And not a polar bear in sight: thoughts on art about climate change

In the middle of her zine/audio play/essay/memoir Heart-Space Astronaut, writer Emma Adams recalls a play she wrote in 2010 about climate breakdown and capitalism, a play she intended as ‘a howl of a warning’ that ‘would make people care, stop, think, change’. Except, she writes, it didn’t. Her work was as ineffective at solving climate change as all those dreadful plays featuring polar bears that plagued theatre in the early 2010s, as ineffective as ‘the many scientific reports written about it. The kids striking about it. The many UN declarations demanding action about it.’

Heart-Space Astronaut is one of a number of works made by the Dissonant Futures Collective, eight multidisciplinary artists exploring together what might emerge from climate grief, a feeling lodged in my bones more or less since my second child was born (both of them are teenagers now). It was exactly what I needed in the days after seeing Katie Mitchell’s production A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction, which made me cry for a solid half hour, but otherwise – primarily – left me exasperated.

Mitchell has form when it comes to frustrating art about climate change: back in 2012 she directed a lecture in the upstairs theatre of the Royal Court delivered by scientist Stephen Emmott, which remains stuck in my memory for its remarkable lack of theatricality, and its irresponsible final line, advising parents who want to protect their kids’ futures in a climate emergency to teach them how to use a gun. Walking home afterwards through darkening streets, air thick with London traffic, its pessimism felt isolating, defeating.

Emmott’s text was a howl of a warning at the risks of an exponentially growing human population; written by Miranda Rose Hall, A Play for the Living is a howl of a warning that entire populations of non-human species are dying in an ongoing extinction event. There’s a long slide show showing photographs of critter after critter: birds, insects, mammals, and the plant-life that feeds them, all desiccating or disappearing from the surface of the earth.

I care: hence the tears. But what use is there in plunging the already despairing into more despair? Hall’s play makes its audience feel powerless, and in doing so does something else, which I think is unintentional, but no less infuriating for it. Notwithstanding a finger briefly pointed at white supremacism and its ride-or-die, capitalism, as the culprits behind present-day climate disaster, its steady enumeration of the five preceding extinction events makes this sixth feel oddly inevitable: planet Earth recalibrating to ensure its own survival. It gives climate change sceptics space to argue that what we’re experiencing is nature – cruel, competitive, survival of the fittest nature – taking its course. Worse, the framing device – the person on stage delivering the text is the show’s fictional dramaturg, the rest of the company having had to race home to the bedside of the fictional director’s mother, who is dying – asks that the audience mourn these billions of deaths, the deaths of entire habitats, entire ecosystems, at a scale commensurate to losing one’s mother. This reads to me as human supremacism: not a comment on the problem but the problem itself.

The compassion for climate grief in Emma’s zine softened my rage: I appreciated Hall’s purpose in making space for mourning. However, I want something else from art about climate change. I want a sense of different possibilities: of action, refusal and resistance – even if all of it fails – revealing or proposing other ways to live. Arguably, that’s what Mitchell’s staging offers: at every performance, local bikes and riders are sourced, for an electricity grid powered by cycling. But this energy is squandered on the huge projection screen, and what it implies: that humans are incapable of caring about anything they can’t see; that humans are incapable of imagining beyond the built environment in which they happen to be.

But then this, too, is a problem: the fallacy that the environment that needs protecting is an unspoiled nature over there, and not every place, every habitat, each person’s here. In an interview for Nora Samaran's book Turn This World Inside Out, Diné (Navajo) activist Natalie Knight phrases this with clarity:

So, the waterways that many are defending from pipelines, the forests, the mountains, that is the land; but the city is the land, too. … This is a human-made environment, just as the forests and rivers have been manipulated by humans for millennia. If we understand that this is how we have manipulated and/or cared for the land, instead of having this false divide between supposedly unmanipulated land and urban space, we can ask, have we cared for the land in a good way? If the answer is no, then what is our responsibility to change our ways of caring for and stewarding the land?

For me the real energy of A Play for the Living flared in a brief moment of audience participation that answered this very question: a moment also squandered, because there’s no scope in the text or the production for what’s shared to expand beyond its tight confines. Invited to describe their favourite tree, two people in my audience told stories of care and action. In one, the speaker recalled their childhood fury at the arrival of lumberjacks to chop down a much-loved local tree, their righteous attempt to prevent the crime by calling emergency services, and the scolding they received as a result. The other person also campaigned, also unsuccessfully, alongside their neighbours against the felling of trees on their street. The failure of play or production to respond to or fully absorb these stories made the closing moments, in which a community choir fill the stage with soft-focus song, feel disingenuous: a gesture, nothing more, towards the potential of common unity or togetherness.

In one of life’s glorious serendipities, I watched A Play for the Living in the same week I was reading Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, which examines a variety of forests around the globe to redefine togetherness as an interdependence between humans, animals, trees and mushrooms, a ‘latent commons’ that refuses human supremacism. More recently I’ve been reading Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, which picks up Tsing’s baton and races into a fraught ‘ongoingness’ in which critters (her word to gather humans with non-humans) relearn how to live and die well together. Haraway has done much to illuminate my frustration with A Play for the Living; and, to be honest, with myself as someone responding to climate urgencies: also her word, in preference to emergency, which to her ‘connotes something approaching apocalypse’, a story she refuses to reinforce. 

