Feet in the mud
Recent years have seen no shortage of exhibitions concerned with ecology and the environment, but to date, they seem to have had little effect. What seems to be going wrong?It might one day well happen, as the French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky claimed during the Estrella Levante SOS 4.8 sustainability festival in Murcia, Spain in 2008, that the threat of losing the earth will give new impulse to our pathological consumerism.[1] Consumerism works the way doping does, and now there are also green ways of heightening life’s intensity and feeling vigorous. Green has become a brand, a lifestyle. The fact that the label ‘green’ usually reaches no further than good marketing strategy need not dampen the fun. But cynical it is: excessive consumption puts pressure on energy reserves, not to mention unwelcome by-products such as waste and obesity. Every thoughtful person knows that hyper-consumerism and sustainability are contradictory. Nonetheless, we live in a world in which ecology has become a commodity, with major consequences. Take the disproportionate distribution of environmental damage, for example. The greatest costs are born by those with the lowest incomes, while wastefulness and eco-luxury reign supreme on the side of wealth. Ecology has become the perfect condition for a sustainable consumer society. The blinders come free of charge.In the meantime, there is growing criticism of the essential failure of today’s environmental organizations. There is even a post-environmental movement, to point out the one-sided concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘environment’. In a lecture in Athens and New York in 2007, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek added fuel to the flame by saying that the romantic idea of ‘nature’ as a ‘thing’ that must be cherished in all its purity and goodness, is based more on stubborn faith than on reality.[2] According to Žižek, the fear of climate-related catastrophes being stirred up by environmental activists is opium for the people. Ecology might well become the dominant ideology of global capitalism, he claims, a ‘post-political bio-politics’ that takes the place of diminishing world religions.With climate change, threats to the environment, and sustainability on the agendas of every government or multinational corporation, ecology is also a hot theme in the visual arts. There is a marked increase in the number of ‘green’ exhibitions and events. In the Netherlands alone, there were dozens in 2008 and 2009, including Fieldwork 1 & 2 at Smart Project Space in Amsterdam; TransAgriculture at V2 and Ecoscape at TENT, both in Rotterdam; the long-term Foodprint project at Stroom in The Hague; and Portscapes, again in Rotterdam. This year, the amiable The Woods that See and Hear was presented at 13 Hectare in Heeswijk, with inspiring works by Tue Greenfort, Tea Mäkipää and Eve Armstrong, and as part of Foodprint, Stroom opened a dynamic solo exhibition by Raul Ortega Ayala, called Living Remains. Each month, new ecology-related exhibitions are likewise being presented in other countries. We can therefore justifiably ask how these exhibitions contribute to the debate and whether or not they stimulate change in our knowledge of the challenging relationship between man and nature. A critical look at three extensive exhibitions in London (2009), Copenhagen (2009) and Sydney (2010) offers some insight.
Romanticizing versus Demonizing
In 2009, the Barbican Art Gallery in London presented Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet (1969-2009), an exhibition in which work by pioneers was intended to nourish the ecological reflections of younger generations. In contrast to what the title promised, there was very little to be seen of anything radical. Perhaps the extent of the exhibition in square meters of floor space was radical, but certainly not, for example, anything on the level of the breaking of geopolitical borders. This was no fault of the artists. Famous projects from the 1970s, including Joseph Beuys’ Honey Pump (1977), Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), Hans Haacke’s Grass Grows (1969), or the Survival Series (1970-1973) by Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, were shown in documentary form or as art objects without any explanation. Unfortunately, the focus was on the object status of the artworks, with an added bonus for artists who make use of living plants.From the conceptual standpoint as well, the discussion set in motion by Radical Nature went no further than the romanticizing of ‘nature’ as opposed to the demonizing of ‘man’. It was not exactly an ideal decor for Mobile Wilderness Unit (2006), the ‘readymade’ work with which Mark Dion commented on so-called scientific presentations of ‘nature’ in natural history museums. Devoid of humour, Radical Nature left no space for a wink of the eye of that sort. Simon Starling’s Island for Weeds (2003), a rejected proposal for a float in Scotland’s Loch Lomond meant to ensure the future of rhododendrons that are in fact classified as weeds, met with the same fate. Playful attempts or serious interventions able to engage the public were smothered by the easy to sell and easily digested message.A happy exception was the off-site Dalston Mill project, by EXYZT, a group of French architects giving expression to the concept of urban farming and feeding. Dependence on a worldwide network with anonymous food producers and supermarket chains was here exchanged for growing, producing and consuming food in the city itself. Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield: A Confrontation, from 1982 , a plan to transplant rural nature to the heart of Manhattan, was taken over in London and tested on location by adding a mill and an adapted infrastructure according to the EXYZT working methods. Beyond this, the social approach of Dalston Mill, based on characteristics such as information and participation that are shared by a fair percentage of contemporary, ecology-related visual art was strikingly absent in Radical Nature.Rethink: Contemporary Art & Climate Change, a collaborative effort on the parts of four museums in or near Copenhagen during the international climate conference in December of 2009, had a more stimulating and topical point of departure. Conceptually, Rethink was decidedly more challenging than Radical Nature. Each of the four institutes took responsibility for one of the themes: worldwide interdependency (Rethink Relations), dystopias and utopias (Rethink Kakotopia), standard conditions and alternatives (Rethink the Implicit) and the role of providing information (Rethink Information). The differing approaches offered participating institutions the opportunity to contribute their own emphasis. It was consequently disappointing that for all four, the aesthetic component was the determining factor in their selections of the artworks. As a result, it created the mistaken impression that the artists were not truly committed. There seemed to be something of an institutional fear of losing control of ‘the message’ and the tone of their communication with the audience.The major eye-catcher in Rethink was Biospheres (2009), by Tomás Saraceno. His visually appealing and seductive, high-tech floating bubbles are well loved, but they are also dangerous. They can all too easily be adapted to coincidental or random themes. Installations such as Vertical Skip (2009) by Thilo Frank and Your Watercolor Machine (2009) by Olafur Eliasson were also interactive and spectacular. Several works combined beauty with a sinister undertone, including Acid Rain (2009), by Bright Ugochukwu Eke. Six thousand plastic bags hung at varying heights in the space. Although they glittered like Christmas decorations, on further inspection, one discovered them to be filled with carbon dioxide. A similar strategy was characteristic of Yao Lu’s photographs, which looked like traditional Chinese landscapes, but were in fact refuse from contemporary industries.Although it was more subtle than was the case with Radical Nature, the curators for Rethink selected works with autonomous status. Process-oriented contributions were limited to kinetic and computer-generated interactions, resisting any accusation of possibly having a political or activist agenda. Only Superflex, with their Hypnosis Group Sessions/The Cockroach (2009), were cleverly able to escape the pattern of expectation created by Rethink. Their promise of being able to experience the consequences of climate change from various perspectives while under hypnosis was only accessible to the happy few, while the majority had to make do with hearsay. Rethink undoubtedly brought together more intelligent contributions to the environmental debate, not least in the articles in its catalogue. It is consequently a shame that the aesthetic gravy smothered the catalytic elements of this initiative, nipping them in the bud.
