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How Should Art Reckon with Climate Change

By Zoë Lescaze

1/9 – 2006, very recent popularization of climate change as an issue. Impact of Al Gore film on popularization of climate change? I remember watching as kid in school, marked by the drama of the storytelling. Wasn’t he in front of an audience (~live action, they react? Maybe my own memory reaction).

1/9 – rise of climate ‘conscious’ art production, maybe due to extreme politics maybe extreme weather. Climate ‘conscious’ vs. climate ‘addressing’? Connotations of the more active latter term?

1/9 – Stephanie Smith concerned that imbibing art productions with surface level ethical value, i.e. climate ‘conscious’ makes it easy for us to say that the issue is being addressed. Re. holocaust monument/anti-monument. Climate conscious art productions can take the place/act as a stand-in for our own consciousnesses, making it easy to forget the necessity of seeking meaningful change. The art productions stand in place of meaningful change, while enacting none of it. 

2/9 – “alarmist works that function as little more than propaganda.” Value of changing ideology re. propaganda? Does it work, does it invest in later change. Maybe no. 

2/9 – Library of Water, Roni Horn. Collecting artifacts, the stuff, and bringing it into the exhibition space. Medium is the message etc. Her non-climate addressing intentionality. Glacier graveyard. Or opposite cryo-storage (whatever it’s called), thawing glaciers in contained environments in order to one day freeze them again, instead of freezing people to one day thaw and give them new life in the science fiction future.

2/9 – ‘the resulting works are not demands for immediate action but ones that expand our psychological capacity to act.” Right, investing in future action through foregrounding what is going on. Does Lescaze then believe in these tactics? As she says, the scale has changed compared to the AIDS crisis. The forces at work are even less visible, take place over time-scales larger than our regular imaginative abilities… what works can invoke this time scale? Thing to look for. Think nuclear storage and communicating radiation danger into deep future.

4/9 – Falls of the Kaaterskill. Painting, ‘untouched beauty’ etc. made timeless by the addition of indigenous figure. Painter subtracted the tourist viewing platform. Commodification of lands into views. Tourist views made to be out of time. But they are manufactured.

5/9 – emergence of art addressing pollution and development, 2nd half 20th century.

5/9 – Liminal Lacrimosa, Mary Mattingly. Expression of glacial (in the sense of actually relating particularly to glaciers instead of broadly expressing very large slow moving time scale) in concrete forms through drips and tear catching urns of Rome (why Rome?). What does it mean to be glacial? 

5/9 – regionalization of climate change belief. Climate change as existing in public knowledge or belief based on politics, convenience to existing lifestyle and identity formed/entangled with that lifestyle (maybe not lifestyle, maybe economy. Lifestyle is a recent invention).

5/9 – “collaboration between strangers” as necessary to effectively combat climate change.

5/9 – artists seeking ways to reduce climate impact. Shipping via sea instead of air. Action fostered through shame?

6/9 – impossible contraction, irreconcilable difference between art world and climate action because of the extreme overindulgence of high art collectors and consumers. True, but they’re thankfully not the whole picture. 

6/9 – art fairs as comically over-consumptive. A parody of the works they present? 

6/9 – wait a minute. We’re talking about galleries and collectors here when we talk about shipping. This has nothing to do with the work being made. New Yorker might take for granted the high art market and collectors as the de-facto art world but I do not. Talking about art and talking about collectors are two different things. 

7/9 – have a good look at Robert Adams’ “New West” photo series, 1974.

7/9 – ok ok, museums and their corporate sponsors.

7/9 – individual billionaire sponsors, their immoral actions, and their positions on boards and trusts of museums and galleries. They are apparently actively contributing to taste-making in the arts sector. People watch what these institutions put out. 

8/9 – Lescaze calls for greater outrage towards the sponsors and board members whose corporations are actively contributing to the climate crisis. Agreed. The list she expounds is terrible. But, does this have specifically to do with the creation of works at our level on the Canadian side? To what extent are we able to make work freely while relatively outside of the direct sponsorship of these people? I’m not sure. The internet definitely spreads the influencing power of these institutions. 

9/9 – John Cage slowest possible organ work. Expressing long time scale, forcing us to relate to those a long way down the road from us. Placing a possible future out of a doubt of future at all. An expression of belief that there will be a future, or a challenge to make sure that there is one? A reason added to make sure there is one?

