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TJ Demos Politics of Sustainability Contemporary Art and Ecology 1 PDF
TJ Demos Politics of Sustainability Contemporary Art and Ecology 1 PDF
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In their recent multimedia installation, Greenhouse warming. The IPCC predicts a coming world, half
Britain, 2007 – 09, Newton Harrison and Helen Mayer uninhabitable, of rising seas and temperatures, drought
Harrison chart the future impact of global warming on and water scarcity, and massive species extinction,
the UK. Using video animation, a large-scale topo- which will undoubtedly provoke geopolitical chal-
graphical map of Britain, photographic documentation, lenges regarding resource distribution, environmental
analytical texts and sound elements, their pedagogi- justice between developed countries and the global
cally oriented presentation portrays a dark future of South, and vast climate migration.2 This future defines
rising waters, storm surges and shrinking coastlines. new imperatives for an ethics of living, a politics of
Supplementing this ominous forecast, their governing, and in turn provokes new challenges for
project also supplies creative proposals for the con- contemporary artistic practice and art exhibitions –
struction of water barriers and the development of particularly for those, such as the Barbican’s exhibition,
environmentally friendly housing for the scores of Radical Nature – Art and Architecture for a Changing
people who will inevitably be displaced as the waters Planet 1969–2009, intent on participating in the ethico-
overtake low-lying areas such as the Norfolk Broads political reinvention of life in the face of climate change.
and the Thames Estuary, owing to the gradual melt-
ing of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets over the Exhibiting Sustainability?
course of the next century and beyond. Given this state of urgency, there has
Yet while the Harrisons’ art has admirably been, not surprisingly, a slew of recent exhibitions
addressed global warming since the early 1970s, when and research projects worldwide attuned to art and
they began their longstanding collaboration and when ecology. The most prominent include: Ecovention:
climate change was much less discussed, today’s con- Current Art to Transform Ecologies, an exhibition at the
text of widespread public information campaigns – Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, 2002, which
from Al Gore’s 2006 educational film An Inconvenient surveyed practices since the 1960s that endeavour to
Truth to popular science books like Tim Flannery’s ameliorate the effects of environmental degradation;
The Weather Makers, 2005, and Elizabeth Kolbert’s Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art, mounted at
Field Notes on a Catastrophe, 2006 – have shifted Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art in 2006, investigating
the discourse on the environment. This has revealed design-related approaches to environmental
new questions about what role art might play now that sustainability; Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook,
consciousness-raising is being accomplished by the a 2006 compilation of texts by ecologists, cultural
mass media and culture industry, even if still plagued theorists, activists and art writers that considers
by governmental inaction. 1 As is now widely known – notions of land, cultural production and the ecological
particularly since the scientific consensus established emergencies of the 20th century; Still Life: Art, Ecology,
by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate and the Politics of Change, the eighth Sharjah Biennial,
Change), most recently in 2007, which has rendered 2007, addressing social, political and cultural relations
those who deny climate-change increasingly scarce to nature and the environment, including a symposium
(but, with continued industry funding to wage their that examined ecological practice and everyday life;
misinformation campaigns, by no means extinct) – and lastly, Weather Report: Art and Climate Change
we live in a changing world of anthropogenic global at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007,
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the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, West Germany, Nevertheless, Haacke’s demonstration of
the artist set up a chemical treatment, charcoal and ‘ecological health’, to use Bateson’s terminology, might
sand filtration plant to process polluted water from be criticised for its failure to involve the audience more
the Rhine river. The purified water collected in a large directly within its feedback loop; rather, it relegated
acrylic basin containing goldfish, which demonstrated viewers as mere observers of a system that excluded
the successful restoration of a life-supporting, albeit their immediate active participation (perhaps the
artificial, habitat. Yet this project would not be limited pedagogical authority of Haacke’s mode of address
to the local, cosmetic fix of restorationist aesthetics. corresponded to the project’s technoscientific instru-
In his related Krefeld Sewage Triptych, 1972, shown mentalism, a criticism with which cybernetics has also
on the same occasion, Haacke recorded the level of had to contend). 29 It was left to other artists, such as Dan
untreated sewage that the city of Krefeld spewed into Graham, to initiate video-based social experiments
the Rhine annually (42 million cubic metres), included that developed the social possibilities of cybernetics
the volume and types of industrial and household systems, particularly as it was conceptualised in the
sewage, and provided the names of major contribu- magazine Radical Software.
tors. As Haacke observes in his description of the Running between 1970–74, and published
piece, because the Museum Haus Lange is a municipal by the Raindance Corporation, a counter-cultural
institution, whose director is a civil servant, his project media think-tank, the magazine served as a platform
generated media reports via regional newspapers for the articulation of the notion of ‘media ecology’, de-
that exposed the city’s role in the creation of the river’s fined by theorist Arlo Raymond as ‘the study of a medi-
pollution. The resulting political effects of the techno- um of communication and its affect upon other media/
biological operation performed in the art gallery could society’. 30 Exploiting the low-cost possibilities of video
thus be considered as part of what Haacke termed a technology, artists and activist groups attempted to
‘real-time social system’, which not only intervened in construct and mobilise feedback systems from com-
a degraded ecosystem but also identified the causes of munity cable television (such as Ant Farm, Videofreex
its situation and worked towards drawing public atten- and TVTV) to closed-circuit video installation experi-
tion to the broader political culture of abuse.28 ments (as in the work of Peter Campus, Dan Graham,
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1 Tim Flannery, The Weather Perils, Promises, and Perplexities, Definitions. Northwest Forest Plan
Makers: How Man Is Changing Fondazione Sandretto Re (NWFP) definition of sustainability
the Climate and What It Means Rebaudengo, Turin, 2008; After (http://www.reo.gov/general/
for Life on Earth, Atlantic Monthly Nature, New Museum, New definitions_r-s.htm)
Press (New York, 2006); Elizabeth York, 2008 6 Gro Brundtland, Our Common
Kolbert, Field Notes from a 4 Bruno Latour, ‘Why has Critique Future, p. 8. For further critical
Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Run out of Steam? From Matters of discussion of the Stockholm
Climate Change, Bloomsbury Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical conference, see Green Planet
(New York, 2006) Inquiry, Winter 2004, pp. 225–48 Blues: Environmental Politics
2 On the IPCC and for an account 5 Gro Brundtland, Our Common from Stockholm to Johannesburg,
of the recent science and politics Future: World Commission on eds. Ken Conca and Geoffrey D.
of climate change, see Robert Environment and Development, Dabelko, Westview Press
Henson, The Rough Guide to Oxford University Press (Oxford, (Oxford, 2004)
Climate Change, Rough Guides 1987), p. 43. Compare the more 7 For a discussion and critique
(London, 2008) bio-centred definition of the of the economic imperatives of
3 Of course, this list is incomplete. Regional Ecosystem Office in green government, see Timothy
Also of note are the following: the US: ‘In an ecological context, Luke, ‘Environmentality as Green
Ecotopia: The Second ICP sustainability can be defined as the Governmentality’, in Discourses of
Triennial of Photography and ability of an ecosystem to maintain the Environment, ed. Éric Darier,
Video, at the International Center ecological processes, functions, Blackwell (Oxford, 1999)
of Photography in New York, 2006; biodiversity and productivity into 8 Erik Swyngedouw, ‘Circulations
Greenwashing: Environment, the future’, REO Information Center and Metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures
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