Hanging over a wooden balustrade in an old naval barracks in Venice, you could look down on a brightly lit beach scene in the summer of 2019. It was performed by actors and volunteers on several tons of specially laid sand. You saw the bathers lying on their towels and in beach chairs under the roof of that naval building. It got even weirder. They sang an opera, about minor beach annoyances, about how hard they’d had to work all year to lie here and about the importance of a beach vacation. A woman in a red bathing suit sang: “My boy is eight and a half / And he’s already been swimming in / The Black, / The Yellow, / The White, / The Red, / The Mediterranean, / Aegean seas…” Beyond in the libretto becomes more explicit true Sun & Sea (Marina) about: a volcano has erupted – metaphor for the climate catastrophe. The earth strikes back, a volcanic dust cloud has grabbed a plane from the sky: “Not a single climatologist – predicted a scenario like – this.”
This Lithuanian entry for that year’s Venice Biennale was a breathtaking, sun-soaked opera about climate change. The piece, that still tours the world, manages to transform the oppressive feeling of man-made global warming into a spectacular, artistic form. As far as I’m concerned, it was the rightful winner of the Golden Lion for the best pavilion that year.
Yet it is important: Sun & Sea is a very expensive mega-production. And the Biennale is a mega event, attracting more than half a million visitors to the vulnerable lagoon city every two years. That we traveled en masse by plane and car to Venice to be able to wallow in the climate crisis, through art, for a while – oh, it’s so bad, oh, how beautiful – that felt inappropriate.
Big gestures
It is not fair to consider individual travel movements, works of art or events along the CO2to keep a ruler. Climate change is a collective problem, it cannot be solved by individual actions alone. But still: can you make good art about global warming if the same art contributes to the problem? And above all: are these kinds of large productions the best way to depict the climate crisis at all?
Precisely in the years when art further developed into an international industry, the theme of climate in art also became ‘hot’. Not a biennial, art festival or new collection presentation goes by without the climate, the Anthropocene and the complex relationship between man and nature playing a role. Often with large, ambitious projects, such as Sun & Sea (Marina). The gigantic scale of the climate crisis seems to inspire artists to make ever greater gestures. As if they want to measure themselves against the problem.
That’s a fantastic development, you might say, because the climate crisis is, like NRCcolumnist Marijn Kruk also wrote a “crisis of the imagination”. Climate change is what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a ‘hyperobject’: a phenomenon “so vast in both time and space that we can only glimpse it at any one moment in time.” Climate change is so big, and our individual contribution so small, that we can hardly imagine it.
Fortunately, art excels at making the unimaginable imaginable. But when artists do that with large-scale climate art, it often feels like that art falls short. Art has a paralyzing effect, often because it pollutes itself, or because it depicts the problem, but does not propose an alternative. This makes the artwork look powerless.
40,015 kilometers of cotton thread
Take a work of art from the exhibition stormy weather that Museum Arnhem, also in 2019, organized in the temporary location De Kerk. In the nave of the church building was a five-meter high jet engine wrapped in enough cotton to stretch a thread around the world. Work around the world (2017) by Maarten Vanden Eynde is about the devastating influence of the cotton industry. About 10,000 liters of water is needed for one kilogram of cotton, the exhibition booklet reports. Maddening. Because if cotton is so polluting, why are we standing here looking at 40,015 kilometers of the guilty material?
Something like that. At the Drenthe art biennale Into Nature you can take a seat in a white-painted container until 24 October in the middle of the Bargerveen. Inside the installation Melt (2016) you see fog and an alarming red light. You hear something dark creak, it drips and it flows. It turns out to be the sound of a melting glacier near Greenland. Artist Jacob Kirkegaard traveled up and down several times to make these sound recordings. There is of course a link between the melting ice and the vulnerable Drenthe nature reserve, which arose after the last ice age. But it also has something ridiculous: come in a closed container on a beautiful peatland and listen to a glacier, to imagine the climate crisis.
Spectacular melting ice is also Ice Watch with which Olafur Eliasson caused a furore. The Danish-German star artist fished up large chunks of Arctic ice from the waters of Nuup Kangerlua fjord near Greenland. He subsequently exhibited it in the city centers of Copenhagen (2014, at the presentation of a climate report), Paris (during the 2015 climate conference) and London (2018, at the opening of his own exhibition at Tate Modern).
