s witty, bleak, mashed-up montages provided a perfect accompaniment to the mood of anxiety among concerned activists everywhere.

‘Haywain with Cruise Missiles’ by Peter Kennard (1980) Tate: Purchased from the artist 2007 © Peter Kennard

Photomontage

Photomontage is the technique of cutting, arranging and gluing together photos (or parts of photos) to make a new image, sometimes with text similarly cut and pasted from newspapers or other sources. As a technique it’s always been associated with politics and satire, from its origins in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and 30s and the great pioneer of political montages, John Heartfield.

‘The Meaning of the Hitler Salute: Little man asks for big gifts’ by John Heartfield, October 1932

As a student activist in the 196os, Kennard found theoretical underpinnings for photomontage in the critical writings of Marxist thinkers like Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht who promoted photomontage and collage (among other strategies) as ways of puncturing, subverting and questioning the smooth lies of capitalist discourse and bourgeois culture. Indeed, one of newspapers on show here is a Guardian Arts supplement from the 1990s featuring a long essay about Benjamin by James Wood and illustrated by a photomontage of him (Benjamin) by Kennard.

‘Walter Benjamin’ by Peter Kennard (1990) as featured in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery

Kennard at the Whitechapel

This new exhibition of Kennard’s work includes lots of golden oldies from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, witty, savage, sometimes very bleak visual protests against a world run by rich Western corporations who, in what is probably his central theme, make obscene amounts of money by selling arms, weapons, bombs, guns to disgusting regimes which then use them to repress, murder, massacre their own and neighbouring populations. Champagne-swilling capitalists win – unarmed civilians, women and children lose.

‘Stop’ by Peter Kennard as featured in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery

However, this exhibition is not by any means a retrospective or dwelling on the past. Two of the three rooms contain very up-to-date works, completed in 2023 or this year, which show Kennard expanding his range in new and interesting ways. Having pondered all this a bit, I think the best way to 1) indicate what the show actually contains and 2) to indicate how the new stuff differs and expands on the old, is simply to describe it room by room.

Room 1

Room 1 is named the Archive Room and contains four elements. First there’s a plain table on which are ten books, publications from Kennard’s career from coffee table blockbusters to smaller, postcard-sized works. You could grab a coffee from the cafe downstairs, sit and browse through these for an interesting half hour or so.

On a shelf round two walls are 17 copies of one of these books – @earth – open to 17 different images.

On another wall is a hinged rack (the kind you see in art gallery shops) of 42 posters of Kennard images ranging from 1979 to 2019, made from photolithography and silkscreen on card.

Lastly, there are piles and piles of newspapers – or at least that’s what I thought they were till I looked closely and realised they are specially printed broadsheet-sized, newspaper-style folded versions of his images, accompanied by smatterings of text, which are FREE and we are encouraged to take away with us.

Installation view of ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery, showing the reading table, copies of @earth open on the shelf and piles and piles of free papers (photo by the author)

Room 2

Barely a room, really just an extension of the same space, the second gallery contains three elements. There is a display case which bears the title ‘Worktop, 1966–2024’ and is, as the name suggests, a junk shop-style collection of the kinds of materials that Kennard collects – magazines, books, photos – plus all manner of equipment used to make the works, such as a tape measure, rulers, paints, knives and tools and so on.

The artist’s bric-a-brac at ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)

Above the display case are four large framed works titled ‘Stocks’ from 1994. These are four copies of the Financial Times which have been subjected to a dramatic transformation, namely a gaunt, ravaged, black and white arm and hand tearing its way down through the neat columns of stock market prices, in a gesture which manages to convey terrible despair.

©Peter Kennard Newspaper 8 (1994) Carbon toner, oil, charcoal, pastel on newspaper, wood

‘Stock’ by Peter Kennard (1994) as featured in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery

Opposite these a sort of alcove has been filled with 25 poster-sized blow-ups pf his images to create a little forest of placards, each attached to a wooden post themselves secured in red vices. This is his newest work, created specially for this exhibition, is titled ‘People’s University of the East End’, and there’s a story behind it.

It turns out that the three ‘galleries’ in which the show is held were once part of the former Whitechapel Library (1892 to 2005). At the turn of the twentieth century this was a free resource to the poor inhabitants of the area who would have read books, magazines and newspapers here. Back then it was nicknamed the ‘People’s University of the East End’, hence the title of this installation which, as the curators put it, ‘reflects on the capacity for learning, community and activism in public spaces.’

The exhibition, we learn, was conceived to echo and reflect on this idea of a library, a place where ideas are made available, promoted and circulate. Hence the inclusion of the word Archive in the title of the show, for it brings together not just the images themselves, but includes actual copies of the original newspapers and magazines and posters, as well as the more recent books, in which his images were first published and continue to circulate.

Installation view of ‘People’s University of the East End’ in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)

This little copse of placards is quite a neat idea, and contains up-to-date works such as the barbed-wire tree from the civil war in Syria (centre right) and the image of Julian Assange intercut with the American and British flags at the bottom right, but it didn’t pull my daisy, I’m not sure why. In the same way, the notion of the Archive certainly explains the bringing together of all these formats – posters, newspapers, and the vitrine showing his bric-a-brac – but doesn’t really come off, as an idea.

The best bit, I thought, were the shiny red vices supporting the posts, like a little army of red crabs. ‘Red vices’, hmm, that could have been a witty alternative title for the exhibition and the right-on causes Kennard has spent a lifetime supporting…

Anyway, themes from these first two spaces are picked up in the third, biggest and best room of the show.

Room 3: the installations

The first wall of the third and final room displays no fewer than 40 of his classic photomontages, ranging from a piece commenting on British Army brutality in Northern Ireland in 1973 to the Free Julian Assange piece I mentioned above, made in 2023, via one of my favourites, the very funny Maggie Regina from 1983.

Maggie Regina by Peter Kennard (1983) in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)

It’s an impressive selection from fifty years of mostly stark and upsetting imagery designed to provoke the viewer into thinking again about the forces of violence and exploitation which underlie our shiny Western world.

But the big thing here is the installations which I think are brilliant. There are four of them and, remember the copies of the Financial Times with the gaunt arm tearing through it in the previous room? – they all rely on newspapers as their central material.

1. Reading Room

The simplest is ‘Reading Room’. Picking up on the Whitechapel Library motif, these are four old two-sided wooden lecterns, the kind that turn-of-the-century readers would have read their newspapers on. Each of them hosts an original edition of a newspaper or magazine where a Kennard work originally appeared. Most of the 8 newspapers in question were copies of the Guardian, the exceptions being two copies of The Workers Press and a vintage copy of the New Musical Express.

Installation view of ‘Reading Room, 1997 to 2024,’ in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)

The classic black-and-white photomontages address these issues:

1973 scientists involved in torture (The Workers Press)
1974 British investment in apartheid South Africa (The Workers Press)
1981 nuclear weapons, a skeleton morphing into an atom bomb (New Musical Express)
1989 reunification of East and West Germany (Guardian)
1990 the Whites Only policy of South African apartheid (Guardian)
1990 profile of Walter Benjamin (Guardian)
1991 Gulf War, the attempt to stop Saddam Hussein (Guardian)
1991 a centrefold collection of photomontages (Guardian)

2. World Markets (1997 to 2024)

‘World Markets’ is a set of 16 broadsheet newspaper double-spreads, most if not all from Kennard’s favourite target, the Financial Times, on which he has projected faces intended, presumably, to represent The Poor and Exploited. The aim is to remind us that behind the wall of numbers which is the faster-then-ever, digitally automated stock market, are the lives of the poor and downtrodden who suffer from the ravages of global capitalism.

Installation view of ‘World Markets, 1997 to 2024,’ in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)

Both these are straightforward in manner and material. The last two installations represent something completely new because they use electric lights and projections.

3. Double Exposure, 2023

‘Double Exposure’ covers a whole wall. It consists of three rows of 12 Financial Times pages with lights projecting images of war and conflict and poverty onto them. It was made in collaboration with Nigel Brown and is large and imposing. Part of the overall visual impact comes from the complicated spaghetti of electric cabling hanging from each projection and spooling along the floor.

Installation view of ‘Double Exposure’ in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)

The dynamic nature of this installation i.e. the lights continually changing, is appealing. And the notion of this magic lantern show revealing the ‘truth’ behind the blank walls of stocks and shares prices on the FT pages is also sort of interesting.

Kennard’s dualistic worldview

‘Double Exposure’ really just brings out the fundamental concept which underlies all Kennard’s work which is that there are two levels of reality – the smooth, plausible, ‘common sense’ world we inhabit, defined and described and promoted in the hegemonic discourse of neo-liberal consumer capitalism, the world of perfect people smiling down at us from advertising hoardings in the streets, on the sides of buses, on the Tube, on TV on our social media, the world of newspapers and TV assuring us that our values and our way of life, our pensions and investments in mega-corporations, are the only rational, practical ways to run the world – and the other world, the Dark Side, where the huge profits which keep the corporations afloat which our pensions and savings are invested in, the world of ‘shiny happy people’ is sustained by the ruthless exploitation of the poor and powerless, of indigenous peoples around the world, of peasants and workers forced to sweat in terrible conditions in Indonesian sweatshops or be psychologically destroyed in China’s suicide factories, and where, above all, the West maintains its hegemonic control of the world’s economic and financial systems through the ruthless elimination of anyone who stands in its way via wars of conquest dressed up as ‘liberation’ or ‘freedom’ – as in the deep need to control the world’s oil supplies which underlay the West’s adventures in the Gulf War and then the Iraq War.

Kennard’s works represent this Two World Hypothesis, this duality, via works which are themselves dualistic or dichotomous, in which (in his classic works) images from two different value systems are made to crash into each other, the startlingness of the disjunction intended to wake us from our complacent slumber.

‘Thatcher Unmasked’ by Peter Kennard (1986) A/POLITICAL

You can see how this duality underlies all his work, from duality of ‘The Haywain with Cruise missiles’ (where the self-deceiving bourgeois dream of some Old Englande is punctured by the modern reality of England being a lunch pad for American nukes) through to the dual image of copies of the Financial Times which have been ripped by the gaunt arm of the global poor (‘Stocks’) or have projected onto them the faces of the global poor (‘World Markets’ and ‘Double Exposure’).

There are, of course, a number of problems with this approach and with the whole radical worldview which underlies it, of which three spring straight to mind.

1. What’s the alternative?

One is, What else do you suggest? Forty years ago I read Class War and Socialist Worker and the kind of publications Kennard’s works appeared in and fondly imagined that the (Western) world could be subjected to a socialist transformation, but the collapse of the Soviet Union and of all the regimes around the world which it supported took all the steam out of those (wildly impractical) hopes and into the vacuum rushed the two flavours of neoliberalism which have ruled the West ever since, the Hard Neoliberalism of the Conservatives and Republicans, of Reagan and Thatcher, or the Soft Neoliberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, which promised a fairer world and a middle way but still deregulated the financial sector leading to the 2008 crash and enthusiastically promoted the War on Terror and invasion of Iraq, trashing Blair’s reputation forever.

Photo-Op by kennardphillipps (2005) © kennardphillipps

Right up to the present day, activists on the Left are still trying to devise a new economic and social theory on which to base their policies, an ideological vacuum you can clearly see in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, which is just the British wing of the general bemusement of left-of-centre parties across the West.

Which explains why the Left has so enthusiastically embraced identity politics – it’s an excuse, it’s a fig leaf, it covers for their lack of an economic theory. Certainly feminism and black rights and refugees and Palestine are worthy causes, but in all the Western nations the Left and progressives and activists have clustered round these causes because they don’t know what to do about the economy any more – should we nationalise all the utilities, should the government create an industrial strategy and support native industries?

The Right has won everywhere because it has a clear strategy – reduce the state, privatise everything, neuter trade unions, leave all economic decisions to the market, cut taxes on the rich – which it implements everywhere with total consistency, and has ideological allies in all the media owned by the rich who stand to directly benefit from these policies.

I take the pint that Kennard’s work is satirical commentary and like satire through the ages is under no obligation to propose its own alternative agenda, and yet at some point, during this review of 50 years of political engagement, surely every visitor is going to ask, ‘OK – you hate this universe of exploitation and warmongering – what’s your alternative?’

2. The post-Cold War multipolar world

The second objection to Kennard’s worldview is that it is too western and too parochial. If Reagan and Thatcher deserved mocking in the 1980s how much more so did the totalitarian regimes in Soviet Russia and Communist China?

In this century 9/11 crystallised the threat from radical Islam, a completely new force which entered the world with the 1979 Iranian revolution but none of us were really aware of in the 1980s and 90s (except for those plucky mujahideen Sandy Gall was always reporting on for ITN) and despite the mounting rhythm of Islamic terror attacks.

