Consultant Dan
27 July 2010
HotHouse : cultural power and climate globalism
I am in Sydney this week for work and it is lovely to be back.
The HotHouse Symposium on climate and culture at the Sydney Opera House this week is excellent. I have been a distracted by some calls with clients and a long breakfast with a journalist this morning but here are some initial impressions.
Climate globalism is the situation we all face now, in every part of our already globalised world. It is the realisation of climatic interdependence, where we need every nation to move to renewable energy and conservation if we are to save the global climatic commons.
It is also a nascent realisation of cultural interdependence, in which we use the innovation and learnings made elsewhere as resources for our own work.
Cultural campaigning is the most interesting development in climate politics. The formal (institutional, governmental) politics of climate change is broken, for now. In the absence of a global scheme to slash emissions, the most power to shift is coming through cultural activities that change how we make, do, live and think.
Some of the speakers:
Jill Bennett, Director of the National Institute for Experimental Arts, set the scene for us. She explained that the HotHouse project will be ranging across the established contemporary arts, experimental edges of artistic practice, creative industries such as architecture and design and philosophy.
Tony Fry, Director of Team D/E/S and professor at Griffith University, opened up a philosophical space to think about climate change and culture. He made some complex points about the history and meaning of climate change. He takes the position that global environmental problems including climate change are symptoms of deeper causes inside our beliefs and shared culture, including our being.
Fry asks us to become cultural producers, rather than consumers, to make provocations which speak the truth of things. He says climate culture should destabilize perception of normality and break new cultural ground.
Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist in NYC, who addressed us via videophone. Her practice is brilliant and amusing. She says that global-scale problems are inherently insoluble and even invisible to us. She turns ecology into a health issue, running Clinics that measure environmental health and intervene in the environment in tangible, localised ways.
Jeremijenko has ‘Impatients’ come to her clinics, to speak about the health of their communities. These people are then able to participate in art works that are activist moments that research and verify environmental degradation. In one work this might involve sensors in a river that measure chemistry and fish movement, transmitting this information by flashing lights on buoys or by SMS to people who see the work. In another work she had robot dogs light up and cry out for attention, in response to air pollution.
Hou Hanru is a curator and wit. He wants curators to resist the Culture of the Spectacle in which Cities have become brands, which use art, sport, architecture and other mass cultural efforts. He did not get anywhere near the end of his talk, where he would have explained his own work, but he did show other works which were provocative.
One example of a work that ‘disrupts’ for Hanru is Thomas Hirschhorn’s Musee Precaire Albinet. Young people built a little ‘museum’ made out of cardboard and wood inside another building. They then installed some art works by major modernists including Beuys and Duchamp.
I will report more later today or tomorrow, distractions notwithstanding.
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