Louis Helbig (2014)
Pro-industry, pro-environment, anti-industry, environment, essay contributors included CEO of energy companies, Green Party leader, Presidents of oil companies, Journalists, Family Physician, Artist and Members of Parliament providing a broad-scale insight into the varying views on the issue.
Those from a pro-industry position, such as Rick George, former president and CEO of Suncor Energy and Greg Stringham of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, who stress the tar sands' value in providing energy security for North America, white pundit Ezra Levant decribes the pictures to be of "a liberal, peaceful, democratic society" based on "ethical oil" distinct from the "conflict oil" of Middle East Dictatorships.
Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch highlights the political corruption enabling petrochemical Canada - all speaking to the fact that if "conflict oil" exists anywhere at all it is here.
The oil/tar sands lends themselves to aerial photography. It is not possible to see, interpret and understand them as effectively from the ground.
"The airplane" in the words of one Canadian government official in 1942, "introduced a romance of its own - a romance of modern pioneering" lifting the "veil of ignorance" that in the eyes of modernists of that time shrouded the primitive Natives who occupied what was, in those Canadian modernists' minds, uninhabited land.
I hope these aerial photographs do indeed lift a veil of ignorance, and that the critical reader will use their imagination.
 |
| Effluent Boil and Steam |
- disturbing and seductive imagery
- mixture of natural and industrial elements, where noxious byproducts merge with formerly pristine ecosystems of a previously forested area
- environmental toxicity is transformed photographically into visual splendor
- "liberal, peaceful, democratic society" based on "ethical oil" distinct from the "conflict oil" of the Middle East
- the aerial shots isolates the poisonous industrial exploitation from its larger socioeconomic and politico-cultural environment - ABSTRACTION - the photos are then commercialised in editions via art galleries and online shopping
- disorientating perspective, cropped at an angle producing wrongful sensations of visual pleasure
- shot on a plane flying over head thereby displacing the scenes from the misery of those living in or near the industrial apocalypse
- Alienation - our 'perverse enjoyment' of images of our own annihilation
- translating scenes of destruction into compositions of aesthetic beauty?
- 'The above whitewashing' exemplified 'the aesthetics of the Anthropocene' which 'comes to seem natural, right, then beautiful, and thereby anaesthetised the perception of modern industrial pollution - Nicholas Mirzoeff "Visualising the Anthropocene"
The Subterrafuge
http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-changing-of-the-gods-of-reason/
The Subterrafuge: in the Karoo, in the proverbial Middle of Nowhere, on a farm next to Tankwa National Park, was a multi-tower installation contra fracking. Its name is a conglomerate of sub: under or below; terra: land or territory; and fuge: expelling or dispelling; and plays on the word “subterfuge”: deceit used in order to achieve one’s goal.15 Connecting earth and sky, living and dead, the permanence of industrial infrastructure and the temporality of fire, Subterrafuge references the tall infrastructural installations that will be required to turn this part of the Karoo into an extractive economy, as well as the small-town church spires and the cedars planted in old graveyards across the Karoo. Built as part of the AfrikaBurn festival in 2014 and burned in a 2015 event, the Subterrafuge installation was a mixed-media, wood-and-word comment on the logic of shale gas, justified by subterfuge, in which gas, water, rock, earth, and air are commodities extracted for the purpose of economic growth measured in capital, which is assumed to “trickle down” through layers of stratified humans.16 Such subterfuges continue to divide the necropolitical from an ecology of life across all spheres,including the university, whether in macroeconomics or mining engineering.
Edward Burtynsky
“Most people would walk by a dump pile and assume that there’s no picture there,” says global industrial landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky. “But there’s always a picture, you just have to go in there and find it.” Born in Canada in 1955, Burtynsky has been investigating human-altered landscapes in his artistic practice for over 35 years, capturing the sweeping views of nature altered by industry; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, and silicon. “Of course, it’s important to me to make sure that my pictures are attractive to the eye,” he says. “But beneath the surface there’s always a bigger, deeper environmental issue.”
His latest exhibition, The Anthropocene Project, is directly influenced by the proposed new geologic era ‘Anthropocene’ – introduced in 2000 by chemist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Jozef Crutzen, to represent a formal recognition and acknowledgement of the “human signature” on the planet. Experts argue that the end of the current epoch has been marked by striking acceleration since the mid-20th century of carbon dioxide emissions and rising sea levels, the mass extinction of global species, and the transformation of land by deforestation and development. Burtynsky hopes to demonstrate this.
“Scientists do a pretty terrible job of telling stories, whereas artistshave the ability to take the world and make it accessible for everyone,” says the 63-year-old. “We are having a greater impact on the planet than all the natural systems combined. I’m trying to let people know that.”
