Climate Summit Art. Art and Political Event, 1972 – 2022
Project head: Dr. Linn Burchert
Student research assistant: Justine Vivian Ney
Funding
Even at the earliest of UN environmental conferences, artists were paying attention to these political summits and producing works directly related to the events and their reception in the global media. Between 1972 and 1992, conferences were held at intervals of five to ten years. Beginning in 1995, however, the so-called Conferences of the Parties (COPs), or UN Climate Summits, shifted to an annual international forum to address climate change. Participants in these major events include representatives from science, business, civil society, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Additionally, a diverse range of artistic production, including individual artworks, installations, curated exhibitions, and collective artistic activism have become standard features of this context, and constituents of the summit as mega-media event, typically occupying peripheral urban spaces and institutions around the conferences. This phenomenon and its history have yet to be studied.
Climate Summit Art: Art and Political Events, 1972 – 2022 is the first project to examine climate summit art as a corpus, with the objective of discerning characteristics and shifts that are particular to the relationships between art and politics, society and the economy, since the 1970s in the context of the political summit. A major task is to explore the historiographical positioning and institutionalisation of such art. For this project, a database of all relevant artistic and cultural projects has been constructed, cataloguing additional information such as the respective art forms, participants, funding institutions, and exhibition venues. At the end of the project, the full database will be published as a catalogue.
In the planned monograph, ideologically critical perspectives will be applied to climate summit art, art historiography, and exhibition history, refraining from dominant post-structuralist theoretical orientations, and from post-modern, anti-modernist (e.g. in terms of a romanticised anti-capitalism), and moralizing discourses. It also distances itself from advocacy in art historical scholarship, which tends to define the role of art and artists as politically progressive or emancipatory, neglecting the critical analysis of chosen positions and artistic strategies. The first section (1) provides a historical perspective on the preconditions and developments of climate summit art, with a focus on museum exhibitions. The second section (2) considers artistic positions on population policy and their integration into hegemonic discourses from the 1960s around the limits to growth to the focus on (individual) consumption and lifestyles from the 2000s onwards. What both discourses have in common is that they ignore questions of production and capitalist dynamics, and instead individualize the causes of ecological problems or seek to simplify them according to dichotomous world views (e.g. “North vs. South”). Against this background, the third section (3) investigates the depoliticization of politics based upon, but also critical of, Ingolfur Blühdorn’s studies on simulative, “post-ecologist” politics and Stefan C. Aykut et al.’s diagnosis of a “politics of incantation” in the climate context. In particular, interconnections amongst the performativity and theatricality of political summits and those of art artistic practices are explored here – on the bases of both the official and the unofficial art programs. A critical examination of the practices and contradictions of artistic activism is carried out, for example, in an examination of Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of “pseudo-politics”. The fourth section (4) focuses upon artistic and cultural initiatives that have the goal of exerting political influence over the summit negotiations themselves. The relevance and significance of art vis a vis ecology and climate policy, as well as the roles of artists (e.g. as “observers”, “ambassadors” and “envoys”) at climate conferences are analysed in relation to certain ongoing trends towards the culturalisation of politics. One point of focus is the problematic fashioning of artists as representative models for essentialized origins or identities (e.g. the supposed proximity of “women” to nature, etc.). The final section (5) looks closely at specific artistic forms, workshops, assemblies, and campaigns, paying specific attention to the dissolution of boundaries between art and other operative discourses in the context of the climate summit. In addition to the subordination of art to political goals, or even, sometimes, slogans, this project likewise examines ideals of cooperation and collectivity currently negotiated in these artistic practices.
This investigation into 50 years of environmental and climate negotiations via their artistic and cultural components thus contributes novel means with which to explore certain discursive and ideological crises within the fields of climate politics and environmental capitalism.
The project workshop “Summit Art: Art and Political Events since the 1970s” took place at HU Berlin in 2022. A publication is currently in process.
Events/ Projects
Past: »Collaborative Event Ethnography: Power and (In)Justice in Global Climate Governance«, at COP27, Sharm El-Sheikh
Past: »Summit Art: Art and Political Events since the 1970s«, 15–16 October 2022, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Talks/ Discussions
»Natur – Umwelt – Kunst: Ent-/Grenzungen«, Panel discussion, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich, 17.7.2024.
»Summit Art: Simulative Politics at the UN climate conferences«, Talk, Dipartimento di Culture del progetto, Università Iuav di Venezia, 29.11.2023.
»Zeremonien, Pavillons, Policies: Kunst und Kultur auf der COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh 2022«, as part of the student seminar »(Re-)Aktion – Das Wechselspiel von Kunst, Ausstellungspraxis und Umwelt«, conductors: Lena Fischer & Marietta Geiger, 18.1.2023.
»Zwischen kritischer Reflexion und Extraktion: Die Arte Amazonas-Ausstellung in Rio 1992«, Talk, (Neo-)Extraktivismen in der Kunst der Gegenwart, Workshop, Universität Duisburg-Essen, Essen, 24.–25.11.2022.
