Culture and Climate Change – Arts

Even for the Russian Constructivists the demand for a social function of art was part of their radically aesthetic program. Today however, in these times of all-consuming capitalism, how can we expect art to have a social function?

The question whether art should have a social function always grows more heated when society and its organisational systems are bogged down in a major crisis – even if nobody really expects art to come up with any actual solutions to the undesirable developments society is being confronted with. There are other “operating systems” to do that job. Just how much of an effect however ecological issues and climate change have on artistic activity can be seen in museums and art galleries all over the world. These exhibitions serve as a reaction to the catastrophe on a local level, call the reporting into question, endow Mother Nature with an aesthetic value and revise the status of the utopian works that came about in the 1970s. So far, so good. Artistic practice therefore is able to generate a different - an unaccustomed form of visibility for a subject that in the case of climate change, for example, is depicted in the media mostly in the form of dramatic images of disaster or data graphs.

The world of art is able to propagate new role models and lifestyles. The question is however - what becomes of them? “It is above all important that the way is paved for a new awareness of a ‘more environmentally adequate’ lifestyle, maybe in the sense of Bruno Latour’s “Parliament of Things”, says the curator and critic, Raimar Stange. This is why the artistic designs and ideas do not necessarily have to be immediately suitable for everyday consumption.

„Natur macht einsam“

“Nature makes us lonely”

Certain forms resulting from environmental change have been objects of art for quite some time now. We only have to think of the Impressionists and their picnics on idyllically green grass with the dirty smoke of the factory chimneys in the background; then there is the situationist and radical critic of capitalism, Guy Debord, who in his work “La planète malade” (The Sick Planet) attacked society’s cynicism in the following scathing statement, “Environmental pollution is in fashion.” Debord wrote that our ever sickening, yet ever stronger, modern society created the world “as the stage and showcase for its sickness”. Society that has all the technical means at its disposal to restructure the way we live is the very same one that has divested itself of the means of controlling and predicting in advance just where its alienated production methods are leading it.

One can only endorse Debord’s ideas - this sickness is still with us today. Film expert, Georg Seesslen, reflected on this in his article “Natur macht einsam” (Nature Makes Us Lonely). He writes of the three “sicknesses” of nature. Debord, in his day, could only think of two: the “sickness of acquisition” and the “sickness of exploitation and destruction”. Seesslen has hit upon a third – replacing nature with biotechnology.

The destructive mode of capitalism

How has art then reacted to this fashionable sickness, i.e. to the destructive mode of capitalism? The situationists do not believe art is the “solution” to all the problems, but they do see it as a comprehensive alternative to the existing social order. For quite some time now artists have been constantly striving to depict the dialectics of hedonism and sustainability.

Whenever there is talk of climate change and commitment, it is mostly direct political commitment that is meant – art as propaganda for an ideology. It is however also a form of commitment when art tests conventional images to see how real they are – a commitment to reality that is more or less on a par with criticism of the ideology. Max Frisch once said the same about the role of literature.

Art can confront its beholder with unpleasant information, transform a concept that is hard to grasp like climate change into an aesthetic experience – in short, depict the socially distorted relationship with nature and bring home the urgency to do something about it. The effect however that art has on society is hard to define. Why is it then nevertheless relevant to make a disaster that is perceived as being far off in the distant future the subject of exhibitions?

“Climate Camp” and “Plane Stupid”

The artistic works on the subject are, as to be expected, very different. This does not mean however that more social art is being produced. There are only a few basic approaches. One of them being the trend towards artists forming a collective with activists – something that happened all the time, however, before the subject became so widespread. New public images are most prevalent whenever art and activism merge, as is the case with the London-based groups known as “Climate Camp” and “Plane Stupid” that have become the style pioneers of the new protest aesthetics.

The fact that artists who express their views on climate change manufacture social situations and sometimes close the gap between art and life like the avant-garde of the 1920s may well be a reaction to the refinements of capitalism. Above all however the exhibition format has to combine art production and discourse and not just view art as a contemplative area of society, but also integrate it constructively into social processes. In order to achieve this institutional domains occasionally have to be abandoned.