On what happens when artists are brought into projects about climate change<\/p>\n
During the countdown to the paperback release of\u00a0<\/em>At Work in the Ruins<\/a>, I want to pick out a few of the passages from the book that I hear people talk about the most. These are the stories, ideas or framings that are proving helpful to readers in their own work. Today, a passage about the role(s) of art under the shadow of climate change.<\/em><\/p>\n Art is not a cheap alternative to an advertising agency or a sophisticated extension of the communications department, and the urgency of the message doesn\u2019t change this.<\/p>\n During 2015-16, I served as leader of artistic and audience development at Riksteatern, Sweden\u2019s national theatre. The role didn\u2019t exist before I was appointed and it doesn\u2019t exist today. It came about because the incoming artistic director, M\u00e5ns Lagerl\u00f6f, had read the Dark Mountain manifesto and been powerfully affected by it, and then discovered to his surprise that I had moved to Sweden. He brought me in to work at the core of his artistic team and part of my brief for those two years was to explore the role(s) of art under the shadow of climate change.<\/p>\n There are several places in\u00a0At Work in the Ruins<\/em>\u00a0where I draw on what I learned in that process, but the passage that people have told me they find themselves returning to and using with students or in their own practice comes from part three of the book.<\/p>\n When artists are brought into projects about climate change, the assumption tends to be that they will make something that helps \u2018deliver the message\u2019. A poem, a play, a film, a pop song that will wake people up to the depth of the trouble we are in, that will stir people to action or bring about \u2018behaviour change\u2019. If this invitation is accepted, the result is usually a failure \u2013 both as art and as message delivery \u2013 because this is not how art works. As the Swedish playwright Anders Duus put it to me, \u2018Our job is to complicate matters.\u2019 Not to be difficult for the sake of it but to do justice to the strangeness and the messiness of life in a world like this, and to create the kind of space in which stories come alive. None of which is helpful if what you are looking for is a tool to get across a message. Art is not a cheap alternative to an advertising agency or a sophisticated extension of the communications department, and the urgency of the message doesn\u2019t change this.<\/p>\n This doesn\u2019t mean art can go on as if it doesn\u2019t know, ignoring the smoke that drifts through the open window of the studio, pretending that the world is not on fire. In the conversations that led to the Dark Mountain manifesto, I remember a sense that those who came after us would look back on the art being made in our time with disbelief: how could we have made this stuff, given what we already knew about the trouble we were in?<\/p>\n There\u2019s no single answer to the question of what art should do under the shadow of climate change \u2013 and besides, anything that\u2019s worth the name of art is allergic to words like \u2018should\u2019. It takes a subtler kind of dialogue, an indirect approach, to stumble on the places where the work of art comes alive. Still, over the years, I began to gather a list of possibilities worth exploring. If our job is to complicate matters, then we could start with whatever seems to be getting taken for granted. Take this urge to get the message across. Is it really the case that people don\u2019t have enough information about climate change? Or is it that we struggle to make sense of what this information means, to fit it into the frames we use to make sense of our lives? Art is not an information technology but it does have a knack of drawing our attention to these frames, bringing them into question, suggesting the possibility of other framings. In its attention to whatever is missing or taken for granted, art can lead us upstream.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is as far as I take it in the book, but in\u00a0an earlier essay<\/a>\u00a0I offered an unfinished list of the roles that art might play, picking up from the same line of thought:<\/p>\n I hope that\u00a0At Work in the Ruins<\/em>\u00a0itself plays some of these roles for readers, in as much as it is possible to do so within the covers of a book. And I\u2019m hugely grateful to M\u00e5ns for his trust in bringing me to work with him at Riksteatern and to all the artists I got to work with during those two years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Art is not a cheap alternative to an advertising agency or a sophisticated extension of the communications department, and the urgency of the message doesn\u2019t change this<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3503642,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79718,213530,79720],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3503641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment","category-environment-featured","category-society"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3503641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3503641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3503641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3503642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3503641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3503641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3503641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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