Section 1 The climate of representation

Ecological postures for a climate realism

The ways we imagine and respond to ecological crisis are centrally bound to acts of representation that condition perception. In turn, the honing of vision plays an integral role in shaping the course of ecological knowledge. This aesthetic activity is occurring at a time when scientific knowledge of climate change is hotly contested by corporations, governments, and the general population alike. A constellation of ontological and epistemological demands is putting the “objective knowledge” of the life sciences through its paces. Thus, a heterogeneous climate realism is emerging alongside the ideology of climate change skepticism.

In many respects, the disputes over knowledge-claims about climate change produce a delusional condition. The tension between a popular environmental knowledge and the inhibition of political action produces a cultural spasm, in Felix Guattari’s terms: a painful and compulsive mobilization of nervous energies that are both symptomatic of an intensified, excitable discourse and an exploitation of those energies for the preservation of the social body. The question thus becomes: how do we disengage from this refrain of continually “reading signs” of climate change without being discredited as illiterate?

I will argue that contemporary art provides an alternative ground to experience and make claims about the realism of climate change and its impact. I will chart a trajectory that begins with an originary form of ecological denial, the political cover-up, common in the late decades of the twentieth century when governments tested chemicals in depressed cities across North America and then denied the physical effects of their slow violence. This overt denial became an integral facet of the more recent and culturally distributed forms of denial that accompany climate change-related catastrophes. Importantly, I will chart this course through the lens of conceptual artists. Thus, my ambition is not merely to provide an environmental history, but also to show how artists present ecological crisis through alternative sensibilities that attempt to ease the spasmic refrain patterning the battle over the truth about the climate condition, and resolve it into a re-syntonization of bodies, knowledge, and exchange. I consider how art accomplishes this through propositions of moods and modalities that open the possibilities for navigating the new terrain of climate realism. I will examine four postures: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; Tony Oursler’s video installation, Kepone (1993); Doug Aitken’s Electric Earth (1999); and Mary Mattingly’s Wearable Homes (2004-ongoing).

Ecological postures for a climate realism

If there is a realism to be thought through the terms of climate, it is not one that is solely defined by scientific data, nor by a hard political line. Rather, it is one that must be considered in connection with disbelief. The realism of climate is particular and exemplary; it is a form shaped through the oversights and responsiveness, skepticism, and speculative inquiry that it generates. Climate raises a constellation of ontological and epistemological demands that challenge the ground of objective knowledge of the life sciences while at the same time triggering regressive contestations of the value of knowledge and questioning. Thus, while climate has a shared history with ecology, it cannot be reduced to ecology per se. The drive for a purely instrumental worldview divests the discourse of climate of its hold on critical inquiry of the external world. What a dilemma: one cannot be skeptical without being conservative (i.e., a climate change denier) and one cannot be realistic without being lofty and fantastical, if not paranoid! Climate demands new coordinates of interpretation.

In this chapter, I will link climate realism to acts of representation that express ecological perspective, political scenes, and aesthetic atmosphere. But I will show how these are geared toward a specific climate realism. I do so by running through four postures that I discuss in relation to the ecologist Rachel Carson, installation artist Tony Oursler, video artist Doug Aitkin, and conceptual artist Mary Mattingly. When I speak of postures, I am referring to the etymology of this term, meaning an artificial mental position. These postures enable the transection of a systemic perspective, an aesthetic sensibility, and a critical voice in order to gain purchase of climate from its emergent terms of reality. The four postures are a starting point which give contour to climate realism and its possibilities: (1) a strange stillness, (2) psychogenic spasm, (3) dancity, and (4) reflexive carapace. I suggest that it is through the performative gestures of these mental positions toward climate that realism can be thought and figured.

To suggest that climate realism has form and contour is to implicate its presentness and availability to interpretation. But crucially, the interpretation of climate’s realism is not of the order of either scientific or political inquiry; it requires an alternative basis for questioning. In his essay, “Various Ways of Questioning About the Thing,” Martin Heidegger writes that even to ask the question, “What is a thing?” invokes a modality of thinking and interpreting. He writes,

The answer to the question “What is a thing?” is ... not a proposition but a transformed basic position, or better still and more cautiously, the initial transformation of the hitherto existing position toward things, a change of questioning and evaluation, of seeing and deciding; in short, of the being-there (Da-seiri) in the midst of what is (inmitten des Seienden). To determine the changing basic position within the relation to what is, that is the task of an entire historical period.

(1967, 50)

Following Heidegger’s provocation, I suggest that to probe the question, “What is a climate realism?” is to explore the basic positions that are nested within and emerging from the co-extant discourses of climate and realism as this is being defined in the age of ecology. These basic positions, I suggest, stem from our embeddedness in global ecosystems and the critical reckoning with that embeddedness. That is to say, ecological postures are the transformed basic positions that undertake a questioning, evaluating, perceiving, and acting-toward climate.