Underneath the water, leaves and coins, I suspect there might be more bluestone, sitting on top of a large bed of soil of Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. I chose to photograph this place as a way to anchor this piece, following an exercise my friend Tim Humphries shared with me earlier this year. Then he called it ‘an ephemeral map’, recently he called it a ‘small patch exercise’.
In his words, it’s a way of ‘reflecting on the earth we move with or stay over’. My rough translation of the process is that, with a phone or through some other way of seeing, you find a way of delineating an area of ground. Through observing detail in the space, you follow the visual cues to help you move through ideas, giving you limits or prompts for what might be circulating in your mind. This can vary with pace, structure and timing. It’s a way to start thinking, but with the help of limits and coordinates to come back to when you get lost, particularly when things feel overwhelming or unwieldy.
This photo is taken outside the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), looking into the beds of waters (the institution calls them ‘moats’) that mark either side of the entrance. It’s funny to see the coins intermittently scattered on the watery floor, wishes from the public towards the benevolent artistic institution which received $32.1 million dollars in state funding for its 2022 ‘blockbuster summer exhibition program’, received $52.3 million in yearly state funding in 2023, and in the same year made around $16 million from their investment activities alone. [1] I imagine what it would be like if these investment returns were given to smaller organisations to buy their buildings or if they were used to purchase cooperative artist housing; what it would be like if the NGV saw their survival as intrinsically linked to the rest of the ecology instead of a monolith above it. Working outside the Arts Centre one year, I saw a man diving into the water features in a full wetsuit and snorkel to collect the coins. After reading the NGV’s annual report I’m ready to dive in too, determined to see something else funded by the dreams of a public rather than going to an institution that has an indestructibly solid economic trajectory, little appetite for experimentation and a lack of support for its surrounding arts ecology.
But the dreary reality is that when they have eventually collected all those coins (in 2015 it was around seven wheelie bins worth), they are registered as donations to the NGV for the acquisition of new artworks. Wishes really do come true! More money for artists, more artwork for the public and more government funds for exhibitions like Pharaoh, an exhibition in collaboration with the British Museum, displaying more than 500 objects from Egypt.
A few months ago I was at a dinner where I heard that the Singapore Airlines flight – the one that was hit by severe clear-air turbulence necessitating an emergency landing – was carrying some of the objects that the NGV had on display as part of the Pharaoh exhibition. I remember the person at dinner telling me that their NGV employee housemate who was handling the objects believed they were cursed, with the flight being one of many strange happenings associated with the objects. I think it’s probably true, but I also think that the correlation of the ‘curse’ lies somewhere wider and more ill-defined. Are the objects cursed or is it the museum? How could a culture underpinning a museum lead to an increasingly unpredictable destabilisation of air?
Clear-air turbulence happens when bodies of air moving at widely different speeds meet. It is an accelerating occurrence in our skies, resulting in planes being thrust into undetectable patches of cold and hot air in erratic currents. The planes shake, people are propelled into cabin ceilings, the flights — sometimes — make emergency landings. Climate change is increasing the temperature differences between these pockets of air, making these experiences more common on flights around the world. It’s one of the many effects of climate change that have come more clearly into focus in the last year.
Climate change, or the climate crisis, is often explained as an imbalance of chemical compounds in the atmosphere, leading to the greenhouse effect, which warms our planet. The process is understood and translated primarily through the story of scientific fact, and from this there is often a shared ambience and assumption of seeing it as something that requires technical and material solutions of a certain ilk: geoengineering, renewable technology, carbon sequestration. After decades of guilt-based and techno-centric environmental messaging, we often reduce climate change solutions to keep cups, solar panels, tree planting and becoming paperless. These understandings feel like echoes from 2004, when British Petroleum unveiled its ‘carbon footprint calculator’, a tool to assess our daily lives for their chemical output, as concocted by public relations professional Ogilvy. This method of measurement is often critiqued as a way of shifting a corporation’s blame onto an individual, but I think the real clincher is that it reaffirms climate action only something that is calculable, a phenomena of chemistry. It mistakes the symptoms as the cause.
The narrow focus on particular technological fixes obscures story and culture as the strongest technologies we have, the root of our material realities. For COP30, set to be in the city of Belém in Brazil’s Amazon next year, campaigns to promote culture-based climate action are forming. For every gathering of COP so far, culture has never been on the agenda. It’s easier to look at a forward-facing tangible solution based on quantifiable facts. A climate crisis is more palatable to current dominating power structures than a cultural crisis. It’s simpler to frame the problem in terms of temperature targets as it doesn’t highlight the transformative social change that we really require, which if really attended to would mean the end to many of our existing power structures.
