Greenologie / Green note #1: What's the Weather Like?

Green note #1: What's the Weather Like?

Does the pervasive presence of the climate - with its corollary, global warming - in current conversations, political and weather-related, translate in art? What would a climate as seen by an artist look like? It would develop out of composite materials flaunting their artificiality, probably to quash any illusions about a nature defined outside any cultural footprints. Do its more or less spectacular atmospheric effects form the symptom of a politically committed art? Could we even talk of a climatic art that wants to embody a new ethics? The construction of such mechanical, dreamlike climates offers a critical view on the current debate and its sharp split between the advocates of a societal responsibility in climate change and those who simply see a "natural" history at work. The allegory of the seasons has indeed changed dramatically and is getting a new lease of life in an era where everything is measured in terms of effects on the climate.

Let us examine four symptomatic examples of these canned climates. The best-known is a completely synthetic sunset orchestrated by Olafur Eliasson in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London in 2003 and titled The Weather Project. In his 2005 Choose your day, Vadim Fishkin had spectators sit comfortably in a leather armchair under a rack of lights and close to a screen: they could choose between a sunset, a sunny or a rainy day, a stormy winter night or a full moon by simply pressing a switch. Miks Mitrevics used a hairdryer, a branch, maidenhair ferns and a large piece of moss to "reconstruct" in miniature, harmless form a Foehn (2009), a warm, strong dry wind typical of mountainous areas. Finally, a wooden jetty out into a lake was bathed in the strange light of a fake full moon - a mere rice paper lantern plugged into a regular socket and placed in the middle of the large room of the Frac Pays-de-la-Loire last spring. Spencer Finch's Between the Moon and the Sea is a vicarious landscape set before a window that opens onto the real landscape, whose experience is completely unsettled as a result.

What do these examples prove? The ever greater opportunism of artists prone to manipulate any postnatural sign to follow the way of the environmentally correct? Quite the contrary: these four artists take particular care not to bind their works to a message or a transparent political intention. They cultivate both a fruitful ambiguity and a radical environmental thought, without forgetting, even for a moment, that it should also foster an aesthetic sense.

Common sense

Quite evidently, the climate has become an obsession. Common sense confuses it with meteorology, global warming, or the quality of air, and artists are not necessarily exceptions to the rule. Most of them work on the perception of climate, making visible this most elusive ethereal domain, yet one whose consequences are experienced physically - there lies the paradox. Climate has always obsessed artists, from the privileged theme of the four seasons to the ephemeral as painted by Monet to the studies of atmospheric nebulosities by Constable or Turner. All observed its effects: what about today? What to make of the climate when you are an artist? A demonstration through the simulation of an epiphenomenon? A modelization? A projection? A prediction? A science-fiction screenplay? With the climate as a theme, can artists be anything but prophets or therapists? And most of all, can they avoid dealing with the ecological state of affairs, with the apparently inevitable green determinism when grappling with all things climatic - or at least, atmospheric?

Times and Temporalities

In order to avoid generalities and digressions, we should first agree on a definition of climate. The one provided by Pascal Acot in his recent Histoire de climat (Perrin, 2009) is adequate: "The word climate refers to the states of the atmosphere taken together (temperature, winds, rainfalls, sunshine, humidity, etc.) in a given location or on the whole planet, and over a given period. Meteorology (from the Greek meteôros, "lofty") is the science of climate applied to the weather forecast. Climatology is a young discipline: the idea according to which climatic conditions have not always been the same as today prevailed rather recently. Without archives, human memory does not go back more than two or three generations in these matters, which is really too little to put forward in a rigorous manner the hypothesis of regular variations over the long term."

Temporalities and time, duration and event: many ambivalent elements come into play when considering the climate. For artists, everything takes place at the heart of perception as theorized by Merleau-Ponty. The experience of this perception is recreated with ‘model works' that summon up an ‘inner weather', the weather of the site of art and the intimate weather of the spectator. In the white laboratory of art, the spectator is less a guinea pig than an interpreter needed to come to the realization that climatic phenomena constitute a perfect paradigm for the relation between the human and the current post-nature. The hyper-artificiality of Eliasson's or Finch's "ambient" installations make it possible to materialize this cultural nature, stressing the fact that the foundational split between nature and culture has lost its relevance. The apparent mechanisms of these four works also imply that civilization plays a part in the formation of natural climatic phenomena.

