WALKING IN THE VOID PHILIP BALDWIN / MONICA GUGGISBERG WITH AN ESSAY IN TWELVE PARTS BY DOUGALD HINE
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To Monique Pictet and Michael Baldwin
This exhibition has been generously supported by 15. Juni Fonden Augustinus Fonden Aage og Johanne Louis-Hansens Fond Beckett Fonden Knud Højgaards Fond The Robert Weil Family Foundation Kvadrat A/S This book was published in 2020 to coincide with the exhibition ‘Walking in the Void’ at Glasmuseet Ebeltoft (12 June 2020–11 April 2021)
WALKING IN THE VOID PHILIP BALDWIN / MONICA GUGGISBERG WITH AN ESSAY IN TWELVE PARTS BY DOUGALD HINE
GLASMUSEET EBELTOFT DENMARK
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ForeWord sandra blaCh
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ToWards neW horiZons pia sTrandbygaard biTTner
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eMbraCing The Void philip baldWin / MoniCa guggisberg
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The asTeroid: an anThropoCene WhodunniT
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dougald hine
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appendiCes p131
biography p133
bibliography p137
lisT oF WorKs p139
aCKnoWledgeMenTs p141
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posTsCripT
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FOREWORD SANDRA BLACH
GLASMUSEET EBELTOFT
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Destination Unknown (seen through The Labyrinth). Previous page: Blue Gateway
‘The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race.’ These are the words of Rachel Carson, marine biologist, environmentalist and author of several books credited with triggering the global environmental movement in the early 1960s, whose thoughts run like a thread through Philip Baldwin and Monica Guggisberg’s latest exhibition, ‘Walking in the Void’. The exhibition finally opened on 12 June, and what a miracle it actually happened. With an original start date of 4 April, our plans were thrown off course by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Philip and Monica were literally about to leave Wales for Ebeltoft when Denmark closed down completely. During the lockdown I had many phone and FaceTime conversations with Philip and Monica as we consoled one another and kept our spirits up. A new start date was postponed several times and we felt we were in limbo. As if we really were walking in the void. Suddenly we realised how utterly appropriate the title for this exhibition actually is. Philip and Monica have described this exhibition as ‘an exploration of ideas that have been percolating for fifty years’. We are so grateful therefore that they decided to present these ideas in Ebeltoft; having worked closely with them on their exhibition ‘Battuto’ in 2002, I knew what to expect. They are perfectionists whose attention to detail is second to none. Their work is always of the highest quality and craftsmanship – they make no compromises.
We would like to thank Philip and Monica, who have been such a pleasure to collaborate with. We greatly appreciate all the hard work, effort and passion they have put into this exhibition with the help of their two talented assistants,
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The exhibition presents twelve fascinating and thought-provoking site-specific installations touching on issues concerning some of the global challenges we face today, alongside humanity’s place in the universe. On entering the exhibition, the viewer is immediately made to feel their place in our extraordinary universe: steel rods representing the twelve signs form a maze in which one meets planet Earth, the Sun, Moon, meteors, comets and other planets. A group of tall, blown vessels on aged oak pedestals observe us, bearing witness to the passing of time as a pendulum swings back and forth. There is so much to think about. In particular, the ‘Timeline’, which is fun, provocative and full of fascinating facts.
Philomène Roulleau-Thery and Léon Brachet. Philip and Monica’s work truly deserves the international attention this exhibition should bring it. They are remarkable people and equally remarkable artists. We would also like to extend our grateful thanks to the foundations and companies who have supported the exhibition: Augustinus Fonden, Aage og Johanne Louis-Hansens Fond, Knud Højgaards Fond, Beckett Fonden, 15. Juni Fonden, The Robert Weil Family Foundation and Kvadrat A/S.
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We hope you will find the exhibition and this catalogue enjoyable and inspiring, and that they will provide much food for thought.
Towards new horizons PIA Strandbygaard BITTNER
GLASMUSEET EBELTOFT
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Blue Gateway (detail)
Philip (b. 1947, New York, USA) and Monica (b. 1955, Bern, Switzerland) met in 1979 at the Orrefors Glass School in Sweden. After two years working in Transjö for Wilke Adolfsson and Ann Wolff, pioneers in the international studio glass movement, in 1982 they moved to Nonfoux in Switzerland, where they set up their own studio. There they developed their techniques and skills, and collaborated on designs for such iconic firms as Rosenthal, Steuben and, later, Venini. Inspired by the Scandinavian tradition and designers like Kaj Frank, Alvar Aalto and Tapio Wirkkala, Baldwin and Guggisberg’s designs were simple and elegant, characterised by clean lines and clarity of form and colour. Later in the 1980s they began to include geometric patterns on dishes and vessels,
Left: A lamp for Venini, Abaco, 1998. Right: Brazilian Cityscape, 2011
Their approach to glass is in many ways reminiscent of a classical sculptor or painter who strives for perfection through balance and harmony; once a work is complete no detail or brushstroke can be changed without diminishing the whole. And the same can be said of Monica and Philip’s work: whether it’s their designs for the glass industry, or their one-off decorated vessels, their freestanding sculptures, mobiles or boats, the constituent elements are always beauty, simplicity of form and the aesthetic qualities of the material.
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Mention Philip Baldwin and Monica Guggisberg and the first thing that comes to mind is exquisitely blown glass, cut and carved to reveal surface pattern and texture. With an eye for beauty, the pair have explored the aesthetic possibilities of their medium over a forty-year span, creating a groundbreaking body of work. They have developed a unique personal idiom, at once precise and poetic, built on a concern for colour, form and composition.
sandblasting through layers of coloured glass. They still had their roots in the Scandinavian tradition but also drew inspiration from international schools, notably the Bauhaus and constructivism. In parallel with their immersion in Scandinavian glass Baldwin and Guggisberg found themselves increasingly drawn to Italian glass. In 1994 they entered into a short but intensive collaboration with Italian master Lino Tagliapietra. Lino exposed them to new techniques in glassblowing, and most importantly introduced them to Paolo Ferro, one of the most skilled Muranese glass cutters. Ferro in turn introduced them to the world of battuto and inciso cutting techniques, first explored creatively by Carlo Scarpa for Venini in the 1930s and 40s. This connection marked the beginning of a two-decades-long period working with Paolo and his two sons, Riccardo and Pietro, developing a vast array of new cutting patterns. By combining this technique with the Swedish overlay process of layering colour, and cutting through the layers exposing the colour underneath, Baldwin and Guggisberg pioneered their own unique signature. Glasmuseet Ebeltoft was one of the first museums to showcase this work in a major exhibition in 2002; Louise Berndt, writing for the catalogue at the time, said:
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Guggisberg and Baldwin have laid a new avenue. By joining Italian coldworking to the Swedish overlay, they have embarked upon an innovative sequence of experimentation and research not only on surfaces, but also on colour and the interplay of colour and texture through surface treatment. These explorations have increasingly drawn them to probe the expressive fields of textural elements. Initially soft and tactile, with the new strong angles, facets and deep cuts, the surface itself takes on a kind of fourth dimension, something sculptural that moves beyond the limits set by height, width and volume.
In 2009 the boat shape appeared as a significant new motif in Baldwin and Guggisberg’s work. It is an archetypal form, which they use as a container for a wide range of objects in blown and coldworked glass. The boats collect and transport corn, seed, gold, silver, bottles and amphorae across civilisations, and human-like figures as they journey towards new horizons. The introduction of the boat moved their practice towards symbolic expression, extending it beyond formal aesthetic concerns and a more traditional approach to sculpture. In time the boats grew in size, embracing the surrounding space and their physical setting.
In ‘Walking in the Void’ Baldwin and Guggisberg turn their attention to the place of humans and our planet within the geological story of the universe, set against global challenges, political and environmental. An important source of inspiration for the exhibition is The Dark Mountain Project founded by Dougald Hine and Paul Kingsnorth, which The New York Times predicted in 2014 would change
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To an increasing degree, Baldwin and Guggisberg relate as artists to the subjects that influence our times. ‘Walking in the Void’ is the culmination of this development, and with their exhibition in Ebeltoft the artists have stepped deeper into the field of contemporary art, characterised by its concern for the world we live in. This shift appears to be in line with a trend in glass art generally, where younger artists especially are creating conceptual works with a critical angle on politics, society and the environment, utilising other media such as film, video and projection. Baldwin and Guggisberg still insist primarily on glass, but instead of a purely aesthetic exploration there is now a deeper narrative.
Leaving Necropolis, 2016
In their exhibition ‘Under an Equal Sky’ at Canterbury Cathedral in 2018, Baldwin and Guggisberg found themselves entering into a dialogue with the architecture, history and symbolic significance of the cathedral building. Though the exhibition itself marked the centenary of the end of World War I, the world continues to be marked by wars and ensuing humanitarian disasters, and they intended their work to be seen in that context. The boat, having previously functioned as a symbol of the human journey from birth to death, and from one coast to another, as well as of the artists’ own nomadic life, here worked as a metaphor for the challenges faced by society, such as inequality, war and the migrant crisis.
the environmental debate in Britain and the rest of Europe. In their manifesto ‘Uncivilisation’ (2009) the authors call for a ‘challenge to the stories that underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of separation from “nature”’. They reject the right of human beings to perpetual growth, and the idea that technology alone can stave off the most catastrophic effects of global warming. Instead, they recognise the need to find an alternative way forward. Such thinking runs through the exhibition in Ebeltoft, whose installations should be regarded as an entity circling the same theme. In the water at the entrance to the museum, stands ‘The Visitor’, a meteor in glass and metal, red hot, descending at furious speed, a tail of undulating steel behind it. The work simultaneously welcomes visitors and sets the theme for the exhibition in a way that is playful yet powerful. It points both to the origins of life on Earth – the conditions for which are believed to have been generated by comet strikes more than four billion years ago (one bringing water, so scientists now suggest, another creating the Moon) – and to the ever-present risk of human and animal extinction. The sculpture reveals Baldwin and Guggisberg’s overall intentions: to shift our perspective from the human – from the temporal and egocentric – to a wider-angled lens that embraces both prehistoric time and an unimagined future.
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Once inside, visitors find themselves standing in ‘The Labyrinth’ – twelve steel rods intersecting the exhibition space. High up, planets, the Earth and Moon float between the rods which symbolise the twelve signs of the zodiac, reminding us of the vastness of the solar system, in which we inhabit just a small corner. ‘The Labyrinth’ sets the stage for the exhibition and connects the different installations. It resists instant comprehension but rather encourages the viewer to move, to observe and relate actively to the space, allowing a different perspective to unfold, and offering the participant a sense of... well, yes... walking in the void. On the far wall the eye is drawn to a huge installation, ‘Destination Unknown’, a shower of meteors and comets. The six-metre high wall is covered with more than a hundred individually blown, drop-shaped objects in a carefully balanced colour-scale from golden and brown earth tones to shades of green and blue interspersed with found rocks. In its scale alone this impressive piece highlights the magnitude of the universe set against the minuteness of we humans. In the same way that Caspar David Friedrich’s monk is exposed to the boundlessness
of sea and sky in one of German Romanticism’s most iconic paintings, ‘The Monk by the Sea’, and is thereby reminded of his own insignificance, so the viewer is here made to feel distinctly small and mortal before this rain of comets. We are confronted with the cosmos versus the individual, and the infinite versus the finite. With its reference to the origins of the universe and history of the planet, marked as they are by catastrophic events from meteor showers to floods and earthquakes, ‘Destination Unknown’ sums up a fundamental question at the heart of the exhibition: where do we come from and where are we going? And its underlying premise: whether we like it or not, we are part of something much bigger than ourselves; with or without humanity, the planet will continue. The work introduces a form of expression that is precise and minimalist, suggestive and expressive, uniting the exhibition’s highly conceptual starting point in a single hand-crafted statement.
Back in ‘The Labyrinth’, observing the room, are ten free-standing sculptures: the ‘Monoliti humani’, in blown, satinated, opaque glass. These abstract human figures, composed of two balanced parts, are rigorously minimalist while retaining a strong, poetic presence as they silently regard the world. Similar figures appear in the Species Novae series from 2018-19, with subtitles such
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Behind the comet wall stretches ‘The Timeline’, a whistle-stop tour of the development of humanity and its relationship with the world and wider universe told through a multitude of objects, facts and narratives. In the artists’ words it is a quirky, alternative timeline, expressing their personal take on human history and providing an insightful commentary on the human journey from the end of the period known as the Younger Dryas (some 11,500 years ago) to the present day. ‘The Timeline’ also functions as an intriguing accumulation of objects, knowledge and traditions that in some ways are as difficult to fathom as the shower of meteors and its implications for humanity. Despite its chronological structure, the form of ‘The Timeline’ is exploratory and open, and expands the sculptural field in which Baldwin and Guggisberg have worked until now. The line-up of items and facts forges new connections between the exhibits that actively engage visitors’ curiosity and imaginations. It is not the aesthetic experience that is foremost here, but the creation of an opportunity to grasp new meanings and contexts. The artists offer their personal perspective on the evolution of humanity while inviting the viewer to associate freely and follow their own train of thought: to view the world in new ways in open dialogue with the objects and one another.
Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘The Monk by the Sea’ (c.1808/10) P 21
as ‘The Odd Couple’ or ‘You and Me’. Like the comets, the ‘figures’ are devoid of the patterned surfaces we normally associate with Baldwin and Guggisberg. The almost mystical presence of these figures is felt all the more powerfully when there are no details to distract the eye. They exist outside time and space and in their abstract human form are reminiscent of the many anthropomorphic figures humanity has produced throughout history. They also point to another layer in the exhibition, repeated in ‘The Timeline’, namely our need as humans to create and express ourselves by shaping and processing materials with hands and tools. A slowly swinging pendulum hangs opposite the monoliths, symbolising the passage of time. It ends in a bright orange glass sphere with a fine battuto surface. An ostensibly simple installation with a powerful effect, with its serene back and forth movement and constant tick-tock it at once refers to the human measure of time – the clock – that divides the day into hours and minutes, and to Time as an abstract concept – an eternal movement without beginning and end. The installation brings to mind Foucault’s famous pendulum, which was the first experiment designed to provide direct evidence of the Earth’s rotation. The movement is hypnotising and the work has something light and playful about it that speaks directly to the senses and to the bodily perception of the audience. Suspended at the far end of ‘The Labyrinth’ is ‘The Seven Days of the Week’, expressing the relationship between the naming of our days – our observation of a seven-day week – and the planets: a blue-painted wall with five small blown spheres in different colours representing Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn, surrounded by a yellow line in curved steel – the Sun and, at its centre,
Léon Foucault demonstrating his pendulum in 1851
Anchoring the space at the top of the stairs is ‘Meteors for our Time’, a steel frame containing neatly suspended glass elements. This is ‘classic’ Baldwin and Guggisberg, but here the elements in the frame are soft organic shapes without decoration, imitating the irregular forms of meteors. It is a fine example of the pair’s strong sense of composition and colour and of their effortless movement between different types of work as they search for new ways to express themselves.
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a black-and-white, crater-marked Moon. This sculptural window shines a light on the seven celestial bodies visible to the naked eye which give humanity its primary point of reference for the marking of time.
Next to ‘Meteors’, ‘The Law of Unintended Consequences’ demonstrates one of the most urgent environmental challenges we face today – the pollution of the planet with plastic. The ‘law’ is represented by an accumulation of bottles, progressing from unique hand-blown containers with cut surfaces made by Baldwin and Guggisberg’s assistants, Philomène Roulleau-Thery and Léon Brachet, to mass-produced, machine-made glass examples and on to cheap plastic bottles and beach-combed detritus. The work tells the story of chemical engineer Walter Hufnagel, whom Philip met in 1972 and who became a life-long friend. Walter was the problem-solver of the PET bottle, which was subsequently used to store carbonated liquids. It was considered a technological breakthrough that appeared to resolve the issues presented by glass bottles – labour-intensive to clean, expensive to transport – but which gave rise to a new problem on an unforeseen scale. Walter’s story fits the narrative of the exhibition and reflects the artists’ personal experience and the wider, global perspective. Like ‘The Timeline’ it is an ironic comment on the state of human affairs, and similarly draws on the expressive power of story-telling.
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At opposite ends of the museum garden we find two installations: ‘The Tide Machine’ and ‘Blue Gateway’. The first is an interactive display of the alternating ebb and flow of the tides and the powerful influence of the Moon on the Earth. It is a circular contraption in steel, with a handle to turn, so that the water in the container rises and falls along the coasts of a fictional continent, composed of coastlines and countries from the artists’ lives: New England, Switzerland, France and Wales, where they now live. The construction is surrounded by four black-and-white blown glass orbs mounted on steel poles representing the four principal phases of the Moon. In its own whimsical way, the work, with its inventive, interactive dimension, embodies our basic creative urge to explore and invent, which runs as an undercurrent through the exhibition. The second, ‘Blue Gateway’ (2008), is akin to a musical composition: a playful, seemingly improvised, sculpture of blue blown spheres with cut patterns, and a fine example of Baldwin and Guggisberg’s abstract, poetic universe and interplay between colour, form, material and light. A work that leaves room for optimism and belief in a future of new possibilities. Within walking distance from the museum is the church where ‘The Pilgrims’ Boat’ has been installed. This work was originally created by the artists for their 2018 exhibition ‘Under an Equal Sky’ in Canterbury Cathedral and installed on the spot where Thomas Becket’s shrine first stood. The boat suggested the thousands
Fresco depicting the warship Maria at Ebeltoft church
‘The Pilgrims’ Boat’ thus connects local and national history and charges it with a meaning that is at once global, symbolic and existential. It also resonates in another way in our age of anxiety. The word ‘pilgrim’ comes from the Latin ‘peregrinus’ meaning stranger or a traveller who has come from afar, and was originally used to refer to people who journeyed to a place of religious significance. Today, too, people go on pilgrimage to seek peace, contemplation and reflection. ‘The Pilgrims’ Boat’ offers us the solace of shared solidarity, reminding us that we are all in the same boat, whether we live in Ebeltoft, Canterbury, Wales, or on the other side of the globe.
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who came as pilgrims in 1220 as news of Becket’s martyrdom spread throughout Europe, and linked to the exhibition’s overarching theme, which included contemporary humanitarian crises and the challenge of refugees and migration. With its installation in Ebeltoft Church, ‘The Pilgrims’ Boat’ continues its journey, its new location adding another layer of significance. The boat’s spectacular cargo of human-like forms in blown glass, variously cut, calls to mind the stories of pilgrims, refugees and explorers through time and space. It is in good company, sited beneath a fresco depicting the Danish warship ‘Maria’, which was anchored in Ebeltoft Vig in the late 15th century–early 16th century; in the centre of the church nave hangs another ship, a model as is traditional in many Danish and European churches; while not far from the church is moored the famous ‘Frigate Jutland’. At one level these vessels have local and national significance but in a broader sense they each testify to our human need to travel and explore.
Together Baldwin and Guggisberg’s installations tell a story that includes both the artists’ personal history and reaches out to the universe, delving back into the past and projecting forward into the future. It is a breathtaking perspective. It was ambitious enough making work to synch with the museum’s quite particular architecture; it is no less ambitious conceiving an exhibition that seeks to span the entire age of humanity, embracing our existence together with the big issues of our time. Their starting point is still glass, true to their style and belief in the beauty of their medium, but their journey has allowed them to explore new ways of working and sparked creative approaches that extend beyond aesthetics and technical brilliance to create an exhibition that is monumental in every sense: a testament to their deeply felt engagement with the global, political and environmental challenges of the 21st century.
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literature Baldwin Guggisberg: You, Me and the Rest of Us. Galleri Glas, 2019 Baldwin & Guggisberg: Under An Equal Sky. Canterbury Cathedral, 2018 Philip Baldwin, Monica Guggisberg. The Glass Arch, Éditions La Revue de la céramique et du verre, 2011 Baldwin / Guggisberg: Au-delà du verre / Beyond Glass. 5 Continents Editions/Musée Ariana, 2011 Monica Guggisberg & Philip Baldwin: Battuto 2002. Forlaget Glasmuseet Ebeltoft, 2002 Philip Baldwin, Monica Guggisberg: In Search of Clear Lines. Benteli, 1998
Embracing the Void PHILIP BALDWIN / MONICA GUGGISBERG
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Meteors for our Time
Last spring and summer, on road trips in New England and Europe, we listened to two audiobooks. One was Graham Hancock’s groundbreaking work, ‘Fingerprints of the Gods’ (1995), and then the sequel, following fifteen more years of archaeological research, ‘Magicians of the Gods’ (2015). Both books impacted our worldview in meaningful ways, and became the cornerstone of this exhibition. ‘Fingerprints’ exposed us in greater depth to a phenomenon we knew about, Precession of the Equinoxes, the 26,000-year cycle the Earth makes through the twelve signs of the zodiac. ‘Magicians’ opened our eyes to the debate around geological gradualism and catastrophism, or ‘suddenness’, as we like to call it. The Earth’s tectonic plates do move slowly. Dinosaurs do go extinct quickly. We found ourselves inspired not only by the implications of these phenomena but by the sheer magnitude of their reality. Time on a vast scale, yes, but nevertheless also on a human scale, a civilisational scale. Precession refers to the Earth’s ‘wobble’, caused largely by the gravitational pull of the Moon, and the time it takes to complete one full 360° turn, or wobble, on its axis, each degree equalling seventy-two years1. Precession underpins and demarcates time through the ages, from Leo, to Aries, to Pisces and on to Aquarius. The ancients understood all this, hence the Roman poet Virgil, who was clueless about the coming of Christ, but certainly knew about Precession, could say Rome would soon be entering Pisces, thus erroneously earning him the sobriquet, ‘foreteller of the coming of Christ’.
When the opportunity was offered to do a show at Ebeltoft, we asked ourselves how best to keep this new trajectory vital, both to ourselves and viewers of our work, while also remaining true to our underlying love of glass, blown and cut.
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After forty years of glassblowing and dedicating ourselves to celebrating the aesthetics of Swedish and Italian traditions, merging these together in our own blend of evolving perception, in 2016 we made a tentative foray into something larger in scope at St. Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh. Building on one of the installations placed there, ‘Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow’, we were invited to create a yet more dramatic series of installations at Canterbury Cathedral in 2018, at the time of the centennial of the First World War. That exhibition took us on a powerfully fulfilling exercise combining monumental architecture and history with contemporary political and social issues.
Reading about Precession, and the duality Gradualism–Catastrophism, we had our ‘aha’, and that ‘aha’ forms the basis of this show. One of the things that strikes us as missing today is a sense of perspective. There’s not a lot of latitude out there for the long view, for the placing of our predicaments in the context of the larger trajectory of human life and history. Many of us are fond of pointing out the evils of social media, the narcissism it generates in this generation or that, and the too quick waves of calamities provoked by technical innovation that overwhelm our senses. And yet, while it is true that technical innovations often have disastrous and unintended consequences, all we need to do is examine the history of warfare to see the weakness in this line of reasoning. The essential problem remains unchanged. Whether bows and arrows or nuclear missiles, warfare remains the game. And we continue to insist on going there.
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‘Walking in the Void’ is like a train, held up and propelled on parallel lines of steel. One is intended to celebrate the extraordinary local universe in which we exist – the planets, the stars, our galaxy, the Sun, the Moon. And the other seeks to look at our reality inside this larger reality, our own history within this fabulous and mysterious cosmology; to try to visually demonstrate how we are in no way separate from the larger picture, but rather embedded within it, dependent upon it, and needing to be connected to its larger rhythms. ‘Follow the Science’, ‘Settled Science’: what science, and who says? Science is a conversation, not a destination; a dialogue, not a result. Everywhere trends and fashions flow like rivers through changing times. As the economist John Maynard Keynes said, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind.’ Leeches in the middle ages. Penicillin and antibiotics today. Butter yesterday, followed by margarine, and now thankfully back to butter. And let’s not forget eggs! This follows in geology, anthropology, psychology, history and on and on. We move on. And sometimes back again, as we always do. But some tendencies keep coming back to haunt us. Extremism generally, authoritarianism repeatedly. Hard right politics, hard left politics, dogmas. Fundamentalist dogma plagues the Earth, much like a recurring pandemic. Dogmas often lead to tragedy, violence and killing. For example, in Christianity it has been a problem that has plagued the religion at least since it became a pillar of the Roman state, giving way to the elimination of the 90 per cent of the population that was pagan, whether by conversion or at the sword, over the ensuing centuries.
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Meteors for our Time (detail)
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The challenge of weaving all the threads together that flow through this exhibition has been an organic process whose ultimate trajectory remains elusive. Like science itself, the show is a conversation, an inquiry. A discussion of both the bounty at our feet and our perpetually fraught relationship with all that awesome magnificence, and how best to live within it. Over fifty years ago, a mere four years after Rachel Carson’s publication of ‘Silent Spring’, Erewhon’s, the first organic food store in Boston, opened 2. It was an incredibly seductive place, shovelling grains and mueslis with hand-held scoops directly out of barrels into little paper sacks or glass jars; maple syrup flowing out of spigots in large vats. At the time, shopping there made you feel you were part of a revolution. Those of us who participated could be forgiven for missing the likelihood of the tipping-at-windmills quality of our dedication. And yet. Fifty years on, even Don Quixote might be pardoned for his myopia. When we moved to Paris in 2001, fully thirty-five years after the first Erewhon opened, there was hardly an organic store on the horizon, and those few were quirky and obscure. But twenty years later, there is apt to be one, if not two, on every street corner. France is dedicated to being ten per cent organic by 2022. And they’re on track. That’s the same percentage Constantine calculated when he decided to place his bet and make Christianity the state religion.
The mathematician and computer scientist John von Neumann said in 1954, ‘All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control’ 4. He follows in a straight line from Sir Francis Bacon. But Neumann left out the persistent footnote of unintended consequences, overlooking what we all know: sooner or later life breaks in. Perhaps you’ve noticed? At heart we are faced with continuing the commitment we have held dear, at least since the Enlightenment, separating ourselves ever more resolutely from nature, ever ramping up our fear of death. Or alternatively finding our way back to nature. And there you have it. We are walking in a void between two polar opposites, and deeply insecure about which way to jump, and even whether to take a parachute or not.
