The single largest challenge facing humans today is climate change. This chapter discusses major exhibitions responding to increasing global concern over the demise of our natural ecosystems, with a focus on those that began to appear with remarkable regularity in the early 2000s. Featuring art projects that bring together environmental activism and scientific knowledge, exhibitions staged in major museums and public galleries are well resourced to make speculative, cautionary, and occasionally optimistic predictions about the fate of the natural world and future viability of species, including Homo sapiens.
This first section overviews early curatorial forays into eco art, which in the 1960s largely existed under the banner of land art. It centres on two curated exhibitions in the United States as land art first came to the fore. The second section of the chapter discusses a handful of significant environmental exhibitions in the UK and Australia, both First World countries beginning in the early 2000s to assess the reality of climate change. Specifically, these were the first two countries in the world to commission detailed reports into the economic impacts of climate change, both of which were met with enormous publicity, controversy, and alarm. The resulting intensification of public outrage was the catalyst for a raft of environmental exhibitions in each country.1 The final non-biennale curated exhibition considered here was staged in Berlin in 2020. Down to Earth is notable for its cavalier rejection of accepted standards of exhibition presentation in public art galleries and museums.
As narrators of our times, it is the role of artists and the curators of their work to be attuned to the issues of the day and, if public exhibitions of art are to engage broad audiences, to address them in ways that are well informed, thought-provoking, and perhaps even inspiring. While exhibitions are not traditionally perceived as conduits for the dissemination of ecological research, in the face of current crises they can and are being deployed as fora for interpretation and knowledge transfer. How can this be done without depressing audiences and discouraging them from seeking the perspectives of artists in uncertain times? Many people still look to art â even art practice and exhibitions underpinned by a desire to raise awareness about environmental issues â to offer an apolitical reprieve from scientific data that is inevitably filled with dire predictions about the future of our planet. Those viewers are looking for glimmers of light, searching for hope in artistsâ commentaries and proposals, not despair.
If exhibitions are to be seriously engaged with, the exhibition curator must be cognisant of balancing naĂŻve or overly cheerful assertions about the power of art to effect change with ecological realities: certainly artists as creative and lateral thinkers have proven themselves capable of proposing environmentally conscious projects that may be adopted by audiences and in turn may lead to behaviour change, or at least raise awareness around ecologically damaging lifestyle choices. Yet curators can only do so much to persuade audiences of the capacity of art to forestall the worst effects of climate change. While it is not the role of art to greenwash issues of ecological urgency, if art and exhibitions are to rise above the status of comforting distractions from the grim reality of an impending environmental catastrophe, they need to put their ideologies into practice. Returning to the original definition of the curator as one who cares, the current, sweeping transformations in society relating to the environmental movement, including the growing acceptance of green energies and respect for First Nationsâ knowledges around environmental stewardship, offer a timely opportunity for curatorial practice to redefine itself as an agent of change.
Obvious but important to remember is that artists are mostly not scientists and art exhibitions are not analysed in science journals. Rather, they are discussed, often quite subjectively, in the culture and entertainment pages of the mainstream media. In order to respect the conceptual intentions of the artist while not disengaging this core audience of cultural consumers, in weaving together artworks for display the curator must navigate a path underpinned by thematic rigour between visual captivation and subtle didacticism.
Since the first Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in Japan in 2000, a new generation of âbiennalesâ (biennials and triennials) has initiated a diversity of curatorial models that embrace the growing environmental awareness among artists and society more broadly. In the late 20th century, many influential standalone art projects grew out of the land art movement, initiated by mostly independent and politically motivated artist practitioners. Four decades ago, for example, the now iconic projects in Manhattan by Agnes Denes and Alan Sonfist, and in Kassel by Joseph Beuys, emboldened artists to advance environmental issues through direct action.2 With few exceptions, it was not until some decades later, however, as environmental concerns became mainstream social and political issues, that major public institutions began staging exhibitions in response to growing public interest, employing curatorial methodologies to convey information and open new dialogues around the ecological crisis.
Pioneering Curators of Environmental Art: The United States in the Late 1960s
Prior to the first Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in the year 2000, which heralded the 21st-century swing towards biennale-led programmes focused on sustainability, the vast majority of eco art projects were initiated by artists, usually a sole artist, and staged outside traditional biennale or gallery and museum frameworks. Very few environmentally themed projects were taken up by curators: the forced resignation of curator Sam Wagstaff in 1971 following the unilateral hostile response to Michael Heizerâs land art project in Detroit validated concerns that controversial environmental statements had no place in art institutions.3
Yet some of the few exhibitions led by curators prior to Wagstaffâs dismissal are noteworthy for their role as precursors to the international biennales that have since foregrounded ecological crises. Riding the wave of social and political changes that culminated in the mass protests of 1968, a small cohort of pioneering curators advanced the acceptance of environmental art by curating it into exhibitions more broadly interested in the then emerging genre of conceptual art, which often included found materials from the natural world. Adopting the concept of the gallery as a laboratory for research and experimentation, the US exhibitions can in retrospect be recognised as important testing grounds for new models of curatorial practice.
These curatorial experiments date back to when the concept of global warming was first being mooted by scientists and few conduits existed for dissemination of knowledge from the scientific community to the general public. One key catalyst was the publication of American biologist and conservationist Rachel Carsonâs books on the natural environment, in particular Silent Spring (1962), which first threw light on the danger to natural ecosystems of using chemicals in agriculture. An accomplished scientist, Carson revealed to the world the toxic impact of the widely used pesticide DDT, her publication attracting fierce opposition from chemical companies yet eventually leading to the establishment of the US Governmentâs Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and triggering more broadly the environmental movement.
While the potential for human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2) to have a detrimental effect on the climate was noted by scientists back in the late 19th century, scientific data to corroborate that possibility was not collected until the 1950s, when CO2 emissions readings established the reality of global warming. Yet even into the 1960s climate change was not agreed upon among scientists and was met with scepticism, if registered at all, by the wider community. It was not until the mid-1970s that the term âglobal warmingâ entered the public domain and not until 1988 that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established.4 With its beginnings in the late 1960s, land art was, as is often the case with art, representing if not leading the tide of change in attitudes towards the environment. Curatorial practice, also not unusually, was running to keep up with trailblazing artists: only a handful of curators had the vision and means to support artists whose work responded to the burgeoning environmental movement, staging small but seminal exhibitions such as Earthworks (1968) and Earth Art (1969). With these exhibitions, curators provided venues, financial support, and new audiences, amplifying and disseminating the ideas of those artists who were becoming increasingly concerned for the future of planet Earth.
On the 60th anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring, it is timely to remember that it was Carsonâs status as an outsider and her ability to communicate her findings in an accessible and engaging way through her books (as artists do using visual media) that were essential to her success in cutting through the obstacles thrown in her path by the largely anti-environmental scientific community. In her introduction to the 40th anniversary edition of Silent Spring, Carsonâs biographer stressed the role of her relative independent status in reaching broad audiences.
Carson was an outsider who had never been part of the scientific establishment, first because she was a woman but also because her chosen field, biology, was held in low esteem in the nuclear age. Her career path was non-traditional; she had no academic affiliation, no institutional voice. She deliberately wrote for the public rather than for a narrow scientific audience. For anyone else, such independence would have been an enormous detriment. But by the time Silent Spring was published, Carsonâs outsider status had become a distinct advantage.5
Artists, like writers such as Carson, have the opportunity to be influential thought leaders, operating as they do outside the dominant structures of capitalism that prop up non-sustainable industries and self-interested consumers. Since the 1960s, many artists have been positioning environmental issues at the core of their practice, a genre already well established as integral to the history of art in the second half of the 20th century. With few exceptions, however, curators were much slower than individual artists or artist collectives to make environmental matters the focus of their projects. The role of the curator in public art museums and galleries has traditionally been one of organising exhibitions of existing artworks either borrowed or drawn from the organisationâs own collection. Until recent decades, when innovative and collaborative curatorial approaches began to be adopted by international biennales, art in museum and public gallery exhibitions was rarely commissioned specifically for the exhibition.
The curatorial role in many of the significant early environmental exhibitions was recorded in a 2012 largely archival exhibition curated in the United States that set out to investigate âthe art and curatorial activities of the 1960s and 1970s to glean the conditions that contributed to the favourable promotion of land art as a viable new art categoryâ.6 Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 was curated by Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon and presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2012) and the Haus ...