Displacing the Relation to the Environment

The generic, temporal, and even aseptic character of the white cube, the site of art as the site of something close to a laboratory experience whose norms are international, offers the welcome ubiquity of the "here" and the "nowhere." This is a sine qua non condition to de-politicize the relation to nature and avoid an instant dilution of the work in the ecological and social reality. At a time of intense circulation of information, displacing the subject and the act of observing within a generic space seems essential in order to escape the pressure to react fostered by the news cycle, with the problematic emotional slant attached to it. Once the framework has been set, artists most often choose a meteorological phenomenon such as fog, a storm, rainfall, a sunset, or a simple breeze. The climate will always be expressed through a phenomenon, but without exacerbating its dimension of event or catastrophe. The situations recreated by artists are normalized, keeping at bay the risk of producing a purely recreational attraction. Still, this is not to say that they renounce the spectacular altogether. A machinery and a technical management of rapture, of a canned sublime perfectly accepted as such, substitute for the natural climate, most often perceived as unpredictable and immanent.

This artifact-like dimension of atmospheric reconstruction makes it possible to materialize the interdependency of the parties, echoing Bruno Latour's stance "that we produce our own environment." Here the interrelation between human activity and the evolution of climate is not demonstrated but skillfully suggested. The equipment sheds light on the cause-and-effect relationship much more than the outdoor observation of the real climate would. Spectators can thus reconnect to the climatic cycle from an indoor space, experimenting with their power as producers as well as subjects of interpretation. Without guilt, without accusations of bad behavior, the cause-and-effect demonstration develops subtly, almost insidiously, registering under the first optical and aesthetic effects of a sunset or a full moon.

Temperate Climate

In the context of a dense stream of information compiling abnormal climatic disturbances, Eliasson, Finch, Mitrevics, and Fishkin chose to create the spectacle of a temperate, stable climate, without variation. Continuity therefore constitutes a first polysemic basis of these works, outlining the desire - palpable since the generalization of the home air conditioner in 1953 - for a stable temperature and an attenuated experience of seasonal change that also comes with the illusion of mastery over climatic elements and an ideal environment. With this choice, the artists point to a possible excess: that of a smooth climate just as unbearable in the end as sudden and brutal climatic disasters. Bruno Latour himself likes to underline the fact that, with this installation, the point is not so much to express an ambition of overweening control, a mastery over elements, as to put to the test the type of space best suited for civilization. If we take this train of thought further, we might say that it is now the task of the artificial climate to tame the real climate, which due to its unpredictable character has become too stressful. This weather without cycles, ad libitum, impervious to catastrophes, "ideally domesticated" thus presents favorable conditions for an assessment of the climate. It is paradoxically because there is no revolution in these works that a tangible critical position can develop autonomously within them.

With the climate as an operating mode, these artists put together a paradoxically placid situation of crisis that plays on mechanisms of idealization as well as psychological and physiological perception. Without ignoring the paralyzing effects of the spectacle of a disaster, they opted for a climate without drama through the conversion of a moment into a time - that of a permanent sunset, a drawn-out night, an unrelenting foehn, or a standardized climate with limited, predictable choices. These situations paradoxically stigmatize the inhumanity of this meteorological or atmospheric stability devoid of accidents, beginnings, or ends. It is in this imaginary, fantasy framework that the works show their sensitivity to ecology. The Weather Project encourages spectators to question their primary position as observers in the staging of a situation whose nature - extrapolation, prediction, preservation, modelization - is never explicit.

Off-shore Climate

These four retinal experiences show an awareness of the need to steer clear of visual realism to renew the parameters of a democratic community and a critical assessment of the climatic situation. What we have in these instances is a continuous time without acme, a generic climate in a closed-off space with no natural light, works that do not spell things out and therefore do not indict anyone - to the point of freeing the look from the ecological moral so pregnant over the last few decades. A work such as The Weather Project fosters the conception of a shared, dynamic responsibility.

Between knowing the climate or imagining it, these artists have combined two realities and thought through the aesthetic efficiency of their propositions in a way somewhat reminiscent of Jacques Rancière's theses on the distribution of the sensible and its ability to generate the political. What is remarkable in these four works is the will to an emancipation from didactic and political discourse thanks to an intensification of the sensible. It comes with a dynamic redefinition of the spectator, from the status of an observer to that of a participant. From the non-site of art that is the exhibition gallery, a subjective observation post of reality, ecology - until now very imperfectly relayed by pragmatic practices designed as solutions - has found an ideal artistic configuration in the climate. Too vast and confusing to be personal, this ‘dynamogenous' field pieces together a sensible framework out of political questions, scientific data, and ethical causes - a sensible framework that makes the resolution of a post-nature conceivable.

Bénédicte Ramade

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