By Paul Collinson
It is now more than ever incumbent on artists to not be mere reflectors of the societies and environments they live in but be actively engaged in current political issues to create new and better worlds and neighbourhoods in which they live. This announcement is nothing new. During his self-imposed exile in 1930s Paris, Walter Benjamin wrote his now famous essay on the work of art and its technical reproducibility. It is a commentary on the then new media of film and its collective perception by and appeal to the masses and ultimate appropriation for political ends. Benjamin brings forward the role of the unreproducible work of art (painting) as a theology, one of art for art’s sake, of a devotion by the (individual) art lover, and as entertainment for the (collective) masses, whether as acceptance or derision. It is at the end of his essay that Benjamin condemns the artist’s l’art pour l’art manifesto as a fascistic undertaking, of letting the world perish whilst art flourishes so that human annihilation becomes just another pleasurable aesthetic distraction.
This reflecting can be witnessed at the Humber Street Gallery’s latest presentation of film and sound by artist Oliver Ressler. In Space 2 Climate Feedback Loops is a damning large scale two-channel (side-by-side synchronized) projection of images and sound of climate change, the images of and noises made by arctic collapse on the Svalbard archipelago. This affirmation of climate change and how it works, if it were needed, shows the slow but constant rise of global temperature due to lack of reflective polar snow and ice and the effect on that region of the melt: the more greenhouse gasses that are produced the more solar energy is contained within the atmosphere, the polar ice melts, the more it melts the more the global temperature rises due to lack of reflection of that solar radiation
Within the dark space and the sounds of polar catastrophe there is also the indictment from 2020 by Ressler of a technological dream that may never become reality, that dream being carbon capture and storage (CCS). The visual imagery in the film Carbon and Captivity is of the Technology Centre Mongstad (TCM) industrial complex 67km north of Bergen and is accompanied by spoken word (via headphones) and subtitles that narrate the fallacy. The TCM is the world’s largest facility for CCS research: since first starting operation in 2012 Ressler states that the TCM has yet to prove that CCS is economically and environmentally feasible. It is a joint venture by the Norwegian State, Equinor, Shell and TOTAL. The sequestration of carbon dioxide under the North Sea is also not working as shown in the film by its escape from cracks in the seabed thus further exposing the fallacy. Without this ‘bearing witness’ by Ressler I would not be writing these words, nor would they be being disseminated by the Hull Friends of the Earth group and you reading them. This article was intended to be a review of the exhibition Climate Feedback Loops but is opening into a wider discursive on the relationship of culture with the political and social issue of our time – human annihilation due to climate change. The curated testimony, of sounds and images of a diminishing arctic and the fossil fuel industry’s attempts at promoting an unproven science to better greenwash that industry’s survival now have a platform within the cultural sector. Capitalism’s continued reliance and support for the fossil fuel industry carries us along with it as captives, as Ressler points out in his play on words. In a recent ECO article I described how Hull Friends of the Earth members took part in a discussion on utopian visions, of how artists can depict more positive and hopeful images of an alternative future rather than the ongoing melancholic TINAs (There Is No Alternative). Artists and the artworld can bring to their publics’ attention the truths of inequalities and injustices of this world and their neighborhoods when more strident drawing of attention to such inequalities and injustices is now being silenced by ongoing limiting of citizen rights and our rights to resist that which is affecting us directly. This freedom to protest that is being quelled is another of Ressler’s concerns in his oeuvre within the wider subject of climate crisis and capitalism. A permanent state of emergency is a common feature of global capitalism within a nation state. It is not a declared technical (or legal) state but an ongoing delimiting and reduction of citizen rights by the state executive: an example is the recent UK Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Bill currently being amended as I write to limit rights of protest and to resist what negatively impacts UK citizens. This is ostensibly a response to protests that were, up until now, a citizen’s right and the state of emergency becomes the norm, not the exception. It is a lack of accepted ethical and moral standards within society and exemplified by fascism and by preemptive criminalization of citizens outside of its own laws. Ressler’s third film, from 2021, is more reportage on how citizens are attempting to challenge this ongoing limiting of their ability to oppose. Called Not Sinking, Swarming (another subtle play on words, this time the use of neofascist language as exemplified by our current Home Secretary’s recent tirade against refugees) it is a report on how global climate movement networks share strategies for challenging this oppression by national law enforcement agencies on behalf of the fossil fuel industry by organizing in groups, each of which take on a particular responsibility within the whole. Ressler uses images and quotes from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan written at the height of the English Civil War and is one of the first representations of the idea of a social contract, that of a defined link between the people and their governance, and the desires from such a link. Yet the popular idea of Hobbes’ work is that the people have the right of governance, as depicted by the well-known frontispiece etching by Abraham Bosse: yet for Hobbes the ultimate power of a state comes from the God given sovereign.
A more useful future for the art institution is beyond the current failed democratization of culture as a redress to ongoing economic inequalities, of bringing culture to the excluded and thereby ‘improving’ their role in our capitalist society, without reiterating those policies and hierarchies that got us into this mess in the first place. This is not to say that the wider dangerous picture of global capitalism shouldn’t be reflected by those that can testify from beyond our locale, as Ressler does. The danger is that those affirmations are perceived as disasters ‘over there’ and not ‘our’ problem and so become just another distraction as part of the system it is challenging and propagated by that very system. The change needed in social and economic relations globally, let alone in the artworld, is a far too great a subject to be dealt with here (but there are plenty of propositions elsewhere): suffice to say that the term There is No Alternative should start to be questioned by artists at the very least.
Climate Feedback Loops by Oliver Ressler is on until 2nd April in Space 2 at the Humber Street Gallery, Humber Street in Hull.
Paul Collinson is a member of Hull Friends of the Earth and an artist living and working in Hull. Find his work at www.englandsfavouritelandscape.co.uk and www.dreamingofthemiddleages.com
Friends of the Earth Hull 