The Anthropocene Project includes photographs of the biggest terrestrial machines ever built in Germany, concrete seawalls in China that now cover 60 per cent of the mainland coast, and psychedelic potash mines in Russia’s Ural Mountains. Burtynsky says that in order to make an impact it was important to capture the largest examples of extractions of the planet, which explains why he visited a mighty 20 countries over a period of five years.
 |
| Oil Fields #19ab, Belridge, California, USA (2003) |
 |
| Uralkali Potash Mine #2, Berezniki, Russia, 2017 © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London/ Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto. |
 |
| Salt Pan #21, Little Rann of Kutch, Gujarat, India, 2016 © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London/ Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto. |
 |
| Lithium Mines #1, Salt Flats, Atacama Desert, Chile, 2017 © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London/ Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto. |
 |
| Phosphor Tailings Pond #4, Near Lakeland, Florida, USA 2012 © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London/ Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto |
 |
| Saw Mills #1, Lagos, Nigeria, 2016 © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London/ Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto. |
- Canadian photographer whose large-scale prints of industrial landscapes are as seductive as they are horrific
- revealing and aestheticising in a disturbing manner when it comes to Anthropocene visualisations
- monumental, awe-inspiring photographs from scenes of environmental violence - violence defined not only locally in terms of the damage to regional landscapes, but also globally in relation to the contribution of industrial fossil fuel production to climate change
- the scenes are interpreted as depicting the origins of modern development and the guarantee of the American way of life
- "when I first started photographing industry it was our of a sense of awe at what we as a species were up to. Our achievements became a source of infinite possibilities" (OIL- artist statement)
- HOWEVER, his images are less about staging that ambivalence and more about dramatising in spectacular fashion the perverse visual beauty of a technological, and even geological, act of mastery devoid of environmental ethics
- points out the consumer-based participation in the oil economy - however this ruse universalises responsibility for climate disruption, diverting attention from the fact of corporate petrocapitalism's enormous economic influence on global politics that keeps us locked in its clutches
- technology and nature become unified aesthetically, composing a picture that is monstrously not only visually pleasurable but also ostensibly ethically just; an image of America "freedom" whose historical progression, according to the familiar patriotic narrative, is necessary, inevitable, and even 'beautiful'
- he constructs the petro-industrial sublime
- awesome visuality of the catastrophic oil economy's infrastructure founded on obsessive capitalist growth
- naturalises petrocapitalism
Petrochemical America
Richard Mirsrach & Kate Orff
Exhibition 1998, Book 2012
Photographer and landscape artist collaboration
- Hones in on the damaging socio-environmental causes and effects of oil industry development, imaged as pollution-filled apocalyptic landscape
- Shows major waterways reduced to sewers from toxic emissions of industry historically dumped directly into the water and released into the air
- By loading the river with this noxious chemical freight, the petrochemical industry has created an enormous hypoxic dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico (est. 7-8 thousand square miles, for which the EPA has been sues for failing to protect)
- Shows the on-the-ground environmental destruction and human cost of the fossil fuel industry along the Mississippi
- 'Cancer Alley' other Southern oil development as a part of petrocapitalisms necropolitics of ecocide - invokes the Capitalocene's insistence on linking geological alteration to the current political economy
- Cancer Ally impacts certain populations more than others; formally enslaved African-American and working-class white communities, without resources to move to cleaner areas or lacking the resolve to abandon their homes, bear the brunt of petrochemical exposure, while corporation enrich distant shareholders living safely in clean, affluent environments - thus Misrachs images pay attention to the invisibilities of the zones shaped by the entanglement of racial, economic, and environmental violence
- encourages viewers to participate in the growing opposition to fossil-fuel extractivism and its unevenly distributed effects - a political relationality otherwise absent in Anthropocene discourse
- UNLIKE Burtynsky's pictorialism, and Helbig's aerial beautification, and opposite to the remote-sensing imagery that tends to fetishise mastery of the visual field as compensatory manoeuvre against recognising the techno-scientific risks of geo-engineering - these photographs rejects the Anthropocene's terminological obfuscations and disavowals of culpability, showing the on-the-ground environmental and human costs.
- The collaboration with Orff's "Ecological Atlas' provided a stunning analysis of the industrial, economic, sociopolitical, and ecological conditions that frame the "petrolised" landscapes Misrach's images depict - providing a detailed infoscape that usefully footnotes and contextualises the photographs
Without discounting local resistance, SCAPE advocate for bioregional and globally interlinked comprehensive approach directed toward a post-petrochemical culture of sustainability.
In the "Glossary of Terms and Solutions for a Post-petrochemical Culture" attached to the back of the book, are suggestions for citizen action networks, green chemistry, sustainable agriculture, ecological land use, public transportation and environmental law. The solutions reject the "linear, mechanistic and distributed wast in favour of looped and living paradigms centred on human energy and renewable resources"
The Climate Games
personification of the environment has been used as a tool to raise public awareness of the way our actions are impacting the planet...climate games...ecosexual bathhouse...does this present
possibly our best chance of changing our system is changing our perspective on how we view the planet. Chtul considers this approach in another abstract way...making kin...