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Opposing this approach are those who say we need to ramp up industrial production massively to feed at least 10 billion of us (well, why not? the Amazon is still plentiful!). Even such a card-carrying environmental warrior as the journalist George Monbiot speaks out in favour of test-tube foods 3, telling a shocked audience at a conference in Oxford this spring for small-scale farmers that they were obsolete and missing the boat.
A few days ago we had an email from Philip’s brother Ian. We are in frequent contact discussing the wayward ways of this world. Ian wrote: My worldview is we are each and every one of us a trickster, constantly making deals with the Devil, little Fausts we are, and especially now when our multiple pullulating robotic creations are running amok and we believe we’ve superseded our need of the Devil! He of course is no longer smiling: he’s roaring with laughter.
We hesitate. We like the analogy of one of the installations in the exhibition, the story of Walter Hufnagel and his work perfecting the PET plastic bottle and the unintended consequences he could not – or would not – see. With eyes wide shut? Certainly that would be Ian’s view. Our view, which might be more benign, nevertheless tends to merge with his by way of the results. Lynn Margulis, the pioneering microbiologist, was fond of quoting, or slightly misquoting, a popular 1970s hit tune by Vera Wills. Referencing small unseen critters at our feet, she would sing, ‘We got along fine before you, and we’ll get along without you now.’ The original was describing the break-up of a love affair. And perhaps Lynn’s reference is as well. Either way, with or without homo sapiens, life goes on. Whether we want to stick around and be a part of it is at the root of the challenges we face today.
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How did we ever get here? The timeline at the tail end of the exhibition attempts in our own personal and quirky way to illustrate some of the highlights of our trajectory. Any viewer might be tempted to add all sorts, and should feel free to do so. That’s the point after all. It’s about asking questions, and reflecting on the urgent, and perhaps now nearly desperate, need to find a better way forward. Our exhibition has been blessed with an unexpected gift in the form of Dougald Hine, whom we met in the early phase of thinking about all this. Ten years ago Dougald collaborated with fellow thinker and environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth to create a controversial project, a kind of new-wave thinktank for artists and environmentalists, called The Dark Mountain Project. As part of that project they wrote a manifesto, ‘Uncivilisation’, which throws the assumptions of modern environmentalism into serious question. This exhibition shares those questions – without drawing specific conclusions. The manifesto has influenced our thinking in a generous and open way. We are grateful to have met Dougald, and proud to
have him as part of this exhibition. The reader will understand upon reading his thoughtful text, which documents our work at Glasmuseet Ebeltoft. One last thought. Indigenous people around the world, those few still among us, as well as the untold millions that we have effectively silenced, share with the ancients – the progenitors of our own civilisation – a view of life imbued with meaning. No strangers to science and rational thought, they nevertheless were, and are, possessed of a rationality that for the most part we are unable to fathom or experience. The builders of Göbekli Tepe, Babylon, the Pyramids, the Sphinx, Baalbek in Lebanon, Gunung Padang in Indonesia, Machu Picchu, Cusco, Mayan pyramids in Guatemala, the Easter Island statues, Cahokia Mounds in Illinois, Stonehenge, and countless others throughout the Americas, and around the world, illustrate a rationality of profound depth and precision, both in technology as well as in mysterious symbolism. Most of this we treat with evolving, and changing, speculation. But some things we do know. Many of these artefacts and monuments are testaments to their builders’ understanding of the cosmos and their place within it. Much as we insist otherwise, we are not separate from these people. We are part of a continuum, a developing story which increasing numbers of us believe has lost its way. Is it possible we are missing something? Is it possible our arbitrary relegation of all information to the status of mere facts blinds us to larger truths? Larger truths that we need to explore and embrace if we are to overcome our waning confidence in our global civilisation, and escape the desolation of an impending void.
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Footnotes 1 Precession refers to the fact that the 21°–23° tilt of the Earth’s axis causes a rotational counterclockwise wobble, in opposition to our annual clockwise journey through the zodiac. Hence the notion of ‘preceding’ through the signs of the zodiac in the opposite direction. To read more about Precession, see page 121. 2 The American environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken took over Erewhon’s (founded by Michio and Aveline Kushi) in August 1967 and quickly expanded the business model. 3 Monbiot, G., ‘Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet’, The Guardian, 8 January 2020. 4 Fleming, J. R., ‘The Climate Engineers: Playing God to Save the Planet’, The Wilson Quarterly, spring 2007.
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View through the Labyrinth
The Asteroid: an Anthropocene Whodunnit DOUGALD HINE
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The Timeline (detail)
1
We appear to be dealing with the consequences of a fall. A red ball lies on a bed of shards. The event repeats itself, book-ending ‘The Timeline’: the little corridor of human history into which the exhibition funnels us. There is a story here about a rogue object – the same one making landfall in the pool out front. There’s a story about the role of catastrophe in history, about the rhythms within which life takes place, its syncopations. Each of these stories will come around again, but just now I am thinking of something else: a scene from Alain Tanner’s film, ‘Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000’. The new history teacher plants a suitcase on the desk, takes out an eight-foot length of blood sausage, a chopping board, a cleaver and a metronome. To its relentless mechanical ticking he delivers a reflection on the experience of time, coiling like the sausage in his hands, and its transformation in modernity. Capitalism, he says, turned the cycle of the seasons experienced by agricultural societies into a corkscrew with which the winners opened the ‘inferior’ cultures, drinking their fill, and then smashing the bottles. There is a new kind of violence here, he proposes, and with it comes a new fear – of the past, of the ‘inferior’ – that if these things should catch up with us, they would show us the same pitilessness that we have shown them. Well, here’s the timeline and the smashed glass.
‘Is time a sausage?’ the teacher asks. ‘Darwin thought so, even though the stuffing changed between one end and the other. Marx thought that some day everyone would stop eating sausage. Einstein and Max Planck tore the skin off the sausage which, from then on, lost its shape.’
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This way of arranging history is quite recent, a couple of centuries old at most: the past chopped up into centuries, put into a line-up, made into posters on the walls of classrooms. History as destiny, insisting on the relentless Ascent of Man. These timelines began as a way of asserting control, argues the philosopher Johan Redin, at a moment when the geological revelation of deep time had shaken the Western imagination. Within a generation, the age of the Earth had gone from a few thousand years to many millions, and on this enlarged stage of planetary existence it was suddenly hard to sustain our sense of centrality.
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The Timeline (detail)
Tanner’s film was made in the mid-1970s. He wrote the script together with John Berger, the art critic and novelist. Both men were concerned with the outworking of the failure of hopes raised by the events of 1968, a year that comes to seem in hindsight a high-water mark for certain ideas about the future. It was in the decade following those events that talk of ‘postmodernity’ and ‘postmodernism’ began to radiate from the seminar rooms of Paris, reflecting a shift in the relationship with time, a sense of something giving way. If modernity was the era in which our proximity to the future seemed a defining virtue and a source of confidence, then postmodernity names the loss of that confidence. The theorists associated with this naming had all, like Berger and Tanner, been around the age of forty in 1968. While ecological concerns were not at the front of their thinking, the shift they sought to describe was reinforced by the news coming in from the frontlines of the impact of human industrial activity on the rest of the living world. The techno-economic drivers that had powered the achievements of modernity were bringing us to an encounter with limits, and here were further grounds for the transformation of the future from a location of collective hope into a source of fear. What happens to the posters on the classroom walls, the history that was meant to lead us to the future, when the line they were following begins to fray? No longer a means of vindication, they begin to look more like a trail of evidence. History as whodunnit: a mystery in which all of us are suspects. And a suspicion that the past is catching up with us, that we never did leave it behind, not really; it’s still there, coiling around our feet, waiting to trip us up.
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Watch your step. We are walking on broken glass.
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The Visitor
2
The space of the exhibition is cut through by twelve bars of square steel, angled to interrupt its height. One for each of the zodiac constellations, an astrological blues, setting the rhythm to the dance of the spheres. The planets are here, colourful travellers! Their courses weave the nest of our local universe, our corner of everything. Walking beneath them, minding the bars, I get to thinking about cultural time: the ways we name and organise the seasons of our lives, the mix of perception and imagination, the fixed and the wandering. As the climate changes, the cultivation zones in Scandinavia are moving northwards. Some say by as much as a metre an hour. In the part of Sweden where I live, the snow comes later now, or not at all, yet the winter days remain as short as ever. The seasons drift on a frame of light and dark, while the frame itself remains unmoved. The day and the year are given forms of time, common to the experience of most forms of life in a world like ours. An ant knows night and day. An oak tree keeps a record of years. The pull of the Moon that lies behind our calendar months shapes the rhythms of seas and bodies, but which of our fellow creatures would recognise a week? There are other purely human spans of time: the decade, on which we hang the stories of fashions and generations; the century, with which we pace the study of history. But these only began to carry weight in the age of the timeline on the classroom wall. The week is old.
There is some distance between this vision of nature as a prison and the origin
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In his book ‘The Seven Day Circle’ the sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel identifies the cycle of Sabbath observance as one of the great ruptures in the timeline of humanity. It represents the dissociation of time from nature, reflecting a radically new form of religion: ‘the Jewish god was to be regarded as untouched by nature in any way’. To organise the run of days without reference to the cycles of the Moon or the Sun, he writes, was a ‘total emancipation… one of the most significant breakthroughs in human beings’ attempts to break away from being prisoners of nature and create a social world of their own.’
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The Labyrinth/Seven Days of the Week
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The Seven Days of the Week
story of the seven-day week, in which a creator God looks on the living world he has just made and sees that ‘it was good’. Other attitudes can be drawn from the Hebrew Bible than the one that infuses Zerubavel’s argument; yet, as he goes on to explain, the biblical week is only half the story. In Alexandria, in the second century BCE, traditions from Egypt, Babylonia and Greece combined to create the astrological week, whose sequence of the planets is still reflected in the naming of days in most of the languages of Europe, India and beyond. At this point, we are back in the space of the gallery, walking beneath the coloured globes. Even the biblical week has roots that stretch into Babylon and Egypt. The sacredness of seven is an echo of the seven travellers whose movements can be followed with the naked eye, moving across the map of the fixed stars: the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn.
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In whichever language they are named, with whichever set of gods and stories they become aligned, what we have here is a mantra, repeated without interruption for thousands of years: a mantra that invokes the seven heavenly bodies whose nested spheres embrace the world of human experience, whose courses our hunting ancestors once tracked across the sky.
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3
It’s hard to escape the gravity of the situation – as irresistible as a bad joke! The apple has landed halfway along the timeline. It marks a new fall: Isaac Newton’s moment of knowledge in a garden outside Cambridge. With Voltaire’s help, this anecdote will be transfigured into an origin myth for modern science. There are no scientists in Newton’s time, there are natural philosophers. The split between science and philosophy will come later, and in the meantime, glass is a philosophical tool. With prisms from Venice, Newton can split light and recombine it, disproving ideas about its purity that go back to Aristotle. He’ll still count seven colours in the spectrum, though, to match the seven heavenly bodies and the seven notes of the diatonic scale. The philosophers of the seventeenth century are fascinated by optics. Descartes and Hobbes have written on it, but Spinoza takes it furthest, making his living as a grinder of lenses. His craftsmanship is such that, ten years after his death, Constantijn Huygens Jr. will grind a ‘clear and bright’ lens for a 42-foot telescope from one of the philosopher’s old grinding dishes. Between them, these men are grinding a new worldview. Until their time, you’d look for infinity in the metaphysical. Now, with the help of their telescopes and microscopes, it has changed address, landing in the physical universe, in depths and heights of scale that lie beyond direct human experience. As the heirs to their ways of seeing, we know how the telescope revolutionised the story of our place in the universe. We might pause, though, over the difference between this new kind of astronomy and the ways of knowing that went before it.
Viewed from our end of the telescope, it is hard to reconstruct the weave of cosmology, where practical calculations of the growing season are inseparable from the dreamtimes of myth. But these earlier astronomies are necessarily relational: attentive to the evidence of the senses, they ask how the universe looks from here and what it can tell us about how to live here.
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How long have we been stargazing? Hard to say, but the stories of the constellations echo across continents and cultures, bridging great depths of prehistory. They figure in carvings on the oldest prehistoric structures. The arrangements of sites whose meanings are long since lost suggest their use as observatories.
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The Timeline (detail)
The limitations of the senses and the limitedness of these questions are giving way, by the time of Newton’s apple, to a new project of the technological extension of the senses and the pursuit of a kind of knowledge that stands nowhere and everywhere. We are still learning how to live with such a knowledge. We are still here.
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Meanwhile, the same century gives birth to the mania of financial speculation, and even the visionaries of natural philosophy are not immune. Newton himself went on to lose his shirt in the South Sea Bubble of 1720 – forgetting, it seems, the lesson of his most famous calculation, that what goes up must come down.
