Olafur Eliasson’s “In real life”, which is on until 5th
January 2020, is a truly must-see exhibition at the Tate Modern. All forty of
this Danish-Islandic artist’s installations push you into thinking beyond what
appears before your eyes, challenging your senses and your perspective of the
world outside the gallery walls. Room after room, the sculptures are enthralling,
and paintings and photographs defy categorisation. Each room comes as a
surprise.
The most thrilling installation is a 39-metre tunnel, pumped full of thick ‘pea soup’ fog, which confuses and amuses in equal measure. It is impossible to see more than one metre in any direction, and people appear and disappear surreally in the ether. Entitled ‘Din Blinde Passager’ (Your Blind Passenger), it is both disconcerting and exciting. The colour of the fog gradually transforms from orange, yellow, blue, purple and finally to white, further challenging your senses. Adding to this assault on one’s sense of sight, one’s sense of taste is also confronted: the fog tastes of candyfloss. Nothing is as it should be: the fog envelops people unnervingly. Nature controls humans – it’s the fog that seems to be playing with us. Unsurprisingly, Eliasson has a keen interest in natural phenomena, hence his thought-provoking incorporation of mist and light in this work.
The use of light
and shadow is also explored with ‘Your uncertain shadow’. Here, brightly
shining lamps cast shadows in four vibrant colours, getting smaller the closer
you are to the projecting wall. The different perspectives and the playful
element in this piece is particularly entertaining for the younger visitors,
who delight in chasing their own shadows. In another room there are several
kaleidoscopes, including one which is big enough to be walked through. It feels
as though you are part of an experiment. Eliasson’s hope is to provoke visitors
into recognising that there is more to these instruments of light than being
mere playthings. The reflections, refractions and somewhat bewildering use of
space in fact seem to unite the inside of the exhibition with the bustling
outside world.
At the heart of “In real life” is Eliasson’s focus on the environment and the pressing
issue of global warming. The array of Scandinavian photographs entitled ‘The
glacier series’ displays the melting of glaciers over time, allowing us to
reflect on our role in its destruction. It offers a clear yet shocking
presentation of the reality of the Arctic ice melting. In the final room, the
evidence of our destructive impact on the natural world crescendos. Along one
wall, a pin board is covered by news articles and images on this topic. Several
films in this room also discuss the exhibition as a whole and tackle the
relationship between such artwork and science in an interactive manner.
Eliasson does not refrain from making hard-hitting points about the
environment. This exhibition educates as well as entertains.
There is a vast array of
material on view, and at times the layout is unclear and confusing. It is too easy
to miss some of the highlights, like the fog tunnel, due to the
higgledy-piggledy arrangement of the exhibition. Perhaps, however, this is part
of the fun: we need to navigate the physical reality, as well as the ideas, for
ourselves.
If you only visit one gallery this year, make it this one. It is thought-provoking, fun, surprising and serious all at the same time. Eliasson’s originality ensures there is something to capture all imaginations.
The appointment of Ursula Von der Leyen as President
of the European Commission is an unabashed betrayal of the great strides which
have been made towards a democratic European Union. The progress made with the
adoption of the Spitzenkandidat (or
‘lead candidate’) system in 2014 has been singularly undone by Europe’s
national leaders. As the German Social Democrats have rightly complained, this
represents a return to the bad old days of a Europe governed by backroom deals
and political subterfuge. Nevertheless, Europe’s democrats must move past it in
order to save the dream of a strong, free, and democratic Europe. For those who
work to reform the un-transparent and undemocratic institutions which continue
to blight the European project the choice is dire yet simple: support Von der
Leyen or face the bloc’s destruction.
Plenty of excellent criticisms have been levelled
against the prospect of a commission led by Germany’s outgoing Defence
Minister. One of the best, by the Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde writing
for The Guardian, deftly highlights
how the political manoeuvring which led to her appointment will likely only
heighten disdain for the EU’s anti-democratic bent and will weaken the Commission
at a critical point. As Mudde predicted, Von der Leyen only won the support of
the parliament by the skin of her teeth, and she remains distrusted by its
social democrats, the left, and the greens, on whose support she will depend.
Her firmest allies, the European Peoples Party and Renew Europe, led de facto by Angela Merkel and Emmanuel
Macron, respectively, are the very factions whose abandonment of the popular
lead candidates Manfred Weber and Frans Timmermans created this mess. Unpopular
in Germany and unheard of in the broader EU, Von der Leyen will likely struggle
to govern.
