{"id":17335,"date":"2022-10-06T14:30:18","date_gmt":"2022-10-06T14:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=17335"},"modified":"2022-10-06T14:30:20","modified_gmt":"2022-10-06T14:30:20","slug":"sensing-sensitizing-and-speculating-the-work-of-artworks-in-the-climate-crisis-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=17335","title":{"rendered":"Sensing, Sensitizing, and Speculating: The Work of Artworks in the Climate Crisis Era"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

T. J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, and Subhankar Banerjee, eds. The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change<\/em><\/strong>. New York: Routledge, 2021. 492 pp., 23 color ills., 84 b\/w. $200.00<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change<\/em>, edited by T. J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, and Subhankar Banerjee, is a stunning achievement. It brings together fifty-five contributors from diverse backgrounds\u2014including the Cherokee Nation, Lebanon, and South Africa\u2014to think through climate-change-themed art and visual culture from regions ranging from Chiapas to Hong Kong. No comparable volume exists; as the editors point out, \u201cwithin the environmental humanities . . . the visual arts are seldom foregrounded and sometimes sidelined,\u201d while \u201cart history as a discipline has . . . been slow in considering ecology and related environmental studies\u201d (2).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This achievement emerges at a curious impasse: climate change has advanced so as to become palpable to even the most privileged, while public responses\u2014where they exist\u2014often seem crushingly inadequate. Art and visual culture seem both necessary and dubious in this moment. To begin with, \u201cclimate change . . . presents profound representational dilemmas\u201d (2) because of its lifetime-exceeding timescales but also because evidence of its violence regularly gets hidden, manipulated, or managed. As Caroline A. Jones points out in her chapter, \u201cAtmospheres and the Anthropogenic Image-Bind,\u201d \u201cidealistic images (the volunteer helping the oil-covered shore bird) were actively produced\u201d by BP in the period after its Deepwater Horizon disaster, \u201cas the corporation tripled its advertising budget\u201d (247). In such a context, art and visual culture can function to reveal or counter<\/em>-represent\u2014though usually on much smaller budgets, if any. And yet such functions may prove to be a trap; images of climate disaster, particularly the more spectacular, can, as Birgit Schneider points out, \u201cimmobilize observers and put them in a state of sublime amazement\u201d (271) rather than fomenting action. Further, those \u201crepresentational dilemmas\u201d may in fact be moot, given the aforementioned palpability of climate change: as contributor Sarah Kanouse narrates, \u201cA few years ago, artists spoke of global warming primarily as a problem of representation\u2014how to . . . make its \u2018slow violence\u2019 perceptible. The emerging question seems to be less about perceiving and more about feeling and acting\u201d (153).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Companion<\/em> tackles these questions about representing, feeling, and acting across forty short chapters organized into six sections: \u201cExtractivism,\u201d \u201cClimate Violence,\u201d \u201cSensing Climates,\u201d \u201cIn\/Visibilities,\u201d \u201cMultispecies Justice,\u201d and \u201cRuptures\/Insurgencies\/Worldings,\u201d plus a general introduction and section introductions from the editors. The diversity of contributors is matched by the diversity of media and genres discussed, which range from virtual reality to photo collages, taxidermy to underwater sculpture, performance art and protest actions to paintings and short films. Some authors are practitioners, writing about their own art and activism, while others are academics. A few are both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The chapters prioritize works that are noncommercial and non- or anti-institutional, though some are certainly better known than others. This prioritization chimes with the Companion<\/em>\u2019s mission of centering \u201cthe perspectives, experiences, and voices of underrepresented and under-resourced frontline communities\u201d (6) as well as its efforts to \u201cforegroun[d] a decolonial and climate-justice-based approach\u201d1<\/a><\/sup>. This means that, except for a few brief references (often critical), giants of political\/environmental art such as Ai Weiwei, Edward Burtynsky, and Olafur Eliasson are largely absent. Likewise, discussions of climate and energy in the mainstream museum\u2014such as the need for temperature regulation to preserve delicate artworks\u2014are not to be found here. (But interested readers might turn to Fernando Dom\u00ednguez Rubio\u2019s 2020 book Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum<\/em> [University of Chicago Press].) Nor do we delve deeply into the bourgeois arts, such as landscape painting, that emerged from colonial centers. Such arts, along with conservation discourse, have tended to invisibilize the humans \u201cwho have cultivated biodiversity for centuries\u201d (11), the humans that these chapters seek to center.