Art for earth’s sake: Melting Into The Mind

Can art change the climate of opinion on climate change? Yes, says Ed Gillespie – but it doesn’t need ‘activist art’ to make its point.

“Art is to the community what the dream is to the individual.” So said Thomas Mann. Dreams may not be where we find direct answers to our challenges – but analysing them in the cool light of day can provide sharply useful insights. Personally, I have nightmares about what the future might hold if we’re not a lot more careful with our carbon emissions.

Yet I can’t hope to unravel that challenge myself. It’s a collective issue – the collective issue, even – one for the whole community, however that’s defined.

“What the warming world needs is art, sweet art, to register what’s happening in our imaginations, the most sensitive of all our devices.”

But if Mann (who lived through two world wars and the rise of Nazism) was right, perhaps art can help us come to terms with it? Nature writer Bill McKibben thinks so: “What the warming world needs now is art, sweet art. We can register what is happening with satellites and scientific instruments, but can we register it in our imaginations, the most sensitive of all our devices?”

There’s been an amazing resurgence in the popularity of contemporary art in Britain over the last decade or so. But how is it addressing the most pressing of contemporary challenges? Damien Hirst, enfant terrible of the Brit Art scene, has had a go at representing the carbon dioxide by-product of our lifestyles. This is challenging in its own way, because CO2 is a colourless, odourless gas.

So making visible its increased concentration in our atmosphere, by a hundred or so parts per million, wasn’t easy. But Hirst has form in grappling with the insubstantial: remember The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (aka ‘The dead shark’)? To illustrate CO2, he made the intangible physical in the form of 441 empty gas cylinders, corresponding in volume to his own annual carbon emissions (around 15 tonnes for the carbon spotters out there).

Its impact was somewhat undermined, however, by the fact that the ‘sculpture’ remained a concept. Hirst’s assistant told us that the piece was “mocked up for a newspaper article and Damien doesn’t want his name attached to it...”

Arctic inspiration

For a more committed approach, try the cumulative output of the scientists, writers and artists who have ventured northwards on the good ship Noorderlicht, heading into the previously ice-bound Arctic north of Norway, where the sea is now passable as the ice retreats through the warming effects of climate change. The artist David Buckland devised and led these ‘Cape Farewell’ expeditions, with big names like Antony Gormley, Rachel Whiteread and Gary Hume among those on board.

Often the in-situ works are ephemeral, such as Buckland’s own Ice Text projections, where messages are embedded into the leading face of crumbling ice sheets, quite literally putting the issue of climate change at the cutting edge of the debate.

“Do these beautiful images and curious phrases communicate climate change to their whirling audience – or are they just an aesthetically pleasing backdrop?”

The ice texts have also been projected onto the façade of Somerset House in London, above the seasonal ice-skaters enjoying the rink below. But do these admittedly beautiful images with their curious phrasing (The Cold Library of Ice, Norwegian Blue: Arctic Canary) communicate climate change to their whirling audience – or are they just an aesthetically pleasing backdrop? It’s a question which hangs over much of the work from the Cape Farewell artists – and most are sceptical of more overtly didactic, message-bound art.

Alex Hartley, says it’s “bound to fail, as it becomes like advertising; if it’s too preachy or schooly it just won’t work”. Heather Ackroyd, working with her collaborative partner Dan Harvey, fiercely resists art becoming an easy soundbite; for her it has to be a “psychic response: it must be lateral, not literal.” Nonetheless, the Cape Farewell experience has left her “voracious for all things climate-related”, as she puts it.

“We didn’t set out to necessarily make a piece of environmental art about the Arctic, but we’ve opened up to the experience of going there so much that now we can’t shut it down.”

“Turner and Constable probably didn’t mean to generate an English landscape conservation movement, but that’s undoubtedly part of their legacy.”

Art doesn’t have to be overtly ‘environmental’ to trigger such a response. One of the most successful pieces of public art at the Tate Modern was Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project: its moody evening light of the ‘sun’ that illuminated the gallery could easily evoke a twilight civilisation; the power of a change in the weather.

And I can’t have been the only one who saw in Turner Prize winner Martin Creed’s The lights going on and off a flicker of the potential for power blackouts in these days of looming peak oil and uncertainty in fuel supplies. And if my responses weren’t the artists’ express intentions, does this matter?

Will the interpretation of the work ultimately fit the issues of the day or, conversely, create issues out of previously unconsidered questions? Turner and Constable probably didn’t mean to generate an English landscape conservation movement, but that’s undoubtedly part of their legacy.

Happy accidents

Ackroyd and Harvey’s latest work uses a Minke whale skeleton which they recovered in maggot-ridden festering pieces from the exotically named Gibraltar Point in less exotic Skegness. By repeatedly immersing the (cleaned) bones in a super-saturated salt solution they are encrusting them with shimmering crystals. The end result will be a 20-foot long skeleton enmeshed in ‘ice’.

For Harvey whales are wonderful, mysterious creatures that capture the public imagination. “I don’t know what it is but they get me,” he says. But they are also “fundamental to the industrialisation of the UK through wide use of their oil... now we are looking at the fate of a rather different kind of oil.” He and Ackroyd hope their whale will work effectively as a stand-alone piece, as well as within the explicitly climate-change-related Cape Farewell exhibition at London’s Natural History Museum next year.

This emerging body of work is sophisticated, yet subtle; it’s compelling, but yet not complicit with the agendas of climate change communicators like me, who might prefer to see a bit more of Hirst’s brand of brash, in-your-face populism. There’s similar subtlety in Andy Goldsworthy’s wonderful works with the ‘materials of nature’, which are part of a long history of environmental art inspired by the natural world.

Climate change, however, provides a rather different, more urgent and complex challenge to the artist. Its questions won’t be solved, or public behaviour changed, by art alone. But, as Buckland says, “wonderful, happy accidents” can provide more motivation for change than logical thought. My hope is that art, culture and those ‘happy accidents’, in conjunction with the appropriate information, can engage the public emotionally as a precursor to action.

The impetus for change is, after all, manifold – robust science, market forces and art are all part of the same matrix. And iconic images? The Hiroshima mushroom cloud has already been used by the Carbon Trust as a metaphor for the destructiveness of climate change.

Historically other major campaigns have also become defined by their imagery (think of Kim Phuk, the naked, burnt napalm victim in Vietnam), but these are all negative visions. Let’s not exclude the positive – art that’s capable of exciting us about the future. Moving people by the power of dreams needn’t just mean terrifying them into dissonance with nightmares. I know which I prefer to think about last thing at night. Ed Gillespie is creative director at Futerra Sustainability Communications.

5 January 2006

Ed Gillespie