It is vitally important that those who believe in the
European project band together to help her. If the new President is weak – as
her ability to gain the votes of just 383 MEPs, fewer than the 400 needed to
govern effectively, suggests – then the crises plaguing the European Union from
Belfast to Budapest will only deepen. When Viktor Orbán agreed to the
appointment of Von der Leyen, a candidacy partly engineered by President Macron
(a leading opponent of the Spitzenkandidat
system), he no doubt made the crucial calculation that Von der Leyen, a
President without the firm backing of the parliament’s democratic left, will be
weak and ineffective. This is exactly what the European Union’s opponents, from
Britain’s Brexiteers to the anti-democrats of Eastern Europe, want.
In order to ensure that the Commission can continue to
fight the good fight for a “united and strong Europe” (Von der Leyen’s stated
priority) the social democratic, green, and socialist left must work with her,
but she must also work with them. Having accepted and supported Von der Leyen’s
appointment, the Social Democrats will be looking for compromises from the
centre and centre right, and they should receive them. The pledges Von der
Leyen has already made – to invest billions in green technology, to fight for
the economic advancement of women, and to champion the rule of law are a good
start, but they are not enough. One vital concession which must be made is a
commitment to the long-term reform of Europe’s political institutions, and a
promise that never again will the Commission presidency be decided by a
stitch-up engineered by Europe’s national governments against the wishes of its
voters. To restore confidence in, and build support for, the European Union, it
must fully embrace democracy, a task which it has avoided for too long.
Reforms should be undertaken to ensure that elections
in the European Union matter. The Parliament, as the only body elected by the
entirety of the union’s people, must take for itself the power to choose the
Commission President and the power to initiate legislation. One means of doing
this is to create a set of MEPs elected in a continent-wide contest in addition
to national-level elections. Parties should re-empower the Spitzenkandidat system to ensure that the Commission is accountable
to the people. Whilst the realities of the European Union’s
pseudo-federal/pseudo-confederal structure mean that national governments must
continue to play an important role in its political process, backroom deals
between the likes of Emmanuel Macron and Viktor Orbán must not be allowed to
undermine the democratic process. If it is to continue to be fit for purpose
into the twenty-first century’s third decade, the European Union must face a
serious internal political realignment which puts power back in the hands of
the people.
It must also take real action to face up to the
problems faced by the continent today. These are not limited to the problems of
the never-ending Brexit nightmare or the increasingly rapid erosion of
democratic and liberal institutions in Eastern Europe. They also include
soaring income and wealth inequality, environmental degradation, and a refugee
crisis which has only been made worse by inconsistent responses by the EU and
its member states. These are all areas where the European Union has a unique
potential to coordinate action amongst member states, and which demand a
unified progressive response. To protect democracy across the continent, fight
the climate emergency, alleviate the effects of crippling income inequality,
and tackle the refugee crisis, the states of Europe have to work together, and
only cooperation between the centre, the left, and the greens to empower the Commission
can do this. This is a project which would require compromise between the
centre right’s reluctance to effect serious change and the left’s desire to
dismantle the neoliberal structures at the heart of the European Union, but it
is a necessary compromise.
If Europe’s democratic parties fail to work with one
another to guarantee a strong, progressive, and democratic union, they will be
as good as handing it to the likes of Orbán, Salvini, Le Pen, and Farage. The
next five years cannot be wasted on internecine squabbling in preparation for
another farcical set of elections that produce a powerless Commission. The
nature of Ursula Von der Leyen’s selection as Commission President is
regrettable, but the best must be made of it now that she is in position. The
fact that the Parliament’s moderate left held its nose and supported her is a
good sign that compromise is possible, but it must be reciprocal. At this
moment of crisis, vital reforms to transform the European Union from the
imperfect reality of what it is to the soaring possibilities of what it might
and ought to be are beyond essential. A better Europe is possible – we cannot
let it slip through our fingers.
Lia Mice is someone important. The experimental pop creator and film score composer combines dreamy vocals, and otherworldly sonics to create a kind of pop utopia that feels like something your coolest friend would play you at 3am in the middle of a hot summer night. Her most popular hit, Memory Maps is wistful and light, faraway sounds and lyrics combining together to create an abstract kind of story reminiscent of fantastical worlds like Wonderland: “do you remember a time we’d eat hills of cake and drink lakes of champagne?”. It’s beautiful, and more importantly, it’s unique.