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Insights and Common Threads<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The Companion<\/em> offers several galvanizing insights and common threads. To offer an example of the first: the contributors understand, vis-\u00e0-vis art, that \u201cextraction also entails labor,\u201d not just natural resources. As the editors explain, \u201cin the art world, this is detectable . . . in the prevalence of literal uncompensated labor (e.g., the notorious gallery internship . . .)\u201d (11), and in more egregious cases like that of \u201cthe migrant workers building the infrastructure for the Guggenheim franchise in Abu Dhabi\u201d under \u201chorrific labour conditions\u201d (410). Emma Mahony\u2019s standout chapter sees hope in the possibility for solidarity between these different types of art laborers and the many artist-activist collectives that have been pressuring mainstream museums to divest themselves from fossil fuels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for common threads, two conceptual touchstones reappear throughout the collection. The first is the work of philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte (Potawatomi), especially his critique of the notion that climate change constitutes an unprecedented crisis, given how settler colonialism forced Indigenous peoples into new climates, severing their traditional relations with plants and animals.1<\/sup><\/a> The second is literary scholar Rob Nixon\u2019s question of how to represent \u201c\u2018slow,\u2019 \u2018attritional,\u2019 and, especially, \u2018invisible\u2019 violence\u201d (113). Sintia Issa writes that, for Beirut-born artist Jessika Khazrik, known for works such as the poetry\/sound installation Mount Mound Refuse<\/em>, \u201csound emerges as a way out of this representational impasse . . . to make perceptible what is buried in subterranean grounds and cannot be seen\u201d (113)\u2014like the toxic waste dumped in Lebanon by militia forces during the country\u2019s civil war in 1987.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, in fact, sound itself becomes a surprising common thread throughout the collection. For example, Renata Ryan Burchfield (Cherokee) theorizes the juxtaposition of traditional and electronic music in the multimedia work of Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit\/Unangax\u0302) (182\u201384), while, in another chapter, we learn how Anishinabe artist Rebecca Belmore creates \u201cgiant ear trumpe[t]\u201d sculptures that \u201cinvite passers-by to get close to the ground and listen\u201d (210). Heather Davis sees in this work, Wave Sound<\/em>, an \u201cimplicit argument that . . . try as the government might to shut its ears, the waves of Indigenous resistance will persist.\u201d As she concludes, \u201cThe land, in this work, is the authority. It is the land to which we must answer\u201d (200).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not surprisingly for a collection focused on art and visual culture, the essays in the Companion<\/em> attend to the roles of specific media and methods, showcasing lively and provocative examples. Berlin-based Dierk Schmidt and Nigerian-born Jelili Atiku, discussed in separate chapters by Jones and Nomusa Makhubu, respectively, employ crude oil as their medium in order to offer critiques of deadly petropower. The latter artist, as Makhubu reports, actually puts his life at risk through skin contact with crude oil (291). Meanwhile, as Virginia MacKenny and Lesley Green describe, Congolese artist Maurice Mbikayi \u201cfabricates computer waste into clothing that references the fashionable dandyism of nineteenth-century Europe in the heyday of colonial power\u201d (21). This \u201cTechnoDandy\u201d persona thus draws links between that past and the present of so-called \u201cwaste colonialism,\u201d in which e-waste and other detritus are dumped in poorer countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also, the essays trace more positive intimacies between artists and their media. For example, Rose B. Simpson, a mixed-media Indigenous artist from Santa Clara Pueblo, tells scholar Jessica L. Horton in another noteworthy chapter that \u201cclay is material that is the direct flesh of our mother, what grows our food, becomes the dishes that nourish us, becomes the walls of the houses that protect us. It is personified, and when I use it, I ask it what it wants to become\u201d (318). Such intimacies redress the severing of relations mentioned above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Several chapters describe how artists repurpose dominant