The point is that the radical or Marxist critique of the West which Kennard’s works seem to embody – his relentless criticism of the British state and army, from Ulster to Basra, and British arms and weapons suppliers making fortunes from murder – has been trumped or eclipsed by forces which are demonstrably more evil and wicked – ISIS in Syria, the Taliban in Afghanistan – and the great arc of instability across North Africa, through the Middle East, Iran-Iraq, up into Syria, countries which were destabilised by the uprisings of the Arab Spring and the chaos, civil wars (Libya, Yemen, Syria) or renewed repression (Egypt) they left in their wake. And of course the horrific Hamas raid on Israel followed by the brutal war on Gaza, with the constant threat of a second front opening against Hizbollah in the Lebanon.

And if you throw in the very real threat to Eastern Europe presented by Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine and the ever-present anxiety about China’s threats to Taiwan, then get a world in which even the most radical Left are hard put to argue that it’s the West who are the biggest threat to peace or the most violent culture or the most repressive regimes.

It’s quite clear to everyone that, even if you want to excoriate Western arms companies and rapacious corporations who are, for example, continuing to supply arms for Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza, the overall values of the West need supporting against the very real enemies threatening it from all sides (including, of course, from within – Trump, Reform and the maniac right of the Conservative Party). As in France, the Left needs to present a united front against the Right which, as I mentioned above, succeeds time and time again because it knows what it wants, in a way the fractured Left all-too-often doesn’t.

In summary, mocking the American and British state, big corporations and warmongering leaders made a lot of sense in the Reagan-Thatcher 1980s, and again in the light of the Bush-Blair Iraq War of 2003 – but now, in 2024, doesn’t feel like an adequate response to a far more complicated, and threatening, world. The iniquity of British arms manufacturers continuing to supply Israel or the Syrian government, profiting from conflict in Yemen or Sudan, remains deplorable.

Union Mask by Peter Kennard (2007) Courtesy the artist

3. How ‘radical’ can any contemporary artist be?

The third objection would be the familiar one levelled at all artists no matter how ‘radical’ or ‘subversive’, which is that their works, across all channels and media, fit smoothly inside the capitalist consumer culture they claim to critique, so smoothly as to have, in practice, zero effect.

The Whitechapel Gallery has a shop which, as always, devotes a section to merchandise from the exhibitions of the moment, in this case books and posters and postcards by Peter Kennard all available at very competitive prices. All artists are as tightly enmeshed in the system they wish to undermine as the richest stockbroker or wickedest arms dealer.

You know the old Leftie joke, ‘If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it’ – same here: Kennard, Banksy, any other political artist you care to mention, don’t change anything at all, so much as provide a kind of backdrop for certain kinds of lives, images certain kinds of student zealots and ageing activists identify with and enjoy looking at.

The richest man I know loves all kinds of art, including ‘radical’ stuff like Kennard, loved political photos in the Elton John photo exhibition, coos as Yoni Shinkobare CBE’s deconstruction of imperial statues and why shouldn’t he? None of them threaten him or his ample investments in the slightest. They’re lifestyle accessories, they’re one more set of consumer items to be flicked through while waiting for a plane or by the pool or in a pokey room in Whitechapel.

The man who made them, Kennard, has to believe in The Cause and is as fiercely committed to making works skewering the evil arms trade as he was 50 years ago, and his consistency and commitment is admirable. But strolling round this exhibition inevitably raises the question whether work like this changes anything at all, even in the minds of visitors who, half an hour later, are browsing in the shop or wedged onto a busy tube train.

4. Boardroom (2023)

The last of the installations in the third room is ‘Boardroom’ which dates from last year. I really liked these works because they use rough, industrial, derelict materials, the kind of thing which always lights my candle. On three big salvaged boards are suspended sheets of (as usual) newsprint. Onto these have been printed anonymous portraits of everyday people, The People, the masses. And onto these are projected the logos of oil and arms companies, of Shell and BP, BAE Systems and many others of the same ilk, the point being, of course, that it’s ordinary people, especially in developing countries, who pay the price for the rapacious exploitation of oil (in the Middle East or Nigeria) and the disgustingly indiscriminate use of weaponry (Syria, Ukraine, Gaza).

Installation view of ‘Boardroom’ in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)

Arms and the artist

On reflection, maybe it’s his hatred of state violence which is Kennard’s most consistent subject, from the US bombing of Cambodia and North Vietnam, the British Army’s use of rubber bullets in Northern Ireland in the early 70s, the threat of nuclear apocalypse during the 1980s, the West’s use of devastating firepower against Iraq in 1991 and then again in 2003, and western arms companies continuing to profit from conflicts in Ukraine and Israel.

Maybe, rather than critiquing capitalism per se, it would be more accurate to say that Kennard has spent a lifetime excoriating the ruinous products of Western arms companies and the bellicose leaders who support and encourage the militaristic worldview.

‘Sub-Trump’ by Peter Kennard (2018) Courtesy of the artist and Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, Rome and New York

As an intellectual position, this hatred of companies who profit from selling instruments of death and destruction is more viable than thoughts about overthrowing the entire capitalist system. Who doesn’t agree that we should be feeding starving children rather than building nukes and subs and drones? Except that we live in a world with a Russia in it, where even if Vladimir Putin miraculously dies of a heart attack, chances are he would only be replaced by an even more aggressive Russian nationalist – and a world which also has an increasingly nationalist China in it – not to mention a belligerent Iran which was the main beneficiary of the foolish war in Iraq.

With the result that we live in a world where the defence ministers of every country in NATO are calling for more to be spent on defence budgets in readiness for a war with Russia. Is that wrong? Is Kennard saying European nations should be winding down their defence budgets and sending a signal of passivity to Putin?

You look at Kennard’s powerful images and installations, you are touched by the images of starving children and with one part of your mind you strongly sympathise with criticism of arms companies (and the entire ‘system’) which profits from making and selling weapons of death… and yet… another part of your mind wonders – ‘OK, I get it, arms companies are immoral and wicked… but what would your policy be towards Ukraine and Russia? What would you be advising NATO leaders? Do you think this is the moment to reduce our military capability even further?’

The moral outrage of the works excoriating the killing of the innocent and profiteering from death… clash with a realistic assessment of the warlike world we live in… and so left me, literally, in two minds about all of these works.

New media

Putting their subject matter to one side for a moment, Kennard was keen to emphasise that these latter works – the ones using lights and projections, ‘Double Exposure’ and ‘Boardroom’ – are an interesting new strategy of his, an attempt to deconstruct the whole process of photomontage, the artistic practice which made his name.

I think I understand what he thinks he’s getting at but I’m not sure it’s really true. If you use a narrow definition of photomontage i.e. juxtaposing photographs from different sources on a flat surface to make a new photo image, then yes. But if you use the broader definition I attempted above, of juxtaposing objects from two different value systems (faces of people from the developing world with the sleek markets pages of the Financial Times) then this is fundamentally the same approach, the same way to get an effect.

Putting the idea of ‘deconstruction’ to one side, I still liked these works the best: 1) because I like the industrial paraphernalia of salvaged wood, clips and metal brackets and cabling which they involve, and 2) because they are fresh and new, in technique and aim, when set beside the yellowing montages from the 1970s and ’80s. I found them the most interesting as overall objects or sculptures in the same way that I liked the red vices (novel) more than the protest placards (familiar).

Summary

As you can tell, I’m conflicted. I really liked the photomontages because, in their deliberately scrappy mashed-up appearance, they actually display great visual taste. They’re like classic punk visuals and are almost all impactful and effective images, cousins of the political cartoons from the period, distant relations, maybe, of the savage satire of Gerald Scarfe. Despite being made out of other people’s material, their harsh juxtapositions have an immediately recognisable visual identity, much as you can instantly recognise a Banksy work of graffiti.

And I liked the four installations, and the efforts he’s been making with wood and placards and lights etc to broaden out his practice.

And yet I couldn’t help feeling that, at some level, it all comes from a bygone age. Even his response to the most recent events like the terrible civil war in Syria or the jokey photomontages featuring Donald Trump… they’re good but they signify a style and approach which comes from another era and doesn’t (as I’ve tried to explain) really reflect the complexity of our time, the troubled 2020s.

‘Syria’ by Peter Kennard (2018) Courtesy of the artist and Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, Rome and New York

Or am I being too harsh? Is this a man who has been impressively true to his radical beliefs through half a century of political turmoil and social change, an unflinching critic of corporate greed and political mendacity? As he himself puts it:

‘My art erupts from outrage at the fact that the search for financial profit rules every nook and cranny of our society. Profit masks poverty, racism, war, climate catastrophe and on and on…’Archive of Dissent’ brings together fifty years of work that all attempt to express that anger by ripping through the mask by cutting, tearing, montaging and juxtaposing imagery that we are all bombarded with daily. It shows what lies behind the mask: the victims, the resistance, the human communality saying ‘no’ to corporate and state power. It rails at the waste of lives caused by the trillions spent on manufacturing weapons and the vast profits made by arms companies.’

Is it a good thing that he’s still making images which highlight the violent exploitation lying behind the sleek corporate reports, the environmental destruction which pays for BP bonuses, the murderous blowing up of innocent bodies which underlies the profits of the arms manufacturers named in ‘Boardroom’?

Or is it both at the same time? I was conflicted.

Recommendation

It’s not a big exhibition, it’s not a major exhibition. The first two rooms are small, the second one little more than an alcove. If you’re already a fan you should go in order to see the installations and new pieces, but if you’re not, I’d hesitate to recommend it. You don’t get a lot more of a visual hit than you do from surfing the images on his website.

On balance, I think the wall of images of poor people and babies’ faces projected onto copies of the FT which makes up ‘World Markets’ is worth seeing in the flesh, but as to the rest…well, I’ve given a detailed description of what you see, so you can make your own mind up.

The good old days: a copy of the New Musical Express from 1981 featuring a page-size photomontage by Kennard on the left and reviews of recent gigs by Echo and the Bunnymen and The Cure on the right, on show at ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)

Related reviews

Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis @ the Hayward Gallery

This is an outstanding exhibition. It may be my favourite exhibition of the year so far. Why? At least six reasons:

1. Empty It was empty. When I arrived at 10 past 10 there were 5 or 6 people in it. When I left an hour later there were more visitors, maybe 30 to 40, but I could still walk into a room and be the only person there. This is very rare at a gallery. At a blockbuster show at the National or British Museum, by 11 it would be so packed it often gets hard to see the pictures. Here I waltzed from one big white empty room to another, almost completely alone, like a private view.

2. Cold The Hayward’s galleries are, for the most part, big and spacious. On the first floor they are light and airy. And all of them have excellent air conditioning! I arrived hot foot from the boiling, sweaty tube, and the weather outside was warm and humid. So entering big, white, airy and beautifully cool spaces was a welcome balm to the senses.

3. Outstanding art This exhibition is full of outstanding pieces of modern art. I’ll pick out the four or five highlights below, but it feels like an excellent introduction to this is what art is like now, in 2023. Not old paintings by dead white men from 100 years ago. Many of the works are from just the last few years, no fewer than seven of them were commissioned specially for this show, so these are by way of being world premieres.

4. Big installations Many of these works are big and immersive. There are plenty of photos and paintings and a few rooms devoted to huge projections of videos i.e. traditional media. But half a dozen of the works are really massive and impressive and enjoyable. It’s just fun to walk around a very big work of art.

5. International And it’s very cosmopolitan, very international. Art these days is, of course, an international business, with a non-stop calendar of festivals and biennales which artists, curators and gallery owners have to jet to all around the world (Beijing, Dubai, Venice, Buenos Aires) and, thanks to the internet, works from exhibitions all round the world can be seen online. But this particular selection is deliberately global in range. It felt like a series of windows into alternative worldviews, from other countries, other sensibilities.

(I suppose if you were being cynical, you could argue the opposite; that all the works have a certain sameyness, if not of execution, then certainly of worldview and mindset, products of a fully globalised artworld with a highly conformist artspeak. Well, on this day, at this exhibition, I was in a good mood – helped by the lovely air-conditioning – and so responded lightly and brightly to all the shiny exhibits and chose not to be dour and cynical.)

6. Women artists And the majority of the artists are women. I’m not sure you could tell from just the art works alone, but on this particular day, on this particular visit, I enjoyed the knowledge of being surrounded by the work of caring sharing women; maybe it contributed, at some level, to the calming, healing, hugely enjoyable tone of the whole show.

Climate change

On the ramp up to the second room or space you’re confronted by a motto made of neon signage by the ‘passionate ecofeminist’ and American artist, Andrea Bowers. It’s from 2017 and reads CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL. Maybe that was sort of necessary in 2017 but I think most people in the West now know about climate change, most educated people anyway.

