This blog post thinks through the themes of aesthetic
interventions, sensing time and engendering response-ability using artistic
responses to climate change. Here, these themes are drawn from one piece of
art, Your Waste of Time, by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. This
performative showcasing of glacial ice establishes interactions and relations
between human bodies and icy materialities- but what is at stake here and what
potentialities could be created through artistic practices? These are questions
that have arisen through my current dissertation, where I hope to explore
artistic responses to environmental degradation through the materialities of
ice and plastic.
For the piece Your Waste of Time, Danish-Icelandic artist
Olafur Eliasson transported several large blocks of ice from Vatnajökull, the
largest and oldest glacier in Iceland, to the Berlin gallery
Neugerriemschneider (Eliasson, 2006). This glacier is almost incomprehensibly
ancient, with some parts dating from around 1200 AD, but human-driven global
warming has begun thawing Vatnajökull, dislodging chunks of ice from the main
body of the glacier. This has left behind a scattering of sculpture-like
nuggets of ice across the landscape, pieces that untouched, would soon melt
away. Eliasson’s project transported these pieces to Germany, to be displayed
in an art gallery.
Here the wayfaring blocks of ice were kept in a refrigerated
space as immersive sculptures that audience members were encouraged to touch.
This was an attempt by Eliasson to bring the visceral reality of human-driven
climate change to the attention of the audience through a sensory engagement
with ice. In Eliasson’s words, ‘we take away time from the glacier by touching
it’ (Eliasson, 2006). Within this molecular moment of sensation between the
human and icy touch, the exchange of human warmth is enough to begin to decay
the ice. Your Waste of Time then becomes an experiment to curate a sense of
environmental care through molecular icy interactions.
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| Your Waste of Time, Olafur Eliasson, photo by Jens Ziehe |
Recently, such environmental artistic interventions have
been located temporally with the term ‘anthropocene’[1]. Anthropocene has come
into use to refer to human-driven environmental change and degradation.
Although the ‘Anthro-pocene’ privileges and homogenises the human (a white,
western human) within environmental discourses, the term has become a buzzword
for the current era of global pollution and warming. As an imaginary, the
Anthropocene cuts through different temporalities; finite human lives, longer
lived materialities (such as ice) and geological timescales.
Artistic responses to environmental issues engage with this
increasingly unpredictable world, through a sensory engagement with temporality,
with other materialities and bodies. It can even be said that ‘attuning
ourselves, through poetry, art, and description, to pay attention to other
times…these are crucial practices; in fact, they are matters of survival.’
(Davis and Turpin, 2015). Although influential feminist scholar Donna Haraway
(2015) proposes other terms such as Capitalocene to denote the specifically
capitalist causes of environmental degradation, the Anthropocene also remains
an arguably productive term. Art positioned as relating to different temporal
imaginaries is thus a speculative, experimental project to think differently,
to world differently. Although the term Anthropocene remains contestable, it’s
very instability lends itself to artistic conceptual engagements that function
through such fragile and indeterminate encounters.
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| Image: Your Waste of Time, Olafur Eliasson, photo by Jens Ziehe |
Positioned in the white, empty space of the art gallery, the
fragility of the ice is magnified. This fragility comes to light through the
invocation to touch the surface of the icy sculpture. In the words of Eliasson;
‘When we touch these blocks of ice with our hands, we are not just struck by
the chill; we are struck by the world itself. We take time from the glacier by
touching it’. As Erin Manning (2006), notes in her work on the intersections
between art practice and philosophy, sensation opens up the body to thinking
and doing differently through its relation to other bodies and things. Touch,
in this light, is located neither with the human or the inhuman, but invented
through the encounter.
But what happens at a touch? Ice, as sensory aesthetic
experience, brings closer together the relations already held between ice and
human bodies. Quantum physicist turned feminist philosopher Karen Barad (2012)
brings together feminist traditions that unsettle ways of thinking materiality
and quantum physics. A sense of touch, for Barad, can be unsettled a molecular
exposition of the minute interactions between electrons. This is a murky and confusing
world of quantum physics for most social scientists, but Barad productively
draws out the indeterminacy at the very building blocks of sensation. Quantum
theory holds infinites as integral. This argues for a radical openness of
potentialities at the very building-blocks of mattering – all matter is
unstable at its foundations. Could it be argued that there is at stake, the
unsettling of stable ways of thinking and an opening up of openness already at
the heart of mattering?