technologies, such that their methods serve as metacommentaries. For example, Paulo Tavares recalls how, for the collaborative project Memory of Earth<\/em>, \u201cwe re-appropriated several visual instruments utilized by the [Brazilian] state to displace the Xavante people, chiefly maps and satellite images produced [by] secret military surveillance missions, to extract evidence of gross human rights violations\u201d (32). Similarly, Jessica Mulvogue theorizes the glitches and poor image quality in Christina Battle\u2019s video Chemical Valley<\/em>, which employs street-view renderings of an industrial site from Google Earth: \u201cSuch illegibility suggests the breakdown of the Western-based military-state-corporate apparatus and the all-encompassing and seamless representations of the planet commonly attributed to\u201d cartographic technologies (60).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Critiques and Limitations
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Given the innovations of the works they showcase, I wished for greater formal diversity and experimentation in the contributions to this collection. Indeed, these contributions take fairly standard essay form\u2014with a handful of exceptions, such as three transcribed \u201cconversations.\u201d Another exception, Ravi Agarwal\u2019s chapter, draws on the author\u2019s own photographs and diary entries to document changes in India\u2019s Yamuna River and Tamil Nadu coast (365\u201375). This local, personal perspective is particularly moving and made me wish for more like it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also wanted more engagement with artistic-affective modes such as humor and playfulness, especially given the grim injustices cataloged throughout the collection, as well as Din\u00e9 scholar-activist Melanie K. Yazzie\u2019s comment that \u201chumor [is] essential to art\u201d (443). (Full disclosure: my own research focuses on the role of humor in environmental movements, so this desire may be idiosyncratic!) Only one chapter, Julie Sze\u2019s \u201cClimate Justice, Satire, and Hothouse Earth,\u201d centers such modes. And other chapters seem to gloss over their possibilities\u2014such as when Mahony reports without comment that the Reclaim Shakespeare Company protested BP\u2019s sponsorship of the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival \u201cby commandeering the stage as the plays were about to start and performing their guerrilla interventions in iambic pentameter, while dressed in Shakespearian costumes\u201d (413). (I\u2019m still laughing about that, and about the name of a related initiative, \u201cBP-or-Not-BP.\u201d) What risks and rewards come with such tactics? Beyond being taught, politicized, or even horrified, what pleasures can be taken in contemporary environmental artworks and activism? Perhaps other readers who share these questions can look forward to \u201cUnserious Ecocriticism in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture,\u201d the collection-in-progress from US art historian Jessica Landau and US artist Maria Lux.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some readers might complain that several Companion<\/em> chapters spend more time establishing the complex political and economic histories of a given region than discussing \u201cactual art.\u201d But such choices, to use the words of Rodrigo Guimar\u00e3es Nunes and Alyne Costa, \u201ccontribut[e] to the intelligibility not only of the consequences of the environmental crisis, but of the economic and political dynamics that underpin and sustain it, so as to enhance the collective capacity to identify weak spots, chokepoints, leverages and possibilities for . . . action\u201d (42). And, indeed, one of this collection\u2019s major achievements is bringing to light injustices that many readers might not have been familiar with previously\u2014such as the Indonesian government\u2019s proposed construction of a 4,300-kilometer (2,600-mile) Trans Papua Highway, which, as Nabil Ahmed and Esther Cann tell us, \u201cposes major threats to the rainforest and to local livelihoods\u201d (65).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What Art Is\/Does<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