Philosopher Timothy Morton was involved in Ice Watch. In his book Being Ecological (2018) he explains what the intention is. The artwork is supposed to make people “tune in” to a different kind of time scale, the time of a chunk of ice. „The meeting with ice watch is in a sense a dialogue with ice blocks”. According to Morton, art is ideally suited to establish this dialogue with non-human phenomena: the artwork touches us, and as a result we become aware of our relationship with the melting polar cap.
It will be, and the images of Ice Watch went around the world every time, often as an illustration for articles on climate politics. Ice Watch cleverly combines a victim of the climate crisis – the melting glacier – with the perpetrators – politicians, the shoppers. It is a beautiful representation of the problem, but it also looks powerless, because the artwork itself was polluting, and because the artist does not offer an alternative.
The melting glacier in a strange place, the bleak climate opera, the giant spool of polluting cotton – these works of art communicate: this is going wrong and as you stand looking at it you are most likely contributing to the problem, we make you an accomplice and we give you no action perspective. Contributing to awareness seems the highest attainable, but has anyone bought one less T-shirt through the cotton spool in Arnhem?
Reachable ideal
Does it exist? Art that inspires action on climate? Investigated that two Norwegian scientists at the 2015 Paris climate conference. The 37 works of art that were on display at the ARTCOP21 festival in the city they divided into four categories, ‘the comforting utopia’, ‘the challenging dystopia’, ‘the mediocre mythology’ and ‘the great solution’. They then interviewed 874 visitors about which works of art had touched them the most. Only three works of art made people feel they could do something about climate change. All three were categorized under ‘the great solution’. The researchers described them as “beautiful and colorful images of sublime nature that show solutions to environmental problems.”
Perhaps the research was not entirely representative, but there is something to be said for the conclusion: an achievable ideal stimulates you to take action yourself rather than a gripping, paralyzing dystopia.
Coordinate with your environment
Two recent works of art show that small-scale art is much more effective in conveying a message about people and the environment. The video artwork The Garden by Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide), for example, now on display at the exhibition The Botanical Revolution at the Central Museum in Utrecht. The hour-long video is a filmed report of a year in an Amsterdam allotment garden. You see a worm endlessly slowly crawling through the earth, you see plants eaten by insects, a dog roams among the greenery. Wet, dry, flowering, semi-digested. The video shows the enormous wealth of colors and textures that can be found on no more than 330 square meters. It’s all filmed with such awe that you get an eye for the connection between people, animals and plants.
The Garden contains no appeal to fly less, makes no attempt to put you in contact with a glacier. It’s just a garden. Human, in a certain balance with nature. It is harmless, well-behaved almost, but in that respect it is inspiring: the film is a silent invitation to coincide with your surroundings.
Urgent, precisely because it doesn’t look urgent at all.
Another relatively small work of art, in this context, that makes the larger connection visible, has been hanging on the wall in the plenary hall in the temporary building of the House of Representatives for a month and a half. Soil by Jos de Putter consists of five panels with clods of earth and clay from different Dutch provinces – it depicts different stages: unprocessed earth, soil in which people have played, to earth that is displayed as a commodity.
De Putter placed the ground “upright, that is the position of an interlocutor”, he said when I spoke to him, because “whichever way you look at it, we consider the relationship between man and planet here.” Is there a hidden ecological message in his work? “I see my work as an invitation to look at the earth. Art that takes a stand does not become better art.” That modesty graces the artist. The prominence of the ordinary clay, scooped up around the corner, is from now on every evening in the news a silent reminder of what is really at stake – without a distracting big gesture.
The small convinces faster than the large. This is also apparent from a passage from Timothy Mortons Being Ecological, in which he tells how he explains to a journalist who does not want to understand what it means to be ‘ecological’: „’Do you have a cat’, I asked. “Certainly,” he replied, possibly a little taken aback by this casual, simple question. “Do you like petting her or him?” ‘Absolutely!’ ‘Then you are already connected to a non-human being, for no particular reason. You are already ecological.’”