At the moment of touch between a hand and the blocks of ice,
this becomes clear- the warmth of the body causes the ice to change state and
start to melt. For Eliasson, ‘We take away time from the glacier by touching
it. Suddenly I make the glacier understood to me, its temporality. It is linked
to the time the water took to become ice, a glacier. By touching it, I embody
my knowledge by establishing physical contact. And suddenly we understand that
we do actually have the capacity to understand the abstract with our senses.
Touching time is touching abstraction.’ What does it mean to touch time? Touch,
as unsettling and in-touch with infinite possibilities could signal a potential
for thinking differently. The term anthropocene signals (if problematically)
this need to think differently about temporality. The geologic lifespan of the
ice is not permanent, but made fragile under a human touch. Temporality, then
is not a stable concept either, but one that aesthetic interventions can
trouble and disrupt assumptions that time related solely to a stable ticking of
the clock.
This touching-time, for Eliasson, has a political undertone.
Time is a crucial and sensitive issue in climate change debates. The critical
question is, how to engender response-ability and action to do something to halt
the tide of environmental degradation and global temperature rise. Haraway
(2015) has written about an art project by the Institute of Figuring
(2005-ongoing) to crochet coral reefs, involving thousands of people working to
cultivate and care for these crochet-corals, gathering each person’s work into
an exhibition, curating the corals to establish a reef. Like Your Waste of
Time, The Crochet Coral Reef Project has time at its centre. Crocheting, like
the establishment of a coral reef, takes time, and has the potential to
establish caring relations through the touch of human-material and time. Could
art such as this create publics that could do differently concerning climate
change?
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| Image: Crochet Coral Reef Project, Institute of Figuring |
Care in this context relates to everything that both humans
and nonhuman things to continue to repair their world to live as well as
possible. These caring relations knit the world together and create complex
links between things and humans in the world. Feminist scholar Puig de la
Bellacasa (2011) proposes an ethics of care. This care is not a moralism. It is
not a case of you should care about environmental degradation! Rather, it is a
speculation to see what could happen if we relate to the things and
environments around us through more caring relations.
Your Waste of Time, framed through touch, time and care
touches upon possible pasts, presents and futures that are framed as undecided.
As the ice hovers indeterminately in-between solid and liquid, so does the
potential for doing differently. Geologic timescales interact with a momentary
present. Could this moment of touch between ice and human engender more caring
relations that span other times and other places? Your Waste of Time, then, may
not be a waste of time, but rather put us in-touch with time.
Blog by Rosie McLellan
Reposted from 'Bristol Society and Space' Blog of the University of Bristol's MSc in Human Geography
Bibliography
Barad, K. (2012) ‘On touching – The inhuman that therefore I
am’, Differences, 23(3): 206-223
Davis, H. and Turpin, E., eds. (2015), ‘Art in the
Anthropocene’, London: Open Humanities Press
De la Bellacasa, M. (2011), ‘Matters of care in
technoscience: Assembling neglected things’, Social Studies of Science, 41(1):
85-106
Eliasson, O. (2006), ‘Your Waste of Time’, Berlin:
Neugerriemschneider [http://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK100564/your-waste-of-time]
Haraway, D. and Kenney, M. (2015), ‘Anthropocene,
Capitolocene, Chthulhocene’, in: Davis, H. and Turpin, E., eds. (2015), ‘Art in
the Anthropocene’, London: Open Humanities Press
Institute of Figuring, (2005-Ongoing), ‘Crochet Coral Reef
Project’, New York: MAD Museum of Modern Arts
[http://madmuseum.org/exhibition/crochet-coral-reef-toxic-seas]
Manning, E. (2006), ‘Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement,
Sovereignty’, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
[1] See more regarding the Anthropocene at
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/29/declare-anthropocene-epoch-experts-urge-geological-congress-human-impact-earth