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The Timeline (detail)
4
Strange weather we’re having. A rain of comets comes slanting in across the wall in comic book colours. CRASH! BANG! POW! It’s March 1978 and the novelist Amitav Ghosh clambers onto the balcony of an admin building on the campus of Delhi University to take shelter from an unheard-of event, a tornado in northern India: Stealing a glance over the parapet, I saw, to my astonishment, that my surroundings had been darkened by a churning cloud of dust. In the dim glow that was shining down from above, I saw an extraordinary panoply of objects flying past – bicycles, scooters, lampposts, sheets of corrugated iron, even entire tea stalls. In that instant, gravity itself seemed to have been transformed into a wheel, spinning upon the fingertip of some unknown power.
Four decades later, in his remarkable essay on climate change, ‘The Great Derangement’, Ghosh will wonder why he has never been able to mine that experience for a scene in a novel. The trouble is, he thinks, that no one would believe it. And with this example he uncovers something about the nature of the novel as an art form, what sets it apart from other ways of telling, and how this marks it as belonging to the historical moment of modernity. The sign on the wall below the hail of comets talks about ‘gradualism’ and ‘catastrophism’, two schools of thought concerning the geological history of the Earth, and it is this that makes me think of Ghosh’s essay. Uniquely among the many modes of human storytelling, he argues, the realist novel is troubled by the introduction of unlikely events. Tornadoes, comets, tidal waves: these are the stuff of pulp fiction, not high literature. Outlandish tales become trashy, a guilty pleasure perhaps, but something the sophisticated reader is meant to have grown out of.
While that faith lasted, it stretched even to the study of rocks. The idea that the Earth has been remade by violent events was mocked as a primitive delusion.
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‘Probability and the modern novel are in fact twins,’ Ghosh explains: the offspring of a way of seeing the world that gives us the laws of nature and the order of bourgeois society. The high rhetoric of this worldview was always twinned with the darker logic of colonialism, the brutal order of the plantation. Now climate change brings home to us the catastrophes exported in the name of progress, and faith in history as a gradual process of amelioration falters.
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Destination Unknown (detail, seen through The Labyrinth)
As recently as 1985, a ‘New York Times’ editorial could lay into the theory that the mass extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by an asteroid: ‘Astronomers should leave to astrologers the task of seeking the causes of events in the stars.’ The lenses through which we see the world can also blind us. These days, the role of catastrophe is no longer seriously disputed: ‘WE ARE THE ASTEROID’ announce the LED signs erected at locations around the world by the artist Justin Brice Guariglia. But Ghosh has one more clue for us. It hits me as I wander back along the timeline corridor, noticing the bamboo pipe that slices through the shelf. More than 2,000 years ago, in Sichuan, such pipes were used to carry oil and gas. When Edwin L. Drake drilled his first well in Pennsylvania at the end of the 1850s, Burma was already exporting thousands of barrels of oil onto the world market. If the Euro-American version of industrial history was always less than half the story, where does that leave us? What kind of catastrophe are we headed into? There’s a temptation to label the asteroid ‘human nature’, to replace the narrative of gradual amelioration with a trajectory of implacable destruction: a species destined by its genes to be a destroyer of worlds. We’ll walk with this thought for a while, with the planets hanging overhead, but I want to say now that this story is also too simple.
Later critics, pointing to achievements like the Burmese oil industry, have argued that the cultures of Asia were no less equipped to bring about such a revolution. But Duara makes a different move, standing Weber on his head: let us agree that there is something peculiar about Protestantism, without which modernity as we have known it would not have been thinkable, and let us then acknowledge that its trajectory has resulted in ‘human overreach’. ‘Might it not be time,’ he
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And so I turn to Prasenjit Duara, whose work I first learned of in ‘The Great Derangement’. Duara begins his book, ‘The Crisis of Global Modernity’, by taking up an old argument from the sociologist Max Weber concerning the cultural and subjective conditions that catalysed the project of ‘rationalization, by which he meant world mastery by calculability and prediction’. Though it proceeded by ‘disenchantment’ and the secularisation of society, this project was made possible (Weber argues) by a certain religious culture: only Protestant Christianity could have produced ‘the modern revolution’.
asks, ‘to revisit the alternative traditions from China and India’ – and elsewhere, we might add – ‘to examine whether they allow a more viable cosmological foundation for sustainability?’
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Overleaf: Destination Unknown (detail)
Some of us may quietly wonder whether there is any life left in talk of sustainability. Cosmology, though: that does seem to name the undertaking, the work of making ourselves at home under the turning sky.
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Heraclitus
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‘For those who are awake the cosmos is one’
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‘not unfortunately the universe is wild’
William James
5
Here it is, out front, caught in the moment of its crash landing: a hypothesis in glass and steel, the comet that may have caused the climate event we call the Younger Dryas. Around 12,800 years ago, a 1200-year winter set in across Europe and beyond, interrupting the gradual thawing of glaciers and spreading of forests. Its name comes from the Dryas octopetala, an Arctic–alpine flower that thrived in the colder conditions. There are competing hypotheses as to how it came about, a local version of the old struggle between the catastrophists and the gradualists. All we know for sure is – something happened! An event on a scale that could change an ocean, sending enough fresh meltwater into the Atlantic to switch off the Gulf Stream and take temperatures across the northern hemisphere back to ice age lows. In wooded valleys across the Levant, a people known to archaeologists as the Natufians were living in settled villages when this sudden change in climate reached them. This was back before the beginnings of agriculture, but the rich hunting and foraging in those valleys allowed for one of the earliest human experiments in settlement. The experiment lasted 1,500 years, until the coming of the Younger Dryas. In ‘After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC’, the archaeologist Steven Mithen reconstructs the ending of the early Natufian way of life, the villages abandoned and the people returning to a nomadic existence. From now on, they would return to the village sites only to bury the bones of their dead among the ruins of their ancestors’ houses. Three things haunt me about this story.
The next thing has to do with the cause of the catastrophe. Perhaps they did see strange lights passing in the sky – they might have carried such a memory of celestial signs into the currents of myth that travelled with them – but of melting ice sheets or ocean currents, the Natufians could know nothing. The ending of the
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The first is the sheer extent of time involved. That village way of life was fifty generations old: in a culture with no written language, any memory that life had once been otherwise belonged to the deep time of myths and culture heroes. How unthinkable must it have been, that all this might come to an end?
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The Visitor
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The Visitor
world as they had known it arrived as an unsettling of the seasons: the rains that failed, the cold dry winter, the end of abundance. The climate change that undid their way of life was not a consequence of the way they had been living. Burdened with responsibility for the changes we have brought about, perhaps there is a lesson for us here. History is not a morality tale; its catastrophes are not always about us. Our dreams can be brought to an end by a change in the weather. This is the kind of world in which we find ourselves, and it always has been. Then there’s the final thing: a moment in Mithen’s telling of the story. In between his discussions of the state of the archaeological knowledge, there are passages where he sends a time traveller to walk unobserved through the settlements and landscapes he has been describing. He returns to the Natufians, first in the years of their village living, and then centuries later, as the descendants of those villagers gather among the ruins, bringing bones for reburial. As Mithen pictures it, the gathering is a time of storytelling, feasting and celebration, a respite from the hardness of the present. Yet afterwards, as the people go back out onto the land, they do so gladly.
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‘They are all grateful,’ he writes, ‘for the return to their transient lifestyle within the arid landscapes of the Mediterranean hills, the Jordan valley and beyond. It is, after all, the only lifestyle they have known and it is the one that they love.’
6
A photograph on the wall shows a pillar at Göbekli Tepe, a mysterious prehistoric site in eastern Turkey. When archaeologists first surveyed this round hill in the 1960s, it was mistaken for a Byzantine burial ground. Thirty years later, the German researcher Klaus Schmidt brought new eyes to the landscape and began to uncover a set of buried chambers, pushing the timeline of its construction back to the edge of the Younger Dryas, as early as 11,600 years before the present. Inside those chambers Schmidt and his team found T-shaped monoliths, up to five metres tall and weighing tonnes, set in circles of ten or twelve around a central pair of stones. Some of these chambers are over twenty metres across. The work involved in constructing them would have taken hundreds of people. Their discovery pushes back the story of megalithic architecture by millennia and shifts its focus from the familiar terrain of Egypt and Mesopotamia. In the Jordan valley, descendants of the Natufians had settled again by this period, building round huts on the site that would become the city of Jericho; but their architecture was crude by comparison with the structures discovered at Göbekli Tepe, hundreds of miles to the north. It is not only the scale of the construction that is astounding, but its decoration: the configurations of birds, animals, fish and human figures tempt the imagination, teasing our desire to find pattern and meaning. Schmidt called it his ‘cathedral on a hill’, a mountain sanctuary and a pilgrimage destination. The effort involved and the layered symbolism suggest an encounter with something vast. And the people who built it were hunter-gatherers, confounding the longstanding conviction that only a settled agricultural civilisation could undertake such ambitious works.
Archaeology deals in shards. Fragments of pottery, bone or glass, along with stone and metal objects. Fragments of time, partial glimpses, and stories that fill the gaps. The work of archaeology depends on patience and thoroughness, and still the joining of the pieces is closer to drawing constellations than completing a
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‘Göbekli Tepe changes everything,’ declares Ian Hodder, the archaeologist leading the excavation of Çatalhöyük, another major Neolithic site in southern Turkey. How many other sites that could change our whole understanding of the past remain unnoticed or unknown? It is impossible to answer, and hard to believe that the answer is none.
jigsaw. So much will always be missing; often the best you can hope for is to find the pattern of best fit. This is how timelines are made. I think of Hannah Lewis’s essay ‘On This Site of Loss’ about the work of the Iraqi artist Rashad Salim. As a young man, Salim was among the crew of Thor Heyerdahl’s Tigris expedition, when the Norwegian adventurer set off from the marshes of Iraq and sailed down the Gulf, across the Arabian Sea to Pakistan and back again, on a raft made of reeds. Some years ago, I visited Salim in south London: his studio felt like a boat, an ark of sorts, a salvage operation. ‘An inhabited artwork’, Lewis calls it. She describes the lasting influence of the Tigris voyage on Salim’s art, not least in the Headgear Project, where he seeks to categorise all the many ways that humans have adorned their heads, tracing the co-evolution of craft and consciousness. This undertaking is a deliberate contrast with ‘the “monumental” narratives we typically follow in school… skewed by their dependence on archaeological remains, while overlooking those behaviours and technologies which leave little trace’. It occurs to me that objects used to cut or kill or crush will last for millennia, while objects used to carry or heal or bandage will tend to disappear. This thought calls back to anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher’s ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Human Evolution’, according to which the first ‘cultural device’ was not a weapon but a container. The novelist Ursula K. Le Guin riffed on Fisher’s thought to offer ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’: the story as a pouch or a medicine bundle, a home for many kinds of experience, in place of ‘the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic’.
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There’s a theory that the mountain valleys around Göbekli Tepe served as a refuge through the dry centuries of the Younger Dryas. There’s speculation that the carvings on the stones depict the alignment of the constellations at the time of a comet impact that brought on that abrupt climate change. Whatever meanings it contains, Göbekli Tepe remains ‘the world’s oldest temple’ – for now, at least. The archaeologists go on gathering, sifting and sorting, marvelling at what we know and what we cannot know.
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The Timeline
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The Comet Denier (© Jessica Olien/The New Yorker; detail from The Timeline)
7
I leave the museum and walk up through the town, my head still full of carrier bags and containers. It turns out I am late and the priest is locking up when I reach the church, but she is kind enough to let me in. Under these old brick arches, ‘The Pilgrims’ Boat’ has come to rest: crowded with colourful glass passengers, a vessel full of vessels. Above it on the wall, a sixteenth-century fresco depicts another boat. ‘The warship Maria,’ the priest tells me, and she explains cheerfully that the Maria was part of the fleet that sailed on Stockholm in 1520, capturing the city and triggering a sequence of events that culminated in the Stockholm Bloodbath, in which the greater part of the Swedish aristocracy was put to death. Within three years, the stars would turn against Christian II, the author of the bloodbath. He was driven from the Danish throne and fled to Holland, taking much of the country’s navy with him, since he considered its ships his personal property. The Maria was among the ships he took, but she ran aground on the Dutch coast and the wreck was sold to a merchant of Genoa. This merchant had her rebuilt, and so it was that she saw out her days as a trading vessel in the Mediterranean. This talk of Scandinavian history stirs a memory from my first years in Sweden. Among my fellow students in the Swedish for Immigrants class, many are refugees from Syria. They rarely talk about the journeys they made, but some will have crossed the waters of the Mediterranean in crowded boats. One morning, we are sent out in small groups to historic sites around the city, to find out about its history and prepare a presentation. Our group is given the castle, a building whose oldest parts go back to the Middle Ages. I throw myself into the assignment, playing the good student. My classmates are dragging their heels. Finally, one of the women in the group turns to me. ‘Maybe this building looks old to you,’ she says quietly, ‘but we come from a city that has existed for 8,000 years. To us, this is not so impressive.’
In his latest novel, ‘Gun Island’, Amitav Ghosh sends two of his characters on a journey across land and sea in search of a better life. These young men are
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The process of glassblowing was invented in Syria in the first century BCE. The major techniques were developed within a few decades and remain substantially the same to this day.