No ice floe, no miles of cotton, no burning sand – just a house cat, clay or an allotment garden.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of October 7, 2021
Hanging over a wooden balustrade in an old naval barracks in Venice, you could look down on a brightly lit beach scene in the summer of 2019. It was performed by actors and volunteers on several tons of specially laid sand. You saw the bathers lying on their towels and in beach chairs under the roof of that naval building. It got even weirder. They sang an opera, about minor beach annoyances, about how hard they’d had to work all year to lie here and about the importance of a beach vacation. A woman in a red bathing suit sang: “My boy is eight and a half / And he’s already been swimming in / The Black, / The Yellow, / The White, / The Red, / The Mediterranean, / Aegean seas…” Beyond in the libretto becomes more explicit true Sun & Sea (Marina) about: a volcano has erupted – metaphor for the climate catastrophe. The earth strikes back, a volcanic dust cloud has grabbed a plane from the sky: “Not a single climatologist – predicted a scenario like – this.”
This Lithuanian entry for that year’s Venice Biennale was a breathtaking, sun-soaked opera about climate change. The piece, that still tours the world, manages to transform the oppressive feeling of man-made global warming into a spectacular, artistic form. As far as I’m concerned, it was the rightful winner of the Golden Lion for the best pavilion that year.
Yet it is important: Sun & Sea is a very expensive mega-production. And the Biennale is a mega event, attracting more than half a million visitors to the vulnerable lagoon city every two years. That we traveled en masse by plane and car to Venice to be able to wallow in the climate crisis, through art, for a while – oh, it’s so bad, oh, how beautiful – that felt inappropriate.
Big gestures
It is not fair to consider individual travel movements, works of art or events along the CO2to keep a ruler. Climate change is a collective problem, it cannot be solved by individual actions alone. But still: can you make good art about global warming if the same art contributes to the problem? And above all: are these kinds of large productions the best way to depict the climate crisis at all?
Precisely in the years when art further developed into an international industry, the theme of climate in art also became ‘hot’. Not a biennial, art festival or new collection presentation goes by without the climate, the Anthropocene and the complex relationship between man and nature playing a role. Often with large, ambitious projects, such as Sun & Sea (Marina). The gigantic scale of the climate crisis seems to inspire artists to make ever greater gestures. As if they want to measure themselves against the problem.
That’s a fantastic development, you might say, because the climate crisis is, like NRCcolumnist Marijn Kruk also wrote a “crisis of the imagination”. Climate change is what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a ‘hyperobject’: a phenomenon “so vast in both time and space that we can only glimpse it at any one moment in time.” Climate change is so big, and our individual contribution so small, that we can hardly imagine it.
Fortunately, art excels at making the unimaginable imaginable. But when artists do that with large-scale climate art, it often feels like that art falls short. Art has a paralyzing effect, often because it pollutes itself, or because it depicts the problem, but does not propose an alternative. This makes the artwork look powerless.
40,015 kilometers of cotton thread
Take a work of art from the exhibition stormy weather that Museum Arnhem, also in 2019, organized in the temporary location De Kerk. In the nave of the church building was a five-meter high jet engine wrapped in enough cotton to stretch a thread around the world. Work around the world (2017) by Maarten Vanden Eynde is about the devastating influence of the cotton industry. About 10,000 liters of water is needed for one kilogram of cotton, the exhibition booklet reports. Maddening. Because if cotton is so polluting, why are we standing here looking at 40,015 kilometers of the guilty material?
Something like that. At the Drenthe art biennale Into Nature you can take a seat in a white-painted container until 24 October in the middle of the Bargerveen. Inside the installation Melt (2016) you see fog and an alarming red light. You hear something dark creak, it drips and it flows. It turns out to be the sound of a melting glacier near Greenland. Artist Jacob Kirkegaard traveled up and down several times to make these sound recordings. There is of course a link between the melting ice and the vulnerable Drenthe nature reserve, which arose after the last ice age. But it also has something ridiculous: come in a closed container on a beautiful peatland and listen to a glacier, to imagine the climate crisis.
Spectacular melting ice is also Ice Watch with which Olafur Eliasson caused a furore. The Danish-German star artist fished up large chunks of Arctic ice from the waters of Nuup Kangerlua fjord near Greenland. He subsequently exhibited it in the city centers of Copenhagen (2014, at the presentation of a climate report), Paris (during the 2015 climate conference) and London (2018, at the opening of his own exhibition at Tate Modern).