Just over the last few days the front pages of the newspapers, on the radio and TV, there have been reports of Keir Starmer’s speech being interrupted by climate activists, Just Stop Oil disrupted the cricket test, protesters threw stuff at George Osborne’s wedding; there was the news that Monday and Tuesday had been the hottest days on record; the UN announced that the climate crisis is now out of control. So it’s no longer a niche issue: it’s all over the press and media on a pretty much daily basis, in fact it’s hard to ignore it.

Given almost universal awareness of the climate crisis, what is the point and aim of an exhibition like this? Let’s quote the press and publicity material issued by the Hayward Gallery:

‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ brings together fifteen pioneering artists from across the globe, many of whom have created new commissions for this exhibition. Their work invites us to imaginatively rethink our responses to many of today’s major environmental issues.

Taking its cue from Otobong Nkanga’s suggestion that ‘care is a form of resistance,’ the exhibition focuses on artworks that seek to rekindle our bond with the natural world as a means of developing new attitudes and sustainable ways of being. Different forms of care are made visible throughout the exhibition, whether through nurturing communities, tending to plants or joining protests.

Many of the artists foreground the interconnected nature of all beings and challenge us to engage and empathise with non-human perspectives. Some works highlight the voices of environmental activists; others underscore histories of industrial and chemical pollution, whilst illuminating ways in which the growing ecological crisis is entangled with social, economic and political spheres. There are also works that commemorate loss – of people, species, habitats – due to climate change or ecological degradation.

But in one way or another, all of the artworks in ‘Dear Earth’ inventively imagine an ethic of care and compassion. Mapping out an ecology of hope and spiritual connection, they seek to deepen our engagement with the subject in ways that ultimately nurture both our understanding and our capacity to act in support of our planet.

I don’t want to be negative, but I don’t really believe in any of that, in, for example, ‘an ecology of hope and spiritual connection’. This world, and our species, contains Vladimir Putin, the Wagner Group, Xi Jinping, Islamic State, Jair Bolsonaro. Mass murder and ecocide are arguably the distinguishing characteristics of our species.

On a more mundane level, most people think it is fine to own and drive a car. Me, I think it should be a criminal offence to own and drive a car, van, lorry, bus, coach, motorbike or scooter. They should be banned. Everyone should cycle or walk, maybe ride horses, a return to mid-Victorian horse and carts. Cities should be redesigned without ICE-powered vehicles so that people can live closer to their work. Flying should be banned, obviously.

Either we need to make complete and comprehensive and sweeping changes to our lifestyles, and as soon as possible, or we’re just going to carry on as usual. I am a climate radical, a climate extremist. We need to stop burning fossil fuels NOW.

I’m fully signed up to the cause. I don’t own a car, am never getting on a plane again, have been recycling everything for 30 years. In the 1990s my wife helped launch The Forest Stewardship Council which promotes responsible management of the world’s forests. Last year we planted half a dozen trees in our back garden, along with as many butterfly and bee-friendly plants as we could fit in, and each year let it run wild to encourage insects, with the result that we get lots of birds. Trivial, insignificant stuff, I know, but the best I can do.

So maybe that’s why I wasn’t very interested in ‘the message’ of many of the works here – because I’ve been discussing, debating and embodying the same ‘messages’ for decades. With the result that I barely scanned the wall labels telling me how awful capitalism is, or how ruinous the oil industry is, or how the Amazon is being devastated etc etc, the kind of thing I’ve been reading and worrying about since the 1980s.

My pre-existing commitment to the cause freed me up to enjoy the works purely as works of art, judged solely by the impact they made on all my senses.

I can see what the various artists are aiming at, I can read what they wish the world was like, I understand their desire for a more caring and compassionate approach – to ourselves, to each other, and to the natural world around us. But that’s not what the world is like, that’s not what we’re like. We are horribly heedless and destructive. We have to face the facts and act accordingly.

Anyway this, the green environmentalist subject matter, is not why I liked this exhibition; I liked it because a lot of the art is really bold and impactful (and staged in big, calming, air-conditioned spaces).

Top works

As I mentioned, there are:

many excellent large photos – for example, of abandoned industrial plants by Richard Mosse (Ireland)
prints – for example, a series of X-rays of living organisms by Agnes Denes (Hungary)
big paintings – including a striking nude woman in a tribal style by Daiara Tukano

But what bowled me over were the installations.

1. ‘Memorial to Arcadia Woodlands Clear-Cut (Green, Violet, and Brown)’ by Andrea Bowers (2014)

The afore-mentioned ecofeminist Andrea Bowers made a big sculpture consisting of ropes or twines hanging from the ceiling, each ending with a fragment of wood. It’s entitled ‘Memorial to Arcadia Woodlands Clear-Cut (Green, Violet, and Brown)’. It commemorates a forest in California that Bowers attempted to save by climbing and tying herself to an oak tree alongside three other activists. The action failed to prevent the destruction of the pristine grove of trees and the protesters were arrested. Bowers later returned to the site, collecting the remaining wood chippings and connecting them with ropes and other tree-sitting gear to create this shrine. It is a ‘hanging sculpture’.

‘Memorial to Arcadia Woodlands Clear-Cut (Green, Violet, and Brown)’ by Andrea Bowers in ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery

2. ‘we are opposite like that’ by Himali Singh Soin (2018 to 2019)

This is splendid. The space it’s in is dark, no lights. There is a big video screen but instead of hanging on a wall it is standing upright in a big square pool of something. Because it’s dark I wondered if it was oil, a protest against the oil industry etc, but a visitor assistant told me it’s water, flat, cold, completely black water. And so it reflects the action of the video above it. You sit on a bench and watch the video and watch its perfect reflection in the icy black water beneath.

The video itself is a haunting, slow-moving sequence of the artist appearing in various guises, sometimes wearing those foil protective suits against the cold, in Arctic or Antarctic landscapes. Reading the wall label you discover that it is Soin herself and she is playing Ice, an alien figure navigating a polar landscape speckled with coal mines. The film is based on the Victorian fears that a new ice age would advance across the world and consume the British Empire.

So, apparently the artist is reflecting on this colonial past and ‘the reparative possibilities of the Earth’s polar regions as they become increasingly vulnerable in the midst of climate change.’ Maybe. But just as striking as the imagery is the confrontationally modernistic soundtrack an original score (by David Soin Tappeser – any relation?) performed by a string quartet. Apparently the splintered, pointillist fragments are meant to denote the sounds of ice crystals, shifting ice platforms, an eerie, unhuman landscape.

Installation view of ‘we are opposite like that’ by Himali Singh Soin in ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery

A photo can’t convey the impact of sitting in the dark, watching these beautiful images, hearing this jagged spooky music. There’s a video on YouTube of the artist introducing and explaining the piece, with a long extract starting at 3:44.

3. ‘Axis of Life and Vines in the Mountains’ by Aluaiy Kaumakan (2018)

Many of the rooms are such self-contained worlds or zones that they are separated by thick black curtains. You have to actively push through these to go from one artzone to another.

One of the best experiences in the show was pushing through some heavy black curtains into a big room to be confronted by this fabulous work, an enormous sculpture in multi-coloured fabric by Aluaiy Kaumakan. Kaumakan is not a rootless city-dweller but comes from a specific community within Taiwan. In 2009, a devastating typhoon forced the Indigenous Paiwan community to leave their mountain village in southern Taiwan. Kaumakan’s response to the disaster was to begin working collaboratively with other displaced women from her community, passing on the traditional Paiwan weaving techniques her mother had taught her. Apparently, the motifs and styles derives from Paiwan’s highly ornamented ceremonial dress, and Kaumakan combines natural fibres and recycled materials using the Paiwan technique of ‘lemikalik’, a process of binding fabric into cords looped in concentric circles.

This is all good to know but… wow! The piece is big and dramatic and strange and absorbing and mesmeric. I wandered off and came back twice, unable to tear myself away from its strange, and haunting power. Apparently, lemikalik can be translated as ‘intertwining’ and evokes both the joining of threads and the unbreakable bond between people and the land. I felt myself being drawn in, as in a science fiction film, into its strange, haunting, scary, huge, colourful world of skeins and ropes.

Installation view of ‘Axis of Life and Vines in the Mountains’ by Aluaiy Kaumakan in ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery

4. ‘Green Screen’ by Hito Steyerl (2023)

You push through another set of thick, heavy, black curtains into a completely different world. The Kaumakan room is light and bright but next second you are in a room which is dark as a cinema. You are immediately confronted with a wall of what appear to be lightbulbs which are continually flashing ever-changing patterns of changing colours. There’s a bench to sit on and bean bags to slump on. I playfully asked the visitor assistant if the installation included drugs – obviously only natural, organic, environmentally-friendly drugs, things like peyote or mescaline. Apparently not. Shame. It’s screaming out for psychedelic enhancement.

Installation view of ‘Green Screen’ by Hito Steyerl in ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery

But it is, obviously, not just a nightclub-style lightshow. It is an LED screen constructed from empty bottles and crates. When you go round the back you realise that plants, rubber plants, houseplants, are growing out of each of these bottles (‘a living wall of plants’). Now here’s the thing: bioelectrical signals from plants have been converted into the sounds and images displayed on the LED wall, with each bottle acting as a single pixel! So the ever-changing visual patterns (and the bleeps and tweeks which you hear) are generated by the living plants. Cool, eh.

5. Pabellón de Cristal I by Cristina Iglesi (2014)

Up the Brutalist concrete stairs you come across another wonder. This photo doesn’t do it justice.

Installation view of ‘Pabellón de Cristal I’ by Cristina Iglesi (2014) in ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery

What happens is you walk up the concrete steps into something that resembles the steam room at my local gym, a square space with a (green) bench lining 3 sides and which you’re obviously meant to sit and rest on. But what makes it magical is the ‘floor’ is actually a metal grid under which is an uneven wrinkled brown surface, which looks like solidified lava flow, and across the multiple runnels and crevices of this surface is gurgling an abundance of real water. Actual flowing water, in an art gallery! The wall label gives a copious explanation:

The green glass room, benches and the grid floor affect the viewer’s perception of space, creating a sense of instability, while the increasing speed of the water draining away makes the passing of time more visible. Iglesias wants us to slow down and think about where we are standing. The land under our feet is an accumulation of different strata of rock and sediment, but also of layers of culture and memory, which are often overlooked. For the artist, consciousness of this stratification and how our planet is formed reveals our need to care for nature and the environment. ‘I want people to be aware that we’ve constructed the road and under that road, there’s a water system and there are also wider waters coming from deeper back in time,’ she explains.

Maybe. For me, as I mentioned, because the exhibition was incredibly empty meant that on the two separate occasions when I entered the Pabellon, I sat for a couple of minutes, I was completely alone. I put down my bag and notebook and pen and glasses and sat back against the green wall and closed my eyes and listened to the gurgling water and felt really, really chilled.

6. The Living Pyramid by Agnes Denes (2015/2024)

In one sense, the best is saved for last. Further along the corridor, you open double doors into the biggest display space in the Hayward, the Anna and Michael Zanni Gallery. And smack bang in the centre of this huge white open space, lit by skylights in the ceiling, sits the enormous Living Pyramid by Agnes Denes.

Installation view of ‘The Living Pyramid’ by Agnes Denes in ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery

Denes is, apparently a leading pioneer of the environmental art movement, well known for creating outdoor works that engage with nature ever since the 1960s. She is perhaps best known for ‘Wheatfield – A Confrontation’ where she sowed, tended and harvested two acres of wheat on a landfill site beside the World Trade Centre in New York, and there are big colour photos of that and other similar works on the walls. But it’s obviously this dirty great pyramid lined with plants which grabs your attention.

The Living Pyramid was first shown in 2015 at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York and has become one of Denes’s iconic works, with versions appearing in Germany and Turkey. This is the first time it’s been shown indoors and this most recent iteration reaches five metres in height and showcases a flourishing selection of wildflowers and grasses. They include, for the gardeners among you, Calamagrostis, Deschampsia, Echinacea, Festuca, Helenium, Pennisetum, Rudbeckia and Veronica.

Obviously it’s meant to be saying something about the hierarchy of power in modern society and is probably a statement against capitalism or some such – but it’s also just a really impressive, big artefact, makes a awesome impression on the senses, is amusing and uplifting to walk around or to go up close and examine the plants.

However, at this point you notice something quite ironic, which is that quite a few of these carefully spaced and arranged plants are dying. I asked the visitor assistant if they’re getting enough water, because the soil around them (lovely compost-y soil, not like the heavy London clay soil in my garden) seemed very dry. This led him to tell me that the curators did at one point consider putting the whole thing outside, on the terrace just outside the Anna and Michael Zanni Gallery. That way it would have got natural sunlight and the showers which we’ve been getting here in London recently. He doesn’t know why they decided to stick it inside. There are skylights in the ceiling of the gallery, so the plants get some daylight but, by the looks of things, not enough. And not enough water.

