Eva Hagberg

Art Goes Apocalyptic (Wallpaper*)

Published in Wallpaper* November 2008

New Yorkers love to practice the destruction of their city. The Will Smith-fights-vampires movie I Am Legend showed, again and again, a desolate Times Square, lions ripping up deer flesh while grasses whispered in a space currently alive with five-abreast tourists gawking at Sex & the City ads. J J Abrams’ Cloverfield imagined a monster ripping through the city with the force of a thousand furies. And the War of the Worlds had Tom Cruise just across the river, watching cracks in the streets open up for attacking aliens. It’s a post-9/11 condition, this desire to rehearse, prepare for and control our destruction before it happens. At the same time, we’ve become obsessed with the Greenmarket, with eating locally, seasonally, with sustainable futures, with trying to be as close to a Michael Pollan version – “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” -- of an omnivore as we can. It seems like two completely separate channels, but three art events this summer only showed that our love for nature and our obsession with the apocalypse are, in fact, closely entwined.

After Nature is a brilliant show put on by the New Museum, suddenly a big hitter since the opening of their SANAA-designed building last December. Organized by Massimiliano Gioni and curatorial assistant Jarrett Gregory, After Nature uses a Werner Herzog film and a W.G. Sebald essay as starting-off points for a series of pieces that explore how the world might be, once nature is something we remember rather than look forward to. The works span aesthetics and media, sharing only polemic drive. A tree sawed apart and put back together with massive brackets and screws by the artist Zoe Leonard makes you realize the inanity of the idea that nature needs our help to survive, while a piece by Tino Sehgal in which a series of dancers writhe on the floor -- changing every two hours with a few minutes of synced-up overlap – is, through its face-to-face (or body-to-body) communication, about the translatability of oral history. It implies that, one day not so far away, person-to-person contact might be the only technology we’ve got.

Luck of the Draw (Wallpaper*)

Published in Wallpaper* November 2008

Alan Aldridge is so LA. It’s taken a while for him to become so LA – answering the door to his La Brea Park apartment in bare feet, hair dyed black and slicked back, stereo playing music that would fit just as well in a raucous yoga class as in this spare art-decorated space – but he made it. It’s taken a few career shifts, a few absurd stories, and one self-described Machiavellian move, but Aldridge is settled in this fair city of angels. And, after years as a Hollywood screenwriter, Aldridge is back to his art.

Aldridge designed this month’s magazine cover and, when we speak a bright August afternoon, is about to start designing the word “Wallpaper.” He doesn’t really have a plan for how it’ll go – “when it’s right it just hits” – and he’s not really worried about having to get ready for a big retrospective of his work slated to open this October at the Design Museum London –“it’s not a problem.” Mostly, right now, he wants to tell the story of how he got here.

Carbon Footprint (Metropolis)

Published September 2008 (link)

It is probably a bad idea to drive a Hummer to a Scandic Hotel. It is probably a bad idea to leave it idling while you run in looking for a single-packed toiletry item (which you won’t find) and an equally bad idea to ask the staff to change your sheets every night. It is definitely a bad idea to ask for your own hermetically sealed packet of jam at breakfast (you won’t get it) or not to separate your trash from your recycling (because it means the hotel has to do it for you).

It might seem like a lot to ask of guests, but taking a hard line on some choices, and a gentler, encouraging touch with others, is all part of the Swedish chain’s program to reduce its carbon emissions to zero. The company is giving itself a little bit of time to get there—“By 2025, we shall not contribute to the carbon emissions at all with our operations,” says Jan Peter Bergkvist, the vice president for sustainable business—but Scandic is trying. And so far, its efforts are working. 

Click on Scandic’s Sustainability Live Report on its Web site (www.scandichotels.com) to see a delightfully graphic tally of “the environmental savings we have made since 1996.” For now, the company shows the numbers for four target systems—measuring consumption levels for energy, water, unsorted waste, and fossil carbon dioxide—a framework created by the Natural Step, an international NGO dedicated to improving corporate sustainability. For now, you can calculate the environmental gains from your Scandic sojourn (achieved by drinking the tap water, sharing the jam, and staying in a place heated and lit by alternative energy sources) by clicking on how many nights you’d like to stay and seeing just how many lightbulbs pop up. That number is compared to a benchmark released by the International Tourism Partnership, a hotel-industry NGO set up by the Prince of Wales Trust. They’re not exact, but they’re close enough that Scandic can tell that it’s making a difference.