Philosopher Timothy Morton was involved in Ice Watch. In his book Being Ecological (2018) he explains what the intention is. The artwork is supposed to make people “tune in” to a different kind of time scale, the time of a chunk of ice. „The meeting with ice watch is in a sense a dialogue with ice blocks”. According to Morton, art is ideally suited to establish this dialogue with non-human phenomena: the artwork touches us, and as a result we become aware of our relationship with the melting polar cap.
It will be, and the images of Ice Watch went around the world every time, often as an illustration for articles on climate politics. Ice Watch cleverly combines a victim of the climate crisis – the melting glacier – with the perpetrators – politicians, the shoppers. It is a beautiful representation of the problem, but it also looks powerless, because the artwork itself was polluting, and because the artist does not offer an alternative.
The melting glacier in a strange place, the bleak climate opera, the giant spool of polluting cotton – these works of art communicate: this is going wrong and as you stand looking at it you are most likely contributing to the problem, we make you an accomplice and we give you no action perspective. Contributing to awareness seems the highest attainable, but has anyone bought one less T-shirt through the cotton spool in Arnhem?
Reachable ideal
Does it exist? Art that inspires action on climate? Investigated that two Norwegian scientists at the 2015 Paris climate conference. The 37 works of art that were on display at the ARTCOP21 festival in the city they divided into four categories, ‘the comforting utopia’, ‘the challenging dystopia’, ‘the mediocre mythology’ and ‘the great solution’. They then interviewed 874 visitors about which works of art had touched them the most. Only three works of art made people feel they could do something about climate change. All three were categorized under ‘the great solution’. The researchers described them as “beautiful and colorful images of sublime nature that show solutions to environmental problems.”
Perhaps the research was not entirely representative, but there is something to be said for the conclusion: an achievable ideal stimulates you to take action yourself rather than a gripping, paralyzing dystopia.
Coordinate with your environment
Two recent works of art show that small-scale art is much more effective in conveying a message about people and the environment. The video artwork The Garden by Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide), for example, now on display at the exhibition The Botanical Revolution at the Central Museum in Utrecht. The hour-long video is a filmed report of a year in an Amsterdam allotment garden. You see a worm endlessly slowly crawling through the earth, you see plants eaten by insects, a dog roams among the greenery. Wet, dry, flowering, semi-digested. The video shows the enormous wealth of colors and textures that can be found on no more than 330 square meters. It’s all filmed with such awe that you get an eye for the connection between people, animals and plants.
The Garden contains no appeal to fly less, makes no attempt to put you in contact with a glacier. It’s just a garden. Human, in a certain balance with nature. It is harmless, well-behaved almost, but in that respect it is inspiring: the film is a silent invitation to coincide with your surroundings.
Urgent, precisely because it doesn’t look urgent at all.
Another relatively small work of art, in this context, that makes the larger connection visible, has been hanging on the wall in the plenary hall in the temporary building of the House of Representatives for a month and a half. Soil by Jos de Putter consists of five panels with clods of earth and clay from different Dutch provinces – it depicts different stages: unprocessed earth, soil in which people have played, to earth that is displayed as a commodity.
De Putter placed the ground “upright, that is the position of an interlocutor”, he said when I spoke to him, because “whichever way you look at it, we consider the relationship between man and planet here.” Is there a hidden ecological message in his work? “I see my work as an invitation to look at the earth. Art that takes a stand does not become better art.” That modesty graces the artist. The prominence of the ordinary clay, scooped up around the corner, is from now on every evening in the news a silent reminder of what is really at stake – without a distracting big gesture.
The small convinces faster than the large. This is also apparent from a passage from Timothy Mortons Being Ecological, in which he tells how he explains to a journalist who does not want to understand what it means to be ‘ecological’: „’Do you have a cat’, I asked. “Certainly,” he replied, possibly a little taken aback by this casual, simple question. “Do you like petting her or him?” ‘Absolutely!’ ‘Then you are already connected to a non-human being, for no particular reason. You are already ecological.’”
