Swap meat

Grant Hutchinson, Flickr

Taking the EU's Emissions Trading System and the modern inclination to Instagram all our meals as my inspiration, I have a proposition for you.

Would you like to pay me to not eat meat so that you can eat it instead?

Just as countries that would prefer not to ween themselves off fossil fuels can get off the hook by paying others for their above-and-beyond efforts to do so, I offer you the opportunity to go on scarfing meat like there is a tomorrow in exchange for my refraining from partaking.

For the low, low price of just $12, €11 or £10 per day, I will let you scoff flesh with the guilt-free abandon that can only come from knowing that someone out there (me) is abstaining on your behalf. Each sausage I don't eat will be the anti-matter to the sausage that you do, with the two annihilating across space and time to leave nothing but the innocent lip-smack of blissfully methane- and CO2-less air rushing in to displace a pristine void.

How will it work? I'll be available by the day or by block booking. You'll pay me via PayPal or bank transfer the day before, and on the day itself I'll tweet photos of whatever I eat, thereby proving (or at least strongly indicating) the sacrifice I've made on the altar of your greed. In order to prove I'm not double-booking myself, I'll include a word of your choice in the tweet, and the absence of any tweets without that word will show that I'm all yours.

Obviously this only benefits the planet and thereby absolves you of your guilt if I'm not already a vegetarian, so on my unengaged days I'm prepared to tweet whatever photos of me chowing down on formerly sentient beings you need to feel confident that I am in fact depriving myself on my on days.

Step up, meat-eaters, and do your bit! (Tweet me or leave a comment or whatever).

Juxtapositions #1: Tiepolo and Mondrian

Tiepolo's The Building of the Trojan Horse, about 1760, National Gallery, London

Mondrian's Composition With Red, Yellow and Blue, 1942

Just the essentials

Like most Londoners, I move flats a lot. I've lived in 9 different places in 8 years, which I think is pretty average for this city. Because I move so often, I try not to acquire too much stuff; nevertheless, the last time I moved - 3 weeks ago - I spent about 4 days packing in fits and spurts, no more than 5 minutes in the removal van, and then about 6 hours unpacking at my new place.

This is roughly the amount of stuff I have (the furniture isn't mine):

My stuff

Conversely, most of the people in Kiki Streitberger's Travelling Light photographic project, one of several such projects being exhibited until 29 August at the University of Westminster's 2015 Documentary Photography and Photojournalism MA course graduation show, took only about half a dozen things with them the last time they moved homes.

That's because Kiki's project focuses on Syrian refugees who have made their way to the UK by boat, for the most part taking not even only what they could carry but only what they could stuff into their pockets, as traffickers want to use all available space on their boats for more people.

For the project Kiki photographed not the refugees themselves, but the clothes and objects that survived their perilous journey. The photos are accompanied by descriptions of the items in the refugees' own words.

One of the people featured in Kiki's project is Alaa (his is the second entry on her own website's link to this project), a 14-year-old student who chose to share the T-shirt he wore on the trip, his asthma inhaler, his glasses, a book on Arab history, a notebook and a report card.

I don't have permission to reproduce the photograph or the full text, but Alaa's thoughts on masculinity, based on his history book, are surprisingly insightful given his age - although perhaps less surprisingly so given his own history.

I'll just quote the final few sentences of his entry, which read as follows:

"The school report is my last one from home. I brought it with me because I want to show people that I'm not stupid. When I come and ask for asylum, this doesn't mean I'm an idiot and I want people to know that."

FreshFace + WildEyed

Showing at the Photographers' Gallery is the 2015 FreshFace + WildEyed. Included are:

Jocelyn Allen's Covering the Carpet, in which she poses naked in contortions that hide her pubic hair from the lens, in reference to the removal of a painting from a London gallery in 2014. Allen's photographs are comically and perhaps sarcastically playful but also illustrate sculptural qualities of the human body. Seeing them in the flesh I was reminded of architectural plans, but of limbs, joints, head etc. This might be because Allen's face isn't visible in any of the photos either, so there's no immediate focal point for an intimate connection.

Aida Silvestri's Even This Will Pass, which presents highly blurred portraits of people who migrated from Eritrea to London, with the convolutions of their journey superimposed in thread. In the gallery, these are accompanied by the sitters' accounts of their journeys, including beatings, slavery, starvation, birth and miscarriage.

The exhibition is running until 5 July.

Serendipity and creativity

Wandering around Dublin on Friday night, freed from the conference that took me to that city, I stumbled across the graduation party for the National College of Art and Design's Visual Communication degree. There was live jazz, beer and chorizo hotdogs, plus a crowd of joyful arty types and their families - and the chance to see all of the graduates' final-year projects in the College building adjacent. I polished off a 'dog and a pint of Hooker while enjoying the music and general gaity, and then checked out the work...