9/9 – for the museum guy, it (the organ) forces a notion of hope, imposes a notion of hope.

Summary/Response: 

The function of artworks to create public consciousness, or to take the place of public consciousness around climate issues. AND, one possible route to expressing climate crisis, i.e. expressions of climate change time-scale that impart a notion of responsibility towards the future.

Though the article jumps between the production of artworks, their expressive and consciousness making capacities, and the world of collectors (seemingly to rightfully point out the terrible people and their corporations that still hold too much sway over boards of galleries and museums), the main function of the article is to map out one possible route of making meaningful additions through artwork to addressing the climate crisis. 

While simplistic works that mirror the crisis by representing forest fires and floods can easily and only replace meaningful reflection on the crisis (in the way of some monuments to things that we would rather not think about), works that express a timescale and necessary cooperation with future unborn generations may actually create a climate-conscious responsibility in the viewer/caretaker. John Cage’s “Organ/ASLSP,” while not specifically presenting the climate crisis or what it looks like, is a work that can only be realized through collaboration with future generations because of its time scale. Maintenance and chord changes of the organ must be undertaken by people of the future. Therefore there must be a future, and therefore we in the present must reflect on how our input influences the possibility or impossibility of that future, whether it will be there at all. Forced collaboration with the future is one way of activating a present caretaking of the conditions that will make that future possible.

 

Dowsing for Remediation with Alana Bartol

By Valérie Frappier

1/3 – Alana asks how we as white settler relate to the land. Especially in ways that are reciprocal. What does she mean by this, reciprocal in the sense that we relate to the land the land relates to us? I.e. how the land changes us and we change the land? Her and I are looking for the same thing insofar as looking for ways in which we relate to the land. I am looking for images and texts which manifest the ways/roots we did not realize held such deep sway in creating our fundamentally extractive relation to the land. Is Alana seeking actual artierlative methods of relating to the land, i.e. non extractive ones?

1/3 – for her dowsing is a reciprocal (as it we both benefit?) act with the land, undoes ways of owning land, the classically western thought projected onto land. LIDAR and magnetic surveys are doing to, rather with working with the land. Especially western ways of acting upon land through cataloging those things we want to take out. 

1/3 – “digging beyond the narrative of compulsory extraction”

1/3 – Alana is jarred by Crowsnest pass interpretive centers as they put on display an untricial attitude towards the content which they describe. This one of the worst mining disasters in Canadian history is presented without mentioning that the mine collapse is most likely due to the creeping of tunnels too close to the surface of the mountain slope. 

1/3 – “what coal mining has meant for the land, water, and more than human species of this ecosystem while considering how this extractive legacy haunts our present.” How does it haunt our human present? I would challenge Bartol to remember the human practitioners of coal mining and other extractive processes—what happens to them? Should this even be a question in the face of the severity of the climate crisis? I might say yes.

1/3 – dowsing as a method of prospecting for coal?

1/3 – “an appropropriate muse” found in Martine de Bertereau (Baroness de Beausoleil) because she is both a pioneering woman (pioneer feminist, feminist pioneer), while also a pioneer of mining. This is appropriate because Bartol has profited from the same capitalism that has been born out of extraction. Contradictions between the feminist and the prospector. Good and evil? The settler (pioneer) and capitalist go hand in hand (a place to challenge her perspective here?).

2/3 – Bartol selects the witch, through de Bertereau (because of her imprisonment for witchcraft), as an embodiment of both capitalism and our ability to find a connection with the earth. A double pronged symbol/muse. “How we fall prey to system of power (the “bad witch”), yet how we also have the ability to heal by rebuilding our connection to the natural world (the “good witch”).

2/3 – “the paradox of our present, clutching to exploitative processes we know have killed and contaminated us.”

2/3 – Bartol collects core samples and rocks from these places. I actually had coal from crowsnest also. How to we as artists use these materials in our work to call to attention the imperative of change away from extractive processes? How do we collect these objects when the impulse to collect and museum-ify objects is a specifically colonial one? Do we create a reciprocal relationship to land when we collect the refuse of extraction to communicate the depth and pervasiveness of our extractive mindset at work, so that we might change it? 

