Now I've finally got round to it, the subject matter isn't the jolliest. It's not about prominently tusked and flippered marine mammals as much as it's about something that, if we're not careful, may see the end of them. May eventually see the end of us. Our old friend (or enemy) - the climate crisis.
Meltdown:Visualizing the Climate Crisis was a free exhibition hosted by the Horniman from November last year to January this year that, with only slightly more urgency than those tasked with making the changes needed to try and stop it, I'm finally getting round to writing about. I wonder how much ice cap meltage has happened while I've been waiting. How high the sea level has risen.
Peter Funch - Mt. Shuksan (2014)
It pissed it down a fair bit of the weekend so that can't have helped! Flippancy, and flippers, aside - the people behind the show, Project Pressure, are a group that use art to try and inspire personal action and behavioural change in an attempt to mitigate against the certain devastation if we don't. Of course the likes of one tiny show in SE23 having a global effect are unlikely but, as with our own personal actions, shows like this all over the world can combine to make a difference, make a sea change even. If you'll pardon the pun.
If everyone agrees to do something, something tends to get done. If too many people sit back and think it's someone else's job, nothing ever happens. That's as true now as it's ever been so even if Project Pressure's well meaning show lacked the power that one would hope from such an experience they can't be faulted at all for getting out there and doing their bit.
Calling on artists from Denmark, Nigeria, the UK, the US, Canada, France, Ireland, and South Africa and showing images from Armenia, Bolivia, Iceland, India, Kenya, and Nepal nobody could accuse the show of forgetting that the warming, and warning, is certainly global. The show was split into three 'chapters' and chapter one, The Importance of Glaciers, did pretty much what it said on the tin. Chapter two, Current Issues, took in different cultural, archaeological, and geopolitical approaches to the problem and chapter three, Meltdown Consequences, sought to explain just how vast, how global, the scope of the problem is.
It's a problem that shouldn't, and can't, be denied. Simon Norfolk's images of mountains in Nigeria show just how much they've changed over the last ninety years and Erwin van den Ijssel, Erik Schytt Holmlund, and Klaus Thymann's Tarfata Valley Photogrammetry Film took images from 1946 onwards (an even shorter period) and made a two minute video to show how the landscape has altered. Remarkably, in 2018 the highest point in Sweden changed as excessive heat melted the northern peak of Kebnekaise mountain. A southern peak of the same mountain took over the title but how long will that last?
Erwin van den Ijssel/PostPanic, Erik Schytt Holmlund, Klaus Thymann - Tarfata Valey Photogrammerty Film (2018)
I've no doubt this is true, I tend to believe scientists rather than blowhards on the Internet, but the way it was presented could have been a little more dramatic. The gentle approach has been applied for years and people have ignored it. Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion seem to really piss off those with a vested interest in keeping the status quo in place and for that, and even considering some of XR's dumber stunts, I support them.
Still, you need to come at the problem from all angles. It's not activists OR artists. It's activists AND artists. 69% of the planet's fresh water is held in ice sheets, glaciers, and snow. People in the Andes and Himalayas are hugely dependent on this water to survive and we all need water, there's simply no life without it, so if the glaciers are melting that doesn't just mean mountains won't have picturesque snowy tops for us to admire any more. It means, eventually, we won't exist to admire any scenery whatsoever.
That is, of course, obvious. Something from a lesson for children (and the Horniman is a very child friendly museum) but sometimes, it seems, adults really need to be shown things the way children are shown them to understand them. Hannah Fry did so in her recent Royal Institution Christmas Lectures and I wrote then about how much I supported this approach when done well.
Britain's Christopher Parsons joined a research team studying glaciers in the Himalayas and samples of bacteria taken show how microbes have adapted to cope with temperature rises. Sometimes these adaptions can create new diseases that are dangerous to humans. I can't claim I understand the science here but it's certainly something I wasn't aware of. I was learning alongside the children who, to be fair, were mostly running around and screaming.