To the age-old debates over what art is and does, the Companion<\/em> makes many timely contributions. First, it actively seeks to expand what gets counted as art, especially in its impulse to include \u201cinter- and post-disciplinary practices\u2014such as forensic and cartographical studies, remote sensing data analysis, embodied social movement activism, [and] climate sensing techniques\u201d (8). This expansion reverberates with other recent scholarship such as Heather Houser\u2019s Infowhelm: Environmental Art and Literature in an Age of Data<\/em> (Columbia University Press, 2020), which frames data visualizations and climate predictions as matters of aesthetics and speculation\u2014that is, as humanistic, not just technoscientific, endeavors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further, contributors to the Companion<\/em> insist that art and visual cultures have a unique role to play in an era of climate crisis. For one thing, while \u201cnobody can feel<\/em> average temperatures,\u201d Schneider argues that art \u201ccan make this and other ways of perceiving the climate crisis possible\u201d (264, emphasis in original)\u2014given its general capacities to \u201csensitize[e] us, or mak[e] us more sensitive, to the world around us\u201d (149). Sara Mameni agrees, calling the \u201caesthetic act\u201d \u201ca configuration of experience that can create new modes of sensory perception, induce new forms of political subjectivity, and anticipate futures, that is, build other possible worlds\u201d (93). Many others echo the latter part of that sentiment; the editors offer the premise that \u201cthe world-altering emergency<\/em> of climate breakdown demands the emergence<\/em> of new imaginaries, social formations, and societal organizing principles\u201d (385, emphasis in original) and Issa concludes that \u201cart and visual culture are where questions of futurity are best imagined and explored\u201d (102).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond art\u2019s capacities to sense, sensitize<\/em>, and speculate, this collection articulates more specific functions. \u201cI want to build the capacity to handle complex environmental, internal, and spiritual situations,\u201d artist Simpson declares to Horton\u2014to make humans feel \u201cempower[ed]\u201d and capable of \u201cadapt[ing]\u201d (317). Kanouse reflects on her performance art practice as \u201ca process of trying one thing, and then another, evaluating the result, and then trying again\u201d; such \u201cpractices of experimentation, iteration, and improvisation,\u201d she asserts, are \u201cnecessary to move through the impasse of climate change\u201d (162).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such takes are optimistic, even instrumentalist. But at least one contributor is concerned about the opposite: that much contemporary art and visual culture in the era of climate crisis entails the proverbial fiddling while the world (literally) burns. \u201cWhy make an installation about refugees being stuck at the border when you could design tools to cut through the fences?\u201d John Jordan demands in another memorable, controversy-stoking chapter (390). I therefore wondered at first why he bothered to write this essay instead of designing such tools, but the answer soon becomes clear. Living in an autonomous \u201cZone to Defend\u201d outside Nantes, France, which has been occupied for several years by activists opposing the construction of a new airport, Jordan sees himself as answering Michel Foucault\u2019s call for an \u201cart of living\u201d: \u201cWhen you no longer outsource your problems and needs, everyday life goes from being unthinking automatic behavior, to being a question of technique, of skill and grace: of art,\u201d Jordan insists (395). Thus, his polemic-turned-personal-reportage is itself, arguably, a work of art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond what art is or does\u2014or could or should do\u2014another question emerges from the collection: Who is it for? The obvious, general answer would be \u201chumans,\u201d but Inez Blanca van der Scheer\u2019s chapter offers another answer in considering Jason deCaires Taylor\u2019s statue series Vicissitudes<\/em>, installed underwater in Grenada\u2019s Molinere Bay. Van der Scheer explains how the work serves nonhumans figuratively as well as literally: the statues\u2019 \u201cimmersion is performed as the inversion of the plunder of overfishing or the contamination of pollution,\u201d while the statues themselves serve as \u201cartificial reefs to assuage the threat to natural coral reefs from environmental distress, climate change, and tourism\u201d (377). On the statues today, van der Scheer reports, sponges, algae, and other life-forms thrive, in bright and brilliant shades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Nicole Seymour<\/a><\/strong> is associate professor of English at California State University, Fullerton. She is the author of Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age<\/em> (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and Glitter<\/em> (Bloomsbury, 2022).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. See, for example, Kyle Powys Whyte, \u201cIndigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crisis,\u201d Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space<\/em> 1, nos. 1\u20132 (2018): 224\u201342. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Nicole Seymour reviews a new volume on art in the time of climate change<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":17337,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-art-journal","category-uncategorized",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}