In a time of X Factor and Spotify, it can be hard to create a sound that’s truly groundbreaking. It’s difficult to be unique without being unlistenable, but Lia Mice manages to be distinctive and genuinely good at the same time, and I would be unsurprised to see the chart toppers of 2030 naming her as an inspiration. Her real talent is in using a wide range of experimental sounds to create something beautiful and musical with immersive beats to tie the pieces together. She credits this to growing up partially sighted, stating on her website, “I’m always trying to sculpt immersive sonic landscapes like the ones I grew up in… tape disintegration is part of that too. I lived by my Sony Walkman and played so many tapes to the point of destruction. I love that sound.”. Lia’s not the only one who loves her sounds: she’s played everything from a clock tower in Manhattan to a Buddhist Temple in Tokyo, and has thousands of worldwide fans on social media. Her music feels like something to move to, and it’s unsurprising that so many people are keen to hear it live.
Yet we’re especially lucky because Lia is coming to Oxfordshire very soon. The producer will be taking part in Supernormal, a three-day experimental arts and music in Braziers Park, aiming at showcasing the most innovative talent from around the world. The festival aims not just to showcase fantastic artists, but to do so in a way that’s as accessible as possible for everyone regardless of background. I’d encourage you to go, not just to see Lia, but to experience something that looks like a truly exciting addition to England’s cultural scene.
The culmination of Enlightenment thought, the Encylopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné, defined torture as “an inexplicable phenomenon that the extension of man’s imagination creates out of the barbarous and cruel”. Before the 18th century, torture was essential to social order, with a theatrical function reflected by gleefully macabre representations in verse. The changing depictions in literature parallel radical shifts in Western attitudes. From original Biblical narratives of divine punishment, atrocity, used to stir fear or repulsion and threaten its audience away from offensive behaviour has developed into a means of expressing the irrational and incomprehensible cruelty of humanity and human experience. Yet today’s desensitised society looks complacently upon once-shocking images, from Aylan Kurdi to Oscar Ramirez and his daughter Valeria; in many respects, our indifferent consumption of the spectacle of suffering has progressed little from the days of the public hanging.
Atrocity’s
original function was a practical one: to retain the order of power by
discouraging disobedience. The most seminal depiction of “the ritual of armed
law, in which the prince (shows) himself both as head of justice and head of
war” comes in form of the Old Testament. God is judge, jury, and executioner in
what Foucault aptly termed the “liturgy of punishment”; he is also the
‘prince’, the institution whose principles have been offended. The emotional
volatility of this self-proclaimed “jealous God” leads him to acts of
methodical and stylised cruelty which set a precedent for human imitators. His
punishment of original sin- the original punishment- sees him curse the
serpent with an emphasis on both physicality and the vicious pettiness that
will characterise torture for centuries to come:
“On your belly will you go, and dust you will eat, all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel…”
An
eternity of eating dust is a creative punishment- it combines mutilation (the
loss of the serpent’s legs) with humiliation. The serpent could thus be the
original torture victim. In any case, Original Sin is met with Original
Consequences, a precedent continued throughout the Old Testament in exotic and
gruesome fashion: the Ten Plagues, Sodom and Gomorrah, two bears mauling 42
children to death for mocking a bald guy (4 Kings 2:23-24). Dante picks up this
baton with glee in Purgatorio, elucidating equally creative punishments
for a variety of sins in the nine circles of hell. Of all the beautiful pieces
of music, art, and poetry inspired by the Christian faith, this verse is surely
a standout:
“Reaching that point and looking down, we saw that all of them were plunged in diarrhoea flowing, it seemed, from human cubicles… I noticed one whose head was foul with shit…
But he screamed out at me: ‘Why gawp like that?’ ‘Because,’ I said, ‘if I remember well, I’ve seen you once before, with drier coiffure. You are from Lucca. Alessio Interminei.’
Dante’s
dramatic persona is as the passive observer, merely reporting on the fate that
God has in store for flatterers like Alessio; in reality, the punishment and
scenario are of the author’s own devising. In this case, God provides not only
the template but the excuse for torture- although Dante committed no
physical violence against Interminei, he is torturing a real person in the fictional
domain, “(making) the guilty man the herald of his own condemnation”, as
Foucault would put it. Dante’s Hell is the apogee of the ‘action and reaction’
atrocity narrative: while earthly suffering may be meted out as punishment by
mortals, God has the power to inflict eternal suffering. While on the one hand
this doctrine is tempered in the New Testament, with Jesus taking on physical
and spiritual agony so that the real culprits might not suffer, this new
ideology turns more closely instead to the theatrical aspect of torture: the
emphasis on physical mutilation is translated into the literal theatre of the
Eucharist, constantly reenacting elements of betrayal, murder and cannibalism.