No ice floe, no miles of cotton, no burning sand – just a house cat, clay or an allotment garden.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of October 7, 2021
Hanging over a wooden balustrade in an old naval barracks in Venice, you could look down on a brightly lit beach scene in the summer of 2019. It was performed by actors and volunteers on several tons of specially laid sand. You saw the bathers lying on their towels and in beach chairs under the roof of that naval building. It got even weirder. They sang an opera, about minor beach annoyances, about how hard they’d had to work all year to lie here and about the importance of a beach vacation. A woman in a red bathing suit sang: “My boy is eight and a half / And he’s already been swimming in / The Black, / The Yellow, / The White, / The Red, / The Mediterranean, / Aegean seas…” Beyond in the libretto becomes more explicit true Sun & Sea (Marina) about: a volcano has erupted – metaphor for the climate catastrophe. The earth strikes back, a volcanic dust cloud has grabbed a plane from the sky: “Not a single climatologist – predicted a scenario like – this.”
This Lithuanian entry for that year’s Venice Biennale was a breathtaking, sun-soaked opera about climate change. The piece, that still tours the world, manages to transform the oppressive feeling of man-made global warming into a spectacular, artistic form. As far as I’m concerned, it was the rightful winner of the Golden Lion for the best pavilion that year.
Yet it is important: Sun & Sea is a very expensive mega-production. And the Biennale is a mega event, attracting more than half a million visitors to the vulnerable lagoon city every two years. That we traveled en masse by plane and car to Venice to be able to wallow in the climate crisis, through art, for a while – oh, it’s so bad, oh, how beautiful – that felt inappropriate.
Big gestures
It is not fair to consider individual travel movements, works of art or events along the CO2to keep a ruler. Climate change is a collective problem, it cannot be solved by individual actions alone. But still: can you make good art about global warming if the same art contributes to the problem? And above all: are these kinds of large productions the best way to depict the climate crisis at all?
Precisely in the years when art further developed into an international industry, the theme of climate in art also became ‘hot’. Not a biennial, art festival or new collection presentation goes by without the climate, the Anthropocene and the complex relationship between man and nature playing a role. Often with large, ambitious projects, such as Sun & Sea (Marina). The gigantic scale of the climate crisis seems to inspire artists to make ever greater gestures. As if they want to measure themselves against the problem.
That’s a fantastic development, you might say, because the climate crisis is, like NRCcolumnist Marijn Kruk also wrote a “crisis of the imagination”. Climate change is what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a ‘hyperobject’: a phenomenon “so vast in both time and space that we can only glimpse it at any one moment in time.” Climate change is so big, and our individual contribution so small, that we can hardly imagine it.
Fortunately, art excels at making the unimaginable imaginable. But when artists do that with large-scale climate art, it often feels like that art falls short. Art has a paralyzing effect, often because it pollutes itself, or because it depicts the problem, but does not propose an alternative. This makes the artwork look powerless.
40,015 kilometers of cotton thread
Take a work of art from the exhibition stormy weather that Museum Arnhem, also in 2019, organized in the temporary location De Kerk. In the nave of the church building was a five-meter high jet engine wrapped in enough cotton to stretch a thread around the world. Work around the world (2017) by Maarten Vanden Eynde is about the devastating influence of the cotton industry. About 10,000 liters of water is needed for one kilogram of cotton, the exhibition booklet reports. Maddening. Because if cotton is so polluting, why are we standing here looking at 40,015 kilometers of the guilty material?
Something like that. At the Drenthe art biennale Into Nature you can take a seat in a white-painted container until 24 October in the middle of the Bargerveen. Inside the installation Melt (2016) you see fog and an alarming red light. You hear something dark creak, it drips and it flows. It turns out to be the sound of a melting glacier near Greenland. Artist Jacob Kirkegaard traveled up and down several times to make these sound recordings. There is of course a link between the melting ice and the vulnerable Drenthe nature reserve, which arose after the last ice age. But it also has something ridiculous: come in a closed container on a beautiful peatland and listen to a glacier, to imagine the climate crisis.
Spectacular melting ice is also Ice Watch with which Olafur Eliasson caused a furore. The Danish-German star artist fished up large chunks of Arctic ice from the waters of Nuup Kangerlua fjord near Greenland. He subsequently exhibited it in the city centers of Copenhagen (2014, at the presentation of a climate report), Paris (during the 2015 climate conference) and London (2018, at the opening of his own exhibition at Tate Modern).
