Michael Pinsky's Come Hell or High Water from Climate Change: Cultural Change.
The year 2006 has seen a change in the weather. Climate change, perhaps the most far-reaching and significant scientific issue of this century, is no stranger to the bestseller list, the red carpet, the floor of the Senate, or the corporate agenda. But now another realm has joined the dialogue—contemporary art. Like the Hudson River School of 19th-century painters, who breathed romance into an indomitable American landscape of vast blue skies (most recently threatened by the Clear Skies Initiative and a fast-growing coal mining industry), glistening bodies of waters (although PCB levels make the Hudson River fish inedible), and dense forests (now suburban tracts), these new artists are primarily concerned with representing natural systems. Using different palettes and new media, they are capturing and reimagining our changed relationship with natural systems. Let's call them the Hudson River School 2.0.
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The work of these artists was featured in a slew of major exhibitions this year including "Ecotopia" at New York's International Center of Photography, "The Ship: The Art of Climate Change" at London's Natural History Museum, "Cape Farewell: Art and Climate Change" at the Liverpool Biennial, and "Climate Change: Cultural Change" in Newcastle.
But how do art and the work of the imaginary relate to an issue mired in contested claims and debates on effective policy response? Can they offer anything when we are focused on alternative energy, CO2 trading quotas and glacial retreat? Why not just leave it to trusted scientists? Artists don't give answers; they don't operate within a structure of credentials, reinforced by formal peer review. They explore nuance and subjective experience and accept multiple answers to the same question. And that's precisely the point. The artists in these shows reflect a relationship with nature that is often obscured and muddied by our urban existence. We "know" about climate change, but there has been no en masse abandonment of cars, no mass migration to dense urban centers to shrink our carbon footprint, no sudden antishopping spree—in fact, no significant lifestyle changes. A fundamental conceit of the Enlightenment is that knowledge leads to action. And it is the artists who are producing the post-Enlightenment strategies.
Consider Greetings From the Salton Sea, a photographic series (and associated book) by Kim Stringfellow. Included in "Ecotopia" at the International Center for Photography, it provides a thorough documentation of one of the most contradictory sites in America. Simultaneously a wildlife reserve and a toxic threat to nearby San Diego and L.A. (if it were allowed to dry up, it would release particulate matter), the Salton Sea is a former lake destination for vacationers where irrigation runoff has concentrated pesticides in increasingly saline desert waters. Stringfellow's project documents the hopeful and remarkable capacity of migratory birds to adapt and use the new lakes, which were created when a dam in the Colorado River broke in 1905. They make a temporary home, yet theirs is an evidently frail existence surrounded by the stench of death and chemicals. Stringfellow's images provide an almost tender experience of the details that create this scape, after which she introduces the large-scale infrastructure proposals designed to address this site and provides a clear challenge to the Army Corps of Engineers or corporate counterparts. Her engagement evinces a quality of attention and detail that illuminates without simplifying and invites our intuitions, interest, and collective problem-solving abilities.