|
|
|
FINIS DUNAWAY
seeing
GLOBAL WARMING:
CONTEMPORARY ART AND THE FATE OF THE PLANET
ABSTRACT
Contemporary environmental artists are increasingly turning their attention to climate change. Focusing on an exhibition curated by the renowned art critic Lucy R. Lippard, this essay places selected works in dialogue with mass media framings of environmental problems to reveal how contemporary art can generate new ways of seeing global warming. I argue that the show sought to forge perceptual links between local and global environmental change and to use both doomsday and inspiring modes of address in a dialectical fashion. By melding science, aesthetics, and politics in an imaginative way, many of the artists represented the humanistic dimensions of the crisis and, at times, even gestured toward a promising vision of environmentalism.
| "BE WORRIED. Be Very Worried." So warned Time magazine in a 2006 cover story on global warming. The cover featured what has become the most recognizable image of climate change: a lone polar bear perched on floating ice, gazing uncertainly at the surrounding sea. The polar bear's iconic status can be gauged by its frequent appearance in visual culture ever since. That summer, the tremendous success of Al Gore's documentary film An Inconvenient Truth brought images of shrinking ice caps and vanishing glaciers to surprisingly large audiences. In one memorable cartoon sequence, a polar bear tries, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to climb on chunks of melting ice. The animated creature seems destined to drown. The next spring, for the cover of Vanity Fair's second annual "Green Issue," the photographer Annie Leibovitz depicted Hollywood heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio standing on an Icelandic glacier, along with a digitally added image of Knut, a popular polar bear cub from the Berlin Zoo. Meanwhile, the National Wildlife Federation now urges prospective members to support conservation "by symbolically adopting a polar bear." A donor receives a family of stuffed polar bears in return for helping to prevent the ice from "melting ... beneath their paws." Seeing global warming, so the argument seems to run, means staring at the polar bear and wondering whether its fate may be our own.1 |
1
|
|
Still, though, for all the attention given to climate change, for all the honors bestowed upon Al Gore (including, most recently, the Nobel Peace Prize), global warming does not yet resonate with the public or most policy makers (in the United States, at least) as a truly pressing issue that demands meaningful action now. In a recent collection of essays, Creating a Climate for Change, editors Susanne C. Moser and Lisa Dilling, together with over forty scientists, communication scholars, and activists, grapple with this problem of how to communicate climate change more effectively and, in the process, forge a compelling critique of global warming discourse. To begin, many of them question the reigning assumption that often guides climate change discussions: if people only knew more, if they only had more information about the causes and consequences of global warming, then they would be galvanized to take action. This belief clearly shapes Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, especially his effort to demonstrate the scientific consensus concerning the seriousness of the problem and the role of greenhouse gases in warming the Earth. As he convincingly explains, climate-change skeptics, aided and abetted by the mass media, have deployed the concept of scientific uncertainty to raise doubts and encourage passivity. Nevertheless, several contributors to Creating a Climate for Change argue that information alone is not enough to inspire an effective response. Even if scientists and global warming activists overcome the obfuscating claims of uncertainty, they still must confront other, more complicated barriers to action and should therefore reframe their rhetorical approach.2 |
. . . |
There are about 9264 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