Philosopher Timothy Morton was involved in Ice Watch. In his book Being Ecological (2018) he explains what the intention is. The artwork is supposed to make people “tune in” to a different kind of time scale, the time of a chunk of ice. „The meeting with ice watch is in a sense a dialogue with ice blocks”. According to Morton, art is ideally suited to establish this dialogue with non-human phenomena: the artwork touches us, and as a result we become aware of our relationship with the melting polar cap.
It will be, and the images of Ice Watch went around the world every time, often as an illustration for articles on climate politics. Ice Watch cleverly combines a victim of the climate crisis – the melting glacier – with the perpetrators – politicians, the shoppers. It is a beautiful representation of the problem, but it also looks powerless, because the artwork itself was polluting, and because the artist does not offer an alternative.
The melting glacier in a strange place, the bleak climate opera, the giant spool of polluting cotton – these works of art communicate: this is going wrong and as you stand looking at it you are most likely contributing to the problem, we make you an accomplice and we give you no action perspective. Contributing to awareness seems the highest attainable, but has anyone bought one less T-shirt through the cotton spool in Arnhem?
Reachable ideal
Does it exist? Art that inspires action on climate? Investigated that two Norwegian scientists at the 2015 Paris climate conference. The 37 works of art that were on display at the ARTCOP21 festival in the city they divided into four categories, ‘the comforting utopia’, ‘the challenging dystopia’, ‘the mediocre mythology’ and ‘the great solution’. They then interviewed 874 visitors about which works of art had touched them the most. Only three works of art made people feel they could do something about climate change. All three were categorized under ‘the great solution’. The researchers described them as “beautiful and colorful images of sublime nature that show solutions to environmental problems.”
Perhaps the research was not entirely representative, but there is something to be said for the conclusion: an achievable ideal stimulates you to take action yourself rather than a gripping, paralyzing dystopia.
Coordinate with your environment
Two recent works of art show that small-scale art is much more effective in conveying a message about people and the environment. The video artwork The Garden by Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide), for example, now on display at the exhibition The Botanical Revolution at the Central Museum in Utrecht. The hour-long video is a filmed report of a year in an Amsterdam allotment garden. You see a worm endlessly slowly crawling through the earth, you see plants eaten by insects, a dog roams among the greenery. Wet, dry, flowering, semi-digested. The video shows the enormous wealth of colors and textures that can be found on no more than 330 square meters. It’s all filmed with such awe that you get an eye for the connection between people, animals and plants.
The Garden contains no appeal to fly less, makes no attempt to put you in contact with a glacier. It’s just a garden. Human, in a certain balance with nature. It is harmless, well-behaved almost, but in that respect it is inspiring: the film is a silent invitation to coincide with your surroundings.
Urgent, precisely because it doesn’t look urgent at all.
Another relatively small work of art, in this context, that makes the larger connection visible, has been hanging on the wall in the plenary hall in the temporary building of the House of Representatives for a month and a half. Soil by Jos de Putter consists of five panels with clods of earth and clay from different Dutch provinces – it depicts different stages: unprocessed earth, soil in which people have played, to earth that is displayed as a commodity.
De Putter placed the ground “upright, that is the position of an interlocutor”, he said when I spoke to him, because “whichever way you look at it, we consider the relationship between man and planet here.” Is there a hidden ecological message in his work? “I see my work as an invitation to look at the earth. Art that takes a stand does not become better art.” That modesty graces the artist. The prominence of the ordinary clay, scooped up around the corner, is from now on every evening in the news a silent reminder of what is really at stake – without a distracting big gesture.
The small convinces faster than the large. This is also apparent from a passage from Timothy Mortons Being Ecological, in which he tells how he explains to a journalist who does not want to understand what it means to be ‘ecological’: „’Do you have a cat’, I asked. “Certainly,” he replied, possibly a little taken aback by this casual, simple question. “Do you like petting her or him?” ‘Absolutely!’ ‘Then you are already connected to a non-human being, for no particular reason. You are already ecological.’”