I don’t know whether Denes intended this, for her work to be a pyramid of dying plants? Is that deliberate? Some kind of irony? It certainly raises the problem of creating works of art about ‘nature’ and displaying them in any art gallery because art galleries must be among the most sterile, antiseptic locations in the modern world. Clean, dry, air-conditioned and antiseptic in the highest degree to ensure the complete safety of priceless works of art.

Nature is dirty, messy, full of animals crapping everywhere, fungi and mould and spores and insects eating away at wood and dirty, unhygienic ecosystems everywhere you look. There is a profound contradiction between the messy world of nature and the spic and span world of art. This exhibition goes further than others I’ve been to, to try and address this gap. The very first display is a dirty great big fallen tree incorporated into a sculpture by Otobong Nkanga. But it is, characteristically, dead.

Installation view of ‘The Trifurcation’ by Otobong Nkanga (2023) in ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery

I loved the Pabellón de Cristal with its real water, but the surface it was swirling across was completely lifeless resin moulding. The bottle bank LED had plants in it, but they weren’t the thing you noticed.

Anyway, the apparent ‘failure’ of the Living Pyramid highlights questions the ability of art to be genuinely fertile and full of life. Must art always be sterile and arid?

Videos

In addition to the wonderful Himali Singh Soin video, there are at least three other videos, all projected onto huge screens and so immersive experiences in their own right. Two stood out:

Grid (Palimi-ú) by Richard Mosse

In a big darkened room is a very widescreen projection of a series of poignant speeches by Yanomami people recorded on analogue 35mm infrared film in the village of Palimi-ú, near the Brazil-Venezuela border. On the wall adjacent is projected a series of images, multispectral photographs captured by drones flying over sites of environmental crimes in the rainforest. The aim is to’ document the impact of illegal mining and agribusiness in the Amazon’. Alas, the Amazon.

THE FUTURE (Sixes and Sevens) by Cornelia Parker (2023)

This is one of the seven works commissioned specially for this exhibition. In a darkened room are two massive video screens on which are projected primary school children answering questions about what they imagine their future will be like. After a while you realise the two screens are showing different kids answering the same question or raising other thoughts. In other words, out of this simply material is created a kind of polyphony. (The title is a reference to the very famous [if you’re me and Cornelia’s age] 1964 TV documentary ‘Seven Up!’ in which 7-year-olds were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up.) Watching kids is sweet and touching and maybe speaks to the exhibition’s theme of care and compassion. Doesn’t get us off the hook of doing something, though – doing something radical, now.

Installation view of ‘THE FUTURE (Sixes and Sevens)’ by Cornelia Parker in ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery

Last tweet

Outside on the terrace are two works by the American artist Jenny Kendler. One is the rather scary sculpture, ‘Birds Watching III’, made up of paintings of the eyes of one hundred bird species that are threatened by the climate crisis. They are printed onto the reflective material used for traffic signs to give a sheeny, reflective and spooky effect.

More user friendly, child friendly, even, is the piece, ‘Tell it to the Birds’. This consists of half a ball or drum erected on a tripod and which you lean into to discover a microphone sitting nestled among a bed of foam. The idea is that you should say something into the microphone and… instead of your voice booming out across the rooftops, a savvy software ‘translates’ your words into birdsong. the software contains the calls of a load of endangered bird species and whatever you say will be ‘converted’ into tweets and calls. To quote the wall label:

These songs are broadcast for all to hear, yet only the speaker knows their true meaning. Driven by a desire to ‘re-enchant’ our relationship with the natural world, Kendler asks us to imagine what interspecies communication could sound like.

Installation view of ‘Tell it to the Birds’ by Jenny Kendler in ‘Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis’ at the Hayward Gallery. You can see ‘Birds Watching III’ reflected in the window. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery

Obviously this is nothing whatsoever like what ‘interspecies communication could sound like’ but it’s a fun way to end a wonderfully inventive, big, immersive and enthralling exhibition. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

What can I do?

A few years ago UN Climate Envoy Christiana Figueres made a short list of things everyone should do, must do, right now:

give up meat
give up dairy
sell your car
never fly again
move any savings or investments you have from fossil fuel-supporting companies to sustainable, decarbonised investments

And plant trees. Lots and lots of trees. How many of these have you done? How many of these has anybody done?

Other Hayward Gallery reviews

More Hayward Gallery reviews

3 Comments

by Simon on July 15, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Environment, Exhibition

Tagged Agnes Denes, agribusiness, Aluaiy Kaumakan, and Brown), Andrea Bowers, anti-capitalism, art, Axis of Life and Vines in the Mountains, birdsong, Brazil, British Empire, California, Christiana Figueres, climate change, contemporary art, Cornelia Parker, Cristina Iglesi, Daiara Tukano, David Soin Tappeser, Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis, earth, ecocide, ecofeminism, ecological degradation, ecosystems, environmentalism, exhibition, gallery, George Osborne, global warming, Green Screen, Grid (Palimi-ú), Hayward Gallery, Himali Singh Soin, Hito Steyerl, immersive art, installation art, Islamic State, Jenny Kendler, Just Stop Oil, Keir Starmer, lemikalik, Mark Blower, Memorial to Arcadia: Woodlands Clear-Cut (Green, New York, oil industry, Otobong Nkanga, Pabellón de Cristal I, Paiwan, Palimi-ú, Planet Summer season, pollution, Richard Mosse, south bank, Taiwan, the Amazon, the Anna and Michael Zanni Gallery, The Forest Stewardship Council, THE FUTURE (Sixes and Sevens), The Living Pyramid, the Wagner Group, Venezuela, video art, Violet, Vladimir Putin, we are opposite like that, weaving, Wheatfield: A Confrontation, World Trade Centre, Xi Jinping

Posted by Simon on July 15, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/07/15/dear-earth-hayward-gallery/

Antony Gormley @ the Royal Academy

In the late 1990s I edited a what’s-on-in-London, arts and entertainment TV show for ITV. Mostly it was movies and stand-up comedy and West End musicals but I slipped in occasional blockbuster art shows.

We interviewed him for his 1998 exhibition show at the Royal Academy, the one where he positioned life-sized iron casts of his own body in various postures all round the forecourt, lying, standing on the rooftops, dangling from ropes.

What came over in the interview was his extraordinary fluency. He can just talk, in a calm mild voice, clearly and rationally, about art, for hours, without using jargon or difficult ideas. Here he is, in a short video explaining some aspects of this exhibition:

In his sensible calm voice he makes his art, modern art and its approaches, see seem eminently sensible and practical and interesting and, very often, blindingly obvious. Why didn’t I think of that?

For example, positioning a hundred or so iron casts of his own naked body across a two mile stretch of Crosby Beach in Merseyside. Seeing the figures dotted at random across the sane, some submerged in the sand, and then watching them be submerged and then revealed by the ebbing and flowing tide, is a wonderfully simple, but extremely evocative idea.

Another Place by Antony Gormley (2005)

A few years earlier Gormley had filled Great Court of the British Museum with 40,000 handmade clay figures. As soon as you heard about it, your realised it was a big blank space just crying out for some kind of intervention or installation.

Field for the British Isles by Antony Gormley (2002)

His best-known work is obviously The Angel of the North, erected in 1998, a vast steel sculpture of an angel, 20 metres tall, with wings 54 metres across, placed on a hill overlooking the motorway at Gateshead, Tyne and Wear. Yes. Yes the ‘North’ should have some kind of symbol or icon, something to mark it off from the soft South but give it pride and regional identity.

The Angel of the North by Antony Gormley (1998)

This big retrospective at the Royal Academy confirms that sense of his amazing fluency: there are recognisable themes (cast of his own body, for example) and plenty of other ideas and themes: and yet they all share this same quality of feeling just so, clever but not pretentious, just seeming like good ideas, good things to do, to have a go at.

Of course there’s a room of his trademark life sized casts of his own body, replicating the weirdness of all those bodies hanging all over the courtyard 20 years ago.

Lost Horizon I by Antony Gormley (2008) © the Artist. Photo by Stephen White

But he applies the same technique to other shapes and objects, though all distinguished by the same rust red iron finish, and the odd circular nodules which were originally part of the casting process but have become a visual and tactile signature. Having acquired such expertise at making huge iron casts of bodies, why not experiment with applying the same approach to other organic forms, with things as simple as fruit.

Body and Fruit by Antony Gormley (1991/93) © the Artist. Photo by Jan Uvelius, Malmö

But several rooms contain striking departures from the idea of the solid – the rust-red solid bodies and orbs we’re familiar with – a departure into explorations of the flimsy and the flexible and the peculiar sense of space this completely different approach can create.

Clearing V by Antony Gormley (2009) © the Artist, photo by Markus Tretter

I love industrial materials, I love stuff made from industrial junk redolent of factories and warehouses and the smelly, oily, petrol-soaked culture we actually live in.

I love Arte Povera and Minimalism and Mark Leckey’s current installation of the underside of a motorway bridge – and so that’s what I read into these wonderful ropes and tangles of thin but obviously taut and tremendously strong steel cable. Electricity pylons striding the countryside, motorway viaducts, overhead cables of trains and tubes and trams. Those complex metal grids which concrete is poured over to create tower blocks and tube power stations.

Our world is saturated with huge and immensely strong, durable industrial materials and designs.

The curators claim many of these more experiential sculptures are designed to make us aware of our bodies and the space we inhabit, but they reminded me of the vast, inhuman industrial processes which underpin our entire civilisation.

Matrix II by Antony Gormley (2014) © the artist, photo by Charles Duprat, Paris

The most experiential piece is The Cave, created this year. From the outside it looks like a Vorticist jaggle of angular steel blocks, which we are invited to go inside to discover a forbidding dark and angular space.

Cave by Antony Gormley (2019)

Some of the rooms change scale completely to show us much smaller early works from the 1970s and even change medium altogether to display a range of pocket sketchbooks and drawings. Even these have his trademark sureness of touch, a kind of radical simplicity, the human body against thrillingly abstract backdrops, and often made in the most primal materials, like this wonderful drawing which is made of earth, rabbit skin glue and black pigment. Rabbit skin?

Earth, Body, Light by Antony Gormley (1989) © the Artist

And then we’re back to a massive, radical and yet somehow entirely ‘natural’ feeling installation, Host, like Cave creates specially for this exhibition. One who huge room at the Royal Academy has been sealed watertight, the floor covered in sand-coloured clay and then covered with a foot or so of Atlantic seawater.

Host by Antony Gormley (2019)

What does it mean? Is it the image of a flood, of global warming and seas rising, of a drowned world?

On the whole I shy away from big ideas in art, and am more interested in an artwork’s actual tactile presence, the brushstrokes on the canvas or the shape and heft of a sculpture or, in this case, a purely sensual response to the smell of the seawater and the look of the rubbled clay just under the surface. Humans came from the sea and, all round the world, display the same wish to live on an eminence near water (as described at length in E.O. Wilson’s book The Diversity of Life).

And so Host had little or no ‘meaning’ for me, but conjured up all kinds of primal responses and longings from deep in my once-water-borne mammalian nervous system. I wanted to wade out into it. I wanted to swim into it.

Conclusion

No wonder the exhibition has been sold out since it was announced. Gormley has a genuine magic touch – everything he makes has the same sureness and openness and confidence. Although much of his sculpture sounds or looks like it should appear modern and forbidding, somehow it doesn’t at all. It all feels light and accessible and natural and unforced and wonderful.

More Royal Academy reviews

More Royal Academy reviews

What Is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology by Addy Pross (2012)

I will attempt to show that the chasm separating biology and chemistry is bridgeable, that Darwinian theory can be integrated into a more general chemical theory of matter, and that biology is just chemistry, or to be more precise, a sub-branch of chemistry – replicative chemistry. (p.122)

Repetitive and prolix

This book is 190 pages long. It is much harder to read than it need be because Pross is a bad writer with very bad habits, namely 1. irritating repetition and 2. harking back and forward. The initial point which he repeats again and again in the first 120 pages is that nobody knows the secret of the origins of life and all previous attempts to solve it have been dead ends.