Indestructible Weed
Nowhere else in the world is the need for ecological intervention as emphatically tangible as it is in Australia. Devastating forest fires, extreme droughts and dramatic flooding have characterized the history of this island continent. The timing of In the Balance: Art for a Changing World, presented this fall at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, could not have been more poignant. The opening was just a few days before the elections, with hopes of environmental regulations and climate control on the electoral agenda. In the Balance had several themes, including history, topology, ecology (the results of oil, gas and uranium extraction), and proposals for sustainability. Because the exhibition opened with an historical framework, it was at first dominated by its documentary and aesthetic character. No doubt unintentionally, this created a distinction between the so-called objective reality, filmed by concerned ‘white’ outsiders, and the subjective experiences of ‘black’ victims, who were represented further along in the exhibition. In fact, the tense relationship between the economically and culturally widely divided population groups was reproduced in the exhibition. Aboriginal artists were generously represented, but grouped in such a way that associations with ghetto forming were hard to avoid.Artists whose work was literally beyond the walls of the MCA were able to escape this problematic framework. The Artist as Family, an artists’ collective, found a means of applying the principles of permaculture (long-term collaboration between man and nature) on behalf of ‘social warming’. For the city of Sydney, they created Food Forest (2010), a fruit garden by and for the community, on the grounds of a parish property in a Sydney suburb. The mobile beehive by the Makeshift design team (Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe), entitled Gwago patabágun – We will eat presently (2010), also held its own. The location was perfect: on the memorable lawn in front of the MCA, once the central food collection point for the local population, bees produced honey that was offered to passersby. In the exhibition itself, similar interactive works were rather constricted, as were the amusing proposals of Futurefarmers, in their efforts to creating the necessary conditions for illegally producing the bio fuel Sunshine Still. Even the Talking Trash (2009) installation by Jeanne van Heeswijk, with Paul Sixta, was under pressure. Commissioned by C3West, an organization affiliated with the MCA and which focuses on collaborative projects between businesses, artists and communities, she interviewed the local residents of the town of Goulburn about what refuse and recycling personally meant to them.Amongst the artists who held their own within the walls and the concept of the MCA, Diego Bonetto was the biggest discovery. He is himself very like the subject of his artworks: an indestructible weed who quickly adapts himself to any environment, but without losing the toxicity essential to survive. Bonetto’s is a multi-faceted recipe. His work appears as objects, as performance, is interactive, and it is political, ecological and aesthetic. On Facebook, you can become friends with one of the many species of weeds that he introduces you to with considerable knowledge and respect. There were also other artists who succeeded, despite the institutional straitjacket, in preserving the complex layers of engagement and distance, of being insider and outsider or perpetrator and victim all at the same time. In James Newitt’s film Passive Aggressive (2009), environmental activists and loggers stand directly across from each other in escalating conflict. The confrontation has unpleasant, painful and even dangerous consequences. Equally impressive is the intense film Korban Lumpur (2009), by Susan Norrie and David Mackenzie, which informs us about the cynical fate of the East Javan population from the Sidoarjo region, who are suffering the consequences of an avalanche of poisonous mud as a result of illegal uranium mining, as local authorities simply look the other way. Art institutions clearly have the bit in their teeth, but something still does not feel right. Is it a sense of satiation? Are we already tired of the ecology theme, even before we have begun thinking about actually changing our living environments? The occasionally karaoke-like approach of Radical Nature, Rethink and In the Balance, in which rapid production seems to have been more important than deeper insight, meant that imitation was chosen in preference to experiment, and simplification above complexity, does not bode well. As long as institutions are inclined to repeat outdated rules of nature and cleverly play on sentiment and market value instead of investing in the political and transformative role of the visual arts, the fate of many a truly engaged artist is sealed. In the words of John Thackara, founder of the Amsterdam bureau Doors of Perception, ‘The transition to sustainability is not about messages; it’s about activity.’[3] In order to have an impact, in order to break down barriers, offer new aesthetic perspectives and work at the geopolitical scale that is essential today, artists have to stand with their feet in the mud. Our institutions, museums and financiers must give them this chance and, even more importantly, not gloss over their results – now.Ine Gevers is a curator, writer and activist. She is currently researching the possibilities for Hacking Habitat, an exhibition about unusual relationships between man and nature.
Ine Gevers
