[T]he basic concern . . . was to move away from the idea of the art work as a finite object to be perceived in aesthetic terms by an individual understood as ‘passive spectator’. Instead, the work of art was understood to variously incite, prompt or provoke the audience in such a manner as to transform it from distanced spectator to full and active collective participant in an open-ended socio-political process, performance, encounter, or experience.
This ‘turn’ has, as Bishop has shown, many antecedents, stretching back to Italian futurism, Dadaism and the Russian Proletkult, as well as to the so-called ‘happenings’ of the sixties and, as McKee demonstrates, to much US activist art from the late eighties onwards. But since the turn of the century, it is an approach that has dominated what might be called the radical avant-garde, and it is now clear that this has been a major shift, not just a passing fad.
One key moment in its development was Nicolas Bourriaud’s theorisation of ‘relational aesthetics’ in his book of the same name. Another was the ‘Battle of Seattle’ in 1999, a dramatic confrontation which stopped the World Trade Organisation meeting in that city, and which announced the birth of a new alterglobalisation or anti-capitalist movement in the United States and then internationally. It thus signified the reconstitution and reemergence of an international radical Left after the defeats of the seventies and eighties and the ‘collapse of Communism’, a process since continued by Occupy, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and the Women’s Marches, Bernie Sanders and many others.
Bourriaud offers these definitions:
Relational (aesthetics): Aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt.
Relational (art): A set of practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.
On the face of it, there is a strong similarity here with the distinctive characteristic of Marxist aesthetics – the focus on human social relations. But by ‘relational art’ Bourriaud doesn’t mean an art that was about social relations in the sense that Rembrandt’s, Goya’s and Manet’s were. He means art like that of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Félix González-Torres and Carsten Höller, which induces viewer participation in the work as a necessary component of its completion and thereby stages a collaboration in the creation of an interhuman relationship. Thus Tiravanija made a work in which he presented the viewers/participants with the ingredients for a Thai curry and asked them to make the curry, with the whole process constituting the work.
The times I live in are bleak
When an unwrinkled brow denotes insensitivity . . .
And a conversation about trees is almost a crime
For what it leaves unsaid.
But the weakness of utopianism as a political strategy does not necessarily correspond to its weakness in art. Utopian impulses, from William Morris to Fernand Léger and beyond, can undoubtedly generate important art. Nevertheless, there are problems here too. McKee himself describes how following the eviction of Occupy, many of the artistic energies involved in Zuccotti Park returned to a focus on and within the art world. Illuminator projected the figure of the 1 per cent on the walls of the Guggenheim Museum and Global Ultra Luxury Faction (GULF) staged carefully, and beautifully, choreographed interventions within the gallery space. There may be nothing wrong with this in itself, but it marks a partial retreat from the ‘withdrawal from art as defined by the contemporary art system’ and ‘the reinvention of art as a force of radical imagination and direct action’ proclaimed by McKee. A different but parallel phenomenon is the way in which Banksy’s once-illegal street art is now selling for huge sums. It shows that in the dialectic of democracy and elitism, the pulling power of elitism within contemporary art (even among those ostensibly most committed to the opposite) has not disappeared, and will not disappear, while capitalism survives.
There remains to discuss one overarching problem with the art of the social turn as a whole: namely its overall failure to produce visually powerful art objects. This failure is not absolute, but compared to other art movements, it is real. Compared, for example, to the YBAs, the artists of the social turn are more ethical and politically aware. But where are the memorable images to stand with Hirst’s Mother and Child Divided, Emin’s My Bed or Whiteread’s House? This absence was very evident in the Turner Prize show at the Tate Britain in 2018. The exhibition featured four nominees: Forensic Architecture, Naeem Mohaiemen,
Charlotte Prodger, and Luke Willis Thompson. All of their work tackles, as the Tate says, ‘pressing social issues’ – Palestine, anti-colonialism and Islamism, queer identity, and black victims of police violence – from a human rights point of view, by means of video, documentary, archivism, film and so on. It reflects the rather extraordinary politicisation of contemporary art. But the whole show contains virtually nothing in the way of an aesthetically powerful object.
I want to be precise in my argument here. I am not claiming that because of this absence current art is all worthless or heading downhill, or that ‘the social turn’ was a wrong turn. Rather, I’m suggesting merely that this tendency (not absolute of course) to the loss of objecthood is a real loss, in the same sense that the loss of form, in favour of light effects, was a real loss in impressionism or the loss of colour in Picasso’s and Braque’s synthetic cubism was a real loss. And given that human beings have been making ‘beautiful’ and expressively powerful pictures and objects for over thirty thousand years, it is most unlikely that this will cease now. After impressionism, form made its return with Seurat and Cézanne; after synthetic cubism, colour was developed by Matisse and Miró. The question arises, therefore, as to whether the dialectic of modernism will result in avant-garde art, in its next phase, finding a way back to the object without losing all the gains – also real – of the social turn and its accompanying politicisation.