So, what can we conclude regarding the emergence of life on our planet? The short answer: almost nothing. (p.109)

We don’t know how to go about making life because we don’t really know what life is, and we don’t know what life is, because we don’t understand the principles that led to its emergence. (p.111)

The efforts to uncover probiotic-type chemistry, while of considerable interest in their own right, were never likely to lead us to the ultimate goal – understanding how life on earth emerged. (p.99)

Well, at the time of writing, the so-called Holy Grail (the Human Genome sequence) and the language of life that it was supposed to have taught us have not delivered the promised goods. (p.114)

But the systems biology approach has not proved a nirvana… (p.116)

Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has not proved to be the hoped-for breakthrough in seeking greater understanding of biological complexity. (p.119)

A physically based theory of life continues to elude us. (p.119)

While Conway’s Life game has opened up interesting insights into complex systems in general, direct insights into the nature of living systems do not appear to have been forthcoming. (p.120)

The book is so repetitive I though the author and his editor must have Alzheimer’s Disease. On page viii we are told that the physicist Erwin Schrödinger wrote a pithy little book titled What Is Life? which concluded that present-day physics and chemistry can’t explain the phenomenon of life. Then, on page xii, we’re told that the physicist Erwin Schrödinger’ found the issue highly troublesome’. Then on page 3 that the issue ‘certainly troubled the great physicists of the century, amongst them Bohr, Schrödinger and Wigner’. Then on page 36, we learn that:

Erwin Schrödinger, the father of quantum mechanics, whose provocative little book What Is Life? we mentioned earlier, was particularly puzzled by life’s strange thermodynamic behaviour.

When it comes to Darwin we are told on page 8 that:

Darwin himself explicitly avoided the origin of life question, recognising that within the existing state of knowledge the question was premature.

and then, in case we have senile dementia or the memory of a goldfish, on page 35 he tells us that:

Darwin deliberately side-stepped the challenge, recognising that it could not be adequately addressed within the existing state of knowledge.

As to the harking back and forth, Pross is one of those writers who is continually telling you he’s going to tell you something, and then continually reminding you that he told you something back in chapter 2 or chapter 4 – but nowhere in the reading process do you actually get clearly stated the damn thing he claims to be telling.

As we mentioned in chapter 4…

As noted above…

I will say more on this point subsequently…

We will consider a possible resolution of this sticky problem in chapter 7…

As discussed in chapter 5… as we will shortly see… As we have already pointed out… As we have discussed in some detail in chapter 5… described in detail in chapter 4…

In this chapter I will describe… In this chapter I will attempt…

I will defer this aspect of the discussion until chapter 8…

Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today.

Shallow philosophy

It is a philosophy book written by a chemist. As such it comes over as extremely shallow and amateurish. Pross namechecks Wittgenstein, and (pointlessly) tells us that ‘tractatus’ is Latin for ‘treatise’ (p.48) – but fails to understand or engage with Wittgenstein’s thought.

My heart sank when I came to chapter 3, titled Understanding ‘understanding’ which boils down to a superficial consideration of the difference between a ‘reductionist’ and a ‘holistic’ approach to science, the general idea that science is based on reductionism i.e. reducing systems to their smallest parts and understanding their functioning before slowly building up in scale, whereas ‘holistic’ approach tries to look at the entire system in the round. Pross gives a brief superficial overview of the two approaches before concluding that neither one gets us any closer to an answer.

Instead of interesting examples from chemistry, shallow examples from ‘philosophy’

Even more irritating than the repetition is the nature of the examples. I thought this would be a book about chemistry but it isn’t. Pross thinks he is writing a philosophical examination of the meaning of life, and so the book is stuffed with the kind of fake everyday examples which philosophers use and which are a) deeply patronising b) deeply uninformative.

Thus on page x of the introduction Pross says imagine you’re walking through a field and you come across a refrigerator. He then gives two pages explaining how a refrigerator works and saying that you, coming across a fully functional refrigerator in the middle of a field, is about as probable as the purposeful and complex forms of life can have come about by accident.

Then he writes, Imagine that you get into a motor car. We only dare drive around among ‘an endless stream of vehicular metal’ on the assumption that the other drivers have purpose and intention and will stick to the laws of the highway code.

On page 20 he introduces us to the idea of a ‘clock’ and explains how a clock is an intricate mechanism made of numerous beautifully engineered parts but it will eventually break down. But a living organism on the other hand, can repair itself.

Then he says imagine you’re walking down the street and you bump into an old friend named Bill. He looks like Bill, he talks like Bill and yet – did you know that virtually every cell in Bill’s body has renewed itself since last time you saw him, because life forms have this wonderful ability to repair and renew themselves!

Later, he explains how a Boeing 747 didn’t come into existence spontaneously, but was developed from earlier plane designs, all ultimately stemming from the Wright brothers’ first lighter than air flying machine.

You see how all these examples are a) trite b) patronising c) don’t tell you anything at all about the chemistry of life.

He tells us that if you drop a rock out the window, it falls to the ground. And yet a bird can hover in the air merely by flapping its wings! For some reason it is able to resist the Second law of Thermodynamics! How? Why? Nobody knows!

Deliberately superficial

And when he does get around to explaining anything, Pross himself admits that he is doing it in a trivial, hurried, quick, sketchy way and leaving out most of the details.

I will spare the reader a detailed discussion…

These ideas were discussed with some enthusiasm some 20-30 years ago and without going into further detail…

If that sounds too mathematical, let’s explain the difference by recounting the classical legend of the Chinese emperor who was saved in battle by a peasant farmer. (p.64)

Only in the latter pages – only when he gets to propound his own theory from about page 130 – do you realise that he is not so much making a logical point as trying to get you to see the problem from an entirely new perspective. A little like seeing the world from the Marxist or the Freudian point of view, Pross believes himself to be in possession of an utterly new way of thinking which realigns all previous study and research and thinking on the subject. It is so far-ranging and wide-sweeping that it cannot be told consecutively.

And it’s this which explains the irritating sense of repetition and circling and his constant harking forward to things he’s going to tell you, and then harking back to things he claims to have explained a few chapters earlier. The first 130 pages are like being lost in a maze.

The problem of the origin of life

People have been wondering about the special quality of live things as opposed to dead things for as long as there have been people. Darwin discovered the basis of all modern thinking about life forms, which is the theory of evolution by natural selection. But he shied away from speculating on how life first came about.

Pross – in a typically roundabout manner – lists the ‘problems’ facing anyone trying to answer the question, What is life and how did it begin?

life breaks the second law of thermodynamics i.e. appears to create order out of chaos, as opposed to the Law which says everything tends in the opposite direction i.e. tends towards entropy
life can be partly defined by its sends of purpose: quite clearly inanimate objects do not have this
life is complex
life is organised

Put another way, why is biology so different from chemistry? How are the inert reactions of chemistry different from the purposive reactions of life? He sums this up in a diagram which appears several times:

He divides the move from non-life into complex life into two phases. The chemical phase covers the move from non-life to simple life, the biological phase covers the move from simple life to complex life. Now, we know that the biological phase is covered by the iron rules of Darwinian evolution – but what triggered, and how can we account for, the move from non-life to simple life? Hence a big ?

Pross’s solution

Then, on page 127, Pross finally introduces his Big Idea and spends the final fifty or so pages of the book showing how his theory addresses all the problem in existing ‘origin of life’ literature.

His idea begins with the established knowledge that all chemical reactions seek out the most ‘stable’ format.

He introduces us to the notion that chemists actually have several working definitions of ‘stability’, and then introduces us to a new one: the notion of dynamic kinetic stability, or DKS.

He describes experiments by Sol Spiegelman in the 1980s into RNA. This showed how the RNA molecule replicated itself outside of a living cell. That was the most important conclusion of the experiment. But they also found that the RNA molecules replicated but also span off mutations, generally small strands of of RNA, some of which metabolised the nutrients far quicker than earlier varieties. These grew at an exponential rate to swiftly fill the petri dishes and push the longer, ‘correct’ RNA to extinction.

For Pross what Spiegelman’s experiments showed was that inorganic dead chemicals can a) replicate b) replicate at exponential speed until they have established a situation of dynamic kinetic stability. He then goes on to equate his concept of dynamic kinetic stability with the Darwinian one of ‘fitness’. Famously, it is the ‘fit’ which triumph in the never-ending battle for existence. Well, Pross says this concept can be rethought of as, the population which achieves greatest dynamic kinetic stability – which replicates fast enough and widely enough – will survive, will be the fittest.

fitness = dynamic kinetic stability (p.141)

Thus Darwin’s ideas about the eternal struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest can be extended into non-organic chemistry, but in a particular and special way:

Just as in the ‘regular’ chemical world the drive of all physical and chemical systems is toward the most stable state, in the replicative world the drive is also toward the most stable state, but of the kind of stability applicable within that replicative world, DKS. (p.155)

Another way of looking at all this is via the Second Law. The Second Law of Thermodynamics has universally been interpreted as militating against life. Life is an affront to the Law, which says that all energy dissipates and seeks out the state of maximum diffusion. Entropy always triumphs. But not in life. How? Why?

But Pross says that, if molecules like his are capable of mutating and evolving – as the Sol Spiegelman experiments suggest – then they only appear to contradict the Second Law. In actual fact they are functioning in what Pross now declares is an entirely different realm of chemistry (and physics). The RNA replicating molecules are functioning in the realm of replicative chemistry. They are still inorganic, ‘dead’ molecules – but they replicate quickly, mutate to find the most efficient variants, and reproduce quickly towards a state of dynamic kinetic stability.

So what he’s trying to do is show how it is possible for long complex molecules which are utterly ‘dead’, nonetheless to behave in a manner which begins to see them displaying qualities more associated with the realm of biology:

‘reproduction’ with errors
triumph of the fittest
apparent ‘purpose’
the ability to become more complex

None of this is caused by any magical ‘life force’ or divine intervention (the two bogeymen of life scientists), but purely as a result of the blind materialistic forces driving them to take most advantage of their environment i.e. use up all its nutrients.

Pross now takes us back to that two-step diagram of how life came about, shown above – Non-Life to Simple Life, Simple Life to Complex Life, labelled the Chemical Phase and the Biological Phase, respectively.

He recaps how the second phase – how simple life evolves greater complexity – can be explained using Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection: even the most primitive life forms will replicate until they reach the limits of the available food sources, at which point any mutation leading to even a fractional differentiation in the efficiency of processing food will give the more advanced variants an advantage. The rest is the three billion year history of life on earth.

It is phase one – the step from non-life to life – which Pross has (repeatedly) explained has given many of the cleverest biologists, physicists and chemists of the 20th century sleepless nights, and which – in chapters 3 and 4 – he runs through the various theories or approaches which have failed to deliver an answer to.

Well, Pross’s bombshell solution is simple. There are not two steps – there was only ever one step. The Darwinian mechanism by which the best adapted entity wins out in a given situation applies to inert chemicals as much as to life forms.

Let me now drop the bombshell… The so-called two-stage process is not two-stage at all. It is really just once, continuous process. (p.127) … what is termed natural selection within the biological world is also found to operate in the chemical world… (p.128)

Pross recaps the findings of that Spiegelman experiment, which was that the RNA molecules eventually made errors in their replication, and some of the erroneous molecules were more efficient at using up the nutrition in the test tube. After just a day, Spiegelman found the long RNA molecules – which took a long time to replicate – were being replaced by much shorter molecules which replicated much quicker.

There, in a nutshell, is Pross’s theory in action. Darwinian competition, previously thought to be restricted only to living organisms, can be shown to apply to inorganic molecules as well – because inorganic molecules themselves show replicating, ‘competitive’ behaviour.

For Pross this insight was confirmed in experiments conducted by Gerald Joyce in 2009, who showed that a variety of types of RNA, placed in a nutrient, replicated in such a way as to establish a kind of dynamic equilibrium, where each molecule established a chemical niche and thrived on some of the nutrients, while other RNA varieties evolved to thrive on other types. To summarise:

The processes of abiogenesis and evolution are actually one physicochemical process governed by one single mechanism, rather than two discrete processes governed by two different mechanisms. (p.136)

Or:

The study of simple replicating systems has revealed an extraordinary connection – that Darwinian theory, that quintessential biological principle, can be incorporated into a more general chemical theory of evolution, one that encompasses both living and non-living systems. it is that integration that forms the basis of the theory of life I propose. (p.162)

The remaining 50 or so pages work through the implications of this idea or perspective. For example he redefines the Darwinian notion of ‘fitness’ to be ‘dynamic kinetic stability’. In other words, the biological concept of ‘fitness’ turns out, in his theory, to be merely the biological expression of a ‘more general and fundamental chemical concept’ (p.141).

He works through a number of what are traditionally taken to be life’s attributes and reinterprets in the new terms he’s introduced, in terms of dynamic kinetic stability, replicative chemistry and so on. Thus he addresses life’s complexity, life’s instability, life’s dynamic nature, life’s diversity, life’s homochirality, life’s teleonomic character, the nature of consciousness, and speculating about what alien life would look like before summing up his theory. Again.