- Large-scale game that considered cyberspace as well as the street as playing fields
- Civil disobedience against the power of multinational corporations..."any form of change, what can be called social progress, is the result of disobedience actions"
- 'It is not information that makes us act, it's the desire for another world, it's fantasy and pleasure'
- 'We are nature defending itself.'
- Art and activism
- Playful and theatrical
- Collaborative energy
- Learning by other means than pure rationalism
- Spirit of positive fun into a forceful wedge striking at the heart of the capitalocene political economy, revealing the contours of an emergent institutional liberation targeting global climate governance and its cultural normalisation
- Seeks to 'ensure that one does not talk about energy transition without including the word justice...environmentalism without talking about social issues
- "The way humans dominate each other can be seen in the way man dominates nature"
- "We need to commit to carry out actions of resistance, of disobedience, to stop this suicidal machine that has literally set the climate on fire and that has lead to the extinction of two hundred species per day"
March 2015: Not an Alternative's Natural History Museum project's "An Open Letter to Museums"
http://thenaturalhistorymuseum.org/open-letter-to-museums-from-scientists/
Signed by nearly 150 scientists, including several Nobel Price winners, the open letter called on American museums to "cut all ties with the fossil fuel industry and funders of climate science obfuscation"
An Open Letter to Museums from Members of the Scientific Community generating copious press coverage, the letter was likely a major factor in oil-heir industrialist David H.Koch leaving the board of New York's Natural History Museum in January 2016. An instance of what Not an Alternative has come to call "institutional liberation", its practice moves beyond earlier forms of institutional critique, focused on the critical analysis of institutional functions, and toward emancipation of such spaces from petrocapitalist influence, social and economic injustice, and ant-democratic rule.
Liberate Tate and other London-based groups won a nearly 6 year campaign to compel the Tate to break off its sponsorship agreement with BP, thereby removing the corporation's ability to "artwash" its identity and practice: i.e. making an environmentally destructive business appear as a benevolent cultural philanthropist and thus securing social license to pollute.
That said, BP recently announced a new £7.5 million, 5 year deal with 4 major arts institutions in the UK – the British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Opera House, and Royal Shakespeare Company – despite all recent opposition. The struggle continues, with more activism to come) - Mark Brown, "BP Sparks Campaigners' Fury with News Arts Sponsorship Deals" Guardian, July 28, 2016
The goal of these groups is to reinvent democratic self-determination and support fossil-free culture through direct action, by contesting corporate power and its nefarious sway over public institutions. (Demos, 2017, p110-111)
Favianna Rodriguez
'Defend Our Mother' (2014)
Indigenous Protest
Favianna Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural organiser, and political activist based in Oakland, California. Her art and collaborative projects address migration, economic inequality, gender justice, and ecology. Favianna lectures globally on the power of art, cultural organising and technology to inspire social change, and leads art interventions in communities around the country. Rodriguez partners with social movement groups around the world to create art that’s visionary and transformational. She is the Executive Director of CultureStrike, a national arts organisation that engages artists, writers and performers in migrant rights. She was recently featured in a documentary series titled Migration is Beautiful which addressed how artists responded to failed immigrant policy in the United States. In 2009, she co-founded Presente.org, a national online organising network dedicated to the political empowerment of Latino communities.
Ecosexuals
EARTH AS LOVER
Elizabeth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle
'their loving ecosexual romance modelling a refreshing libidinal way of being political'
- Radical act against environmental destruction
- Retort to ecocide
- With their film Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (2013) they mobilise a documentary cinematic practice to investigate devastating mountaintop removal mining and extremely polluting coal extraction in West Virginia, where Stephens grew up.
- smelling flowers
- massaging river stones
- lasciviously licking and hugging trees
- bathing nude
- luxuriating mud
- presents the artists joyful celebration of the natural world 'where nature figures as an awe-inspiring site of queer becoming and radical indeterminacy, rather than any kind of essentialist ideal form
- their film is unswerving documentary exposure of industrial exploitation
- Juxtaposing anti-mining civil disobedience, unexpected alliance formation, and inspiring activist building, to the horrific blasting of mountain tops, the ecocidal destruction of streams and aquifers, and testimonies of corporate deceit
Their Manifesto:
The Ecosexual Bathhouse
Pony Express - a collaboration led by performance artist Ian Sinclair and Loren Kronemyer
'where visitors can engage in "pandrogynous collaborative processes and an anti-disciplinary approach to create immersive alternative realities" based on libidinally charged, Chthulucene-instantiating human-flora assemblages' - Demos
Explores our perspective of the way we treat the planet - comparing our relationship to the planet with a sexual one to personify the our actions on the earth with the hope of better connecting people to the current and pressing issues of it's mistreatment (questions of consent - rape of nonhumans through GMO agriculture, artificial insemination and the way we dictate the sexual lives of animals 'to conserve a human image of the biosphere).
"Rather than approaching the world as a warehouse of insensate things we wish to stockpile for later use, we should consider it a partner in the longest relationship we'll ever have"
No comments:
Post a Comment