A Search for Progress

This post will perhaps take more of the shape of a personal reflection than one entirely about the week’s readings, but I wanted to focus my discussion on “effective” modes of making art about climate change. Specifically, I’ll ground this in Eve Mosher’s HighWaterLine and Maya Lin’s Pin River. I will note, however, that all of these are my completely subjective opinions, and that this is mainly shaped by my own practice and this specific institution’s view on (conceptual) art.

This class really excited me for its promised explorations of different mediums and mechanisms of exploring climate change. By and large, I think it did so very successfully. A question I ended up, like many of us—I think, disliking was the one posed of “Is this a piece of climate change ___?” As I have already talked about in a discussion post, and as we have discussed in class, I do not think this is a productive framework for viewing and questioning art. Interestingly, though, I think I am leaving this course with a (possibly other unproductive) question: How much is this piece about climate change? A corollary of our class-long interrogation, a lot of our questionings of mediums resulted in us asking if it was enough about climate change to be declared a climate change ___. We ended up deciding this was not helpful, which I fully agree with. Weirdly, though, I think I am walking away asking the question “Is this too much about climate change?”

Let me explain. This line of thought started with an inadvertent comparison of HighWaterLine and Pin River. I by far preferred Mosher’s piece to Lin’s. Of course, we are all allowed our own preferences and often times that just varies based on our visual/formal preferences and backgrounds. Here, however, I ended up evaluating the two works based on their didacticism, or more correctly, I suppose, their readability and literacy. I would argue that there are far more (and many more) “obvious” pieces than Lin’s Pin River, and yet I think my biggest issue with her piece was its one-to-one relationship between the subject matter at hand and its visual representation. My critique stems from my own work; much of my work of the past year has had a similar relationship between the subject matter of climate change and the piece at hand. A couple examples: I take landscape film photographs which are luscious and seductive, but conceptually pretty empty: they show nothing other than nice photographs of beautiful forests. Recently, I installed a piece called Urchin Barren: it used a large gallery space to evoke the emptiness of the ever-increasing barrens. It did so by referencing the statistic that 90% of kelp forests in Northern California were decimated by sea urchin population booms (due to increased sea temperatures and wind patterns which brought in swaths of urchins to kelp forests). With decreased otter populations (urchins’ natural predators), the urchins destroyed the once-lush kelp ecosystems within a two year span in 2016/17. I’ve included a photo below: the area within the black tape is 475 square feet: the destroyed barren took up 90% by area (with a dead half-decomposed urchin skeleton hanging in the middle). I include my own work here to critique it in a way that I have been gleaning from DoVA critiques but also from this course. The work is far too didactic. I wanted to complicate the relationship of marine destruction and create an affective response (the latter of which I think I did), but I think my piece did not do enough. It was too much about climate change. Similarly, I think Pin River is too much about the forms and basins of water it is addressing. Some other pieces from the quarter I find are in a similar vein:

The USGS Repeat photography project, most of the board games we played, Chris Watson’s “Vatnajökull.” I’m torn about Isabella Kirkland’s work: I think it is pretty transparent but it uses medium in an interesting way to complicate pure didacticism. I would say that is the same reason I enjoy HighWaterLine: it exactly draws a line across NYC, but uses medium as the complication—I think its strength lies in the ambiguity of the act, which is only communicated through direct interaction with the artist. Same with Justin Brice Guariglia’s oeuvre—though some of his work is in a more one-to-one relationship than others (and the former are the ones I find are less successful). I do not know how productive this paragraph is— I do not know if effectively listing my preferences is getting me or us anywhere. What I find interesting, though, is that I do not dislike more straightforward/less conceptually nuanced work; in fact, some of my favorite pieces from the quarter were those aforementioned ones. “Vatnajökull” was incredible, and yet I think my critique maybe comes in the sense that I do not think it is as successful as a piece of “climate change art” (even though I don’t like that descriptor)! I suppose that then delves into what makes something a successful piece of climate change art, to which of course I do not have an answer. The search for some sort of framework to answer that question, though is key to understanding what type of work I want to both make and view.

As I have surmised over the past couple years, I think climate change art can produce responses in a few camps. These are absolutely not comprehensive, nor do they intend to be—I think these camps are simply the ones I have dabbled in/been exposed to already. I also think the majority of art functions in multiple of these modalities—very few works are reduced down to doing only one thing.

—Awareness: art that functions to increase awareness of a global climate phenomenon or change (can be land-wise, community-wise, population-wise, etc).

—Activism: art that aims to spur some sort of (desire for) action from the viewer

—Hope/Despair (or Guilt): art that provides an optimistic view of our world going forward // art that utilizes guilt and despair on the point of the viewer

—Nostalgia: art that references a past/space rather untouched by the human presence

—Loss/yearning/desire: By the number of backslashes in this, it’s probably clear that this is the mode I like to/want to work in. Art that creates an emotional response referential of some intense desire on the part of mankind. 

—Many more 

I apologize for the possible incomprehensibility of this post—I just have been trying to make sense of how to make and engage with art that feels like it does something in a world that seems so futile. Maybe, though, I am asking too much of art. As I consider what to do post-graduation, I have always felt that I should be doing something related to our climate—whether that is working within sustainability at a private company, working in a forest as a park ranger, or pursuing art. For that last option, I think I (along with every other artist) fret that I would be producing art that would do nothing and bring nothing to the table. I want to make work that makes people feel something in relation to nature and our dwindling biosphere. And I think that sentence right there clarifies that the way I analyze other works is extremely biased with clear unfair odds. Pin River is not attempting to do what I want my works to do, nor should it attempt to do that. I have not yet even figured out a way to make my works do that. Works can be phenomenal without doing one very specific thing: they function in so many other productive modalities–I think those that are less successful only do one thing. 

There are so many other directions to go with this—an audience of the insular fine art world vs the realm of public art, the layers of complexity that medium/form can offer and bring, a reliance on form as a detriment, etc., etc. At the core, I took this class to try and figure out the most effective modes of making art about climate change. Looking back, I think that was a very naive notion. There is no one effective mode; there is the only modality you want to make art in; the struggle is figuring out how to do the thing you want to do. 

This is a final tangential thought: I wonder too about what space “climate change art” (sorry again!) will occupy a couple hundred years from now. Work that I (and institutions) find too conceptually underdeveloped many transform over time. Of course, all art evolves with its contexts, but I suppose I am thinking about this in terms of artwork that does not pull its conceptual weight now but may function in a completely different realm in the future. An example: Ansel Adams photographs, while beautiful, would not fly in the postmodernist fine art context of today. My landscape photographs, grounded in time, also do not. Three hundred years from now, what if photographs like mine became objects not of fine art but of memorials? What if Pin River and HighWaterLine become relics in a way that we are not able to foresee—although, I suppose there is no massive weight in that line of thought, as I am not trying to make art for the future. 

Overall, I think this class has been extremely productive in prompting these questions for furthering my practice and honing in on what it means to make art in our current time period about climate change. I think it also really helped in broadening my conceptions of the realms of possibilities—of course I am grounded in the world of visual art (specifically photography/sculpture/installation), but I loved looking at video games/graphic novels/films!