A solution to the primary question exists and is breathtakingly simple: life on earth emerged through the enormous kinetic power of the replication reaction acting on unidentified, but simple replicating systems, apparently composed of chain-like oligomeric substances, RNA or RNA-like, capable of mutation and complexification. That process of complexification took place because it resulted in the enhancement of their stability – not their thermodynamic stability, but rather the relevant stability in the world of replicating systems, their DKS. (p.183)

A thought about the second law

Pross has explained that the Second Law of Thermodynamics apparently militates against the spontaneous generation of life, in any form, because life is organised and the second law says everything tends towards chaos. But he comes up with an ingenious solution. If one of these hypothetical early replicating molecules acquired the ability to generate energy from light – it would effectively bypass the second law. It would acquire energy from outside the ‘system’ in which it is supposedly confined and in which entropy prevails.

The existence of an energy-gathering capacity within a replicating entity effectively ‘frees’ that entity from the constraints of the Second Law in much the same way that a car engine ‘free’s a car from gravitational constrains. (p.157)

This insight shed light on an old problem, and on a fragment of the overall issue – but it isn’t enough by itself to justify his theory.

Thoughts

Several times I nearly threw away the book in my frustration before finally arriving at the Eureka moment about page 130. From there onwards it does become a lot better. As you read Pross you have the sense of a whole new perspective opening up on this notorious issue.

However, as with all these theories, you can’t help thinking that if his theory had been at all accepted by the scientific community – then you’d have heard about it by now.

If his theory really does finally solve the Great Mystery of Life which all the greatest minds of humanity have laboured over for millennia… surely it would be a bit better known, or widely accepted by his peers?

The theory relies heavily on results from Sol Spiegelman’s experiments with RNA in the 1980s. Mightn’t Spiegelman himself, or other tens of thousands of other biologists, have noticed its implications in the thirty odd years between the experiments and Pross’s book?

And if Pross has solved the problem of the origin of life, how come so many other, presumably well-informed and highly educated scientists, are still researching the ‘problem’?

Harvard University Origins of Life Initiative

(By the way, the Harvard website optimistically declares that:

Thanks to advances in technologies in these areas, answers to some of the compelling questions surrounding the origins of life in the universe were now possibly within reach… Today a larger team of researchers have joined this exciting biochemical ‘journey through the Universe’ to unravel one of humankind’s most compelling mysteries – the origins of life in the Universe.

‘Possibly within reach’, lol. Good times are always just around the corner in the origins-of-life industry.)

So I admit to being interested by pages 130 onwards of his book, gripped by the urgency with which he tells his story, gripped by the vehemence of his presentation, in the same way you’d be gripped by a thriller while you read it. But then you put it down and forget about it, going back to your everyday life. Same here.

It’s hard because it is difficult to keep in mind Pross’s slender chain of argumentation. It rests on the two-stage diagram – on Pross’s own interpretation of the Spiegelman experiments – on his special idea of dynamic kinetic stability – and on the idea of replicative chemistry.

All of these require looking at the problem through is lens, from his perspective – for example agreeing with the idea that the complex problem of the origin of life can be boiled down to that two-stage diagram; this is done so that we can then watch him pull the rabbit out of the hat by saying it needn’t be in two stages after all! So he’s address the problem of the diagram. But it is, after all, just one simplistic diagram.

Same with his redefining Darwin’s notion of ‘fitness’ as being identical to his notion of dynamic kinetic stability. Well, if he says so. but in science you have to get other scientists to agree with you, preferably by offering tangible proof.

These are more like tricks of perspective than a substantial new theory. And this comes back to his rhetorical strategy of repetition, to the harping on the same ideas.

The book argues its case less with evidence (there is, in the end, very little scientific ‘evidence’ for his theory – precisely two experiments, as far as I can see), but more by presenting a raft of ideas in their current accepted form (for 130 boring pages), and then trying to persuade you to see them all anew, through his eyes, from his perspective (in the final 50 pages). As he summarises it (yet again) on page 162:

The emergence of life was initiated by the emergence of a single replicating system, because that seemingly inconsequentual event opened the door to a distinctly different kind of chemistry – replicative chemistry. Entering the world of replicative chemistry reveals the existence of that other kind of stability in nature, the dynamic kinetic stability of things that are good at making more of themselves.Exploring the world of replicative chemistry helps explain why a simple primordial replicating system would have been expected to complexify over time. The reason: to increase its stability – its dynamic kinetic stability (DKS).

Note the phrase’ entering the world of replicative chemistry…’ – It sounds a little like ‘entering the world of Narnia’. It is almost as if he’s describing a religious conversion. All the facts remain the same, but new acolytes now see them in a totally different light.

Life then is just the chemical consequences that derive from the power of exponential growth operating on certain replicating chemical systems. (p.164)

(I am quoting Pross at length because I don’t want to sell his ideas short; I want to convey them as accurately as possible, and in his own words.)

Or, as he puts it again a few pages later (you see how his argument proceeds by, or certainly involves a lot of, repetition):

Life then is just a highly intricate network of chemical reactions that has maintained its autocatalytic capability, and, as already noted, that complex network emerged one step at a time starting from simpler netowrks. And the driving force? As discussed in earlier chapter, it is the drive toward greater DKS, itself based on the kinetic power of replication, which allows replicating chemical systems to develop into ever-increasing complex and stable forms. (p.185)

It’s all reasonably persuasive when you’re reading the last third of his book – but oddly forgettable once you put it down.

Fascinating facts and tasty terminology

Along the way, the reader picks up a number of interesting ideas.

Panspermia – the theory that life exists throughout the universe and can be carried on meteors, comets etc, and one of these landed and seeded life on earth
every adult human is made up of some ten thousand billion cells; but we harbour in our guts and all over the surface of our bodies ten times as many – one hundred thousand bacteria. In an adult body hundreds of billions of new cells are created daily in order to replace the ones that die on a daily basis
in 2017 it was estimated there may be as many as two billion species of bacteria on earth
the Principle of Divergence – many different species are generated from a few sources
teleonomy – the quality of apparent purposefulness and goal-directedness of structures and functions in living organisms
chiral – an adjective meaning a molecule’s mirror image is not superimposable upon the molecule itself: in fact molecules often come in mirror-image formations, known as left and right-handed
racemic – a racemic mixture, or racemate, is one that has equal amounts of left- and right-handed enantiomers of a chiral molecule.
reductionist – analysing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of its simple or fundamental constituents
holistic – the belief that the parts of something are intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole
Second Law of Thermodynamics – ‘in all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state.’ This is also commonly referred to as entropy
the thermodynamic consideration – chemical reactions will only take place if the reaction products are of lower free energy than the reactants
catalyst – a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change
catalytic – requires an external catalyst to spark a chemical reaction
auocatalytic – a reaction which catalyses itself
cross-catalysis – two chemicals trigger reactions in each other
static stability – water, left to itself, is a stable chemical compound
dynamic stability – a river is always a river even though it is continually changing
prebiotic earth – earth before life
abiogenesis – the process whereby life was derived from non-living chemicals
systems chemistry – the chemical reactions of replicating molecules and the networks they create
the competitive exclusion principle – complete competitors cannot co-exist, or, Ecological differentiation is th enecessary condition for co-existence

Does anyone care?

Pross thinks the fact that biologists and biochemists can’t account for the difference between complex but inanimate molecules, and the simplest actual forms of life – bacteria – is a Very Important Problem. He thinks that:

Until the deep conceptual chasm that continues to separate living and non-living is bridged, until the two sciences – physics and biology – can merge naturally, the nature of life, and hence man’s place in the universe, will continue to remain gnawingly uncertain. (p.42)

‘Gnawingly’. Do you feel the uncertainty about whetherbiology and physics can be naturally merged is gnawing away at you? Or, as he puts it in his opening sentences:

The subject of this book addresses basic questions that have transfixed and tormented humankind for millennia, ever since we sought to better understand our place in the universe – the nature of living things and their relationship to the non-living. The importance of finding a definitive answer to these questions cannot be overstated – it would reveal to us not just who and what we are, but would impact on our understanding of the universe as a whole. (p.viii)

I immediately disagreed. ‘The importance of finding a definitive answer to these questions cannot be overstated’? Yes it can. Maybe, just maybe – it is not very important at all.

What do we mean by ‘important’, anyway? Is it important to you, reading this review, to realise that the division between the initial, chemical phase of the origin of life and the secondary, biological phase, is in fact a delusion, and that both processes can be accounted for by applying Darwinian selection to supposedly inorganic chemicals?

If you tried to tell your friends and family 1. how easy would you find it to explain? 2. would you seriously expect anyone to care?

Isn’t it, in fact, more likely that the laws or rules or theories about how life arose from inanimate matter are likely to be so technical, so specialised and so hedged around with qualifications, that only highly trained experts can really understand them?

Maybe Pross has squared the circle and produced a feasible explanation of the origins of life on earth. Maybe this book really is – The Answer! But in which case – why hasn’t everything changed, why hasn’t the whole human race breathed a collective sigh of relief and said, NOW we understand how it all started, NOW we know what it all means, NOW I understand who I am and my place in the universe?

When I explained Pross’s theory, in some detail, to my long-suffering wife (who did a life sciences degree) she replied that, quite obviously chemistry and biology are related; anyone who’s studied biology knows it is based on chemistry. She hardly found it ‘an extraordinary connection’. When I raised it with my son, who is studying biology at university, he’d never heard of Pross or his theory.

So one’s final conclusion is that our understanding of ‘The nature of life, and hence man’s place in the universe’ has remained remarkably unchanged by this little book and will, in all likelihood, remain so.

Reviews of other science books

Chemistry

The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into the Land of the Chemical Elements by Peter Atkins (1995)

Cosmology

The Environment

Genetics and life

Human evolution

Maths

Particle physics

Atomic by Jim Baggott (2009)

Psychology

1 Comment

by Simon on April 17, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Science

Posted by Simon on April 17, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/04/17/what-is-life-how-chemistry-becomes-biology-addy-pross/

Nature’s Numbers by Ian Stewart (1995)

Ian Stewart is a mathematician and prolific author, having written over 40 books on all aspects of maths, as well as publishing several guides to the maths used in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, writing half a dozen textbooks for students, and co-authoring a couple of science fiction novels.

Stewart writes in a marvellously clear style but, more importantly, he is interesting: he sees the world in an interesting way, in a mathematical way, and manages to convey the wonder and strangeness and powerful insights which seeing the world in terms of patterns and shapes, numbers and maths, gives you.

He wants to help us see the world as a mathematician sees it, full of clues and information which can lead us to deeper and deeper appreciation of the patterns and harmonies all around us. It makes for a wonderfully illuminating read.

1. The Natural Order

Thus Stewart begins the book by describing just some of nature’s multitude of patterns: the regular movements of the stars in the night sky; the sixfold symmetry of snowflakes; the stripes of tigers and zebras; the recurring patterns of sand dunes; rainbows; the spiral of a snail’s shell; why nearly all flowers have petals arranged in one of the following numbers 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89; the regular patterns or ‘rhythms’ made by animals scuttling, walking, flying and swimming.

2. What Mathematics is For

Mathematics is brilliant at helping us to solve puzzles. It is a more or less systematic way of digging out the rules and structures that lie behind some observed pattern or regularity, and then using those rules and structures to explain what’s going on. (p.16)

Having gotten our attention, Stewart trots through the history of major mathematical discoveries including Kepler discovering that the planets move not in circles but in ellipses; the discovery that the nature of acceleration is ‘not a fundamental quality, but a rate of change’, then Newton and Leibniz inventing calculus to help us work outcomplex rates of change, and so on.

Two of the main things that maths are for are 1. providing the tools which let scientists understand what nature is doing 2. providing new theoretical questions for mathematicians to explore further. These are handy rules of thumb for distinguishing between, respectively, applied and pure mathematics.

Stewart mentions one of the oddities, paradoxes or thought-provoking things that crops up in many science books, which is the eerie way that good mathematics, mathematics well done, whatever its source and no matter how abstract its origin, eventually turns out to be useful, to be applicable to the real world, to explain some aspect of nature.

Many philosophers have wondered why. Is there a deep congruence between the human mind and the structure of the universe? Did God make the universe mathematically and implant an understanding of maths in us? Is the universe made of maths?

Stewart’s answer is simple and elegant: he thinks that nature exploits every pattern that there is, which is why we keep discovering patterns everywhere. We humans express these patterns in numbers, but nature doesn’t use numbers as such – she uses the patterns and shapes and possibilities which the numbers express or define.

Mendel noticing the numerical relationships with which characteristics of peas are expressed when they are crossbred. The double helix structure of DNA. Computer simulations of the evolution of the eye from an initial mutation creating a patch of skin cells sensitive to light, published by Daniel Nilsson and Susanne Pelger in 1994. Pattern appears wherever we look.

Resonance = the relationship between periodically moving bodies in which their cycles lock together so that they take up the same relative positions at regular intervals. The cycle time is the period of the system. The individual bodies have different periods. The moon’s rotational period is the same as its revolution around the earth, so there is a 1:1 resonance of its orbital and rotational periods.