2/3 – review Grassy Mountain Coal project. Was it approved? I believe not. Or still in talks? Could we say that Bartol’s works had any sway over the decisions of local townspeople in Crowsnest? That’s a whole other question. The extent to which post-extractive works are made available to those who live at points and sites of extraction. For whom are these works made? Who actually gets to see them? In what discourse do they actually get taken up? (Think of the satellite images of the tar sands that are purchased and hung in oil exec. offices.)

2/3 – open pit coal mining in the Rockies, the removal of 1976 legislation that banned mining on the eastern slopes of the Rockies (the most visible slopes), and this article failing to mention that very particular fact about that ordinance (the view, the tourist view). Bartol’s exhibition was at the University of Lethbridge–where is this exactly? Also the linking from the exhibition to the webpages of activist, indigenous and community groups, their significant role in the fight.

2/3 – Grassy Mountain was eventually disapproved, the 1976 legislation was put back in place. But that doesn’t mean coal mining doesn’t happen, it’s just kept invisible.

2/3 – inviting visitors to the museum to take packets of native plant seeds to spread over the grassy mountain site. But also remediation being facilitated by non-native plants, i.e. mullein that can actually take heavy metals out of the ground (what happens then when the plant dies? They go straight back into the earth?) Does this point to another layer of irony, we the settlers, the mullein remove the contaminants in the name of remediation, but does it do anything? Can we accomplish anything through our acts of remediation while we thrive on the refuse of extraction—or is the land back (back to native plants) ultimately the better route (land back).

Artworks to look at: orphan well adoption agency—the roles of satire and fiction. The witches hands alongside collected objects/artifacts. 

Teju Cole collates musings on the everyday and an exploration of image context and space in his new book

by ALICE ZOO

3 – Impassable distance in time. The ability of photography to capture a specific time, stamped in the photo or in the metadata of the digital image (or also in our minds as viewers—all photos are a snapshot of time). Tying a photo of anything taken at the same moment as a collective change, occasion, thereby tying the things together.

3 – Diverting attention away from something that he didn’t want to occupy his mind, US elections. The project was first disseminated through instagram (the project is the instagram?). Cole posted every day. The routine attention he gave to this project kept his mind off the election that he didn’t want to think about. The kitchen just happened to be there? Why the kitchen? Why the fruit? Is it specifically the ‘everydayness’ that the kitchen represents? Or other histories?pasts being brought into play here?

4 – “nothing will be moved… the operation of chance” is deciding where the objects are in the room etc. Right but so what? The photograph mediates always, the compositions are dictated more by the angle and framing than by the arrangement of the objects. Nothing random here. Cooking with this project in mind also makes you bring out the nice dinnerware, the ugly old cookpots—whatever is your fancy, there’s an aestheticization at work.

6 – Invoking our imaginative force. The pictures don’t show much, Zoo says they ask us to imagine the cooking, the ‘what else is going on,’ which is what still life can do so well. Still life suggests the wider context, the wider ‘life’ going on around the still objects, the moments and movements that were necessary to land them in the places they now sit. 

8 – ‘de-skilling’ the photographs. Coles pulls away from skill to try to clear the path to emotional access. A more direct connection or appeal to emotion when the images aren’t complicated by skill?

8 – The many ‘yous.’ Cole addresses us through many ‘yous’ in the accompanying essay. Do his yous mirror the ones we imagine at work in the kitchen?

9 – Inwardness as openness. Cole cooking for himself during pandemic-instituted isolation became a way to relate, even offer to the outward, inaccessible kitchens of others. A mirroring of activity to create imagined proximity?

13 – ‘Aliveness in a period of time.’ The inevitable interpolation of life among still life. The clutter of life here evoked through a list of medical reports and symptoms of Cole’s illness while making the project. I guess a simple document of a moment? Radical everydayness as a counter to the monumentality of the elections and the pandemic? Asserting the everyday as a humanizing, relatable force?

13 – Documentation of everydayness creates a calendar of points of contact. As a reader Zoo states that we can ask how Cole’s body is now, where the pots are now, how everything has moved and shifted since the photos were taken. These are actual pots, maybe in his kitchen still, maybe the thrift store, maybe broken. The transience of objects and their fates. Look at them go. Wonder where they are. Archeology. What we can know from a broken pot.

