Endgame: energy crisis, climate change and visual culture

When artist David Cross - one half of Cornford and Cross - was invited to initiate a new teaching and research strand at the Royal College of Art last year the result was Endgame, a project about art and its response to the challenges of a low carbon society. Here, in an essay written for RSA Arts & Ecology, he writes about how his fears for the future have been tempered by the creativity of the responses to his work.

Staring down the barrel of the end of the Oil Age, it is hard to imagine how any historical moment might be defined by a more contradictory and dangerous dependency. While the very thought of leaving oil in the ground for others seems threateningly altruistic, practical self-interest doesn’t yet extend to saving some oil for our own later use. If only to avert economic collapse, social unrest and political conflict, we must press ahead in the transition to a low carbon society. To do this, we will need to conserve oil to make new materials and chemicals, while maintaining production of many plastics, solvents, detergents, paints, adhesives and medicines. Instead, we are burning oil as fuel.

Despite years of disinformation, the fact that climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels has at last become common knowledge. Three points remain less widely understood. The first is that a stable climate is essential for agriculture, which is the basis for the settled societies from which civilizations arise. The second is that "feedback mechanisms" in the earth’s atmosphere and oceans, soil and vegetation are interacting cumulatively, like compound interest on multiple debts. The third is that it is not only distant strangers and unborn generations who will struggle to live with the consequences, but ourselves. Each new scientific report shows that the rate of change is faster than previously thought: climate change is accelerating towards the point beyond which it will be impossible to avert the mass extinction of species and multiple disasters on a scale beyond the range of human experience.

The apparent convergence of peak oil and climate change is an illusion: the two sets of events are already inseparable aspects of industrialism, with its ethos of expansion and militarism. Experts believe that to stabilize the climate, the “developed” countries must halve their resource use and double its utility value, within one generation. They have shown that this can be done. So why has the experts’ vision failed to capture the public imagination? In the manufactured dream of ever-increasing consumption, environmentalism has long been associated with poverty, darkness and loss. This is a treacherous fiction: it is consumerism, not environmentalism that is leading to the point when conflicts between basic needs will foreclose higher hopes. As cultural producers, we cannot objectively witness what is happening. Art and design never passively "reflect" the turbulence or stability of the social world; as influential expressions of how we think and act, they are positively involved in it.

Endgame is a research and education project in art and design, responding to the energy and climate crisis. The aim is to rethink problems and envision solutions that are not technical, but social and cultural. As in Samuel Beckett’s 1957 play of the same name, Endgame is ambiguous. An "end" might be a physical limit such as the end of oil, or the capacity of the ecosystem to absorb carbon. In pointing to completion or closure, "end" also relates to its opposite, a new beginning that could evoke the idea of an aim, goal or purpose. "Game" may seem frivolous, given the grave issues being addressed, but a balance between playfulness and adherence to rules or principles is called for, whether we think of a game of skill or a game of chance. "Endgame" might evoke the final stage of a game of chess, when few pieces remain. Depending on the players’ attitudes, this stage can be marked by greater resourcefulness and tenacity, or an approach that is more adventurous and free.

Clearly, such a project is loaded with contradictions. Though time is running out, we need to pull back from the endless "now" of production and consumption, and find time to dream and play. Yet as consumers of visual culture, we inhabit a media landscape that works continually to convert such a need into desire. With images that range from the hopelessly perfect to the touchingly homespun, dreams are conflated with ambition for the home, success in business, or escape on holiday. Caught between overwork and redundancy, play has been subsumed into leisure or sport, or pressed into service within the neoliberal conception of the "culture industries". As producers of visual culture, our moments of autonomy can be frustratingly elusive. We must inform and persuade, and appeal to both reason and emotion if we are to replace passive spectatorship with conscious action. But in the market, attention is finite, and the demands on our audiences’ time are many. Even our most original and radical messages are assembled from borrowed fragments and framed by preconceptions. To be meaningful, they must be palatable to audiences accustomed to more familiar narratives.