Mathematics doesn’t just analyse, it can predict, predict how all kinds of systems will work, from the aerodynamics which keep planes flying, to the amount of fertiliser required to increase crop yield, to the complicated calculations which keep communications satellites in orbit round the earth and therefore sustain our internet and mobile phone networks.

Time lags The gap between a new mathematical idea being developed and its practical implementation can be a century or more: it was 17th century interest in the mathematics of vibrating violin strings which led, three hundred years later, to the invention of radio, radar and TV.

3. What Mathematics is About

The word ‘number’ does not have any immutable, God-given meaning. (p.42)

Numbers are the most prominent part of mathematics and everyone is taught arithmetic at school, but numbers are just one type of object that mathematics is interested in.

Stewart outlines the invention of whole numbers, and then of fractions. Some time in the Dark Ages the invention of 0. The invention of negative numbers, then of square roots. Irrational numbers. ‘Real’ numbers.

Whole numbers 1, 2, 3… are known as the natural numbers. If you include negative whole numbers, the series is known as integers. Positive and negative numbers taken together are known as rational numbers. Then there are real numbers and complex numbers. Five systems in total.

But maths is also about operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. And functions, also known as transformations, rules for transforming one mathematical object into another. Many of these processes can be thought of as things which help to create data structures.

Maths is like a landscape in which similar proofs and theories cluster together to create peaks and troughs.

4. The Constants of Change

Newton’s basic insight was that changes in nature can be described by mathematical processes. Stewart explains how detailed consideration of what happens to a cannonball fired out of a cannon helps us towards Newton’s fundamental law, that force = mass x acceleration.

Newton invented calculus to help work out solutions to moving bodies. Its two basic operations – integration and differentiation – mean that, given one element – force, mass or acceleration – you can work out the other two. Differentiation is the technique for finding rates of change; integration is the technique for ‘undoing’ the effect of differentiation in order to isolate out the initial variables.

Calculating rates of change is a crucial aspect of maths, engineering, cosmology and many other areas of science.

5. From Violins to Videos

He gives a fascinating historical recap of how initial investigations into the way a violin string vibrates gave rise to formulae and equations which turned out to be useful in mapping electricity and magnetism, which turned out to be aspects of the same fundamental force, electromagnetism. It was understanding this which underpinned the invention of radio, radar, TV etc and Stewart’s account describes the contributions made by Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Heinrich Hertz and Guglielmo Marconi.

Stewart makes the point that mathematical theory tends to start with the simple and immediate and grow ever-more complicated. This is because of a basic approach common in lots of mathematics which is that, you have to start somewhere.

6. Broken Symmetry

A symmetry of an object or system is any transformation that leaves it invariant. (p.87)

There are many types of symmetry. The most important ones are reflections, rotations and translations.

7. The Rhythm of Life

The nature of oscillation and Hopf bifurcation (if a simplified system wobbles, then so must the complex system it is derived from) leads into a discussion of how animals – specifically animals with legs – move, which turns out to be by staggered or syncopated oscillations, oscillations of muscles triggered by neural circuits in the brain.

This is a subject Stewart has written about elsewhere and is something of an expert on. Thus he tells us that the seven types of quadrupedal gait are: the trot, pace, bound, walk, rotary gallop, transverse gallop, and canter.

8. Do Dice Play God?

This chapter covers Stewart’s take on chaos theory.

Chaotic behaviour obeys deterministic laws, but is so irregular that to the untrained eye it looks pretty much random. Chaos is not complicated, patternless behaviour; it is much more subtle. Chaos is apparently complicated, apparently patternless behaviour that actually has a simple, deterministic explanation. (p.130)

19th century scientists thought that, if you knew the starting conditions, and then the rules governing any system, you could completely predict the outcomes. In the 1970s and 80s it became increasingly clear that this was wrong. It is impossible because you can never define the starting conditions with complete certainty.

Thus all real world behaviours are subject to ‘sensitivity to initial conditions’. From minuscule divergences at the starting point, cataclysmic differences may eventually emerge in mature systems.

Stewart goes on to explain the concept of ‘phase space’ developed by Henri Poincaré: this is an imaginary mathematical space that represents all possible motions in a given dynamic system. The phase space is the 3-D place in which you plot the behaviour in order to create the phase portrait. Instead of having to define a formula and worrying about identifying every number of the behaviour, the general shape can be determined.

Much use of phase portraits has shown that dynamic systems tend to have set shapes which emerge and which systems move towards. These are called attractors.

9. Drops, Dynamics and Daisies

The book ends by drawing some philosophical conclusions.

Chaos theory has all sorts of implications but the one Stewart closes on is this: the world is not chaotic; if anything, it is boringly predictable. And at the level of basic physics and maths, the laws which seem to underpin it are also schematic and simple. And yet, what we are only really beginning to appreciate is how complicated things are in the middle.

It is as if nature can only get from simple laws (like Newton’s incredibly simple law of thermodynamics) to fairly simple outcomes (the orbit of the planets) via almost incomprehensibly complex processes.

To end, Stewart gives us three examples of the way apparently ‘simple’ phenomena in nature derive from stupefying complexity:

what exactly happens when a drop of water falls off a tap
computer modelling of the growth of fox and rabbit populations
why petals on flowers are arranged in numbers derived from the Fibonacci sequence

In all three cases the underlying principles seem to be resolvable into easily stated laws and functions – and in our everyday lives we see water dropping off taps or flowerheads all the time – and yet the intermediate steps between simple mathematical principles and real world embodiment turn out to be mind-bogglingly complex.

Coda: Morphomatics

Stewart ends the book with an epilogue speculating, hoping and wishing for a new kind of mathematics which incorporates chaos theory and the other elements he’s discussed – a theory and study of form, which takes everything we already know about mathematics and seeks to work out how the almost incomprehensible complexity we are discovering in nature gives rise to all the ‘simple’ patterns which we see around us. He calls it morphomatics.

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Reviews of other science books

Chemistry

The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into the Land of the Chemical Elements by Peter Atkins (1995)

Cosmology

The Environment

Genetics and life

Human evolution

Maths

Particle physics

Atomic by Jim Baggott (2009)

Psychology

2 Comments

by Simon on March 31, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Mathematics

Tagged 1995, addition, book, calculus, chaos theory, communications satellites, complex numbers, Daniel Nilsson and Susanne Pelger, data structures, differentiation, Discworld, division, DNA, double helix, earth, force = mass x acceleration, functions, Guglielmo Marconi, Heinrich Hertz, Henri Poincaré, Hopf bifurcation, Ian Stewart, integers, integration, James Clerk Maxwell, Kepler, laws, Leibniz, Mathematics, maths, Michael Faraday, morphomatics, multiplication, natural numbers, Nature, Nature's Numbers, negative numbers, Newton, operations, oscillation, patterns, period, phase portrait, phase space, rainbows; snail's shell, rational numbers, real numbers, reflection symmetry, resonance, rotation symmetry, rules, Science, square roots, strange attractors, subtraction, symmetry, Terry Pratchett, tigers, transformations, translation symmetry, zebras

Posted by Simon on March 31, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/03/31/natures-numbers-ian-stewart/

The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov (1956)

‘You had a plainer motive, too, Dr Leebig. Dr. Rikaine Delmarre was in the way of your plans, and had to be removed.’
‘What plans?’ demanded Leebig.
‘Your plans aiming at the conquest of the Galaxy, Dr. Leebig,’ said Baley.
(Chapter 17, A Meeting is Held)

It is 3,000 years in the future. Humanity is dived between ‘Spacers’, who have colonised 50 of the ‘outer planets’ which rely heavily on robot labour, and have developed cultures and laws of their own – and earth, packed to the brim with 8 billion citizens, all raised in the subterranean cells and covered domes of 200 vast super-cities, terrified of ‘the outdoors’, used to cramped living space, rationed artificial food, and a rigidly hierarchical society.

Detective Elijah Baley, who we first met in The Caves of Steel, has been promoted to grade C-6. Despite his protests he is assigned another murder case, but this time on a remote planet out there in space somewhere, Solaria.

Baley’s agoraphobia

As usual, Asimov’s description of many of the appurtenances of his imagined future are genuinely interesting and effective, especially around Baley’s fear of the open. Asimov powerfully conveys Baley’s terror at being forced to catch a plane from New York to Washington – over and again he fixates on how there’s only an inch or so of steel between you and… nothingness! – and then petrified at taking a spaceship. He is horrified when he lands on Solaria to learn that the human population has windows in its buildings and wander around outside.

It is one of the themes of the book how Baley he tries to nerve himself to get used to being ‘outside’: these are interesting attempts to convey how generation after generation of humans living in completely covered urban ‘wombs’ would create a new human nature and psychological conventions.

Baley is pretty much blackmailed to take the case by his boss, Under-Secretary Minnim. If he refuses, he’ll be ‘declassified’ i.e. he and his family will lose all their privileges in the city. And Minnim asks him not only to solve the case, but to keep his eye open and record everything he observed about the outer Worlds, their strengths and weaknesses. ‘Be a spy?’ asks Baley.

It comes as a huge relief when, there to greet him on his spaceship’s arrival on Solaria, is the advanced, humanoid robot, Daneel Olivaw, who had worked with on the case described in the prequel, The Caves of Steel.

Solaria’s peculiarities

Another prominent element is the drastically ‘different’ customs of the Spacers who live on Solaria. Here people, from birth, avoid personal contact, and live on huge estates which are worked by vast populations of specialised robots. There are only some 20,000 humans on the whole planet but two hundred million robots – that’s ten thousand robots to every human!

People live either alone or with a spouse but physical contact – even being in the same room – ‘seeing’ someone in the flesh – is regarded with disgust. Instead, communication is carried out through holography (referred to as ‘viewing’). Only then are the Solarians truly relaxed about what they wear or say.

As the leading Solarian sociologist tells him, when Baley, insists on actually visiting him, in the flesh:

‘You’ll forgive me, Mr. Baley, but in the actual presence of a human, I feel strongly as though something slimy were about to touch me. I keep shrinking away. It is most unpleasant.’

The plot

As to the plot, it kicks off like hundreds of thousands of detective stories, with a murder. Rikaine Delmarre is a prominent Solarian and a foetologist by profession and he is found, at his house, with his head smashed in as with a blunt implement. Unfortunately, his household robots clean up the crime scene so efficiently and even dispose of the body by incinerating it, that there isn’t a shred of evidence left at the scene of the crime.

It’s only well over half way through the book that we discover what this means, when Baley visits what he expects to be a laboratory and discovers it is in fact the baby farm which provides all of Solaria’s population. He is shown round by Delmarre’s assistant, Kiorissa Cantoro, who explains how ‘growing’ babies in test tubes is the logical extension of the Solarians’ distaste for being physically near anyone. In the same way, the babies, once hatched, are raised entirely by robots, lacking any contact with adults.

Ordinarily, Delmarre’s wife, Gladia, would be the prime suspect, since no-one else had access to or was anywhere their joint home (not that she was physically anywhere near him at the time; robots summoned her after the murder and she discovered a robot had been present but had a nervous breakdown due to its failure to implement Asimov’s First Law of Robots:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

On first arriving at the house (which has been built specially to accommodate him during his stay and will be demolished after he leaves) Baley has several holographic interviews with the man who asked for his services, Hannis Gruer, the Head of Security on Solaria. Hannis explains that they have no crime on Solaria, none at all. So a murder has really thrown them, but they had heard of his reputation through his involvement with the murder of a Spacer which was heavily publicised in the Outer Worlds (the subject of the first novel in the series, The Caves of Steel).

About the third time they’re chatting via hologram during a meal, Hannis takes a swig of his glass and is immediately poisoned, saying his throat is burning, falls to the floor and passes out with Baley, of course, unable to do nothing. Hannis is replaced, as Baley’s contact point with Solario authorities, by Corwin Attlebish.

Baley has an interview with the planet’s leading sociologist, Anselmo Quemot, who boasts about his theory that Solario has reached an optimum human-robot population. Henceforward the human population will not grow. And how, eventually all planets, even earth, will become like this. A finite, controlled human population surrounded by vast hordes or robot slaves.

And he also meets Dr Jothan Leebig, Solario’s premier roboticist. With him Baley points out the flaw in the First Law of Robotics. Ostensibly the law says no robot may harm a human. But it doesn’t take account of intention. It should really read that no robot may intentionally harm a human.

The climax

After all the effort put into creating an entirely new world with its own rules and conventions, and into creating half a dozen characters, with whom Baley has elaborate, and sometimes interesting, conversations, the climax is straight from an Agatha Christie novel, with Baley playing the role of Hercules Poirot.