Christopher Parsons - Amphulapcha Tsho, Nepal/Lhotse Nup Glacier, Nepal/Imja Glacier, Nepal/Lhotse at Sundown, Nepal (2016)
Which, to be fair, is a fairly appropriate and rational response to living in these times. Denmark's Peter Funch bases his artwork on historical postcards and uses the improvements in technology as a kind of crude parallel to the melting ice caps not least, it appears, because the Industrial Revolution is widely held to be the starting point of the current climate crisis. It's odd how something that's been celebrated so long, and happened such a long time ago, is now being revealed to have effects way beyond what Abraham Darby or Richard Arkwright could ever have imagined.
Peter Funch - Thunder Glacier from Marmot Ridge (2014)
Edward Burtynsky - Markafljot River #1 (2012)
Edward Burtynsky - Affall River on Landeyjarsandur (2012)
I don't think it means we shouldn't, still, celebrate those people's achievements but it just goes to show how progress is only progress if it enhances our lives. Once it starts to make our lives worse or even threaten our lives, that's no longer progress!
Canadian Edward Burtynsky, whose work is the most aesthetically pleasing at the Horniman - just to keep an arm in the art world there, shows how we are reshaping the planet in colossal ways and how we may be engineering our own demise. It's hard to read Burtynsky's images as landscapes, so vast and colourful are they, but the monumental scale of melting water in Iceland should act as a warning that we can't drink money.
With less ice there is less reflection of energy which leaves the sea to pick up the slack and this further contributes to and complicates the climate crisis. The UK's Adam Hinton has made an eight minute film of his visits to Indian farming communities who depend on water run off. The unstable weather patterns we're developing have lead to diminishing crops which has in turn led to hunger and involuntary migration. Right wingers tend to speak dismissively of migration (at least into their countries, the other way seems less of a concern to them) so you'd think they'd been keen to address issues like this but, for some reason, for the most part, they seem to prefer to ignore the problems or even deny them.
Adam Hinton - Himalayas, India (2017)
Broomberg & Chanarin - Shoe, 17th Century, Switzerland (2017)
SA's Adam Broomberg and the UK's Oliver Chanarin take a left field approach. They've taken a series of photographs of artefacts long preserved in the frozen mass that have been revealed as the glaciers have shrunk. It reveals an older story of human interaction with these mighty glaciers than we might have expected and, in some cases - like the 17c Swiss shoe, you get the feeling that these stories didn't always end well. At least for the men involved.
The trouble is if it ends badly for the glaciers it ends even worse for humanity. It's not a zero sum game. France's Noemie Goudal has tried to mirror the shifting glacial landscape using biodegradable paper that disintegrates when exposed to water. Which makes for a high concept piece if one that is almost impossible for the casual visitor to either interact with or get anything from.
Noemie Goudal - Glacier I-III (2016)
Toby Smith - Aragats Summit (2016)
Toby Smith - Aragats Summit (2016)
Toby Smith - Aragats Summit (2016)
Toby Smith - Aragats Summit (2016)
Toby Smith's work does a better job of catching the eye. Mount Aragats is the highest point in the whole of Armenia and Smith both 'summited' and circumnavigated the mountain as well as embedding himself with local communities in an attempt to get a grip on the history of the area and how the environment informs religious, scientific, and ecological beliefs.
In keeping with much of Meltdown, you get a feel for this rather than a comprehensive understanding. The architecture is dramatic, the weather looks inhospitable and yet there is an overwhelming sense of beauty and mystery. They're great photos but without context it seems highly unlikely they'd say much to anybody about environmental issues.
Which is my one takeaway problem as regards this show. It doesn't go in hard enough. Canada's Scott Connaroe is another who shows us how beautiful a place is and then tells us how environmental problems affect the areas that hold this beauty (here, the glaciers define borderlines and as they melt the borders, and local geopolitics, change). What I'd really like to have seen is art that didn't need explaining for it to work. Art that made visiting kids ask their parents, more or less, what the fuck is going on? Why are you destroying my future?