It is obviously impossible to know the precise effect climate change will have on art, but what is certain is that the effect will be enormous. The Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, modern urbanism, the First World War – all of these historical developments had a profound impact on the history of art. Climate change is a historic development of the same or greater magnitude. If it is allowed to proceed unchecked, and there are strong signs that this is what is going to happen, the consequences (unless the scientists are completely wrong) will be global catastrophe of almost-unimaginable proportions.
It will affect the daily life of everyone on the planet, and this will necessarily be reflected in art. But in order to halt or even seriously mitigate climate change (it is already too late to ‘stop’ it completely), there will also need to be a profound change, probably a revolutionary change, in the character of our global society and its relations with nature. This, too, cannot fail to transform art.
Human relations with nature are always a function of human social relations, and vice versa. There is always a dialectical interaction, and we see this reflected throughout the history of art. The walls of the caves at Chauvet and Lascaux speak eloquently of a classless society and its symbiotic relationship with the natural world; Rembrandt’s magnificent Slaughtered Ox and Stubbs’s paintings of prize bulls and thoroughbred stallions depict, in their different ways, the commodification of animals, as does Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child Divided today; Gainsborough in Mr and Mrs Andrews does the same for land. Constable and Turner represent different responses to nature in the face of industrialisation and so on.
When it comes to climate change, the historic moment is very different from the Industrial Revolution, or the birth of capitalism, in that we have scientific knowledge in advance of the change that is heading our way, and that change is clearly not progressive. The question arises, therefore, as to the role that art can play in influencing our individual and societal responses to the challenge.
This raises a major political divergence. The dominant discourse regarding the prevention or curbing of climate change is that what is needed is for ‘all of us’ to change our behaviour (eat less beef, drive cars less, fly less in planes, etc.), and in this scenario it is likely that attempts will be made by the rich and powerful to enlist artists, along with the media and public relations ‘experts’, in the cause of altering popular attitudes and habits. It is also likely that this role will appeal to some artists. The Marxist view – my view – of climate change is that its cause and its solution lie not in the behaviour of ordinary people but in the behaviour of giant corporations and states, governed by the central drive of capitalism to accumulate capital. No amount of art, no matter how powerful or exquisite, will be able to negate that drive or significantly modify the behaviour of ExxonMobil and BP, or the US and Chinese state machines. Insofar as art has a part to play in this, it will be rousing and expressing the anger of ‘ordinary’ people against those who are presiding recklessly over the trashing of the planet on which we depend.
I do not mean by this that art which responds to climate change and the many other challenges of the Anthropocene, such as plastification and acidification of the oceans, mounting air pollution in our cities, and the mass extinction of species, will primarily be focussed on agitation and propaganda – though there will doubtless be a place for that. There will also, I would expect, be a place for art that expresses the full range of human emotions generated by this ‘metabolic rift’ opened up between humanity and nature: rage, grief, loss, despair, hope and the rest.
In terms of precedents from the art of the past, there are a number of individual works that might serve as points of reference because they attempt to depict human and environmental catastrophes. For example Turner’s Snowstorm, Henri Rousseau’s War, Hokusai’s Wave, Munch’s Scream, Paul Nash’s We Are Making a New World, Ernst’s Europe after the Rain, Picasso’s Guernica, Pollock’s Lavender Mist, One (Number 31) and others, Anselm Kiefer’s Sau Paulo dystopia Lilith, and the autodestructive art of Gustav Metzger and Jean Tinguely.
However, it is obvious that the scale of the catastrophes represented in these works is tiny compared to the disaster that will befall humanity and the planet in the event of runaway climate change.
When it comes to dealing with climate change and the wider matter of the Anthropocene, the art of the past that most immediately springs to mind as relevant is the land (or earth) art of the sixties and seventies.
Land art, associated with artists such as Richard Long, Robert Smithson and Andy Goldsworthy, arose in response to the new ecological movement of that time, sparked and epitomised by Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring. It sought to respond to impending ecological crisis not by exposing, depicting or protesting environmental damage, but by encouraging and celebrating a new, positive and reverential, attitude to nature. In art historical terms it emerged ‘out of’ sculpture, in opposition to the abstract hard metal sculptures of David Smith and Anthony Caro and as an extension of the minimalism of Donald Judd and Carl André.
Like all art ‘movements’, land art produced diverse work of varying quality. At one end of its spectrum was Goldsworthy, whose sculptures using natural materials ‘in nature’, were certainly pretty, arguably beautiful, but always slightly saccharine and sentimental. Long’s work, which ranged from records of marks made by walking in remote places to flat circles and lines of natural stone in galleries, was a more radical departure from previous art – more austere and more ambitious and, to my eye, often authentically beautiful. But the outstanding work of this category and time was by Smithson. It was he who made the single most memorable image/object, namely the 1970 Spiral Jetty, and whose art raised the toughest questions about the effects of human actions on nature. But the period of its production meant that land art did not have to deal with anything on the scale of the destruction and calamity threatened in the Anthropocene, and which, therefore, would seem to demand a much ‘angrier’, more urgent or, possibly, more tragic response.