Outrages against Christian morality, and their equally outrageous punishments, formed the basis of pre-Enlightenment literature from the morality play to its successor, the Jacobean revenge tragedy. The latter provided a typically gruesome and highly stylised investigation into cause and effect, showcasing the ever-popular element of ritualistic mutilation as an answer to moral atrocity. ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore ticks all these boxes, centering on an incestuous sibling relationship and taking the audience on a whistle-stop tour from cast out eyes and letters written in the author’s blood to a climax of the main character bounding on stage with his sister’s heart kebabbed on a dagger. Yet it might also be viewed as an early attempt to develop the use of torture from simple condemnation to more complex moral questioning; the controversy that dogged the play into the 20th century derived not so much from the subject matter as from the author’s failure to condemn his protagonist, instead portraying him as a virtuous man overcome by irresistible, sinful passion.
The revenge play exemplifies not only the entanglement of human nature with the horrific, but the endurance of human obsession with this relationship. Thomas Pynchon parodies the genre in 1966’s Crying of Lot 49, where the fictional Jacobean ‘Courier’s Tragedy’ is used to link the barbarity of the pre-Enlightenment era with that of World War II, a technique viewed by American critic Sima Farshid as a “simulacrum”, after Jean Baudrillard’s theory of mirrored representations of reality. This is the postmodern face of the horrific: it is a nuanced and self-referential successor to the binary of action and consequence conveyed through extreme and visceral examples in the Bible, or at the 18th-century gibbet.
Before
the Enlightenment, daily life was saturated in and indeed thrived upon violence:
upon the introduction of the guillotine, French crowds complained that they
couldn’t see the execution, and began chants of “give us back our gibbet”.
Literary depictions of violence were an effective means of social commentary, as
they were grounded in a real-life understanding. In Foucault’s words, when
witnessing “the spectacle of suffering truly endured, one could decipher crime
and innocence, past and future, here below and eternal”. This connection with
brutality died away along with the custom of ritualistic public mutilation, to
the point where depictions of fictional violence, much less the real thing, could
evoke shock and horror.
The return to extreme dehumanisation and
brutality with the Second World War jolted the West out of its moral
complacency, demanding a new language to account for an unprecedented kind of
atrocity. Violence was stripped of its novelty; accounts which would have
commanded the entire front page of a Victorian broadsheet were now innumerable,
indistinguishable, stripped of their power to move.
Vasily Grossman with the Red Army in Schwerin, 1945
Writing
about the Holocaust, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the Terror Famine in the
Ukraine, Vasily Grossman was by definition writing about violence and atrocity;
however, his response to the unfathomable scale of the horror was to recognise
the futility of attempting an objective account of it, and his works are not
centred around depictions of violence. In an effort to form a modern response
to barbarity which did not belong to the modern day yet had come to define it, Grossman
focuses on intimate accounts of the depth of individual human life and
experience, contrasted with reminders of the scale on which these lives were
wiped out. In An Armenian Sketchbook, he devotes a paragraph to the
sufferings of his aunt, an uneducated, ordinary woman evacuated from Odessa via
the Semyonov Pass, after losing her husband and children to state oppression,
suicide, or war, and all her Jewish relatives to the Nazis.
“I asked my companions to tell me about the great men who had travelled this wonderful road. It didn’t occur to me to say, ‘You know, my aunt went along this same road in the winter of 1941. She was just one of many, an anchovy or sardine in a great shoal of anchovies or sardines. And, as you know, the biographical details of anchovies and sardines do not enter the pages of history.”
The
true story of Grossman’s aunt differs from this version; she was highly educated,
and the deaths of her children are fictionalized. Grossman seems to have wished
to emphasise not only her Jewishness but the ordinariness, during these years
of what might otherwise seem an improbable intensity of tragedy. Repeated
accounts of violence could never hope to provide an account of the Holocaust,
and would ultimately cheapen it, partly due to humanity’s history of
voyeuristic enjoyment in human suffering. Instead, Grossman turns to the accessible
and universal to evoke the unimaginable scale of what was lost.
“The ewe had bright eyes, rather like glass grapes. There was something human about her- something Jewish. The inhabitants of a Jewish ghetto would probably have looked at their Gestapo jailers with the same alienated disgust if the ghetto had existed for millennia, if day after day for five thousand years the Gestapo had been taking old women and children away to be destroyed in gas chambers.
Oh God, how desperately mankind needs to atone, to beg for forgiveness. How long mankind needs to beg the sheep for forgiveness.”
Foucault
sees humanity as overeager to celebrate its ‘humanisation’, to
congratulate itself on moral advances from the 18th century onwards which have
civilised away a long history of cruelty and indifference. One has only to look
at the current debate over the definition of ‘concentration camp’ to see that
we are now in another period of moral complacency: Enlightenment questions of
atrocity committed “with scandalous openness or secret cunning” are
particularly pertinent in the internet age, where anyone with a mobile phone
can instantly watch victims of human trafficking in violent porn, or footage of
strangers’ last moments on the Watch People Die subreddit.
