Art for earth’s sake: Move over Tracey

The new wave of artists are subversive shamans, subtly challenging us to live less destructive lives, says Hannah Bullock. But when sustainability becomes the message, does creativity get smothered?

Remember that guy who invited the public to watch him destroy everything he owned? Over two weeks, Michael Landy sent his categorised, weighed and dismantled possessions down a conveyor belt into a shredder. Car, bed, toothbrush, letters - the lot - were reduced to dust. Performed in a disused C&A store, Break Down was a disturbing vision of production, consumerism and destruction writ large.

Landy turned artefacts into waste; the WEEE Man turned waste into art. If you walked along London’s South Bank last year, you couldn’t have missed it: the towering robotic sculpture with satellite-dish ears, computer mice teeth, and washing machine chest. The giant embodied the total amount of electronic waste we each cast off in our lifetime - and acted as a sneaky way of waking up passers-by to the new EU law that gives the WEEE Man his name.

Art as a wake-up call, sparking that moment of insight that will resonate in the mind. At its best, says Charles Landry, author of Creative Cities, art “can communicate iconically. It can get people to grasp something in one.” “

You can provide people with charts and statistics until the cows come home,” adds curator Clive Adams. “But if they don’t actually feel moved by something, they won’t do anything about it.” When artist Mark McGowan turned on the tap in a London gallery and announced that it would flow for a year, several visitors angrily turned it off, and Thames Water threatened to cut the gallery’s supply.

“I tried to waste 15 million litres, but I only managed 800,000,” a disappointed McGowan told Green Futures. His next stunt - a car left running inside a gallery, with the exhaust pumped into the adjacent square - pointed the finger at parents who leave the engine idling while waiting for the kids outside school. The experiment came to an end after only two days, when the leaking fumes inside the gallery got too strong.

“You can provide people with charts and statistics until the cows come home. But if they don’t actually feel moved by something, they won’t do anything about it.”

“McGowan’s projects are set up to reach a level of outrage whereby it has to stop,” explains John Carson, head of fine art at Central St Martins College of Art and Design. The artist himself says that creating anger is how he gets the message across: “I aim to create a resistance against the way things are normally done.

If you say you’re going to tackle climate change or pollution, everyone’s going to say ‘Isn’t that in the newspaper?’ But if you say: ‘What I’m going to do is put this car in Peckham, where it’s going to pump exhaust into a public space,’ people say: ‘That’s disgusting!’”

Illuminating science

Revelling in the unusual post of artist in residence at the University of Bristol’s physics department, Box was struck by a professor’s research papers on the health effects of radiation from overhead powerlines. Remembering the school physics experi-ment where you light a neon tube simply by holding it under a power cable, he planted a mass of fluorescent bulbs under a line of electricity pylons. They glow from the waste discharge of the power lines, as the electrical potential between the wires and the earth ‘excites’ the neon in the tubes. Although it’s hard to believe, there’s no other power source in the installation.

The result is an eerie incarnation of the dry theory of hidden electric fields. Like a 21st century shaman, Box says he was excited by the idea of “taking something that’s invisible and making it visible”. It was this, rather than any agenda to illustrate the “‘evil effects’ of cables”, which sparked his interest.

But his magic show, situated just off the M4, nevertheless brought Professor Henshaw’s research - disputed within the scientific community - into the public limelight. But is there a danger in artists setting themselves up as interpreters of science?

Nicola Triscott, director of Arts Catalyst, which fosters links between the two, agrees there can be problems when artists assume a role as medium between scientists and the public, when they themselves don’t fully grasp the subject. (The Day After Tomorrow’s football-sized hailstones and somewhat creative take on climate theory hardly endeared Hollywood’s finest to the scientific profession.)

Yet Triscott is all in favour of “embedding” well informed artists in as many scientific institutions as possible. In a typical Arts Catalyst training session, 20 artists get to grips with the science and ethics of biotechnology, and try their hand at mutating cells. “Scientists are looking for proof,” says Carson. “Artists are searching for the essence... of something we don’t see.”

“Back in the 90s, all my students wanted to make smart-arse work like Emin or Hirst. But after the Iraq war, there’s more of a political edge.”

When recent Turner Prize winner Simon Starling built a fuel cell electric bicycle and crossed the Tabernas desert on it, it wasn’t so we could see the wiring, but to illustrate its beautiful simplicity. He collected the contraption’s water emissions in a bottle as he went and, at the end of the journey, used them to paint a picture of a cactus.