It was inspired and inspiring stuff. NCAD says its Visual Communication degree teaches students to use "a variety of media to creatively communicate ideas and concepts that can inform, challenge, educate and potentially transform lives", which sounds like it could be PR-esque guff, but actually the show bore it out.

Some of my highlights were:

Ben Hickey's use of illustration to break up and enliven selected pieces of journalism as a way of making them more accessible.

Ellius Grace's photographic and interview-based portraits of people and the things that make them feel alive (not on his website, but his other photos are in a similar vein).

And Laura Dunne's "experimental cutlery", such as knives and forks made of pig skin, to "disrupt the eating process" and encourage people to be more aware of what they are eating.

There were other unconventional ideas too, like Stephen Kerr's alternative design for musical notation, and Manus De Brun's idea for a way of encouraging contemplation through a particularly innovative way of watering a plant - neither of which seem to have been put online, so I'll say no more about them.

The students' inventiveness and implementation were fantastic, and it was amazing to see so much creativity and passion in one room.

There's a video of the graduates' work over on The Irish Times. Be inspired.

Trial by pen and paper

One of Zunar's cartoons, which he makes freely available

Next week, the cartoonist Zunar will begin standing trial on nine counts of poking fun at the Malaysian government. His sentence, if he's found guilty, could be anything up to 43 years.

Zunar doesn't call the Malaysian government "the government": he calls it "the regime" or "the cartoon government". The same party - Parti Perikatan, now called Barisan Nasional - has been in power since 1955.

Hence in Malaysia, , Zunar says, the job of political cartoonists is "to fight, to push for reform". "My philosophy is: why pinch when you can punch?", he says.

Nor, of course, does the government call the charges ranged against Zunar "poking fun". Probably, though, it would take even them a while to remember the official terms: Zunar says that initially there was just one charge against him, then eight more appeared as if from nowhere.

Zunar isn't in Malaysia at the time of writing: he's in London. On 14 May he took part in an event organised by the Index on Censorship, a discussion with the English cartoonist Martin Rowson at the Free Word Centre in Farringdon.

Rowson asked Zunar why he's prepared to return to Malaysia to stand trial; why not just stay in the UK?

"For me, talent is not a gift. It's a responsibility," Zunar said. "It's very important for a political cartoonist like me to fight for my people. The trial will expose just how cartoon this government can be."

Zunar asked Rowson and another English cartoonist who was present, Steve Bell, whether, particularly in light of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, they would draw cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. Both said they had pitched ideas to their respective employers in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, but that the publications had, after much consideration, rejected the ideas. Rowson said that for the 48 hours after the cartoon he did draw was published, one of himself slumped at his desk, he received a torrent of accusations of cowardice from internet users hiding safely behind their anonymity.

For Bell, though, the compulsion to draw the prophet is not strong. "What's really important is that we choose our targets: I won't let some twat who's got a bee in his bonnet about Mohammed chose my targets - I want that job", he says.

Rowson followed by saying that the reason he is a cartoonist is that he is himself offended. "I'm offended by the very idea that people think anyone can place themselves in a position of power over me and the rest of us," he said.

Zunar finished by saying that everybody can do their part to highlight abuses. "If you can write, write; if you can speak, speak; if you can blog, blog", he said. "We are all just like a drop of water in the ocean. But if we combine, we can create a tsunami."

Zunar can be found on Twitter at @zunarkartunis. The hashtag for the event and to follow the proceedings of the Malaysian government's trial is #freezunar.

Book Review: Curationism - David Balzer (2014)

In 40 not-very-densely-typed pages of Curationism (Pluto Press), David Balzer manages to undermine one of my more firmly entrenched ideas of myself, as well as my idealisation of work and one of my burgeoning fantasies. He also drags into the light one unpleasant truth I hadn't fully acknowledged.

These are, in turn:

• That because I don't buy much, I'm not a mindless consumer (when actually I quite mindlessly consume many things; it's just that they're cheap or free).
• That doing something you love as a job is exclusively a good thing (I still think it's mostly a good thing, but now I'm mindful of the danger of work, even the best kinds of work, being devalued by people agreeing to do it without being properly recompensed).
• That curating is glamorous and I'd like to do it.
• That I "curate" content for others using Twitter etc because I'm yearning to connect with people.

The ideas in Curationism may not all originate with Balzer, but no matter: he has - argh, don't, don't; yes, yes, I'm gonna - curated them (and rewritten and reformulated them, obviously) very well. And, of course, they were new to me.

Curationism describes the rise of curation in the art world and, more recently, in our daily lives, and then deftly considers its prospects in each. The first 90 pages, setting out the history of the subject matter, are not so deft as the final 40, but in keeping the whole short and ending so strongly Balzer gives us a book that feels timely, informative and insightful.

Perhaps most tellingly, he made me want to spend less time reading articles about contemporary culture online and more time reading well written and edited short books about it instead.

I still followed him on Twitter, though.