Image rights: Phillip Medhurst / CC-BY-SA-3.00 – Noah’s Ark and the Deluge, Genesis cap. 7
Here are some things that some people
have said about Elvis:
“I wasn’t just a fan, I was his brother.” —James Brown
“It was like he came along and whispered some dream in everybody’s ear, and somehow we all dreamed it.” —Bruce Springsteen
Did they really know
Elvis? Funnily enough, they might have done. I wonder, though, whether in their own
fame, and after having actually met him, they would still say they feel the
same. As the man himself said:
“The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.” ― Elvis Presley
There’s a fundamental
difference between the way that people perceive the man, and the way the man
perceives the people. This is not a reciprocal relationship—it’s one-way. We
can see that there’s an illusion of connection: this is the driving force
behind the phenomenon of celebrity. Only now, celebrity has met
with the technology that allows it to reach its full commercial and social
potential.
The reason we’re so
interested in celebrity is quite simple: we aren’t one.
They illuminate the central conflict of experience: though we know we are
insignificant in the grand scheme of things (sorry for the reminder), we have
no way of observing the world in a way which reflects that fact. We only know
the world in first person; the ‘subjective centrality’ of our lives is in
direct opposition with our objective insignificance. Celebrities are a way of
managing this troubling truth, because the illusion of connection makes us feel
we know them intimately as no other does—but, in the back of our minds, we know
that everybody thinks this.
The figure of the
celebrity shapes, on the one hand, the social consciousness: it is both a
product of and producer of the society of which it is a part. That is to say,
it is born of the media and, once born, sustains that very same media by the
content it produces as it vies for relevance. Though
I’m sceptical of blindly following Marshall McLuhan’s dictum ‘the medium is the
message’ (well, yes, but come on, people do say things, don’t they?
There’s content in what they say?), I think in this case it might hold. The
very existence of an article about a celebrity demonstrates their presence – and
that we should talk about them. McLuhan exemplifies this through the idea of a public
opinion poll, which both gauges what that opinion is, but also proves that
there is a public opinion in the first place. A magazine article does the same
thing for celebrity.
The celebrity also
sustains the individual, with what, in some cases, may be false nourishment.
People absorbing media —believing in both the idea of media and in what it says—
is what sustains it. A young girl might think: “if that video says this about
Miley Cyrus, it must be true, and I ought to copy her because everyone likes
her—otherwise the video wouldn’t have been made— and that’ll help me to fit in
with everyone else”. She would then keep absorbing media in order to get more
information, and the cycle continues because the media outlet will fabricate
content which matches the image of the star to keep selling. As she absorbs it,
she changes her behaviour: in this way celebrity becomes a yardstick, an ‘other’
around which to construct ourselves.
Byron brooding ‘George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron’ by Richard Westall
There used to be a
subtle depth to celebrity: take Byron, for instance, or Liszt—essentially the
rockstars of their ages, known from afar. People talked about them; they
speculated, word of mouth and rumour accumulated with the force of avalanches,
and their legends spread. But the modes of reproduction couldn’t circulate
masses of information about them; media was limited in time, space, and, through
censors, even in content. Thus, it was always a one-way connection, which
allowed no mistake: you couldn’t really imagine Byron was talking back to you
or played any role in your life. He was merely a symbol. He may as well have
been fictional.
Technology developed,
and these mediated representations of a person drew closer and closer to what
looked like reality—but was actually a rather a meagre construction of it. The
illusion of connectivity grew and where there is a feeling of emotional
investment, so come the Omnipotent Forces of Moneys to profit from that
emotion. America, predictably, led the way in this, and Hollywood became a
factory of images.
Now we come back to
Elvis. If we note, though, the past tense, the sort of wistful tone of Brown
and Springsteen, we see that they’re reliving what they used to think. Any
magic that used to hang over Elvis like a halo has dissipated to some extent,
because at this point, they too are famous.
They were once like us.
(I say ‘us’ assuming you’re not famous.) When they become like Elvis, the
intoxicating thing about him—the strange oscillation between his distance and
his closeness to them—loses its power. The twentieth century, a time of
exploding advancement, of television, of broadcasting, was a breeding ground
for feelings of closeness with people who existed worlds away. So frequent and
intense did intrusions of media into daily life become that, I would argue, an
illusion of ‘two-way’ connection emerged. This connection needs to be illusory;
if you actually become friends with a celebrity, and develop a real two-way
connection, then you become interested in them in a completely different way.