No ice floe, no miles of cotton, no burning sand – just a house cat, clay or an allotment garden.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of October 7, 2021
Hanging over a wooden balustrade in an old naval barracks in Venice, you could look down on a brightly lit beach scene in the summer of 2019. It was performed by actors and volunteers on several tons of specially laid sand. You saw the bathers lying on their towels and in beach chairs under the roof of that naval building. It got even weirder. They sang an opera, about minor beach annoyances, about how hard they’d had to work all year to lie here and about the importance of a beach vacation. A woman in a red bathing suit sang: “My boy is eight and a half / And he’s already been swimming in / The Black, / The Yellow, / The White, / The Red, / The Mediterranean, / Aegean seas…” Beyond in the libretto becomes more explicit true Sun & Sea (Marina) about: a volcano has erupted – metaphor for the climate catastrophe. The earth strikes back, a volcanic dust cloud has grabbed a plane from the sky: “Not a single climatologist – predicted a scenario like – this.”
This Lithuanian entry for that year’s Venice Biennale was a breathtaking, sun-soaked opera about climate change. The piece, that still tours the world, manages to transform the oppressive feeling of man-made global warming into a spectacular, artistic form. As far as I’m concerned, it was the rightful winner of the Golden Lion for the best pavilion that year.
Yet it is important: Sun & Sea is a very expensive mega-production. And the Biennale is a mega event, attracting more than half a million visitors to the vulnerable lagoon city every two years. That we traveled en masse by plane and car to Venice to be able to wallow in the climate crisis, through art, for a while – oh, it’s so bad, oh, how beautiful – that felt inappropriate.
Big gestures
It is not fair to consider individual travel movements, works of art or events along the CO2to keep a ruler. Climate change is a collective problem, it cannot be solved by individual actions alone. But still: can you make good art about global warming if the same art contributes to the problem? And above all: are these kinds of large productions the best way to depict the climate crisis at all?
Precisely in the years when art further developed into an international industry, the theme of climate in art also became ‘hot’. Not a biennial, art festival or new collection presentation goes by without the climate, the Anthropocene and the complex relationship between man and nature playing a role. Often with large, ambitious projects, such as Sun & Sea (Marina). The gigantic scale of the climate crisis seems to inspire artists to make ever greater gestures. As if they want to measure themselves against the problem.
That’s a fantastic development, you might say, because the climate crisis is, like NRCcolumnist Marijn Kruk also wrote a “crisis of the imagination”. Climate change is what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a ‘hyperobject’: a phenomenon “so vast in both time and space that we can only glimpse it at any one moment in time.” Climate change is so big, and our individual contribution so small, that we can hardly imagine it.
Fortunately, art excels at making the unimaginable imaginable. But when artists do that with large-scale climate art, it often feels like that art falls short. Art has a paralyzing effect, often because it pollutes itself, or because it depicts the problem, but does not propose an alternative. This makes the artwork look powerless.
40,015 kilometers of cotton thread
Take a work of art from the exhibition stormy weather that Museum Arnhem, also in 2019, organized in the temporary location De Kerk. In the nave of the church building was a five-meter high jet engine wrapped in enough cotton to stretch a thread around the world. Work around the world (2017) by Maarten Vanden Eynde is about the devastating influence of the cotton industry. About 10,000 liters of water is needed for one kilogram of cotton, the exhibition booklet reports. Maddening. Because if cotton is so polluting, why are we standing here looking at 40,015 kilometers of the guilty material?
Something like that. At the Drenthe art biennale Into Nature you can take a seat in a white-painted container until 24 October in the middle of the Bargerveen. Inside the installation Melt (2016) you see fog and an alarming red light. You hear something dark creak, it drips and it flows. It turns out to be the sound of a melting glacier near Greenland. Artist Jacob Kirkegaard traveled up and down several times to make these sound recordings. There is of course a link between the melting ice and the vulnerable Drenthe nature reserve, which arose after the last ice age. But it also has something ridiculous: come in a closed container on a beautiful peatland and listen to a glacier, to imagine the climate crisis.
Spectacular melting ice is also Ice Watch with which Olafur Eliasson caused a furore. The Danish-German star artist fished up large chunks of Arctic ice from the waters of Nuup Kangerlua fjord near Greenland. He subsequently exhibited it in the city centers of Copenhagen (2014, at the presentation of a climate report), Paris (during the 2015 climate conference) and London (2018, at the opening of his own exhibition at Tate Modern).