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The Pilgrims’ Boat (detail)
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The Pilgrims’ Boat (detail, and overleaf)
part of a tide of displacement whose causes include the changing climate of the Sundarbans, the tiger-stalked mangrove forests that lie between Kolkata and the Bay of Bengal, a landscape which also figured in ‘The Great Derangement’. The plot of the novel pinballs through an array of coincidences of the sort that Ghosh has argued strain the boundaries of the literary form; and, sure enough, reviewers seem unable to decide whether they are dealing with a serious work of fiction or the Indian equivalent of a Dan Brown thriller. The narrator, Deen Datta – an antiquarian bookdealer who left Kolkata decades earlier – is on the trail of a Bengali epic poem whose fragments encode the journey of a seventeenthcentury merchant. The poem’s hero reaches Venice by way of Egypt and Turkey, a zigzag route that is mirrored in the journeys of the pair of modern migrants. When Deen Datta himself reaches Venice, he finds its tourist haunts and building sites to be full of Bengalis, an invisible caste of casual workers who are startled to be addressed in Bangla. Out walking with his Italian friend Cinta, they meet a young man carrying a bucket of ice and bottled water. She asks about his story, and hearing that he crossed from Libya in a rubber raft, she gasps: ‘Wasn’t he afraid to take such risks?’ ‘He says he never thought about it like that,’ says Deen, translating. ‘He was in a group and they crossed over together, giving hope and courage to each other.’ At which point, the young man breaks in and challenges Deen, grinning, asking how he came here. ‘Did you study the risks before you got on the plane?’
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The work of Syrian craftsmen travelled the trade routes of the Roman Empire and the craft of glassblowing spread widely across Europe. Yet sixteen centuries would go by before the first glass workshop was established in Sweden. This happened under the rule of Gustav Vasa, the strongman who emerged as victor in the civil war that followed the Stockholm Bloodbath.
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8
In 1972, while travelling in East Africa, Philip Baldwin falls in with a German couple, Walter and Katrin Hufnagel. They share a love of climbing that will form the basis of a lasting friendship, but also an interest in the making of bottles. Walter Hufnagel is a brilliant chemical engineer. The year they meet, he has just made the great breakthrough of his career. The material known as the fabric polyester – or, when used in packaging, PET – has been around for decades, but attempts to use it for the bottling of carbonated drinks have foundered on its permeability: the bottles may be lighter and less breakable than glass, but the drink inside goes flat! What Walter figures out is a low-cost process for heating and stretching the plastic into a strong, thin bottle that will hold its fizz. Thanks to his work, the drinks industry is about to abandon glass. Walter’s PET bottles are blown in moulds on fast-running machines. It’s a technique whose lineage goes back, however distantly, to those Syrian glass workshops, two thousand years earlier. Meanwhile, since the raw materials for the plastic are a product of crude oil, these bottles are made from the fossilised remains of tiny creatures who swam in ancient seas. And so we find ourselves on a beach, among the wreckage of abandoned vessels, the remains of empty containers gathered on a Welsh shoreline, watched over by a whole congregation of still intact bottles, some made and some bought. A too-familiar image comes to mind: Chris Jordan’s photograph from the wildlife refuge at Midway Atoll, half an ocean from anywhere; the decaying body of an albatross, its stomach filled with plastic debris, bottle tops, a lighter, strands of fishing net. The birds fish in the Pacific Gyre, the almost mythic mass of floating garbage that gathers within a circle of ocean currents.
The containers matter. The ways we choose to carry our presence through the world.
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Such stories haunt the conscience, but the beach scene here brings something further into view. It’s not just the general wastefulness of our way of living, but the particular materials that bring death and break down into ugliness, so different from the coloured pebbles the sea makes of our broken glass.
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The Law of Unintended Consequences (detail)
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The Law of Unintended Consequences
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A few years after Hufnagel’s breakthrough, Ivan Illich is watching the spread of plastics in Brazil, noting their hidden costs. ‘Plastic buckets from São Paulo are lighter and cheaper than those made of scrap by the local tinsmith,’ he writes. ‘But first cheap plastic puts the tinsmith out of existence, and then the fumes of plastic leave a special trace on the environment – a new kind of ghost. The destruction of age-old competence as well as these poisons are inevitable byproducts and will resist all exorcisms for a long time.’ The cost, as he describes it, falls on culture and nature alike. In moments of disgust at the consumer economy and its consequences, you hear people curse our materialistic ways, yet this curse misses its target. What I see on this beach is our lack of attention to the material. We are careless because we can’t afford to care, to think about the chains that wrap around the world with the hiss of an opening bottle. Look hard at the contents of an albatross’s stomach and you’ll lose your appetite.
P 93 The Law of Unintended Consequences (detail)
I think of Hufnagel and his bottles. He was only solving the problem that lay before him, improving on the technologies he had been given. It isn’t enough to work within the containers we are offered. Easier to see this now than then, perhaps. We have to question the containers, to break the frames and refuse the problem-formulations, if we’re to have a chance of – what? ‘Of making new mistakes,’ a voice says quietly, ‘instead of repeating the old ones.’ It is my friend Vanessa Andreotti, and I find the passage where she writes these things. ‘To open our imaginaries,’ she goes on, ‘as we assist with the birth of something new, undefined, and potentially, but not necessarily, wiser.’
In the hall where the planets hang, where the steel bars slant across and the comets are interstellar spermatozoa headed for their unknown destination, a glowing orange ball swings on a pendulum. A diagram on the pillar beside it explains the Precession of the Equinoxes, the cycle of the Great Year.
9
It’s all in the timing. I’m learning that from being around glass people.
The Earth spins at 1,000 miles an hour, the movement that brings us day and night, while revolving around the Sun in a little over 365 days. These are the beats of time that we share with oak trees and ants. There’s an impact story here, too: not a comet, but a planet-sized asteroid that hit the early Earth, or so they reckon, casting off the molten debris that became the Moon. This collision gave Earth the tilt it has to this day, the reason for the seasons, without which life might never have evolved. And with the Moon, it gave us the rhythm of the tides, completing the set of cycles that shape the time of living creatures. Yet there is another cycle, vastly larger, a rhythm closer to the time of mountains. This is the Great Year: a slow, consistent wobble in the axis of the Earth’s rotation, which appears to us as a movement in the position of the stars. So Polaris, the star that marks North for us now, will not hold true; rather, over millennia, the fixed point around which the northern heavens turn will drift slowly away, towards other stars, until some 26,000 years from now the circle is complete and Polaris resumes its current role. The same cycle can be tracked on the horizon, where the constellation in which the Sun appears to rise on the vernal equinox will change twelve times in the course of that great turning, moving through the houses of the zodiac.
The Ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus compared his measurements with those of his predecessors a century earlier and found that the stars had moved;
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There is a colony of quaking aspen trees in Utah that has been shown to be a single living organism, its root system 80,000 years old. The glass sponge is an animal that can live to 11,000 years or more; the oldest living members of the species may well have been around at the time of the Younger Dryas. For humans, though, these depths of time are first glimpsed through tiny changes revealed by patient observation.
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The March of Time
mention of his works by later writers gives us the earliest recorded calculation of precession. Newton explained that the gravitational forces of the Moon and the Sun, acting on the imperfect sphere of the Earth, created this wobble in its axis. He found the rate of precession to be around one degree every seventy-two years. Call that a human lifetime, and you get a sense of scale: one lifetime, by our lights, makes one day of the Great Year. Feeling small, I step out of the hall and into the museum garden. Surrounded by the phases of the Moon, a slice of Earth’s surface is modelled in a large steel dish. An island landmass that could belong to Le Guin’s Earthsea archipelago, it turns out to be a composite of the coastlines and borders of the territories Monica and Philip have called home. Turn a handle under the dish and you can make the tides rise and fall. A material has its own sense of time, calling people according to their temperament. ‘Like dogs and their owners,’ Monica laughs, ‘the way they match each other.’ So stone is slowness and patience, the piece you can leave and come back to and pick up where you left off. Metal is heat and strength, the forceful cunning of the forge. ‘Well, glassblowers are all speed freaks!’ Philip grins, and I think I’m seeing how this works. There’s something mercurial about these glass people, working at the crossroads of fire and air. As I look at them now, I realise, you only have to imagine points on their ears to see what kind of creatures they are. It’s all in the timing. Between the dish and the pendulum, I’m caught in the vastness of the nested scales: the tide that turns four times a day and the axis that brings the sky around to the same point once in 26,000 years, and both driven by the same powers of Moon and Sun. The unlikelihood of it all fitting together calls for awe. ‘To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment,’ murmurs Le Guin, quoting from a translation of Chuang Tse. ‘Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.’
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And the stars turning above us, and the deep song of the world below.
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Destination Unknown. Overleaf: The Tide Machine (with Moons)
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There’s a bit in ‘On This Site of Loss’ where Lewis writes about Walter Andrae. A German archaeologist in the early decades of the twentieth century, Andrae argued for the existence of highly developed societies whose architecture and technologies did not depend on stone or metal, leaving few of the traces out of which the museum timeline of prehistory was constructed. ‘But in his time,’ Lewis continues, ‘it was to the advantage of the European colonial powers to define human history as a sequence of centralised empires and their monumental architecture’.
10
In between, the watchers: monoliths of glass. They stand for the fragility of our pretensions, our brittle grandeur, mostly oblivious to our place within the scale of things.
Monoliths of glass: I can hardly watch their installation, they look too sure to slip and shatter. In their essay, ‘How to Change the Course of Human History (at least, the part that’s already happened)’, David Graeber and David Wengrow draw together a tantalising weave of recent findings from archaeology and anthropology to argue that much of what we think we know about prehistory is misleading. Far from a linear evolution from ‘bands’ to ‘tribes’ to ‘chiefdoms’ and on to ‘the kind of complex and stratified “states” we live in today’, accompanied by an inevitable rise of hierarchy and inequality, they find a wealth of other patterns within the ways in which humans have lived together and made life work.
As kids, our mums would say, ‘Don’t pull that face, the wind will change and it’ll stick!’ The story that usually gets told as the start of civilisation becomes, in Graeber and Wengrow’s telling, the moment when the wind changed, the point where we got stuck. Only after that could a given social structure come to seem the inevitable order of things.
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Over thousands of years, they argue, our ancestors moved between different modes of social organisation, according to a seasonal rhythm: ‘shifting back and forth between alternative social arrangements, permitting the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year, on the proviso that they could not last; on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable.’
P 101 Monoliti humani (detail, and overleaf)
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P 104 Monoliti humani (detail)
This all has to do with ‘human nature’ and so with what it means to say ‘WE ARE THE ASTEROID’. It’s not just Guariglia’s signs, it’s the anthropos in Anthropocene, the anthropology of our predicament. Graeber, the anthropologist, and Wengrow, the archaeologist, take aim at the stories of human nature laid down during the Enlightenment. Influential writers such as Jared Diamond and Francis Fukuyama, they point out, are still operating from a basic narrative framed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 1750s: it’s the story of linear evolution from hunting to farming to cities, the unavoidable threshold where it all went wrong or it all went right, depending on your point of view. ‘There is a fundamental problem with this narrative,’ they declare. ‘It isn’t true.’ Their exasperation is matched by that of the political scientist James C. Scott, longstanding director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale. In the introduction to his book ‘Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States’ he traces this framing of civilisation back to seventeenth-century England and the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, whose view of human nature is usually invoked as the polar opposite of that of Rousseau. What unites them is precisely this ‘sequence of progress from hunting and gathering to nomadism to agriculture’ in which ‘the move from one mode of subsistence to the next is seen as sharp and definitive’. Whether spun as triumph or tragedy, this is the template of the timeline on the classroom wall. Scott is no archaeologist and he presents his book as the product of his own surprise at discovering how little of this sequence held up to the accumulating evidence of recent decades. Yet the grip of the big, simple story remains powerful: ‘Dislodging this narrative from the world’s imagination is well nigh impossible; the twelve-step recovery program required to accomplish that beggars the imagination.’
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The repetition chimes in my mind, now, and I see Scott standing at the place where the power of scholarship runs out. The task of crafting other stories, constellations of meaning that might serve in the times around and ahead of us, belongs to those who work beyond the pale of footnotes, in the unmapped territory where images take form.
11
The plan for the bonfire places it between the museum and the sea, between day and night, at one of the turnings of the year. ‘This structure, composed of wooden detritus and found objects will symbolically represent civilisation,’ says an early proposal that I’m sent. I wonder what exactly we are burning. Lately, I’ve run into people who talk about the need to ‘reboot civilisation’ in order to rescue it from a trajectory of collapse, and I find that both words leave me cold: I’ve little fondness for computing metaphors, or for this big, simple story that always left too much out. Still, I don’t know if you can burn a story. What do we think we’re doing, with this ritual? ‘You may think when you look at our ritual, it’s like your theatre, because we dress up and we paint our bodies and there’s costumes.’ This is Takumã Kuikuro, a filmmaker and member of the Kuikuro people of the Amazon. ‘Perhaps the word “theatre” and “ritual” do translate each other, but it’s not really what we’re doing. What we’re doing is the nature; the dance of the fish is the fish. There is more than representation there.’ What separates theatre from ritual is a safety line. The deal is, we suspend our disbelief: we let it trail in the water for a while, knowing we can reel it in when the curtain falls, or sooner if we choose to walk out. When the dance of the fish is the fish, the line has snapped.