Not alienated labour as understood by the sociologists – feeling unhappy at work – but as analysed by Marx: as an objective social relation in which human beings come to be dominated by the products of their own labour, which stand over them as an alien and hostile power. Climate change is this in the most literal sense, and in endangering the future of humanity, it obviously also endangers the future of art. It is, therefore, fitting that the forces of art should be mobilised against this deadly force of destruction.
I want to be precise in my argument here. I am not claiming that because of this absence current art is all worthless or heading downhill, or that ‘the social turn’ was a wrong turn. Rather, I’m suggesting merely that this tendency (not absolute of course) to the loss of objecthood is a real loss, in the same sense that the loss of form, in favour of light effects, was a real loss in impressionism or the loss of colour in Picasso’s and Braque’s synthetic cubism was a real loss. And given that human beings have been making ‘beautiful’ and expressively powerful pictures and objects for over thirty thousand years, it is most unlikely that this will cease now. After impressionism, form made its return with Seurat and Cézanne; after synthetic cubism, colour was developed by Matisse and Miró. The question arises, therefore, as to whether the dialectic of modernism will result in avant-garde art, in its next phase, finding a way back to the object without losing all the gains – also real – of the social turn and its accompanying politicisation.
It is obviously impossible to know the precise effect climate change will have on art, but what is certain is that the effect will be enormous. The Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, modern urbanism, the First World War – all of these historical developments had a profound impact on the history of art. Climate change is a historic development of the same or greater magnitude. If it is allowed to proceed unchecked, and there are strong signs that this is what is going to happen, the consequences (unless the scientists are completely wrong) will be global catastrophe of almost-unimaginable proportions. It will affect the daily life of everyone on the planet, and this will necessarily be reflected in art. But in order to halt or even seriously mitigate climate change (it is already too late to ‘stop’ it completely), there will also need to be a profound change, probably a revolutionary change, in the character of our global society and its relations with nature. This, too, cannot fail to transform art.
Human relations with nature are always a function of human social relations, and vice versa. There is always a dialectical interaction, and we see this reflected throughout the history of art. The walls of the caves at Chauvet and Lascaux speak eloquently of a classless society and its symbiotic relationship with the natural world; Rembrandt’s magnificent Slaughtered Ox and Stubbs’s paintings of prize bulls and thoroughbred stallions depict, in their different ways, the commodification of animals, as does Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child Divided today; Gainsborough in Mr and Mrs Andrews does the same for land. Constable and Turner represent different responses to nature in the face of industrialisation and so on.
When it comes to climate change, the historic moment is very different from the Industrial Revolution, or the birth of capitalism, in that we have scientific knowledge in advance of the change that is heading our way, and that change is clearly not progressive. The question arises, therefore, as to the role that art can play in influencing our individual and societal responses to the challenge. This raises a major political divergence. The dominant discourse regarding the prevention or curbing of climate change is that what is needed is for ‘all of us’ to change our behaviour (eat less beef, drive cars less, fly less in planes, etc.), and in this scenario it is likely that attempts will be made by the rich and powerful to enlist artists, along with the media and public relations ‘experts’, in the cause of altering popular attitudes and habits. It is also likely that this role will appeal to some artists. The Marxist view – my view – of climate change is that its cause and its solution lie not in the behaviour of ordinary people but in the behaviour of giant corporations and states, governed by the central drive of capitalism to accumulate capital. No amount of art, no matter how powerful or exquisite, will be able to negate that drive or significantly modify the behaviour of ExxonMobil and BP, or the US and Chinese state machines. Insofar as art has a part to play in this, it will be rousing and expressing the anger of ‘ordinary’ people against those who are presiding recklessly over the trashing of the planet on which we depend.
I do not mean by this that art which responds to climate change and the many other challenges of the Anthropocene, such as plastification and acidification of the oceans, mounting air pollution in our cities, and the mass extinction of species, will primarily be focussed on agitation and propaganda – though there will doubtless be a place for that. There will also, I would expect, be a place for art that expresses the full range of human emotions generated by this ‘metabolic rift’ opened up between humanity and nature: rage, grief, loss, despair, hope and the rest.
In terms of precedents from the art of the past, there are a number of individual works that might serve as points of reference because they attempt to depict human and environmental catastrophes. For example Turner’s Snowstorm, Henri Rousseau’s War, Hokusai’s Wave, Munch’s Scream, Paul Nash’s We Are Making a New World, Ernst’s Europe after the Rain, Picasso’s Guernica, Pollock’s Lavender Mist, One (Number 31) and others, Anselm Kiefer’s Sau Paulo dystopia Lilith, and the autodestructive art of Gustav Metzger and Jean Tinguely.
John Molyneux is a socialist, activist and writer.
This essay is taken from Molyneux’s new book, The Dialectics of Art, available from Haymarket Books. Order your copy here.
Zoe shields is a Dublin-based illustrator working in both digital and traditional mediums, find more of her work on instagram at @zsillustration or zsillustration.wordpress.com
Molly Judd, born 1991, is an Irish painter who began her studies at the Florence Academy of Art in 2009.