Ideological rationality, objectification, categorisation, distinction, precision and reason are elements of the dominating, imbalanced logic that creates the colonial destruction of self. This is the curse, the curse of bad listening and naive control. While power-hungry projects and individuals aim for survival, their inability to see their connection to everything around them — due to segmented ways of understanding (self and other) — leads them to the contrary; to death. They don’t understand that everything around them is also part of them, so when they extract and kill from others and the environment, they do it to their own detriment, even though it might look like a win at first. A narrow view of science, museology and economics is underscored ideologically by this split sense of belonging, which leads to many strains of climate activism being premised on climate being separate from us. It feels fitting that turbulence — the effect of two oppositional forces — is increased by this oppositional thinking. For example, the phrase ‘Save the Earth’ comes with a dualism that is at the root of where we find ourselves. It demonstrates a confusion: seeing solutions that are enacted onto nature as if we are not a part of it, applying the very understanding that created the problem and reproducing the same logic. The pitfalls of renewable technologies are becoming clearer, their extraction of rare earth metals and the desecration of land still reek of the practices of the fossil-fuel industries they’re hoping to replace (even if their carbon sum is lower). Renewables risk becoming a transition to another iteration of settler colonialism and capitalism when they are accompanied by incomplete understandings of what it truly takes to live sustainably. [2] The academic Adam Hanieh highlights how many renewables are being used to assist additional energy use, rather than lowering it, given the exponential energy needs of capitalism, which are set to rise with AI. [3]
At its heart, living sustainably requires a whole different worldview, not adaptation strategies. But I am aware that it’s harder than ever to have a full thought, or enough space to think, and so it’s easy to want tick-box, one-stop-shop solutions rather than murky reflective processes with undefined outcomes. It’s easier to work against climate change than work out what it really is. This is dangerous territory, as it makes us work towards solutions like carbon capture and storage (also developed by oil companies), which have minimal impact and also grants licences enabling polluting companies to expand. The half-baked solutions increase the problem.
This lack of full critical thought is rife at the moment through the arts, a space supposedly known for its thinking. The frenzied administrators in the arts are thrown into survivalism through the bureaucratic governmental structures to which we bind ourselves as we attempt to establish stable economic continuity. The heads of organisations and their employees are fatigued, but their frustration is translated into Instagram carousels brag-complaining about how much work they have to do and how they made it through the week. Suffering in the name of legacy and ongoingness, they lose all their lucidity, health and sanity in the process. Such workers, and their fatigued mentality, then determine our infrastructures for collective creative thinking within the arts industry. The structures and processes then become reactive, formulaic and restrictive. They fail to respond to the very real crises we are experiencing, and it leads to bad shows.
I digress, back to the photo. Looking squarely at the NGV International facade, we see, defined inside and outside, a place of work and non-work. I like the way the reflection in the water blurs the edges of the Brutalist bluestone building, creating a warped edge where the building meets the sky. I’m wondering how we can practise the poetry of the institution, the artwork of constructing our time and processes. I imagine this image in the dark and see the defining, delineating lines fade. Maybe this is the time to think together and practise, the time when we go home. Thinking within sharp institutional lines won’t get us far enough.
The genius of the idea of the carbon footprint was reading the problem on a human scale. Ogilvy made the ability to change our extractive relationship to the environment feel manageable and relatable, within our reach. And maybe this is effective because it reflects the way we are able to think — we struggle to think and emote at large scales and we work best through relationality.[4] Our understanding will always be limited and incomplete, unlike how it is often posited. There is freedom and responsibility in this truth. So instead of leaping anxiously towards the project of surviving on scales beyond comprehension and working against ourselves, maybe we can take a breath to follow our grief towards the ways we aren’t living now, moving us all to more clarifying truths and points of departure, where we see our lives and selves as indistinguishable from the crisis. Instead of the too-urgent rush towards saviourism, we need the acuity to see things beyond half-comprehension and to let the story speak through us. Locating the reasons for our inability to think more clearly seems like a good starting point to get us to a place where we can. [5] Paradoxically, the slower and more lucid, connected pace that this requires might be exactly the cultural climate solution we urgently need.
[1] NGV 22/23 annual report: https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/NGV_ANNUAL_REPORT_22_23.pdf, (accessed 23 October 2024).
[2] Tristen Harwood, Climate Aware Creative Practices Keynote Lecture, 2023, https://soundcloud.com/mumamonash/climate-aware-creative-practices-keynote-lecture-tristen-harwood, (accessed 23 October).
[3] Adam Hanieh, Oil, Monopoly Capitalism and Imperialism, 2024, https://player.fm/series/upstream-1111837/teaser-oil-monopoly-capitalism-and-imperialism-w-adam-hanieh (accessed 23 October 2024).
[4] Morgan Brigg & Mary Graham, The Relationalist Ethos for Managing Survivalism, ABC, 26 October 2021 https://www.abc.net.au/religion/mary-graham-morgan-brigg-relationalist-ethos/13604298 (accessed 23 October 2024).
[5] Tom Melick, A little history of fatigue, Rosa Press, 2021 https://rosapress.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/ALittleHistoryOfFatigue.pdf (accessed 23 October 2024).