The illusion of two-way
connection creates a real sense of inspiration which shapes the way we think
about ourselves. Psychologists call it ‘motivation by association.’ “If this
man Elvis can do it, then so can I.” Of course, everybody else had the same
access to him. The more media outlets, though, and the more there was a more
regular sense of his face and voice being seen and heard everywhere, the
greater was the feeling that one was ‘plugged-in’ to a direct line to Elvis—and
wouldn’t we all just love one of those.
Celebrities became
symbols of themselves—plus something else, something powerful. The frameworks
of mediated representation—the four sides of the TV and the billboard, the bandwidths
of the radio—infused their personality with an extra mystique. The difference
between Marilyn Monroe and Byron was that Monroe was that much more in the
public eye. Paradoxically, the more she is presented, the more she becomes
flat: the more the public feels they know everything about her.
Pregnant Kim Kardashian, Image Rights: Larry Busacca (CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0)
Here we reach the
present day —yes, I’m going to talk about ‘influencers.’ Their goal is to
create the ultimate ‘two-way’ connection, something that was previously impossible.
They can literally interact with fans. The product is now synonymous with the
advertisement, because, as mentioned, a celebrity is both a product of and a
reproducer of a commercial society. The celebrity can now directly sell their
personality to brands.
With respect to the ‘flatness’
and ‘depth’ which I’ve mentioned, I’d say that the modern celebrity now appears
to be completely flat, which is where their new interest and marketability
comes from. If we take the Kardashians, who are nothing if not ‘known for their
knownness’—having very little to actually make them famous (well)—we feel we
completely understand them. I’m not saying that there isn’t more to them than
what Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Instagram present, but the
illusion which reality television casts is one of a perfect facsimile of the
Kardashians’ lives. The show requires us to believe that we’re seeing
everything, even though that may not be the case.
Unlike in Byron’s time, the media is no longer restricted by
platform or by time and space. Social media eliminates
those limitations. Internet influencers are closer to us than any stranger has
ever been. Imagining that we’re able to see everything in the Kardashians’ lives
makes us aware of their similarity to us, but also highlights their differences.
We like watching (bear with me even if you don’t) because we see distant lives
of glitz and glamour; but then, we also know they are only people, because we’ve
watched their children grow up. They are similar, therefore relatable; but their
otherness also makes us feel we are more, counters our insignificance, because
we define ourselves against them: “I’m more than that. I’ve got more nuance
than that.”
The Kardashians and the
internet celebrities have weaponised personality. They harness the potential of
the media to beam a commercialised, cultivated image of themselves straight
into our everyday lives; it is all the more powerful because we actively choose
to follow them. And we choose to follow them because other people follow them;
it is only the technology that has changed. They are free to perform relatability;
brands love it because it automatically inserts their product into the everyday
life of an audience.
So, things have
changed. Celebrities used to be used to be symbols. Now they rely on seeming
completely and utterly themselves, on creating the illusion (is it an
illusion?) of a two-way relationship. This, if it is nothing else, is the most
powerful commercial model yet. How long will it last? Will they always seem so
authentic? Or perhaps they’re more like Alexander McQueen’s piece depicting
Kate Moss, from his 2006 ‘Widows of Culloden’ show in Paris—a hologram,
strangely close and ever, ever distant.
The Oxford Student Union has been awarded an NUS Quality Student Award following a two-day assessment.
The Awards are an annual celebration of the work which Union’s undertake each day.
A representative from the National Union of Students (NUS) and an independent assessor visited the Oxford to review twelve elements of the SU, including leadership, engagement, and government.
The Quality Assessment Team decided to give the Oxford SU with a ‘good’ Quality Students’ Union and an award for their work over the past year, especially their “ground breaking work on Democracy”.
Meeting with Oxford SU staff, University Staff, and students, the panel was impressed by the work on Student Council, and the clear and easy Governance.
The creation of Projects, which enable students to deliver real change in a number of individual areas, also impressed the assessors.
Student Projects allow students to start their own projects which matter to them. The SU helps students to kick start their projects by piecing together a project proposal document with a budget and plan. Support from the Student Engagement staff team continues throughout the process.
Ryan Bird, CEO, at Oxford SU said: “I am so proud of what we have achieved so far this year, with the support of the SU staff team, students and volunteers. I am grateful for their continued hard work. The SU has built a reputation of providing strong services to our students and is committed to ensuring all students have a voice on issues that matter to them.”
“We will continue to strive to reach and engage more students in our life-changing work, from campaigning on access to education to improving access to libraries for students with disabilities to helping tackle climate change.”
A former Oxford University employee accused of fatally
stabbing a man in Chicago has pleaded guilty, it was announced on Thursday.
Andrew Warren, who was a treasury assistant at Somerville College at the time of the murder, attacked his victim while he was sleeping, according to a plea agreement released by the court.
