Apes, Oak Trees, and "Carenthood"
An Oak Tree: Tim Crouch dramaturgy. Caring, love and complexities of motherhood. Sustainable Investing does not impact support for climate policy Nathan: a tale on speaking with an extraordinary ape.
An Oak Tree: Tim Crouch dramaturgy
“Carenthood” - the untold stories of parent carers
Sustainable Investing does not impact support for climate policy
Nathan: a tale on speaking with an extraordinary ape
Jo Wolff: Philosophy
I walked from Bond Street to Euston. I relished the mass of life and variety on this walk. I skirted a park. The short journey highlighting some of what I love of London. This pocket of people lounging in the park amidst the busy-ness of London.
I listened to Tim Crouch perform a lecture on his work and the dramaturgy of imagination: see with your ears.
This is what I wrote in 2005 on Oak Tree. In the earliest days of blogging.
This play teases with transforming nature of art, belief and imagination while at the same time produces a moving observation on the different facets of grief.
Quite a few years ago, I wandered into the Tate Modern. I didn’t have a purpose. No specific exhibition or anything to see.
I passed a glass of water on a shelf. I looked away. Looked around. Looked back. There was a label and some text.
An Oak Tree, 1973 by Michael Craig-Martin
Q. To begin with, could you describe this work?
A. Yes, of course. What I’ve done is change a glass of water into a full-grown oak tree without altering the accidents of the glass of water.
Q. The accidents?
A. Yes. The colour, feel, weight, size…
Q. Do you mean that the glass of water is a symbol of an oak tree?
A. No. It’s not a symbol. I’ve changed the physical substance of the glass of water into that of an oak tree.
Q. It looks like a glass of water.
A. Of course it does. I didn’t change its appearance. But it’s not a glass of water, it’s an oak tree.
Q. Can you prove what you’ve claimed to have done?
A. Well, yes and no. I claim to have maintained the physical form of the glass of water and, as you can see, I have. However, as one normally looks for evidence of physical change in terms of altered form, no such proof exists.
Q. Haven’t you simply called this glass of water an oak tree?
A. Absolutely not. It is not a glass of water anymore. I have changed its actual substance. It would no longer be accurate to call it a glass of water. One could call it anything one wished but that would not alter the fact that it is an oak tree.
Q. Isn’t this just a case of the emperor’s new clothes?
A. No. With the emperor’s new clothes people claimed to see something that wasn’t there because they felt they should. I would be very surprised if anyone told me they saw an oak tree.
Q. Was it difficult to effect the change?
A. No effort at all. But it took me years of work before I realised I could do it.
[...]
Q. Do you consider that changing the glass of water into an oak tree constitutes an art work?
A. Yes.
Q. What precisely is the art work? The glass of water?
A. There is no glass of water anymore.
[...]
I’ve always liked the piece because it strikes at the heart of both the playfulness and seriousness of how artists are trying to re-examine the world we live in. Ridiculous, profound, funny and sad.
II
The story of An Oak Tree is relatively straight forward.
A father, Andy, has lost his daughter, Claire, in a road accident. Claire was hit by a car driven by a hypnotist. It seems it wasn’t truly/completely the hypnotist’s fault as Claire was listening to music on a walkman/ipod.
Andy’s wife, Dawn, grieves for Claire but takes the attitude that one has to pull it together and soldier on, to deal with the facts; particularly to keep it together to support Marcy, Claire’s young sister.
Andy has a very different reaction to Claire’s death.
“Dawn went to the mortuary. I refused. If anything, in those first few days, Claire had multiplied. […] She was indentations in time, physical depressions, imperfections on surfaces, the spaces beneath chairs, surrounding blunt pencils, inside plastic buckets.
[…]
Dawn was diminished, She clung to material evidence. To her, Claire was a hair left on a bar of soap, some flowers taped to a lamp post. She was the photograph farmed and hung above the piano. For me, these things were no more of Claire than of anyone else.
[…]
I came to the roadside. I needed a hug from my girl. I looked at the a tree. A tree by the road. I touched it. And from the spaces, the hollows, the depressions, I scooped up the properties of Claire and changed the physical substance of the tree into that of my daughter.”
Just like Craig-Martin suggests.
Dawn tells Andy she is losing her husband. Andy doesn’t know what to do. He sees the sign for the hypnotist and goes to the show thinking that the hypnotist can help.
Here, we also discover the hypnotist has his own reaction to Claire’s death manifesting physically in his ability to hypnotise anyone anymore, except Andy who he doesn’t recognise at first when he comes to the show.
III
The story is relatively simple, however the performance structure adds a brilliant theatrical and transformative layer.
Tim Crouch plays the hypnotist, but the father is performed by a different actor each night. An actor – male or female – who has not seen or read the play until the performance begins. [I think it may be better with a female, but did not get a chance to see it with a male.]
In this way, not only is there an honesty to the performance but the imagination of the audience that transforms the actor into the father in our minds is paralleled by the transformation of the oak tree into Claire by Andy (and by the glass of water into Craig-Martin’s oak tree).
Brilliant.
The piece examines:
The layers of grief and our reactions to them.
