Madeleine Bunting: art and climate

An essay | does the art stop when the persuasion starts?

Within six months the writer and social commentator Madeleine Bunting found herself visiting three major art exhibitions that were all responding to the issue of climate change. All three raised similar questions. Can art carry the weight of expectations that are being placed upon it? Has art discovered a new sense of purpose? Where does the line between art and propaganda lie? In this essay commissioned by the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre, Bunting suggests we need a clearer understanding of what we expect from art – and artists.

Within a matter of a few months last year London saw two major exhibitions on how the visual arts explore the Does the artist serve a prophetic role? environmental crisis. Radical Nature: art and architecture for a changing planet 1969-2009 at the Barbican took the story back to the beginning in the sixties and offered a forty year sample of the engagement in the issue of human impact – and dependence – on the natural world. Earth at the Royal Academy took a timeframe of the last five years, and showed how the work of major contemporary artists is reflecting some aspect of the questions posed by the crisis. Together, the two exhibitions, six months apart, showed how the environment has moved from a preoccupation amongst groups of specific artists to now being centrestage. Earth: art of a changing planet showed how older pieces – such as Antony Gormley’s Field [Below right: 1991, White Cube] – are re-interpreted. The environmental crisis is becoming a, arguably the, dominant theme of contemporary visual arts. Inevitably, such dominance is controversial, regarded by some as a dangerous instrumentalisation of art, by others as a entirely necessary outcome of the role art plays.

The timing of both exhibitions was, of course, not accidental. Both curators had their eye on the international climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009; the same date was the impetus for Copenhagen’s RETHINK: contemporary art and climate change exhibition, a series of exhibitions in several venues throughout Denmark, all themed around climate change. The exhibitions served to sharpen a set of long unresolved questions. What is the role of the artist in this unprecedented challenge to human consciousness? Does the artist serve a prophetic role, awakening the viewer to the need for radical change? Does art become a manifesto, recruited – or volunteering itself – to mobilise the kind of behaviour change sought by policymakers and environmental activists?

Some would clearly argue that the answer to these questions is clearly yes. Why else did the Department of Energy and Climate Change pay for a free gallery guide to the exhibition at the RA? But equally, there is a kickback reaction that art must not be instrumentalised to achieve a politician’s goal. Indeed, there are those artists who absolutely reject a specific role; art should have no purpose but itself.

Several years ago at a private dinner attended by a wide range of scientists, writers and artists, the issue of climate change was raised by a senior scientist; one artist responded with a passionate statement of how the issue affected his work and the pressing need to engage with it. He concluded by turning to his fellow artist asking him to comment; he said he had nothing to say, he just paints, there was a long embarrassed silence. The two responses illustrate the two poles: total engagement, total disengagement. Climate change is putting unprecedented pressure on the artist’s sense of public responsibility. What do they owe us? What are they doing for us? And interestingly the fact that we even ask the questions reveals our expectations of visual art - we don’t make the same demands on other art forms such as music or dance – to offer forms of communication which can mobilise emotion and resolve. Are we asking too much of art? I went to Copenhagen to find out.