Warren also agreed to give evidence against his co-defendant,
Wyndham Lathem, in exchange for a lesser sentence of 45 years.
The pair were charged with first-degree murder for the killing of Trenton Cornell-Duranleau. A hair stylist from Michigan, his body was found with his throat slit and 70 stab wounds in July 2017.
A nationwide manhunt was launched for Warren and the former
Northwestern Professor, Wyndham Lathem, who lived in the apartment and was
identified as Cornell-Duranleau’s boyfriend.
After the body of Mr Cornell-Duranleau was found, Warren was suspended and subsequently fired from his job at Somerville College.
Natosha Toller, an assistant state attorne in Chicago, described the plan as a sexual fantasy. Warren and Lathem began communicating online in the month before the murder.
Abandoning the original plan to commit suicide following the
murder, the pair fled Chicago and headed to California, stopping at a public
library in which they made large donations in Cornell-Duranleau’s name.
Warren eventually handed himself in after eight days on the run in San Francisco, and Lathem gave himself up in Oakland.
Somerville College has been contacted for a comment.
With Highways England in line to open a consultation on the proposed ‘expressway’ between Oxford and Cambridge, two Oxfordshire councils have signaled their opposition to the plans.
South Oxfordshire and The Vale of White Horse district councils have voted to oppose the plan. Comment given by the South Oxfordshire council highlighted the potential damage done to the area.
The council’s leader, Sue Cooper, said: “It will bring more traffic, create a major source of air and noise pollution, destroy farmland and habitats and increase CO2 emissions, all of which are incompatible with the recent Climate Emergency declared by this council in April.”
The two proposed routes for the road will take it either into the Vale or South Oxfordshire.
The development is intended to link Oxford and Cambridge via Milton Keynes, both as a way to provide an outer orbital route around London and to stimulate development in the corridor between Oxford and Cambridge. There are plans to build new towns along the route when it is completed.
In addition to the council’s objections, groups have raised concerns previously. The public consultation comes as the result of a motion by Oxford County Council criticising Highways England for their failure to engage with local people when planning the route. The consultation motion passed by 49 votes to 5.
The Campaign to Protect Rural England has also criticised the route, which is to pass through the greenbelt, as unnecessary and likely to lead to the expansion of Oxford.
Current estimates of the cost range between £3 to £4.5 billion.
Professor Andrew Burrows, a fellow of All Souls College, has
been appointed to the Supreme Court.
A Barrister and Honorary Bencher of Middle Temple, Professor
Burrows is Professor of English Law at the University of Oxford. He will join
the Supreme Court on 2nd June 2020.
An alumnus of both Brasenose College, Oxford, and Harvard
University, his work focuses on private law.
Burrows is the main editor of the compendium English
Private Law which produces textbooks on English contract law and the legal
treatise A Restatement of the English law of Unjust Enrichment.
Popular amongst judges, Baroness Hale said in her 2017
Hamlyn Lecture at the University of Exeter: “there are few, if any, legal
scholars whose writings are more frequently cited in our courts.”
Queen Elizabeth made four new appointments on the advice of
outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May, including Lord Hamblen, Lord Leggatt, and Lord
Reed, a Scottish judge, who will become the next president of the Supreme
Court.
Succeeding Baroness Hale, Lord Reed has sat in the Supreme
Court since 2012 and served as deputy president for the past year.
While Lord Hamblen and Lord Leggatt already sit in the
appeal court, Professor Burrows has sat as a part time Deputy High Court Judge
for more than 20 years and he was a Law Commissioner for England and Wales.
Ruskin College have been accused of ‘victimising’
trade union representatives after a University and College Union (UCU) branch officer
was fired in mysterious circumstances, and four others are due to be made
redundant.
Dr Lee Humber was suspended from his position as a lecturer in health and social care in April, just two days after organising a vote of no confidence in the college’s principal, Paul Di Felice. After months in limbo, Humber was fired last week, prompting outrage from the UCU. Ruskin College denies that the dismissal was related to Dr Humber’s trade union activity.
Speaking to Cherwell, Dr Humber praised
“the absolutely fantastic amount of support I got from colleagues in the UCU,
from the union leadership and from the thousands of other trade unionists who
wrote their support and invited me to address their branch and union meetings.”
“It was clear from the very start that
trade unionists and many, many others understood that this as an attack on me
as a trade union officer, on our UCU branch and on the national union
generally.”
Ruskin College did not respond to a request
for comment.
The adult learning institution, which is affiliated to Oxford University, has been embroiled in an official dispute with UCU over its treatment of staff. The college, which has traditionally maintained strong links to the trade union movement, has recently moved to scrap trade union courses and to casualise teaching contracts in a bid to stem falling student numbers.