Philosopher Timothy Morton was involved in Ice Watch. In his book Being Ecological (2018) he explains what the intention is. The artwork is supposed to make people “tune in” to a different kind of time scale, the time of a chunk of ice. „The meeting with ice watch is in a sense a dialogue with ice blocks”. According to Morton, art is ideally suited to establish this dialogue with non-human phenomena: the artwork touches us, and as a result we become aware of our relationship with the melting polar cap.
It will be, and the images of Ice Watch went around the world every time, often as an illustration for articles on climate politics. Ice Watch cleverly combines a victim of the climate crisis – the melting glacier – with the perpetrators – politicians, the shoppers. It is a beautiful representation of the problem, but it also looks powerless, because the artwork itself was polluting, and because the artist does not offer an alternative.
The melting glacier in a strange place, the bleak climate opera, the giant spool of polluting cotton – these works of art communicate: this is going wrong and as you stand looking at it you are most likely contributing to the problem, we make you an accomplice and we give you no action perspective. Contributing to awareness seems the highest attainable, but has anyone bought one less T-shirt through the cotton spool in Arnhem?
Reachable ideal
Does it exist? Art that inspires action on climate? Investigated that two Norwegian scientists at the 2015 Paris climate conference. The 37 works of art that were on display at the ARTCOP21 festival in the city they divided into four categories, ‘the comforting utopia’, ‘the challenging dystopia’, ‘the mediocre mythology’ and ‘the great solution’. They then interviewed 874 visitors about which works of art had touched them the most. Only three works of art made people feel they could do something about climate change. All three were categorized under ‘the great solution’. The researchers described them as “beautiful and colorful images of sublime nature that show solutions to environmental problems.”
Perhaps the research was not entirely representative, but there is something to be said for the conclusion: an achievable ideal stimulates you to take action yourself rather than a gripping, paralyzing dystopia.
Coordinate with your environment
Two recent works of art show that small-scale art is much more effective in conveying a message about people and the environment. The video artwork The Garden by Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide), for example, now on display at the exhibition The Botanical Revolution at the Central Museum in Utrecht. The hour-long video is a filmed report of a year in an Amsterdam allotment garden. You see a worm endlessly slowly crawling through the earth, you see plants eaten by insects, a dog roams among the greenery. Wet, dry, flowering, semi-digested. The video shows the enormous wealth of colors and textures that can be found on no more than 330 square meters. It’s all filmed with such awe that you get an eye for the connection between people, animals and plants.
The Garden contains no appeal to fly less, makes no attempt to put you in contact with a glacier. It’s just a garden. Human, in a certain balance with nature. It is harmless, well-behaved almost, but in that respect it is inspiring: the film is a silent invitation to coincide with your surroundings.
Urgent, precisely because it doesn’t look urgent at all.
Another relatively small work of art, in this context, that makes the larger connection visible, has been hanging on the wall in the plenary hall in the temporary building of the House of Representatives for a month and a half. Soil by Jos de Putter consists of five panels with clods of earth and clay from different Dutch provinces – it depicts different stages: unprocessed earth, soil in which people have played, to earth that is displayed as a commodity.
De Putter placed the ground “upright, that is the position of an interlocutor”, he said when I spoke to him, because “whichever way you look at it, we consider the relationship between man and planet here.” Is there a hidden ecological message in his work? “I see my work as an invitation to look at the earth. Art that takes a stand does not become better art.” That modesty graces the artist. The prominence of the ordinary clay, scooped up around the corner, is from now on every evening in the news a silent reminder of what is really at stake – without a distracting big gesture.
The small convinces faster than the large. This is also apparent from a passage from Timothy Mortons Being Ecological, in which he tells how he explains to a journalist who does not want to understand what it means to be ‘ecological’: „’Do you have a cat’, I asked. “Certainly,” he replied, possibly a little taken aback by this casual, simple question. “Do you like petting her or him?” ‘Absolutely!’ ‘Then you are already connected to a non-human being, for no particular reason. You are already ecological.’”
No ice floe, no miles of cotton, no burning sand – just a house cat, clay or an allotment garden.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of October 7, 2021