Haraway makes clear that the times we are in are full of danger, and there’s nothing to be gained from ‘delusional caring in general’. Instead, she argues, what these times need are ‘on-the-ground collectives capable of inventing new practices of imagination, resistance, revolt, repair, and mourning’. Staying with the Trouble ends with just such an invention: a speculative fabulation of a future in which humans choose to rethink reproduction, rebuild structures of justice, and revive natural resources by collaborating (even at a genetic level) across species. Haraway crafts these stories from a fundamental understanding that ‘another world is not only urgently needed, it is possible, but not if we are ensorcelled in despair, cynicism, or optimism’. Optimism isn’t active, it’s passive: what Haraway is seeking is effort to dream, propose and live alternatives to the Anthropocene – another term she rejects, as too caught up in the mythologies of Man the Destroyer. 

Those mythologies play a huge part in Mike Nelson’s installation The Deliverance and the Patience, the centrepiece of his big exhibition Extinction Beckons at the Hayward gallery, which coincided with A Play for the Living. The installation is a labyrinth of rooms, some sinister (empty but for a stained mattress, redolent of a detention centre), some evocative of leisure activities (a bar that might be the entrance to a strip club; the office of a social club; a travel agency), all of them evacuated, dusty, decomposed by some kind of apocalypse event. It’s unnerving in patches – but it’s also a game for the visitor, a hide-and-go-seek, an “““immersive experience””” in which you want to be sure to visit all the rooms, see all there is to see. What builds up isn’t dread at the loss of humanity so much as a giddy pleasure in noticing the details; but this pleasure feels far removed from Tsing’s argument for ‘the arts of noticing’, because what Tsing is noticing is evidence of inter-dependence across nature and species, whereas what Nelson invites his audience to notice is the hollowness and cruelty of human existence, and a nothingness that follows its destruction.

I was gathering these thoughts together under the potential title ‘why is it so difficult to make good art about climate change?!?’, when How To Blow Up a Pipeline was released in cinemas. I went with low expectations; I left with legs locked by tension, I’d been that gripped by the story of a motley gathering of activists plotting to – well, the clue’s in the title, innit. I loved how mismatched the group are: their different motivations, different backgrounds, different desires, all a beautiful illustration of the chapter in Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark that argues against ‘the dividing by which we conquer ourselves, the sectarianism, the presumption that difference is necessarily oppositional’. And at the same time, I loved how the film included a number of oppositional points of view, from multiple activists taking different approaches to challenging extractive supremacist capitalism, from a belief that destruction is not an effective tactic. 

There’s triumph at the end of How To Blow Up a Pipeline but no optimism; instead, it closes with ongoingness, with the daily practice of attack, which is in fact a refusal to accept injustice. And this post might have ended thereabouts, and with a melancholy confession that I find such action too terrifying to participate, but for a final serendipity: a visit to Tomás Saraceno’s exhibition at the Serpentine gallery, Web(s) of Life. I’d read in the Time Out review that ‘by converting the building to solar power, he’s made it so that bits of the exhibition don’t work if it’s cloudy’, so bicycled down beneath a bright blue sky when it was 29°C – only to discover the bulk of the gallery was closed due to heatwave! And my oh my did other thwarted attendees experience this as an injustice. One woman I overheard called Saraceno ‘the most stupid artist ever’: she had travelled there with a group, they hadn’t been given the experience they were expecting, and she was making her anger about this known.

What I didn’t gather from the Time Out review was the extent to which Web(s) of Life isn’t so much an exhibition of art works as a proposal for a different relationship with the practice of attending an exhibition. Or, as Saraceno says in an interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist: 

We call it the Ballad of Weather Dependency, and it is about bringing attention to behavioral change as one of the most important components of the green transition. It cannot just be about changing the materials and technology we use, but rather must include altering our relationship to institutions. … Weather dependency encourages visitors to think of themselves as not just passing through, but being an active part of something bigger than an art exhibition.

Being totally honest, I might have passed through without stopping, were it not for my husband – who, as a civil servant, has worked in different ways on energy strategies for over a decade now – insisting that we stay and engage with the work on its own terms. He was right. We sat on the bikes outside the Serpentine and pumped our legs to listen to the Manifesto for An Eco-social Energy Transition from the People of the South, which taught me a lot about the relationship between coloniality and ideas of a Green New Deal. We looked at the homes for critters in a gallery space open to the park and its squirrels, insects, drifting leaves. We wondered whether the Serpentine would keep the solar panels when the exhibition moves on. And we talked about the exasperation of the woman who felt entitled to functioning air con, to art on demand, to experience separate from the material conditions of the world.

Climate change, climate emergency, climate urgencies, sixth extinction event: call it what you will, this crisis is bigger than individual behaviour. And yet. How each person thinks of themselves in relation to water, to grass, to bees, to the delicate web(s) of life, is a particle of a whole; a whole that requires behaviour change at all scales, in multiple directions at once. What are you ready to give, and give up? What are you ready to change? These are Saraceno’s questions, asked of institution and individual alike; and what’s cultivated (to lean on Haraway again) is the possibility of a living alternative, for this place and in this very now.