There’s a moment in the journey when the group that McIntyre is with converges with other groups of Mayoruna. He meets a man who speaks some Portuguese, who can answer his questions about where they are going, what’s going on,
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I catch Kuikuro’s words in a video where he’s speaking with the theatremaker Simon McBurney. They talk about ‘The Encounter’, a one-man performance in which McBurney tells the true story of a National Geographic photographer, Loren McIntyre. Lost in the Amazon, McIntyre is drawn into the world of the Mayoruna tribe, whose language he cannot speak, but who seem able to communicate with him through what they know as the ‘Old Language’. The Mayoruna are on the move, retreating deeper into the forest to evade the destructive forces of economic development. McIntyre follows them, losing his watch and his camera along the way.
P 107 Preparing the bonfire. Overleaf: as it burns, Earth is revealed amid the flames
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what the Old Language is. (‘It is not learned,’ the man says, ‘it is remembered.’) There is a ceremony taking place, a great fire is lit and onto it they begin to throw their belongings: tools, weapons, fishing nets, headdresses of egret feathers; all the beautiful and useful things that make up the material existence of their culture. ‘These things die here,’ McIntyre is told, ‘so we can return.’ So the people can be released from the bind these objects have over them, can become unstuck and make the journey to ‘the beginning’. On stage, McIntyre or McBurney turns from this scene to picture its counterpart: bonfires in every garden along America’s most affluent streets, people dragging out their belongings to be burned, Washington in flames, torching the Library of Congress – and by this point he’s leaping across the stage, taking a hammer to the sound equipment, yelling, Are we going to get rid of all this fucking shit, motherfuckers?! It’s not a ritual, though; it’s an artfully constructed work of theatre. As he’s about to bring the hammer down on his iPhone, it starts ringing, and he’s interrupted by the voice of his small daughter, woken from a bad dream. The anthropological study of ‘rites of passage’ starts with the work of Arnold van Gennep in the first decade of the twentieth century. He described the rituals through which an individual or a cohort of individuals pass, marking a ‘life-crisis’ and a transition to a new social status, and observed that a whole community can pass through such a rite. The burning ceremony for which McIntyre is present marks a ‘life-crisis’ for the Mayoruna: with this dramatic gesture of destruction, they are leaving behind the social reality of their recent existence, to begin again.
What are we ready to burn, I wonder now. Behind the safety line of artistic performance, how much is at stake in our ritual? Do we expect to be changed by it? Do we risk to come unstuck?
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In the 1970s, Victor Turner and Richard Schechner brought this anthropological work into dialogue with performance studies. Identifying the resemblance between modern theatre and the space of ritual, they made the distinction between the liminal spaces entered into in the rituals of a tribal culture and the liminoid spaces characteristic of a large-scale complex society, where an evening at the theatre has become a leisure activity.
As long as the linear chronology of the classroom timeline held sway, the encounter with the liminal seemed to belong to the worlds studied by archaeologists and anthropologists, but we know that this timeline is fraying. The liminal is not done with us; it is not only the Mayoruna who are faced with the end of the world as they have known it, such an ending is coming to us as well.
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John Berger writes somewhere that all mass demonstrations are rehearsals of revolutionary awareness. If the encounters we stage just now remain stuck in the liminoid, representations of a transformation we may long for, then perhaps they can serve as a kind of rehearsal. If so, let us rehearse care. Let us practise discernment, learning to choose what we do well to burn and what to try and save, in the thin hope that when the safety line does snap, we might somehow forge a ritual that can hold the hammer-wielding fury that haunts our dreams, that we might bring a world worth living for through the flames.
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‘The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have
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created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.’ Attributed to Albert Einstein
12
At the end of ‘The Timeline’, alongside the red ball on its bed of shards, there are four final clues. Among them is a reference to the project of the Ecuadorean government to incorporate the principles of ‘Buen Vivir’ (Good Living) into the country’s constitution, a way of thinking that draws on the Indigenous Andean philosophy of ‘Sumak Kawsay’. Attempts to speak about our species and its fate remain haunted by European philosophical debates about ‘the state of nature’. Arguments from Rousseau or from Hobbes get recycled as if they represent the view from nowhere and everywhere; as if they mark the boundaries of the thinkable, rather than a curious local way of seeing the world. This way of seeing the world was coloured by reports and imaginings of far-off peoples. ‘Preindustrial Europe had little that was in demand in the rest of the world,’ mutters Sven Lindqvist. ‘Our most important export was violence. All over the rest of the world, we were seen as nomadic warriors in the manner of the Mongols or the Tartars. They ruled from the backs of horses, we from the decks of ships.’ The gunboat and the rifle would extend this rule across much of the Earth’s surface, opening and smashing bottles, but force is a weak argument for philosophy; it seems doubtful that Europeans appeared as bringers of wisdom in the time of Hobbes.
‘You do know your noble savages had wiped out the megafauna of North America, ten thousand years before the Europeans got there?’ I’ve had this comment before, one version or another, when I write or speak about learning from Indigenous thinkers. There’s a hot debate as to what exactly happened, but the circumstantial evidence doesn’t look good: on multiple continents, the arrival of humans seems to coincide with the disappearance of most or all of the big
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When Europe’s nomadic warriors arrived in the Americas, they encountered other humans. Imagine if the astronauts of the 1960s had landed on the Moon and found footprints, and you get some sense of how this shook the European world. These other humans were the origin of the discussions that followed about ‘the state of nature’: debates in which they rarely had a voice, in which their many ways of living in and making sense of the world were replaced with European projections of savagery, noble or vicious.
P 115 The Timeline (detail; North American Beaver and acorns)
animals. Doesn’t this tell us all we need to know about the nature of our species? WE ARE THE ASTEROID, or what? But now, I think, let’s say he’s right: the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas were the heirs to a legacy of extinction, their distant ancestors responsible for driving out of existence the stag-moose and the short-faced bear, the Smilodon, the dire wolf, the beautiful armadillo and the giant beaver. This doesn’t cancel out the evidence of the ways of living they went on to create, their deeply embedded involvement with the land on which they lived and the creatures with which they shared it. It doesn’t erase the contrast between these ways of living and the smash-and-grab extractivism brought by European ships. Here’s what it changes, though: if there was wisdom in their lifeways, this was not a matter of innocence, a vision of humanity before the Fall, but a matter of experience. The people on the far side of the Atlantic were not living in a state of nature, but a state of culture: an achieved human relationship with the living world, whose terms were mostly illegible to the conquerors and the settlers who followed.
At the end of the Younger Dryas, in as little as a decade, the climate in Europe warms by seven degrees. The Holocene begins with bare tundra turning to forest. For a time, it is thought that the broadleaf trees survived in southern refuges, in Greece and Turkey, spreading steadily out from there to retake the continent. As dating technologies improve, it becomes clear that something is wrong: acorns and nuts turn up in times and places where they shouldn’t be. The newer theory talks instead about Cryptic Northern Refugia: pockets in the landscape which had their own microclimate; northern, because they lay far beyond the assumed distribution of a species, and cryptic, because they were so small they hardly show up in the record. From these seemingly insignificant pockets, with the help of human hands, the landscape was reseeded with oaks and hazels and wild cherries.
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When the sound and light show of ‘The Encounter’ is over, as the applause dies down, McBurney steps to the front of the stage. He tells the audience about his own journey to the Amazon and the request made of him by the headman of the village he went to visit: ‘When you go back and tell this story to your people, please tell them that we, the Mayoruna, exist.’
We are still learning about the persistence of lifeforms declared extinct or obsolescent, still learning to walk away from the tyranny of a single timeline, to recognise all that this way of telling left out. There is hope here, though not the kind we may have hoped for. Worlds end, and ours is no different, but if the Fall is the season of endings, it is also apple time, and there are seeds that want our hands to pick, to carry and to plant. And all of this takes place in one short moment in the life of an earth whose age we can hardly conceive, except as an empty number, as we are held within a weave of worlds, the whole spinning light show, dancing its way through the void.
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dougald hine is a social thinker, writer and speaker. He is co-author of ‘Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto’ (2009) and spent ten years as director of the Dark Mountain Project. He lives in Östervåla, Sweden, where he and his partner Anna Björkman run a school called HOME
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APPENDICES
appendix i
The preCession oF The eQuinoxes – a brieF explanaTion It may take a few readings to get one’s mind around Precession, but once done it provides a helpful and satisfying realisation of how our planet operates in its local universe. It is a straightforward concept but nevertheless a complex one to visualise – what follows is an explanation of how it works. The Earth revolves around its sun counter-clockwise, one full revolution every 365 days (and a tiny bit – hence leap year). While making this annual journey the Earth spins on its own axis, also counter-clockwise, at a speed of about 1000 miles per hour (1600 kilometres) completing one revolution every twenty-four hours. The Earth sits on its axis on the plane of the ecliptic (that’s the name of the plane of its trajectory around the Sun) at a fixed tilt to that plane of 23.5°. This tilt explains why we have four seasons, because as a result of the tilt the Sun’s rays hit the Earth’s surface at a constantly moving, changing angle throughout the year. Absent the tilt, and there are no seasons, and no life on Earth as we know it. At the spring and autumn equinoxes the rays hit the equator broadside. At the start of summer in the Northern Hemisphere they hit us most directly on 21 June, and in winter, least directly, on 21 December, with those two seasons reversed in the Southern Hemisphere. It is generally accepted today that the Earth acquired its tilt in a massive meteoric impact billions of years ago, which also knocked off a chunk from what we now call the Pacific Ocean. As a result there is no substantial land mass in that body of water, which comprises almost half the Earth’s surface and which also gave us the Moon. To these two spectacular gifts, the tilt and the seasons that go with it, we owe much of our known reality.
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Due to the pull of the Moon, and to a lesser degree the Sun (think tides) upon the Earth’s surface, the planet becomes slightly wider at the equator than at the poles, yielding a greater width at the equator of about twelve miles, which effect causes the Earth to wobble slightly but consistently as it spins on its axis. This is not unlike the effect one observes of a spinning top as it begins to slow down, although in Earth’s case it remains consistent thanks to the constant pull of the Sun and the Moon, and the Earth’s unchanging velocity as it turns on its axis. The Earth’s wobble turns clockwise in the opposite direction to the Earth’s own counter-clockwise revolutions, both on its axis and around the Sun. The wobble moves very slowly around its own arc of 21°–24° of inclination. It takes 25,920
years approximately to complete one full wobble. This cycle is often referred to as The Great Year. The reason this is called ‘precession’ is because the wobble causes the Earth to precede through the signs of the zodiac in the opposite direction of their procession through the signs in a normal calendar year, due to the Earth’s counter-clockwise rotation. The Earth’s Great Year of 25,920 years may be divided into twelve parts conforming to the twelve signs of the zodiac: Pisces, Aries, Gemini, etc. Thus each of these sections spans 2,160 years. This is approximate of course, it’s an average, hence we are vague as to the exact date we traverse from Pisces to Aquarius, for example. Depending on your arbitrary yardstick, it will be sometime in the next 100 to 200 years. This is why in astrology there’s that zone between each zodiacal sign in the calendar year when the change of signs is overlapping, running for several days. The same is true in years for the cycle of the Great Year. Hence we have the case of the Roman poet Virgil, who proclaimed, correctly, that we were entering the age of Pisces, symbolised by the fish, and with which we associate Jesus Christ. This prediction earned him the moniker ‘a prophet of Christ’.
These relatively straightforward scientific facts are considered today nothing more or less than that. Ours is a scientific age. We look at facts, not meanings. However, a long time ago this was not the case. The ‘ancients’ looked at the stars and the universe and their movements as having profound, even defining meaning which they wove into their cultures and everyday life. Although clearly not rationalists in the same sense that we are today, they nevertheless had a command of science that to this day leaves us scratching our heads. In addition, the highly precise and scientifically based artefacts and monuments that they have left us to discover and explore are replete with hidden meanings. With remarkable consistency throughout the world, these meanings are related to astronomical realities, in particular the zodiac and Precession. Likewise, many mythologists today postulate that the ‘myths’ of the ancients actually include historical detail, as well as the scientific details of many astronomical phenomena. This includes, fundamentally, the Precession of the Equinoxes.
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To express the foregoing in more comprehensible human terms, each degree of the 360° in the Earth’s Great Year wobble represents seventy-two years. Thus a person who is seventy-two years of age has lived through one degree of the Earth’s 25,920-year cycle.