These proposals led to a vote
of no confidence in the college’s Principal in April, which was passed “unanimously”
by Ruskin College’s UCU branch.
Two days after organizing the vote, Dr Humber was suspended from his post as a lecturer in health and social care. The Ruskin UCU branch said at the time: “We believe that Lee is being victimised in order to intimidate us as a union branch. This is utterly disgraceful behaviour from the management of a college with such deep roots in the trade union and labour movement.”
The campaign to reinstate Dr Humber has attracted the support of ten union leaders and the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. In a statement following Dr Humber’s suspension, Ruskin UCU said: “We believe that Lee is being victimised in order to intimidate us as a union branch. This is utterly disgraceful behaviour from the management of a college with such deep roots in the trade union and labour movement.”
UCU have criticized the college’s restructuring
proposals on the grounds that falling student numbers are a result of poor management
rather than staffing costs or course content. Ruskin College received a 90% student
satisfaction rating for the quality of its teaching in 2018, but just 35% for
the quality of its management – the lowest in the country. No data is available
for 2019.
In a separate incident, the Ruskin Students’ Union was forced to relocate its May ball to a local pub after what it described as “poor, bureaucratic management” of their budget by the college.
The college’s business development plan has resulted in a pivot away from secure, long-term contracts towards the hiring of temporary and insecure agency staff. In 2018, the college spent 19% of staffing costs on contracted workers, compared to just 5% in 2015. These changes saw Ruskin College placed on UCU’s “list of shame” for academic institutions undermining staff pay and job security through casualisation.
In that time, the number of in-house staff has fallen from 75 to 55. Ruskin UCU allege that more than 80 staff, disproportionately women, have left during that period, including three entire senior administrative and recruitment teams.
The union allege that this high turnover is
the result of a “climate of uncertainty, stress and fear” created by the
Principal. The text of the no-confidence motion passed by the group states: “A
large number of women have stated in exit interviews that they are leaving
directly because of the Principal.”
The branch also accused the college of
failing to carry out stress risk assessments for staff, in violation of their legal
duties.
Last week, Ruskin College’s management outlined a further phase of restructuring to take place before the new academic year, including the discontinuation of four of the college’s six higher education courses in a bid to make the college less reliant on trade union teaching for its income. All five employees due to lose their posts as part of these changes are UCU Branch Committee members, which has led to accusations that union activists are being targeted.
Ruskin UCU says that staff and students were not consulted on the move to shrink the college’s higher education programme. In a statement, the union said: “We firmly believe the college is being wound down for merger. This will see multi million pound assets, prime Oxford real estate and working-class resources built up over 120 years given free to the private sector.”
In a statement, Ruskin College said: “Disciplinary investigations are internal
staff disciplinary matters which are entirely unconnected with any trade union
activity of those involved. It would be wrong for any institution
to seek to discipline or suspend a member of staff as a result of
their union activity; the notion that Ruskin College, the home of trade
union education for more than 100 years, would do so is absolutely
inconceivable.
“Trade union
membership at Ruskin is actively encouraged among the staff and there are
currently four unions well-represented in College. Contrary to claims, the
vote of no confidence in March was not unanimous, even among UCU members,
and was supported by less than 20% of staff. Ruskin College remains
the largest provider of trade union training in the UK with up to 3,000 reps
trained each year.”
Speaking to Cherwell,
Dr Humber said: “Everywhere in the country I went to speak to people and
address meetings support was fantastically genuine and warm. Of course, coupled
with this positive end of proceedings were – initially at least – feelings of
anxiety.
“I worried about how I
was going to support my family, whether the stress the dispute bought on me
would infect my young kids, about what would happen in the future. Thankfully,
due to the great resilience of my family, itself underpinned by the incredible
depth and breadth of support we received, we’ve all grown out of it and we’re
facing the future with great optimism.”
Asked how he was
informed of his dismissal, Dr Humber said: “A simple letter. It was the 43rd
letter they’d sent me (in the first 50 days of my suspension) arriving on the
Friday as so many of their meant-to-be intimidating communiques had. It was no
surprise to any of us.
“They made various
allegations all of which we refuted in great detail in a 14-page document we
sent to the disciplinary hearing. They’ve dismissed our refutation. We’ve now
appealed against this decision and they’ll turn that down too.
“Then, at last, we’ll be out of the Alice in Wonderland world of Ruskin-based disciplinary procedure, where they’ve consistently made up policy and process to suit their own ends, and on into the world of ACAS and Employment Tribunals where there are real rules by which both parties in this dispute must abide.”