Scott Connaroe - Glacier Du Tacul, France (2013)
Klaus - Thymann - Illimani, Bolivia (2013)
Klaus Thymann - Speke, Uganda (2012)
Klaus Thymann's photos of Bolivia and Uganda are, again, visually spectacular, and the ideas behind them, too, are noble (by showing us that glaciers exist in places we might not initially think of he intends to hammer home the point that climate crisis is not something that will be experienced only in extreme environments) but, again, to most visitors these will simply be nice things to look at, read the text, have a quick tsk, and move on. If action is needed (which it is) the art and activism that provokes it will need to be much more powerful.
The work of American Michael Benson at least looks suitably apocalyptic! His works are actually comprised of composite and raw data from planetary science archives yet, even here, the large words that inform us that many bears have now stopped hibernating come as far more of a shock than anything Benson has come up with. It hit home. As do other stats. 50% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from just 10% of the world's population.
Michael Benson - Antarctic Peninsula (2018)
The exhibition had a carbon footprint calculator which I didn't try. I'm hoping, and expecting, as a non car-owner who walks a lot mine is not too bad. Also vegetarianism (or, ideally, veganism) helps. Cows farting away the ozone layer may be a funny image but the consequences are pretty serious and it takes way way more space to grow plants for animals to eat than it does to grow plants for humans to eat.
But there's still, undoubtedly, stuff I can do. Stuff we can all do. I don't even have kids and I'm ashamed at the shitty state of the world (politically and socially as well as environmentally) we're bequeathing the next generation. The last three contributors (Nofolk + Thymann (Thymann's all over this show), Corey Arnold, and Richard Mosse) to Meltdown are as good, and as bad, as everything that has come before them.
Norfolk + Thymann look into the story of Swiss entrepreneurs who tried to preserve an ice grotto tourist attraction at the Rhone glacier by wrapping it in a thermal blanket in an attempt to understand the financial imperative that underpins the lack of action on the crisis, Arnold travelled around the Arctic Archipelago of Svalboard on a Polish supply ship called Horyzant to reflect on the interconnectivity between the sea and the glaciers, and Mosse, an Irish documentary photographer, filmed inside and under the Vatnajokull glacier in Iceland to show how climate change is making the process of melting within the glacier more and more predictable.
Norfolk + Thymann - Shroud VII (2018)
Corey Arnold - Esmarkbreen I-III (2013)
Richard Mosse - Ice Cavern, Vatnajokull
Which, again, is all well and good. It's a very noble thing they do and their intentions are beyond reproach. The resulting photographs are awe inspiring and potentially worrying too. But they look too nice. Only fools and those with a vested interest maintain a scepticism as regards the climate crisis and trying to change their minds is pretty much a waste of time. Everything you say to a conspiracy theorist to disprove them is, to them, further evidence of a conspiracy theory.
Fuck them, they're dead wood. Worry now, instead, about the reality of the situation and what it means for our (or your) children's futures. I think what this exhibition needed was pictures of starving and drowned children, destroyed villages, or, at the very least, images of the floods that battered Britain recently and the bush fires that have, so far, killed 34 people and BILLIONS of animals and destroyed over three and a half thousand homes.
You may say such images will be upsetting for children (and they probably would be) but I'd wager that many of those children will be far more upset if their life expectancy is drastically cut just so the CEOs of companies like Gazprom, Aramco, ExxonMobil, and BP can enjoy juicier and juicier bonuses. It seems a strange state of affairs that people are being asked to find a compromise between the life of every single thing on the planet and increasing the bank balance of those who are already billionaires. The Horniman Museum is a great, and admirable, place of learning as I wrote earlier. But for this show they really needed to kick some rich bastards very very hard in the bollocks. Sadly, for all their admirable work, they didn't.