The power of the mind, to suggest, to imagine, to transform “ the fact”
The power of the actor to transform a performance
The imagination of the audience to transform the actor
17 years later, I listen to Tim again on Oak Tree. Tim gives an example of the actor Maxine Peake playing Hamlet. This act of transformation. Finding a thing within a thing.
It occurred to me this is like the catholic act of transubstantiation.
This work is very relevant to my performance lecture work, and I think work like this has echoed down to my current thinking about performance.
In August 2005, I also wrote on Andy Smith.
“a smith is an artist who attempts to make accessible and poetic work. Most often employing forms of performance, writing and installation, this practice uses ideas of the everyday and social as its base, and build itself from there”
There was one particular performance that sticks in my mind (circe 2003). It was part of his series on London. We were both showing work at the Gate Theatre, as part of the ROAR season.
His piece was “London Calling”. There were about 40 in the space. The show started with Andy singing London Calling. After, Andy made us write down a description of an image that we thought of as our London. When we had finished, he read them all out. Our descriptions juxtaposed to weave a personal portrait of London – lyrical, funny, weird, sometimes disturbing; it was utterly brilliant.
It makes me ponder on the compounding nature of art engagement. As this type of technique I use in Thinking Bigly.
I feel bad many days about my caring responsibilities. The burden of care in my family - like it does so often - falls on the mother. I do some, and I try and do more, but it is unequal reflecting structures in society as much as particular circumstances.
Women’s stories lack narrative plenitude. Like disabled stories. Like many disapora stories. These stories are less heard.
My friend Salima Saxton has a podcast with Jennifer Cox. In this episode, she interviews Penny Wincer and Charlotte Adorjan. We know Penny and Charlotte - in part - because they are “our people”.
Our people because they have lived experience of caring. There is an autism thread running through this conversation. Caring is often unfair. It’s very often gendered. The burden falls on the women.
These are also the stories that are mostly untold. The untold stories of women, and carers. Untold stories of love and care. Untold stories of womens’ experience and the complexity of motherhood.
"I've had to embrace the fact that I am now a carer. It's really hard to get your head around that, and the feminist voice in my head is screaming 'Don't give up your career'. But actually, what I want to do is try to make it work for me, rather than me trying to change it.
The transcript of conversation is here and you can also listen to the podcast.
Does choosing a climate-conscious fund erode an individual's support for climate regulation ? Is sustainable investing therefore a red herring placebo ? This working paper attempts to address this question in a pre-registered experiment in the context of a real referendum on a climate law with a representative sample of the Swiss population...
Authors find the opportunity to invest in a climate-conscious fund does not
erode individuals’ support for climate regulation.
Note paper is not yet peer reviewed so comment to the authors can be helpful. Florian Heeb, Julian Kölbel, Stefano Ramelli, Anna Vasileva.
Heeb suggests:
"🔸 Even if sustainable investing is not as effective as regulation in solving societal challenges, if it does not harm political engagement, it is worth pursuing. Especially as political solutions often struggle to get a majority.
🔸 In this light, optimizing the impact of sustainable investing is even more relevant. We need pro-social investors to be as impactful as possible.
In no way should our results be seen as a free pass for greenwashing: And consumer protection and fair competition demand that every impact claim needs to be backed up solidly."
Paper available via my Linkedin.
Language lessons with an extraordinary ape. https://longreads.com/2023/05/09/nathan/
In the years since I have often wondered what we accomplished in the ape house. What exactly was it that I was a part of? Did those in charge really believe all that they were saying? I thought we were doing it better, in knowing no one ever needed to tear infant apes from their mothers to learn about the limits of language. The other ape language studies had got the question wrong, I thought. They all asked whether an ape could talk if we made them sufficiently in our image. I thought we were asking if we could understand each other as equals. The true test not being in the apes’ ability to speak but in our capacity to listen.
I thought we were different. Better. But, we were not, our bonobos no more equal than the charges of any other study. Our cages and facilities were simply nicer; our methods softer.
So much of my understanding of language, and its limits, came from Nathan. His silences especially. Language is messy and incomplete and variable and profound and decidedly unscientific. There is no single, controllable, independent variable. After all, there are so many things that are beyond the ability of words to express. So much meaning outside that which is merely spoken.
Language lessons with an extraordinary ape. https://longreads.com/2023/05/09/nathan/
From the archive:
Listening again. Everything Jo Wolff @JoWolffBSG said in 2021 is still relevant today.
We discuss how to value life and the relevance to public policy for healthcare, and Jo’s initial interest stemming from work on railway safety.
Jo gives insights in how disability studies informed his philosophy. How behind the curve political philosophy was last century and, in that sense, he apologises on behalf of political philosophy.
Jo is concerned over vaccine equity and we discuss what role and duty biopharmaceutical companies have and who should pay for vaccines.
Jo outlines his aspiration and idea of a society of equals.
Jo rates multiculturalism, direct democracy, Adam Smith, the future of the city, cryptocurrencies and pronouns.
We chat about the philosophy of musical performance seen through the lens of music therapy.
We end talking about what a productive day looks like and his advice for young people.
This sums up to:
Be Kind,
Think in other people’s shoes,
Think of where your power and privilege comes from, and,
Study subjects that interest you