The watercolour of this simple organism that really understands water stands in stark contrast to Spain’s manmade desert. So that’s another 100,000 visitors or so, hopefully including the odd decision-maker, who will have grasped the potential of hydrogen power - without going near a scientific journal or ‘green’ manifesto.

The art of possibility

“Residents awoke to a herd of cows grazing beside the tower blocks.”

Residents on a Liverpool estate might have thought they’d woken up outside their box on 18 July 2005, when they saw a herd of cows grazing on the rough grass next to the tower blocks. A group of architects, filmmakers, performance artists and choreographers had brought them along during the night as an entry to an international competition on what to do with empty urban land.

“We decided to illustrate our idea physically rather than graphically,” says ‘The Udder Way’ team member Eike Sindlinger. “So we actually made it reality for a limited amount of time.” During the nine days, curious kids (those who didn’t throw stones) mucked in to look after the cows, keen gardeners helped themselves to manure, and residents were invited to buy a range of sample dung products, including barbecue bricks and cosmetics.

The ‘apparition’ opened the eyes of the local housing association to the possibility of using the empty site as a field, and generated some rare positive news about a place usually in the press for the wrong reasons. For a more mischievous approach, try Sweden, where Alfredo Jaar designed a contemporary art gallery for the industrial town of Skoghall; local architects built it of paper from the town’s ubiquitous mills; hordes of locals passed through its doors; and 24 hours later, Jaar sent it up in flames. Having shared a vision of the future, he explains, he took it away again to “make visible a void”.

The art remedy

So, by helping us think and see differently can artists help bring about a more sustainable society? Joseph Beuys thought they could - and should. Back in the 80s he got locals planting trees for his 7000 Oaks project, reminding them that “an idea grows roots”. Beuys, one of the co-founders of the German Green Party, went so far as to talk of art - both seeing and making it - as a “homeopathic pill”: a tiny dose for everyone would be enough to transform society.

“The arts ... have the power to effect change, helping us to build a more secure and more prosperous future,” proclaimed Tessa Jowell, secretary of state for culture, media and sport, in a speech a few years ago. “If you want to tackle racism, you can do so creatively through the arts; if you want to improve literacy, you can do so effectively working with the arts; and if you want to regenerate a rural or urban environment, then arts projects have demonstrated their power to effect change.”

True, perhaps, but when you hear the government colonising the arts as an official panacea for society’s ills, you can’t help but hear alarm bells, too. At Central St Martins, Carson talks of a new political awareness among his students that might not chime so neatly with the government’s aspirations.

Back in the 90s, he says, “all they wanted to make was smart-arse work like the Young British Artists - Emin, Hirst, Sarah Lucas...”. Now there’s more of a political edge to their work - particularly since the Iraq war - which has given rise to groups like the anarchic Space Hijackers [see right].

“Win the rat race and you’re still a rat” Banksy

Michaela Crimmin, who heads up the RSA’s Arts and Ecology programme, sounds a warning on artists becoming a “conduit” for a political message. “They operate most usefully when they explore issues on independent ground,” she insists. Banksy’s famous graffiti stencils, for instance, hit home harder on work-life balance than any amount of worthy public art: “Win the rat race and you’re still a rat,” says the slogan.

And the ecological undertones of Landy’s work are easier to swallow precisely because he isn’t a politician exhorting us to recycle more, or an environmentalist slagging off the consumer society. “Artists are great communicators and can be catalysts in changing public opinion,” argues Tate director Nicholas Serota, but “we should not expect [them] to be the instrument necessarily of a change in attitude... They should have the freedom to make work which will not immediately bring change, but over a period of time seep into the consciousness”. Alfredo Jaar agrees: “I’m not a doctor. I would love to save the world, but I don’t want everyone to think I will, if you know what I mean.”  

Play time When mayor Antanas Mockus wanted to tame fractious motorists in the violent, traffic-choked Colombian city of Bogota he turned to performance art, hiring hundreds of ‘traffic mimes’ to gently mock people who broke traffic laws. “If people know the rules, and [then] are sensitised by art, humour, and creativity, they are much more likely to accept change”.

In London, the ‘Space Hijackers’ donned sombreros to indulge in long and lazy mass siestas in the City’s bland new corporate plazas, and encouraged passing office workers hurrying back to their desks to join them. The subversion continued when toy farms started to appear on the steps in front of banks...
Shopped out

5 January 2006

Hannah Bullock