Earth’s North Celestial Pole currently aligns with the star Polaris (Alpha Ursae Minoris)
Earth’s c.25,920-year Precessional Arc
Pole of the Ecliptic North Celestial Pole
Anti-VP
Earth’s current inclination to the ecliptic 23˚27´
Plane of the Ecliptic
Earth’s Equator
P 123 Precession, c.2,000 CE
South Celestial Pole
Earth
Vernal Point 5˚ sidereal Pisces
Celestial Equatorial Plane
appendix ii The Tides and The Moon The following explanation centres around the influence of the Moon on planet Earth. The Moon is not exclusively accountable for the tides, probably more like 70 per cent. The other 30 per cent is caused by the Sun and to a much lesser degree the other planets. All of these factors create a considerable amount of nuance in our story. However, the Moon is primarily responsible for tides and other crucial influences on our planet, and thus for simplicity’s sake we will leave out the nuances. The tides illustrate in dramatic fashion the power that the Moon exerts over its mothership, planet Earth, and by extension all living creatures, not least, humanity. That the tides are both a constant, naked-eye affirmation of this, as well as having significant effect on the functioning of society at several levels – not only on maritime navigation – make it a subject of enduring relevance. So first, what are ‘the tides’? Some 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface is covered in water. That entire liquid mass is moved upward and downward relative to the land four times in one day, thus every twenty-four hours: twice up, twice down. High tide, low tide. Approximately six hours in each direction. Note that tide is not to be confused with current. Current refers to the flow of water as it is moving towards high or low tide, its speed influenced by the proximity of land, narrow channels, water depth relative to the land under its feet, and so forth.
The Moon’s constant gravitational pull on the Earth is actually drawing all the water towards itself, thus bringing the water directly below it higher and higher as the Earth crosses the Moon’s position above it.
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Relatively speaking, the Moon stands still, only moving the equivalent of about fifty minutes each day, thus taking circa twenty-nine days to revolve once around the Earth (aka a lunar month), while the Earth hurtles along on its axis spinning at the rate of 1000 miles an hour, completing a full revolution of its 24,000-mile circumference, give or take, in twenty-four hours. In so doing, any fixed point on the Earth passes in front of the Moon once a day, much as it does with the Sun. The timing of this moment advances by those circa fifty minutes of Moon movement each day, which is why the time of high and low tide changes by an equivalent amount each day.
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Now, what’s said above is only half true. We say ‘all the water’ but technically it’s only in fact half the water. That’s the half of the globe that is facing the Moon at any one moment. The other half, on the ‘hidden’ side of Earth from the Moon is also moving outward, directly parallel to the events on its other side. Thus we are having two high tides at roughly the same time, and somewhere approximately in between these points, two low tides. The pull on the water on one side, due to the proximity of the Moon above it, in effect releases the water on the other side to go the other way, due to the reduced gravitational pull of the Moon situated on
the far side of the Earth. It may seem counter-intuitive at first glance, but that’s how it works. So what’s the point of all this? Well, the first answer is, ask any mariner, and especially any navigator. But beyond that, perhaps the bigger point is, it’s simply amazing. Wouldn’t you agree? An experiment to try out: if you would like to experience at first hand the powerful nature of all this (in the event you are not a mariner, and even if you are), find a low bridge crossing a tidal current. They are often to be found at river estuaries, or small saltwater creeks, etc. If you can, lie down and peer over the edge, say half an hour before the designated high tide for that place that day. And watch what happens. Gradually you will see the passing current in one direction move slower and slower until it finally stops and begins to move the other way. This transition is instantaneous. No visible ‘stop’ can be discerned. It’s going one way, and then it’s going the other. In doing this you will experience viscerally the power of the cosmic forces at work on our reality, and the movement of heavenly bodies, of which our planet is one. It is a beautiful feeling. And if you need further convincing of the influence of the Moon on life on Earth, some of the following may help:
· More babies are born when the Moon is closest to Earth, when the gravitational pull is at its strongest
· Full Moons affect our sleep patterns, causing less deep sleep and less sleep overall
· Sea turtles wait until the full Moon’s tide to come ashore and lay their eggs · A woman’s menstrual cycle is about the same length as the cycle of the Moon
· There’s thought to be a connection between a full Moon and people’s · Visits to emergency psychiatric departments increase in the twelve hours before and after a full Moon
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moods – a time more likely to bring about social tension and disharmony
· On Australia’s Great Barrier Reef a full Moon causes hundreds of species of coral to spawn together at the same time
· According to one study, animal bites were found to have sent twice as many people to hospital during full Moons compared with other days
· More fatal motorcycle accidents occur during a full Moon · There’s a greater chance of successful heart surgery during a full Moon – patients are less likely to die and experience shorter hospital stays
· If you want your seeds to germinate, then plant during a full Moon: the Moon has a gravitational effect on the moisture in plants, the soil and water table
· Emergency-room personnel frequently report an increase in cases at a full Moon
· Many marine creatures and organisms use the Moon’s phases as their clock to prepare them for regular changes in their environments – it’s known as the circalunar clock
· Vets report at least a quarter more emergency visits by cats and dogs on
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days surrounding full Moons
appendix iii CaTasTrophisM, gradualisM and The younger dryas
An important proponent of catastrophism was the American geologist J Harlen Bretz (1882-1981), who was one of the first to challenge the prevailing assumptions of gradualism. In 1923 he published a paper in the Journal of Geology in which he outlined his hypothesis that only a single cataclysmic flood could be responsible for the preponderance of broken basalt boulders and erosion in an area of eastern Washington known as the Scablands. His paper kickstarted a debate that raged in the Earth Science world for some four decades and made him an outsider among geologists of his day. As he wrote in 1928, ‘Ideas without precedent are generally looked upon with disfavor and men are shocked if their conceptions of an orderly world are challenged.’ His problem was that he could not provide or prove the precise mechanism that might have created such a flood. It was not until 1965 that evidence in favour of
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The geological history of our planet – and with it the history of humanity – is one of slow continuous change, punctuated by periodic catastrophic events. Many ancient cataclysm myths and traditions preserved by Indigenous peoples across the world tell of comets coursing across skies, razing the land and unleashing immense walls of floodwater, of thick black rain blotting out the Sun. Science, meanwhile, having previously divided its theories into gradualism (the idea that the rate of gradual change observable today is a guide to rates of change in the past) and catastrophism, has since caught up with the deep truths that native peoples have long known.
Bretz’s catastrophic flood theory gained more universal acceptance. But still the question persisted as to the cause of an event of such magnitude. There is today an extensive body of evidence, supported by a slew of peerreviewed scientific papers, that the rapid onset of the global cold period known as The Younger Dryas, some 12,800 years ago, was in all probability provoked by a giant comet hitting Earth (known as the ‘Clovis comet’ or ‘Younger Dryas Comet’). Current thinking now holds that the receding ice cap that covered much of northern North America during the last glacial warming period (including the area of Bretz’s Scablands) was the epicentre of this cataclysm and underwent a mass melting as a result of the comet’s impact, with comet fragments – some up to two kilometres in diameter – generating terrifying floods, tidal waves and vast clouds of mud-like rain, and was likely the source for the sudden disappearance of the Clovis culture which flourished at that time in North America, and possibly the Natufians in modern-day Syria, who had already embarked on living with settled agriculture. Core samples from Greenland's ice cap indicate temperature drops of 10°C and more within a decade, thus dramatically and suddenly reversing the long glacial warming since the peak of the last ice age some 20,000 years ago.
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The relevance of the Younger Dryas to human history lies in the fact that its equally sudden collapse after 1200 years of glacial revival very quickly – at most within a few decades – triggered the warming conditions conducive to settled agriculture and civilisation as we know it. Indeed the evidence of an almost immediate start to the building of that civilisation can be observed at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, which is where ‘The Timeline’ in ‘Walking in the Void’ begins.
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biography
1947 philip (b. neW yorK, usa) 1955 MoniCa (b. bern, sWiTZerland) They exhibit worldwide and live and work in rural Wales.
‘Battuto 2002’, Glasmuseet Ebeltoft, 2002
seleCTed solo MuseuM exhibiTions 2018 ‘Under an Equal Sky’, Canterbury Cathedral, UK (cat.)
‘Hot Glass Cold Glass’, Eretz Israel Museum, 2001
2016 ‘The Cathedral Collection’, St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh (cat.)
‘In Search of Clear Lines’, Benteli Verlag, Bern, 1998
2012 ‘Au-delà du verre’, Museum für angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt (cat.)
publiC ColleCTions Alexander Tutsek Stiftung, Munich Berner Design Stiftung Canterbury Cathedral Carnegie Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Castello Sforzesco, Milan Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia Corning Museum of Glass Denver Art Museum Die Neue Sammlung, Munich Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv Ernsting Stiftung Alter Hof, Coesfeld-Lette Fond Cantonal de Beaux Arts, Lausanne Fond Cantonal de Décoration, Geneva Gewerbemuseum Winterthur Glasmuseet Ebeltoft Glasmuseum Hentrich, Kunstpalast Düsseldorf Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo Houston Museum of Fine Arts Indianapolis Museum of Art Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg Mobile Museum of Art, Alabama Mudac, Lausanne Musée Ariana, Geneva Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris Museo del Vetro, Murano Museum of Applied Art, Frankfurt Museum of Arts and Design, New York Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Berlin Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg Museum of Fine Arts Boston MusVerre, Sars-Poteries Palm Springs Art Museum St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh Swedish Law Society, Stockholm Swiss National Collection of Applied Art The Toledo Museum of Art VitroCentre, Romont Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, Racine, WI
2011‘Au-delà du verre’, Musée Ariana, Geneva (cat.) 2006 McColl Center for the Arts, Charlotte 2004 ‘Cirque de Sphères’, Mudac, Lausanne (cat.) ‘Circus of Spheres’, National Glass Centre, Sunderland (cat.) 2002 ‘Battuto 2002’, Glasmuseet Ebeltoft, Denmark (cat.) 2001 ‘Hot glass, cold glass’, Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv (cat.) 1997 Museum Bellerive, Zurich 1995 Singer Museum, Laren, Netherlands ‘Venetian Tendencies’, Fondation Louis Moret, Martigny 1991 Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Lausanne (cat.) seleCTed design CollaboraTions Nestlé, Vevey Nouvel Studio, Mexico City Rosenthal Glas & Porzellan AG, Selb Steuben Glass, Corning Venini, Venice seleCTed booKs ‘Under an Equal Sky’, The Friends of Canterbury Cathedral, 2018 ‘Au-delà du Verre/Beyond Glass’, 5 Continents, Milan, 2011 P 131
‘Circus of Spheres’, Mudac, 5 Continents, Milan, 2004
‘L’Arche de Verre’, Céramique et Verre, 2011
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bibliography / suggesTed reading
The books listed here are as quirky as our Timeline – personal choices that have informed our thinking over many years. A great deal is left out; the list is merely the tip of the iceberg, but a good tip nonetheless.
