Mariele Neudecker, 400 Thousand Generations, 2009
Exhibition: Earth - Art of a Changing World at the Royal Academy until January 31 2010.
Coinciding with the opening of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, the Royal Academy’s latest exhibition is a timely exploration of the way contemporary artists are responding to global warming.
Earth: Art of a Changing World features over 60 works by 35 leading contemporary artists whose practices have been influenced in some way by the catastrophic consequences of climate change.
The Academy promises work which interconnects ‘issue’ and ‘art’ and in the work of Ackroyd & Harvey, this interconnectivity is perhaps most evident
Their Beuys’ Acorns was inspired by Joseph Beuys’ 1982 project to plant 7,000 acorns whilst Polar Diamond (2009) is a diamond created from carbon extracted from the compressed ash of a bone of a polar bear, which they say questions the loss of the natural world and the price paid for carbon.
(Above) Antti Laitinen, It’s my Island I, 2007
Photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose large-scale colour landscapes explore the post-industrial legacy of nature devoured by human industry, takes a less esoteric approach.
His Brave New World shows a contingent of workers processing cheap chicken in a factory. “To me, what’s interesting as art is to begin to define that theatre of industry that is almost beyond our imagination”, he says.
But it’s not just about theatres of imagination or indeed distant artistic gestures. Since 2003 artists, including Ackroyd and Harvey, have been making a series of expeditions to the High Arctic with the Cape Farewell project to produce work that makes explicit connections with the shrinking polar ice caps and our urban political ecologies.
A Cape Farewell artist explorer is Sophie Calle whose photographic and plaque works include a series that documents the enactment of her mother's last wishes - the burial of her pearl necklace and diamond ring in a glacier.
UVA, Onward, 2009
Shiro Takatani also had glaciers in mind when he joined Cape Farewell for the 2007 expedition. His film ‘Ice Core’ explores the 2,503-metre core of a glacier and illustrates the geological process at work when compacted snow turns into ice. More importantly it also shows how the release of entrapped carbon dioxide governs the temperature of the planet.
Similarly Anglo-Ethiopian playwright, author and poet Lemn Sissay made the journey to the Pole and a filmed rendition of his poem, What If, offers an alternative sketch of Darwin’s ‘Evolution of Species’ - first announced at the RA 150 years’ ago.
Elsewhere the show packs in artists as diverse as Antony Gormley, whose ‘Amazonian Field’ is a room of approximately 35,000 individual terracotta figures and film/sound artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhard of Semi Conductor.
Their chillingly beautiful Black Rain is a result of raw empiric visual data recorded by NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STERO). It’s a beautiful and atmospheric film that apparently shows the interplanetary solar winds and coronial mass ejections that are tracked heading towards Earth by a pair of satellites.
David Nash, Ash Dome, 2009
Where Earth: Art of a Changing World really succeeds is in the pairing of modern experimental artworks like this with the work of people like conceptual sculptor David Nash. His Ash Dome has an immediacy that teems with the natural elements of earth and fire.
There are similar earthy qualities to the work of Cornelia Parker whose Heart of Darkness, a suspended sculpture made from individual charred burnt tree debris and pine cones from a forest fire, takes inspiration from the eponymous Joseph Conrad novella that inspired the film Apocalypse Now.
You could argue that some of the art fails in its attempts to encompass and explain climate change. Regardless of that there is much to experience and ponder here.
Whether it makes any difference in Copenhagen is another matter.