He arranges a conference holographic call with all the characters we’ve met so far, namely: Gladia, Kiorissa, Attlebish, Quemot, Leebig, plus the doctor who attended the scene of the original murder, Dr Altim Thool.

Asimov employs the tried and tested formula of proceeding slowly and leveling an accusing finger at each of the people present one by one until… with a grand flourish, he reveals the true murderer. It is Dr Jothan Leebig.

His motive? He had several. One, he was susceptible to the charms of Gladia Delmarre, young and good looking who, in her first scenes with Baley we had witnessed casually walking about half-undressed (because it was only via ‘viewing’, not in-the-flesh ‘seeing’). She is frustrated by the lack of attention from her dry-as-dust husband, Rikaine, not enough to murder him, but enough to flirt, maybe unconsciously, with other men.

Leebig offered her a job as his secretary but when she turned it down his adoration, as so often in these kind of picturebook versions of human nature, turned to hatred and he devised the murder to take his revenge on both the Delmarres.

‘You despised yourself for your weakness, and hated Mrs. Delmarre for inspiring it. And yet you might have hated Delmarre, too, for having her.’

But why kill the doctor at all? Because Delmarre knew about Leebig’s experimental work into expanding robot capabilities. In particular he knew about Leebig’s plan to create spaceships controlled by positronic brains. Now, ordinarily, a robot simply cannot harm a human: their positronic brains are wired in such a way that they would short-circuit. Even witnessing harm to humans damages them, as the way the brain of the robot who witnessed Delmarre be murdered had completely fried.

But Leebig was planning to make spaceships with positronic brains which would assume that any spaceships which opposed it were also manned only by robots and positronic brains and that it could therefore destroy them with impunity. Such spaceships would behave more logically than ones captained by humans, and would almost certainly win all their battles. Or, as Baley puts it:

‘But a spaceship that was equipped with its own positronic brain would cheerfully attack any ship it was directed to attack, it seems to me. It would naturally assume all other ships were unmanned. A positronic-brained ship could easily be made incapable of receiving messages from enemy ships that might undeceive it. With its weapons and defenses under the immediate control of a positronic brain, it would be more maneuverable than any manned ship. With no room necessary for crewmen, for supplies, for water or air purifiers, it could carry more armor, more weapons and be more invulnerable than any ordinary ship. One ship with a positronic brain could defeat fleets of ordinary ships. Am I wrong?’

Leebig was, in other words, working on a plan to take over the galaxy!!

As a grown-up reader, it was difficult not to smile at the sheer pulp grandiosity of this motive.

The murder weapon – which Baley and robot Daneel have cudgelling their brains trying to figure out and which provided many a red herring throughout the book? The robot which had been in attendance on Delmarre throughout the murder. What? How? It was one of a new range Delmarre himself was working on with detachable limbs. Get it yet? The murder walked up to Delmarre and his robot, ordered the robot to give him his arm, the robot did so, Leebig smashed Delmarre’s head in with it, then clipped the arm back onto the robot which, by this stage, had gone into meltdown.

How did Leebig manage to sneak up on Delmarre? Because Delmarre was a ‘good Solarian’ who had given up ‘seeing’ people in the flesh when he was still a boy. thereafter all his interactions were via hologram. Therefore, when Leebig arrived at his house and entered his room and walked up to him… he simply couldn’t believe, until the last minute, that he was not a hologram. Too late.

I was smiling through all this explication, a smile which got broader when all the (holographic) faces in this meeting turn to Leebig who furiously denies it all, until… Baley plays his master-stroke and reveals that his assistant Daneel Olivaw has, all this time a) been at Leebig’s laboratory securing the records of all his research there which will no doubt prove the positronic spaceship theory but now b) is on his way to Leebig’s house to arrest him in person.

Now Asimov had carefully planted in Baley’s holographic interview with Leebig that the latter was really hysterically afraid of face-to-face contact with humans. When Baley had threatened to do it, Leebig had been reduced to sucking his thumb like a boy and crying. Now, at the threat of another human entering his personal space, Leebig collapses:

‘But I won’t see him. I can’t see him.’ The roboticist fell to his knees without seeming aware of the motion. He put his hands together in a desperate clasped gesture of appeal. ‘What do you want? Do you want a confession? Delmarre’s robot had detachable limbs. Yes. Yes. Yes. I arranged Gruer’s poisoning. I arranged the arrow meant for you. I even planned the spaceships as you said. I haven’t succeeded, but, yes, I planned it. Only keep the man away. Don’t let him come. Keep him away!’

In other words, the accused man makes a full and free confession in front of all his peers. And then – as if that wasn’t cheesy enough – as we hear the arrival of Daneel, we see Leebig fall to the floor, beg to be left alone, then scrabble in his pockets for something which he outs into his mouth, is seized with a spasm of agony, and collapse dead on the floor.

The irony, laid on with a planet-sized trowel, is that the ‘human’ whose proximity drove Leebig to suicide, is none other than Daneel who is, of course… a robot!

If you’re not roaring with laughter by this stage then you are probably the kind of 14-year-old boy this kind of story was originally aimed at.

Coda 1 – last scene with Gladia

There’s more, more clichés. In a final scene Baley has a last interview with Gladia. She is going to Aurora (traveling with Daneel, since Auroroa is his home planet). She has to get away from the scene of this awful murder! He is surprised that she agrees to be there in person i.e. she has agreed to ‘see’ him.

‘Why have you decided to see, rather than view?’
‘Well’ – she smiled weakly – ‘I’ve got to get used to it, don’t I, Elijah? I mean, if I’m going to Aurora.’
‘Then it’s all arranged?’
‘Mr. Olivaw seems to have influence. It’s all arranged. I’ll never come back.’
‘Good. You’ll be happier, Gladia. I know you will.”
I’m a little afraid.’
‘I know. It will mean seeing all the time and, you won’t have all the comforts you had on Solaria. But you’ll get used to it and, what’s more, you’ll forget all the terror you’ve been through.’
‘I don’t want to forget everything,’ said Gladia softly.
‘You will.’ Baley looked at the slim girl who stood before him and said, not without a momentary pang, ‘And you will be married someday, too. Really married, I mean.”
Somehow,” she said mournfully, “that doesn’t seem so attractive to me – right now.’
‘You’ll change your mind.’
And they stood there, looking at each other for a wordless moment.
Gladia said, ‘I’ve never thanked you.’
Baley said, ‘It was only my job.’

Aw shucks, John Wayne.

Asimov may have set out to demonstrate that science fiction wasn’t a genre but a topic or theme which could be applied to any genre. But in these books he merely proved that science fiction can be just as larded with corny characters and hammy scenarios as any 3rd-rate Hollywood B-movie.

As usual, the plot and lots of the characterisation are laughable, they would make a writer of Mills and Boon romances blush with shame.

Again a silent moment while they faced each other at ten paces. Then Gladia cried suddenly, ‘Oh, Elijah, you’ll think it abandoned of me.’
‘Think what abandoned?’
‘May I touch you? I’ll never see you again, Elijah.’
‘If you want to.’
Step by step, she came closer, her eyes glowing, yet looking apprehensive, too. She stopped three feet away, then slowly, as though in a trance, she began to remove the glove on her right hand.
Baley started a restraining gesture. ‘Don’t be foolish, Gladia.’
‘I’m not afraid,’ said Gladia.
Her hand was bare. It trembled as she extended it.
And so did Baley’s as he took her hand in his. They remained so for one moment, her hand a shy thing, frightened as it rested in his. He opened his hand and hers escaped, darted suddenly and without warning toward his face until her fingertips rested feather-light upon his cheek for the barest moment.
She said, ‘Thank you, Elijah. Good-by.’
He said, ‘Good-by, Gladia,’ and watched her leave.

BUT – the book is sort of worth reading for not one but two extended tropes, which are thought provoking – maybe it’s better so say imagination-provoking – and which it dramatises at length, namely:

Baley’s struggle to cope with being outdoors generated by the entrenched claustrophobia of an overpopulated underground earth culture
and the opposite, the repulsion at physical contact or even proximity, created by the exact opposite type of planet, so sparsely populated that individuals almost never meet, except via cam

These two worldviews or psychological states dominate the book and it is interesting to do the thought experiment of thinking your way into these kinds of altered states. Despite Asimov’s rickety plot and execrable English, nonetheless, what if…?

Coda 2 – Baley reports back to Minnim

Remember how Minnim had asked Baley to be a spy. He is thrilled with Baley’s findings because they appear to show that Solaris has become decadent, individuals living too long, and too isolated. Baley expresses this as the fact that they have stopped being tribal of having to co-operate and also conflict. Minnim joyfully sees this as confirmation that Earth will not be conquered by the Spacers who will decline.

But Baley hasn’t finished. He goes on to prove the exact opposite. He says that Solaris is an exception to the outer Worlds, the planet most like Solaria is Earth. Earthers have buried themselves in underground cities and locked themselves away from the rest of the galaxy.

Earthers need to get out, leave earth, go and colonise, face a brave future. that turns out to be the epiphany he had as he faced the outdoors for the first time in his life. He didn’t like it, but he realised it brought a whole new dimension to his life, and that all mankind must face up to it as he has.

Baley felt as though a touch of madness had come over him. From the very first the open had had its weird attraction over him; from the time in the ground-car when he had tricked Daneel in order to have the top lowered so that he might stand up in the open air.

He had failed to understand then. Daneel thought he was being perverse. Baley himself thought he was facing the open out of professional necessity, to solve a crime. Only on that last evening on Solaria, with the curtain tearing away from the window, did he realize his need to face the open for the open’s own sake; for its attraction and its promise of freedom.

There must be millions on Earth who would feel that same urge, if the open were only brought to their attention, if they could be made to take the first step.

So, despite the detective novel trappings, deep down the book turns out to have been a sort of primer, explaining how humans did decide to escape earth. It sets up the origins of the Galactic Empire described in the Foundation books. If all this requires is for Baley’s character and beliefs to undergo a 180 degree transformation, well, too bad for character and plausibility. it was never Asimov’s prime concern. His Visions of Great Futures are his prime concern.

He had told Minnim the Cities were wombs, and so they were. And what was the first thing a man must do before he can be a man? He must be born. He must leave the womb. And once left, it could not be re-entered.
Baley had left the City and could not re-enter. The City was no longer his; the Caves of Steel were alien. This had to be. And it would be so for others and Earth would be born again and reach outward.
His heart beat madly and the noise of life about him sank to an unheard murmur.
He remembered his dream on Solaria and he understood it at last. He lifted his head and he could see through all the steel and concrete and humanity above him. He could see the beacon set in space to lure men outward. He could see it shining down. The naked sun!

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians, a hopeless attempt to overthrow the occupiers is easily crushed
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s

Books & Boots

All posts tagged earth

Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent @ the Whitechapel Gallery

Photomontage

Kennard at the Whitechapel

Room 1

Room 2

Room 3: the installations

1. Reading Room

2. World Markets (1997 to 2024)

3. Double Exposure, 2023

Kennard’s dualistic worldview

1. What’s the alternative?

2. The post-Cold War multipolar world

3. How ‘radical’ can any contemporary artist be?

4. Boardroom (2023)

Arms and the artist

New media

Summary

Recommendation

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Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis @ the Hayward Gallery

Climate change

Top works

1. ‘Memorial to Arcadia Woodlands Clear-Cut (Green, Violet, and Brown)’ by Andrea Bowers (2014)

2. ‘we are opposite like that’ by Himali Singh Soin (2018 to 2019)

3. ‘Axis of Life and Vines in the Mountains’ by Aluaiy Kaumakan (2018)

4. ‘Green Screen’ by Hito Steyerl (2023)

5. Pabellón de Cristal I by Cristina Iglesi (2014)

6. The Living Pyramid by Agnes Denes (2015/2024)

Videos

Grid (Palimi-ú) by Richard Mosse

THE FUTURE (Sixes and Sevens) by Cornelia Parker (2023)

Last tweet

What can I do?

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Antony Gormley @ the Royal Academy

Conclusion

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What Is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology by Addy Pross (2012)

Repetitive and prolix

Shallow philosophy

Instead of interesting examples from chemistry, shallow examples from ‘philosophy’

Deliberately superficial

The problem of the origin of life

Pross’s solution

A thought about the second law

Thoughts

Fascinating facts and tasty terminology

Does anyone care?

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Reviews of other science books

Chemistry

Cosmology

The Environment

Genetics and life

Human evolution

Maths

Particle physics

Psychology

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Nature’s Numbers by Ian Stewart (1995)

1. The Natural Order

2. What Mathematics is For

3. What Mathematics is About

4. The Constants of Change

5. From Violins to Videos

6. Broken Symmetry

7. The Rhythm of Life

8. Do Dice Play God?

9. Drops, Dynamics and Daisies

Coda: Morphomatics

Request

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