ewing duncan, david, ‘The Calendar: The 5,000-Year Struggle to Align the Clock and the Heavens – and What Happened in the Missing Ten Days’ (Fourth Estate: 2011, first published 1998)
aldersey-Williams, hugh, ‘Tide: The Science and Lore of the Greatest Force on Earth’ (Viking: 2016)
Fagan, brian, ‘The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850’ (Basic Books: 2000)
berry, Thomas, ‘The Great Work: Our Way into the Future’ (Harmony/Bell Tower: 1999)
Firstenberg, arthur, ‘The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life’ (Chelsea Green Publishing: 2020)
berry, Wendell, ‘The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry’ (Counterpoint Press: 2019)
ghosh, amitav, ‘The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable’ (University of Chicago Press: 2016)
berry, Wendell, ‘In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World’ (Orion Society: 2001) brody, hugh, ‘The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers, and the Shaping of the World’ (North Point Press: 2000) Campbell, Joseph, ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ (Princeton University Press: 1949)
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Carson, rachel, ‘Silent Spring’ (Houghton Mifflin: 1962)
ghosh, amitav, ‘Gun Island’ (John Murray: 2019) giono, Jean, ‘The Man Who Planted Trees’ (Chelsea Green Publishing: 1985, first published 1953) goldfarb, ben, ‘Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter’ (Chelsea Green Publishing: 2018) gombrich, e. h., ‘A Little History of the World’ (Yale University Press: 2005, first published 1936)
Cavalli-sforza, luigi luca, ‘Genes, Peoples, and Languages’ (University of California Press: 2001, first published 1996)
gooch, stan, ‘Cities of Dreams: When Women Ruled the Earth’ (Century Hutchinson: 1989)
Chapman, Cate, and du Cann, Charlotte et al., eds. ‘Dark Mountain: Refuge – Ten Years on the Mountain’, Issue 16, Autumn 2019 (The Dark Mountain Project)
graeber, david, and Wengrow, david, ‘How to change the course of human history’ (www.braveneweurope.com – April 16, 2018)
Chatwin, bruce, ‘The Songlines’ (Franklin Press: 1987)
gray, John, ‘Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia’ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2007)
Confucius, ‘The Complete Confucius: The Analects, The Doctrine of the Mean and The Great Learning’ (Nicholas Tamblyn: 2016)
gray, John, ‘Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals’ (Granta Books: 2003)
duara, prasenjit, ‘The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future’ (Cambridge University Press: 2015)
hancock, graham, ‘Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization’ (Three Rivers Press: 1995)
dzielska, Maria, ‘Hypatia of Alexandria’ (Harvard University Press: 1996)
hancock, graham, and Faiia, santha, ‘Heaven’s Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization’ (Penguin Books: 1999)
eliot, T. s., ‘Collected Poems: 1909–1962’ (Faber: first published 1963)
hancock, graham, ‘Magicians of the Gods’ (Hodder & Stoughton: 2016, first published 2015)
eldridge, george W. et al., ‘Eldridge Tide and Pilot Book’ (Eldridge: 2020 edition)
hine, dougald, and Kingsnorth, paul, ‘Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto’ (The Dark Mountain Project: 2009)
Mann, Charles C., ‘The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World’ (Knopf: 2018)
hume, ethel douglas, ‘Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology’ (A Distant Mirror: 2017, first published 1923)
Marx, Karl, ‘Das Kapital’; ‘Capital’, translated by Ben Fowkes (Penguin Classics: first published 1867) McCarthy, Cormac, ‘The Road’ (Alfred A. Knopf: 2006)
huxley, aldous, ‘Brave New World’ (Chatto & Windus: 1932) Kingsnorth, paul, ‘Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist’ (Faber: 2017) Klein, naomi, ‘On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal’ (Penguin Books: 2019) Kolbert, elizabeth, ‘The Sixth Extinction – An Unnatural History’ (Bloomsbury: 2015, first published 2014) Kúrten, björn, ‘Dance of the Tiger: A Novel of the Ice Age’ (University of California Press: 1980, first published 1978) lachman, gary, ‘The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World’ (Floris Books: 2013) lapham’s Quarterly, ‘Time’, Vol VII, No 4, Fall 2014 lapham’s Quarterly, ‘Trade’, Vol XII, No 1, Spring 2019 lapham’s Quarterly, ‘The Future’, Vol IV, No 4, Fall 2011
McKibben, bill, ‘The End of Nature’ (Anchor: 1989) Meadows, dennis l. and donella h.; randers, Jørgen, and behrens, William, ‘The Limits to Growth’ (The Club of Rome: 1972) Metzner, ralph, ‘Sacred Mushroom of Visions: Teonanácatl – A Sourcebook on the Psilocybin Mushroom’ (Simon & Schuster: 2005) Michell, John, ‘The New View over Atlantis’ (Sago Press: 1969) Mithen, steven, ‘After the Ice: a Global Human History, 20,000–5000 B.C.’ (Harvard University Press: 2004) Monbiot, george, ‘Feral’ (Allen Lane: 2013) Muller, herbert J., ‘The Uses of the Past: Profiles of Former Societies’ (Oxford University Press: 1952) Murphy, Michael, ‘Golf in the Kingdom’ (Penguin: 1971)
logan, William bryant, ‘Oak: The Frame of Civilization’ (W. W. Norton & Co: 2005) lovelock, James, ‘The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity’ (Allen Lane: 2006) lovelock, James, ‘The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning’ (Allen Lane: 2009) Mann, Charles C., ‘1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus’ (Knopf: 2005) Mann, Charles C., ‘1493: How Europe’s Discovery of the Americas Revolutionized Trade, Ecology and Life on Earth’ (Knopf: 2012)
osbon, diane, ed., ‘A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living’ (Harper Collins: 1991) pirsig, robert M., ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values’ (William Morrow and Company: 1974) poynder, Michael, and Trevelyan, george, ‘Pi in the Sky: A Revelation of the Ancient Celtic Widsom Tradition’ (Random Century: 1992) Quinn, daniel, ‘Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit’ (Bantam Books: 1992) sheldrake, rupert, ‘The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God’ (Random Century: 1990) shepard, paul, ‘Coming Home to the Pleistocence’ (Island Press: 1998)
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lash, John lamb, ‘Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief’ (Chelsea Green Publishing: 2006)
sitchin, Zecharia, ‘Genesis Revisited: Is Modern Science Catching up with Ancient Knowledge?’ (Avon Books: 1990) smith, adam, ‘An Enquiry into the Natures and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’ (Penguin Classics: first published 1776) stein, Matthew r., ‘When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability and Surviving the Long Emergency’ (Chelsea Green Publishing: revised and expanded edition, 2008; first published 1994) Topalovic, radmila, and Kerss, Tom, ‘Stargazing: Beginner’s Guide to Astronomy’ (Times Books, HarperCollins Publishers: 2016)
Vidal, gore, ‘Julian: A Historical Novel’ (Little, Brown & Company: 1964) Wahl, daniel Christian, ‘Designing Regenerative Cultures’ (Triarchy Press: 2016) Walker, barbara b., ‘The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets’ (HarperCollins: 1983) West, John anthony, ‘Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt’ (Harper & Row: 1979) Wilson, Colin, ‘From Atlantis to the Sphinx: Recovering the Lost Wisdom of the Ancient World’ (Virgin Books: 1996) Wilson, Colin, ‘The Outsider’ (Gollancz: 1956)
ridpath, ian and Tirion, Wil, ‘Stars & Planets’, new third edition (Collins Pocket Guide: 2001) sagan, dorion, ed., ‘Lynn Margulis: The Life and Legacy of a Scientific Rebel’ (Chelsea Green Publishing: 2012) de santillana, giorgio, and von dechend, hertha, ‘Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and its Transmission through Myth’ (Nonpareil Books, Godine: 2018, first published 1969) schumacher, e. F., ‘Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered’ (HarperCollins: first published 1973) scott, James C., ‘Against the Grain: a Deep History of the Earliest States’ (Yale University Press: 2017) shelley, Mary, ‘Frankenstein’ (Penguin Classics: first published 1818) sobel, dava, ‘Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time’ (Walker & Company: 1995) Taleb, nassim nicholas, ‘The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable’ (Penguin: 2007)
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Temple, robert K. g., ‘The Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery and Invention’ (Simon & Schuster: first published 1986) Varoufakis, yanis, ‘Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: a Brief History of Capitalism’ (Penguin: 2013)
Wohlleben, peter, ‘The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World’ (Greystone Books: 2016) Zerubavel, eviatar, ‘The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week’ (Free Press/Macmillan: 1985)
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lisT oF WorKs
All works 2020 unless otherwise dated 1. The Visitor Blown and cold-worked glass and steel 350 x 250 x 100 cm 2. The labyrinth Blown and cold-worked glass and steel 560 x 1440 x 480 cm (approx) 3. Monoliti humani Blown and cold-worked glass 215 x 500 x 100 cm 4. The March of Time Blown and cold-worked glass, steel and electrical mechanism 520 x 90 x 30 cm 5. The seven days of the Week Blown and cold-worked glass, steel and paint 350 x 225 x 35 cm 6. destination unknown Blown and cold-worked glass, found rocks and steel 560 x 425 x 25 cm 7. The Timeline Found objects, books, photos, blown and cut glass and text 180 x 800 x 50 cm 8. Meteors for our Time Blown and cold-worked glass and steel 180 x 90 x 12 cm
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9. The law of unintended Consequences Blown and cold-worked glass, found glass and plastic bottles, sea glass, beach-combed detritus, sand, photos and wall text 142 x 200 x 90 cm
10. The Tide Machine (with Moons) Blown and cold-worked glass, steel and aluminium mechanism, and water Machine: 100 x 120 cm (diameter) Moons (four): 250 cm x 23 cm (diameter) at variable distances from machine 11. blue gateway, 2008 Free-blown and cold-worked glass and steel 230 x 110 x 50 cm 12. The pilgrims’ boat, 2018 Blown and cold-worked glass (incalmo technique) with battuto cutting, and steel 100 x 300 x 80 cm The bonfire Ritual burning revealing Earth suspended in flames Performed 9 October 2020
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The team: left to right, Philomène Roulleau-Thery, Monica Guggisberg, Léon Brachet, Philip Baldwin and Emma Lilley with Juanita, Tilly and Watson
aCKnoWledgeMenTs
Every time we undertake a large-scale project, whether an exhibition at a museum, a major commission or installation, we are confronted by the obvious, but an obvious that deserves and wants constant repeating: these things are collaborative efforts. They are invariably a story of teamwork and converged intentions that bring an idea to the ground and to its point of fulfilment. This is without doubt one of the most positive and lasting attributes of everything we do as artists. And we wouldn’t have it any other way. Our two assistants, Philomène Roulleau-Thery and Léon Brachet, have participated with us in the blowing, cutting and build-up of all the elements involved, and in the process have become master glass cutters in their own right. Their good cheer and enthusiastic hard work have been indispensable. Emma Lilley, our project manager, constantly saves us from ourselves and keeps us on a well-timed tempo of delivered results. Since she joined our team three years ago the realisation of our work has taken a distinct and marked step up. Our beloved photographer Christoph Lehmann, who has steadfastly documented our exploits for twenty-five years, and whose fabulous images form the basis of this book, resolutely faced down the Covid threat and made his way to the ramparts yet again. As elaborated in our essay for this book, Dougald Hine has made a massive contribution. Metal workers in Switzerland and Wales, Alain Nicolet and Dan Powell, have as ever been invaluable with creative ideas and solutions for difficult problems of construction. Mervyn Passmore, a rare and creative horologist in London, devised the clever mechanism for the swinging of the pendulum. Finally we must give a major nod to the museum itself and their exceptional staff of volunteers who have been supportive throughout. Pia Strandbygaard Bittner and Sandra Blach, operating under the constraints of Covid-19 and the absence of a museum director, have never wavered in their commitment and support.
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All of which is simply to say, thank you to everyone, as well as to those not cited here who have lent us so much encouragement along the way.
P 140 The Sphinx, c.1890
posTsCripT
Fifteen months ago we began our journey for this exhibition with the Precession of the Equinoxes, a fabulous representation of the functioning of both the planet and its peoples through time. Gradualism and Catastrophism quickly followed, by way of the brilliant research of Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia. From Catastrophism it wasn’t a big leap to arrive at the here and now, the accumulating circumstances of our own moment in time that many among us also think may be catastrophic, at least on a human scale. What keeps coming back to us at this exhibition – and in this book, which follows in its wake – is that there are so many angles to our perspective as well as everyone else’s. How do you make sense of something when there are endless conflicting viewpoints and we have almost instantaneous access to them whenever we wish. Should it be like this? First, forget the word should. Its dangers are manifest. And then there’s ‘always’ and ‘never’. As in, the Sun always rises. The Moon always sets. Uh-huh. Until they don’t. If ever two words shouldn’t exist – oops! – surely it’s always and never. Well, you see the problem. The riddle of the Sphinx, as yet unresolved, is a seductive case in point. The Sphinx: ever enigmatic, with that inscrutable smile. Did Leonardo da Vinci have it in mind when he painted the Mona Lisa? It’s tempting to think so. Received Archaeology presents the Sphinx’s story as a relatively closed book, universally agreed: the Sphinx was probably built circa 2,500 BCE in the reign of Khafre. However, Selim Hassan, noted Egyptologist, writing in 1949, had this to say:
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Taking all things into consideration, it seems that we must give the credit of erecting this, the world's most wonderful statue, to Khafre, but always with this reservation: that there is not one single contemporary inscription which connects the Sphinx with Khafre; so, sound as it may appear, we must treat the evidence as circumstantial, until such time as a lucky turn of the spade of the excavator will reveal to the world a definite reference to the erection of the Sphinx.
Flash forward to the turn of the century when a movement was building in the geological profession asserting that the Sphinx may be as much as 10,000 years old. How could this be? It's called weathering, and opens up a new perspective. The façade of the Sphinx is deeply weathered, and in such a way that some geologists now believe the Sphinx has to be much older than archaeological consensus claims. The archaeologists cannot concede this
point. If they do, their entire edifice as concerns ancient history could take a fatal hit (notwithstanding Göbekli Tepe, which appears to already do the job). It is an apt metaphor for many things in our world and we wanted to include it as an end point in our story.
P 142 The morning after the bonfire, October 10, 2020. Earth is still standing
Finally, we wanted to remind ourselves of the underlying river that runs through Dougald Hine and Paul Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain Project and their manifesto ‘Uncivilisation’. We are headed for uncharted waters, beyond our control, and different from what we have known. Yes, it may be a disaster. Alternatively, it might even be a blessing.
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WalKing in The Void philip baldWin / MoniCa guggisberg
Editors: Sandra Blach, Emma Lilley Graphic design: Lower East / www.lowereast.dk Exhibition photography (and p16, 24): Christoph Lehmann All other photos/images: Baldwin & Guggisberg (p143) Lars Clement/BusinessFilm (p107, 108-09) Alex Ramsay (p18, 138) akg-images (p22, 141) akg-images/Joseph Martin (p21) Translation: Christine Andersen Paper: Munken Kristall Rough 150 g / 300 g Print: Clausen Grafisk, Odense ISBN: 978-87-91179-31-0 © Glasmuseets Forlag 2020 Glasmuseet Ebeltoft Strandvejen 8, 8400 Ebeltoft www.glasmuseet.dk Texts © Philip Baldwin and Monica Guggisberg, Pia Strandbygaard Bittner, Sandra Blach and Dougald Hine All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical or otherwise without first seeking the permission of the copyright owners and publishers. Glasmuseet’s sponsors: Kvadrat A/S Blue Water Shipping A/S Kvist & Jensen Rønde Sparekasse Formuepleje Keinicke
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