»Fomenting Fear: The Population Bomb in 1990s Summit Art«, Summit Art: Art and Political Events since the 1970s, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 15.–16.10.2022.
»Konstruktiv und kooperativ: Kunst und die »Politik der Beschwörung« auf den UN-Klimagipfeln«, Plurale Verschränkungen. Zur Entdifferenzierung von Kunst, Politik, Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft, Jahrestagung der AG Soziologie der Künste, organisiert von Prof. Dr. Nina Tessa Zahner & Marie Rosenkranz, M.A., Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 13.–14.10.2022.
»Ausstellungen – Analyse, Kritik, Politikum«, as part of the student seminar »(Re-)Aktion – Das Wechselspiel von Kunst, Ausstellungspraxis und Umwelt«, conductors: Lena Fischer & Marietta Geiger, 9.6.2022.
»Climate Summit Art: Art, Political Agendas and Sponsorship«, Guest Lecture at University of Kent, 24.11.2021 (digital).
»De-/Politisierung durch Kunst? – Praktiken, Ideologien & Sponsoring auf Klimagipfeln«, Guest Lecture at University of the Arts (UdK), Berlin, as part of »Klasse Klima«, 22.11.2021.
»Fotografie zwischen ökologischem Wissen und Naturästhetik«, w. Maria Männig, Dominique Schrey, Birgit Schneider & Vera Tollmann, Annual Conference of the Society for Media Studies, Theme: Ecology of Knowledge, 23.9.2021.
»Masters of the Arctic. Art Historical and Political Dimensions of a Touring Inuit Art Exhibition (1989–1994)«, Arctic Science Summit Week, Panel: Arctic Voices in Art and Literature, Portugal, 19.-26.3.2021 (digital).
»Art and Political Event. The Arctic at Global Climate Summits«, Mediating the Arctic. Contexts, Agents, Distribution, Humboldt-Universität & Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, 28.–29.1.2021 (digital).
Publications
* »Kunst und Klimapolitik«, in: Turns, Hypes, Trends und methodische Paradigmenwechsel in der deutschen Kunstwissenschaft seit den 1960er Jahren (=Kunstchronik. Monatsschrift für Kunstwissenschaft, Museumswesen und Denkmalpflege), tba.
* »Zeremonien, Pavillons, Policies: Kunst und Kultur auf der COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh 2022«, in: Nina Tessa Zahner/Marie Rosenkranz (Hg.), Plurale Verschränkungen. Zur Entdifferenzierung von Kunst, Politik, Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft, tba.
* »Artist Leaders: Gegenwartskünstler:innen auf politischem und ökonomischem Parkett «, in: Elisabeth Fritz (Hg.), Der Beitrag der Kunst/Geschichte zu Herausbildung, Diskussion und Aushandlung gesellschaftlicher Fragen. Festschrift für Verena Krieger, tba.
* »Artist Leaders: Gegenwartskünstler:innen auf politischem und ökonomischem Parkett «, in: Elisabeth Fritz (Hg.), Der Beitrag der Kunst/Geschichte zu Herausbildung, Diskussion und Aushandlung gesellschaftlicher Fragen. Festschrift für Verena Krieger, tba.
»Concealing, naming, or tackling inequalities? Art, culture and (In)justice at COP27«, in: Climate and Development, January 2024.
»Climate Summit Art. Arts and the carbon industries from Gustav Metzger to Ólafur Elíasson«, ESPACE Art Actuel °128: »Climatologie«, Frühling/Sommer 2021, S. 38–45.
»Schmelzendes Eis. Kunst im Kontext aktueller Ausstellungs-, Kultur- und Förderpolitik«, in: Themenheft Kunst Natur Politik – Jetzt! (=Kunstchronik. Monatsschrift für Kunstwissenschaft, Museumswesen und Denkmalpflege, 73 (7), 2020, S. 358–367.
Dissemination
»Naziha Mestaoui. Kollektivität, Großevents, Nachhaltigkeitsziele – Neoliberale Formen der Interaktion«, in: Kunstforum International 281 (= Zusammen Leben. Kunst des Miteinanders als globale Überlebensstrategie), 2022, S. 136–143.
»Im Kollektiv Geschichte neu schreiben. Ein Gespräch von Linn Burchert mit Anne-Marie Culhane und Lucy Neal von Walking Forest«, in: Kunstforum International 281 (= Zusammen Leben. Kunst des Miteinanders als globale Überlebensstrategie), 2022, S. 144–151.
»Climate Summit Art. Art and Political Event, 1972-2022«, Visual History. Online reference resource for historical visual research, 1/2022.
»Sztuka dla klimatu czy sztuka dla sztuki?«, Dwutigodnik, www.dwutygodnik.com, 12/2021.
Contribution to »Kann Kunst Klima – zwischen Aktivismus und Kommerz«, conversation with Anna-Lena Schubert, Tre!bhaus, Audiocast, treibhauspodcast.ch/kannkunstklima, 29.11.2021.