M - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

‘Y
ou don’t need a Ph.D. in linguistics’, write US
political strategists Michael Shellenberger and
Ted Nordhaus (authors of the 2004 report
“The Death of Environmentalism”), ‘to see that there’s
something funny about the concept of “the
environment”. If the concept includes humans, everything
is “environmental”, and it has little use other than being a
poor synonym to “everything”. If the concept excludes
humans, it is scientifically specious (not to mention
politically suicidal)’. (1) As if shadowing Shellenberger and
Nordhaus, a number of recent artistic projects also
suggest that the literal sclerosis embedded in antiquated
concepts of ‘environmental issues’ and ‘nature’ isn’t up to
comprehending the ecological – and thereby political,
social and economic – territories of our time.
Why is housing for indigenous species, for
example, an ‘environmental issue’, whereas housing for
humans isn’t? Jeremy Deller is perhaps best known for his
re-staging of a violent clash during the 1984–5 miners’
strike (The Battle of Orgreave, 2001), the fall-out from so
much more than the ‘environmental issue’ of burning
coal. Yet his practice has long been concerned with
other marginalized communities, notably urban cyclists –
and bats. For his Bat House Project (2006–ongoing) he is
collaborating with The London Wetland Centre to run
an architectural competition to realize a bespoke
accommodation facility for clients of the flying mammal
variety. The artist treats quality accommodation, decent
living standards and urban space as areas of concern for
both the human and the non-human residents of the
capital. Projects such as this naturally have their
precedents – artists have long engaged with issues of
ecosystem restoration and with collaborative or
ameliorative practices. But just as the provincial
sentiments that gave birth to the popular environmental
movement could never have anticipated Al Gore’s
documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006) – never
5
THE WHOLE
TRUTH
Many artists today recognize that environmentalism needs to embrace political, social and economic factors as well as
ecological ones.
Text by Max Andrews
mind the rather blithe reaction to the 50/50 prospect of
catastrophic global systemic meltdown predicted by the
likes of the Stern Report – the rules of engagement for
artists and all other citizens today involve an entirely
different, far more insidious and pervasive ecological
theatre.
Since emerging in the early 1970s, American
artists such as Helen and Newton Harrison and Alan
Sonfist have been making work about ideas concerning
the rehabilitation and remedy of habitats. Yet it’s fair to
say that, unlike the warming globe, the broader reception
of work identified as ‘eco-art’ or ‘environmental art’ has
always been somewhat cool. Meanwhile in the UK the
countryside romanticism brand of knitted twig or
snowball sculptures by artists such as Andy Goldsworthy
– although, somewhat ironically, hugely popular as ‘dead
tree edition’ coffee-table books – has largely marginalized
itself by tacitly enforcing a rural nostalgia. On the one
hand, as with other liminal areas of art practice (‘live art’
would be another case in point), the commercial and
institutional art system’s seeming reluctance would be
interpreted by some as a metropolitan conspiracy. On
the other hand, that self-proclaimed environmental artists
tend towards a practice of glorified landscaping or
aestheticized surveying – or, dare I say, a certain
lumbering Kumbaya-ism at its extremities – would lead
others to conclude that it’s simply part of a distinct
creative lineage. As a familiar argument goes, laudable
motives, burdened by guilt about making the ‘correct’
ethical choice or holding onto a vision of virgin nature,
are often only fleetingly successful as art. Above all this,
however, is the simple fact that the narrow
environmental imperative that gave birth to such art
practices surely has limited traction in today’s world. The
notion of environmental art apparently has as little clout
as environmentalism either. Despite, or because of, the
fact that many of environmentalism’s key achievements,