Commissioned to encourage a greater public involvement in environmental issues, these large-scale digital images of flooded landscapes by John Goto show some irony.  The Art works feature the consequences of rising water levels to our lifestyles and reframe familiar canvases by old Masters as being useful only in a literal sense in these extreme conditions.  With a burnt out motor six young revellers, whose journey the photographs follow as they sail along River Thames, use Gericault’s ‘Raft of the Medusa’ as a mast.  Structures well established in fine Art are represented such as a child offering her jacket to a freezing crew member being similar to St Martin sharing his cloak with a beggar.  The party mood begins to fade for the crew as soon as their vessel hits a compromised Thames Barrier, the device so defunct it is mere eye candy.  The class system the well-heeled shipmates aspire to demand they show contempt for the struggling injured man seen hanging onto the barrier.  This composition (‘Polyphemus on the Thames Barrier’) is based on the structure of Turner’s ‘Ulysses deriding Polyphemus – Homer’s Odyssey’.  The ocean bound vessel ‘Odyssey 2’ crashes on, hitting the ‘High Seas’; the title of the most outstanding work in this series of pigment prints on cotton paper, each a little over a metre in width.

 

Each work features the progress of the three sets of happy-go-lucky siblings, superimposed onto the ‘Floodscapes’ using state of the art digital technology.  Goto’s technique is at its best in ‘Barbecue at Cliffe Pools’.  Here the crest-fallen Hooray Henry types are glowing only from the warmth of a fire.  Digital technology paints firelight and its reflection to a quality equal to the medium of paint.  The meagre fire at nightfall on the flooded North Kent Marshes is used to spit roast a couple of endangered birds and the embers offer warmth to the viewer. The technology Goto uses in his work is akin to that found in the digital toys the revellers toss away when their boat hits choppy water.  This reflects on which sort of technology will save the day to rescue the world from global warming.  Today’s appearance-obsessed section of the media, like the fashion accessories of the girls on board, will probably end up floating in the seas along with tropical debris and free floating icebergs as in ‘High Seas’.

 

This commissioned work certainly engages the viewer in the subject matter.  Goto cleverly tucks away in the images some solutions such as controlled inundation and marine turbines becoming part of a new ‘Floodscape’ as if to test the water with visitors.  Each time the series is viewed no doubt a unique ‘take’ on the situation is formed.  Science Oxford has a programme of events planned to further develop feedback the public may have regarding the images.  In a city plagued by shrinking floodplains, Science Oxford is away from the hotspots so not likely to be one of the galleries flooded any time soon unlike the heritage property featured in ‘Embarkation from Ham’.  These works of Art are safe, unlike the stone heads that bob like drowned corpses floating next to Goto’s ‘Ham House’.  It all makes me wish I had not used so much hairspray in the 1980’s but at least it was an era that sparked the pop lyric ‘I believe the children are the future’.  As in Goto’s ‘Island of Children’, getting a new generation to start studying ecology now may be the answer.  One positive aspect of global warming is shown in ‘Outside Tate Modern’ where a mosque stands harmoniously next to St Paul’s Cathedral.  This is a global problem and can only be solved by all world citizens working together.  Maybe global harmony is inevitable.