Multidisciplinary artist Doug Aitken, in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) and Parley for the Oceans, manages to make his latest installation a unique experience as well as a physical feat by mounting it in a place only accessible to snorkelers, scuba divers, and fish: underwater in the Pacific Ocean.
Despite all this, Ocean has managed to preserve the musical personality that marked him out as special on 2012's immersive, psychedelic R&B game-changer, Channel Orange.
In a place with too much history and too much certainty, a "lonely rock in a stormy ocean", he manages to reach conclusions without lapsing into narrow judgments, and finds truth without asserting that it is the only truth.Inevitably, perhaps, his vision clouds slightly as he draws near to the present day.
He lands in the ocean and manages to swim to a nearby island, where he meets another famous Jules Verne character, Captain Nemo.
While everyone else is dying all over the place, Davos falls into a burning ocean and manages to wash up on a rock with injuries on par with a bad sunburn.
MPAs are parcels of ocean that are managed according to special regulations to conserve biodiversity (that is, the variety of life or the number of species in a particular area).
The task is to chart a way forward for the high seas; identify challenges and threats, and highlight reforms that will allow the ocean to be managed effectively, productively and sustainably for the maximum benefit to humankind.
This is all the more disturbing because fish are resilient creatures and fish populations are capable of remarkable comebacks if the oceans can be managed as a sustainable global resource — not as a competing, overlapping grid of subsidized national fiefdoms.
Couple that with knowledge of past riches, and a future in which fisheries are more productive and the oceans much better managed starts to look possible and very valuable.