16 – Mass adoption and success of photography. Cole is interested in challenging the easy capture of content through photography. Make the compositions weird, make the content not obvious. A good antidote to the deluge of advertising photography, the very pointed stuff trying to tell us things. 

Timothy Morton’s Hyper-Pandemic

By Morgan Meis

2 – 2013. Morton proposed the hyper-object as the next decider of human life. These hyper-objects are the collective plastic in the ocean, all the carbon in the atmosphere, all the radioactive nuclear waste. According to Morton, these hyper-objects will decide the course of future human lives. I agree? We have to adapt to dealing with them, grappling with their destructive force (as the hyper-objects grow, even as we can’t always measure them, as they loom over us, getting bigger) as the consequences of their existence ripples across our lives. Poisonous things, venom spreading through veins.

2 – Hyperobjects are “massively distributed in time and space.” Time, evoking the fact that they have been made and are growing along in time, hopefully one day shrinking in time also. If we can scrub some carbon out of the atmosphere, will carbon lose its status as a hyperobject? What about other materials that we don’t consider as actively beneficial or poisonous? All the magmatic rock collected on earth. I guess everything has a force. Cultural baggage to all the blades of grass on earth.

2 – ‘fourteen million tons.’ A numbers game. These objects can be measured in mass, but the magnitude of millions of tons is beyond representation or imagination to us. 

2 – Longevity. This stuff will outlive us by many many years. The impossible slowness of nuclear half-lives. That’s a part of the hyper status. 

3 – Ecology as fusion, openness, interpolation of many things… alright entangled. 

4 – Jeans T-shirts Mazda 3 and they. The banalness. A disappearing act. Me too.

4 – Flipping the script and planet of the apes. Nearing climate disaster Morton evokes the weirdness of things, rather than the sublime (like the sublime), to strike awe in us. Awe here is generative of respect, not tame-ability. 

5 – Weird sentences and the awe they inspire. A healthy amount of mystery goes a long way to make people wonder. Making people wonder can generate their respect, and also their disgust. Some things need to be qualified, other things can be poetry.

5 – Cats as transgressors of agrarian private land divide. Borders. We let them go where they want. For Morton this evokes the nature we still wish to be a part of. Let it wander about. Representational of the freedom we wish we had? To move around unimpeded by fences. Even our between yard infrastructure is not prohibitory to cats. They can always jump the fence. Climb stuff. We never wanted to make anti-cat-movement infrastructure, or cats can always get past it anyway?

6 – Ecology everywhere. We live in cities mostly now. Never get out enough to the woods etc. To live ecologically we should see the interrelatedness of all the critters in the city and the materials they thrive on and against.

7 – Oil as transgressor of the boundary between nature and not nature. Comes from the earth but is of industry and plastic. 

8 – O.O.O. , Object Oriented Ontology. Philosophy concerned with all the vastness of stuff colliding and reacting, compressing and spreading. All too big to see at once, always slipping away through time? Everything all at once is way too much to know. This strikes awe. Holy cow there’s so much in a given second. Object oriented ontology as evocative of the terror of time getting away? Car tires on pavement. Waves crashing mid Atlantic. Wow. 

8 – Confronting reality as acknowledging that something will always be missed out of every encounter. There’s always too much. There’s always God out there in the vastness (sublime), but in this case the vastness is the objects that make up our world, not the up and away and heavenly. All right here. Playing Piano for Dad playing inthe background makes this reading very grandiose. I like it. 

8 – “there is no outside—just the entire universe of entities constantly interacting, and you are one of them. 

8 – Does the vastness here described encourage ecologically oriented action? Planet saving action? Or is the vastness pulling us, leaning us into the crash-course, the fatalist drive, the pull of self-destruction, all that’s named inevitable. 

9 – Polyurethane magic. Sick.

9 – Emotional commitment to plastic.

9 – Narrative format of this article is great. The stage setting, the humour allowed for in the in-person visit. The stuff around. The veteran submarine, the yellow sulphur pyramid.

9 – How to cultivate responsible attachment to hyper-objects? In the case of nuclear waste, Morton suggests storing it above ground and visible, so that we might care for it and be responsible. Hiding things away makes us forget, pretends to us the disappearance of their scary forces. They’re still there, only concealed.