Following established procedures can bring acceptance, and conforming to received ideas is often well rewarded. But now the cheap oil is gone and the climate is badly damaged; we are entering a new era. Though the nature of the coming risks cannot be exactly predicted, a safe bet is that their reach, scale and variety will demand many different responses. We cannot prepare for all the uncertainties and surprises ahead, so diversity offers a better chance of success than centralization and uniformity. Besides, experiments are more interesting than blueprints.

I launched Endgame in autumn 2007 with three illustrated talks. The first introduced the context-specific art interventions of my practice as half of Cornford & Cross; the second associated the energy crisis with climate change, and considered the influence and limitations of visual culture in shaping thought on the issues at stake. In the third talk, I showed examples of work from key art movements such as conceptualism and arte povera, to more recent spatially and socially engaged practices. Certain strategies in visual culture transcend disciplinary boundaries and offer models for critically responding to the energy and climate crisis. Of course it is vital that visual communication is used to promote a massive reduction in consumption. But if society is to adapt in time, the issue is no longer simply about raising awareness. Rather, it is about developing more radical ideas and alternatives. In addition to producing aesthetic and contemplative experiences, contemporary art and design should test concepts, assumptions and boundaries in everyday life, and imagine new ways — material and intellectual — of going about the world.

Over the following weeks, invited speakers contributed a welcome breadth of experience and intellectual precision to the project. Michaela Crimmin and Gemma Lloyd presented key art projects of the RSA Arts and Ecology programme, and openly discussed the ethical calculations involved in using air transport to promote cultural responses to environmental issues. Professor Malcolm Miles presented his research into alternative models of community, to make the case for shifting the ideological terms of the environmental debate, away from the material and towards the social. James Marriott of Platform staged Burning Capital, a compelling performance that critically engages with the influence of major oil companies in the City of London, to expand the grounds of personal responsibility within organizational structures.

The people who participated in Endgame are based in London and Beijing. In the early stages of the project, there was a strong ambition that a full dialogue and creative collaboration between them would develop, which I hoped could be facilitated through online communications rather than air transport. Perhaps it was not only inevitable but healthy that this technological ideal would be overtaken by individual and collaborative work between people already in the same time zone, enjoying social and intellectual contact in shared conditions. I did my best to discourage participants from travelling by air, but even so, some put aside their concerns about carbon footprint and used air transport for their research, or to show the work they produced for the project.

Autumn turned to winter, and breaking news of record oil prices, extreme weather events and global food shortage confirmed the interconnected nature of the energy crisis and climate change, both as a subject and as a context for art and design. For some participants, the implications became a burden, for others, more pressing problems and opportunities arose — whatever the reasons, a period of quiet reflection descended into an uneasy, prolonged silence… Spring arrived, and just a small but determined number of artists and designers remained, who had somehow found a purchase on the issues.

By the time of the summer show, the works produced include painting, photography, printed matter and animation, and range from a cookery book to a board game, from delicately rendered scenarios of suburban turmoil to poetic connections between personal narrative, political history and the land. Some works have personified our identification with nature, and others have expanded and compressed our social conception of time. I was tempted to arrange these works in a pattern, though I realised that to fix them in place, or to measure their effects would be to miss the point: in the end, their influence is a function of the interactions that produced them, and of the conditions of their reception. My research for Endgame has made me deeply alarmed: industrial consumerism is speeding us towards inconceivable troubles and losses. At the same time, my contact with the students has strengthened my conviction that creative and critical thinking, playfulness and sociability are more than commodities. They are the vital energies that might reconnect the world to the earth.

Endgame is a teaching and research project initiated by David Cross, Reader in Art and Design at the University of the Arts, London, at the invitation of Professor Dan Fern, Head of Communication Art and Design at the Royal College of Art, London, in association with Professor Liang Ming of the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing.