Disaster Aesthetics

November 15th, 2007

Views: 681

Posted by ChrisG at 12:25 pm

When you imagine the future, what does it look like? And would you want to live there?

BLDGBLOG looks at a new initiative by Greenpeace [PDF] to motivate action in Spain on climate change using before-and-after images of apocalyptic change (found via Owen). Geoff Manaugh notes that the aestheticisation of climate change (through the medium of photography in particular) is extremely problematic from the point of view of using images as a spur for action. The genre resemblance of the images to the kind of photos used for dressing up the pages of a hoiday brochure is clear enough, and Manaugh points out that the ‘after’ images possess a particular kind of exotic beauty of which J. G. Ballard elegiacally writes in The Drowned World. The ambivalence of the images is crucial for Manaugh: taken on their own, their meaning is too unanchored. Different audiences will produce radically different and conflicting readings.

(images by Pedro Armestre and Mario Gómez)

But the treatment of climate change in art can achieve other results. The work of Newton and Helen Harrison deserves mention here. The spectacular nature of the images Greenpeace have used is the problem; they float free of any real social context, and therefore do not have any explicit tie to the material conditions of peoples’ lives. Like a preoccupation with the beauty of ruins, which often imagines a ruin as an index of a transcendental truth independent of its actual history, the Greenpeace images evoke a fetishized, over-unified understanding of climate change. The Harrisons’ work, on the other hand, relies on the building of a narrative of change based on information drawn from those who inhabit a particular region, and from geologists, hydrologists, ecologists and other scientific and academic workers.

The result might be a series of maps which show not only how climatic change will affect the geography of a region, but is accompanied by works which offer stories about how the lives of people in the affected region may have to change. In their current project, Greenhouse Britain, for example, these stories focus on how work, government, agriculture – the whole social and ecologcial system of life – will be affected by the need to withdraw to higher ground in the face of rising sea levels. Their approach attends to the material relationships in which everyday life is anchored, and as such, they transcend the use of images as free-floating signifiers which become annexed either to paralysing fear or to a sense of mildly exotic otherness. In opening up the future, making it tangible, and re-injecting human agency into the picture, they both provoke specific fears and offer concrete hope.