What Art Is Not

On what happens when artists are brought into projects about climate change

During the countdown to the paperback release of At Work in the Ruins, 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.

Stand by for a full announcement of next month’s American tour – and if you’d like to get involved in helping organise and spread the word, then join the Zoom call on Sunday. Finally, a reminder that the early-bird rate for the retreat I’ll be teaching in Chicago on September 14-15 applies until Tuesday.

The walking artist Monique Besten showing images from her work to members of the Dark Mountain Workshop, Riksteatern, 2016.

During 2015-16, I served as leader of artistic and audience development at Riksteatern, Sweden’s national theatre. The role didn’t exist before I was appointed and it doesn’t exist today. It came about because the incoming artistic director, Måns Lagerlöf, 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.

There are several places in At Work in the Ruins where 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.

When artists are brought into projects about climate change, the assumption tends to be that they will make something that helps ‘deliver the message’. 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 ‘behaviour change’. If this invitation is accepted, the result is usually a failure – both as art and as message delivery – because this is not how art works. As the Swedish playwright Anders Duus put it to me, ‘Our job is to complicate matters.’ 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’t change this.

This doesn’t mean art can go on as if it doesn’t 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?

There’s no single answer to the question of what art should do under the shadow of climate change – and besides, anything that’s worth the name of art is allergic to words like ‘should’. 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’t 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.

This is as far as I take it in the book, but in an earlier essay I offered an unfinished list of the roles that art might play, picking up from the same line of thought:

1. Art can hold a space in which we move from the arm’s-length knowledge of facts, figures and projections, to the kind of knowledge that we let inside us, taking the risk that it may change us.

2. Art can give us just enough beauty to stay with the darkness, rather than flee or shut down.

3. Like the bronze shield given to Perseus by Athena, art and its indirect ways of knowing can allow us to approach realities which, if looked at directly, turn something inside us to stone.

4. Art can call us back from strategic calculations about which message will play best with which target group, insisting on the tricky need for honesty – there’s a line I kept coming back to, from the playwright Mark Ravenhill, that your responsibility when you walk on stage is to be ‘the most truthful person in the room’.

5. Art can teach us to live with uncertainty, to let go of our dreams of control.

6. Art can hold open a space of ambiguity, refusing the binary choices with which we are often presented – not least, the choice between forced optimism and simple despair.

I hope that At Work in the Ruins itself 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’m hugely grateful to Måns 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.

DH

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At Work in the Ruins is out in paperback on September 5 and available for preorder now – or take out an annual subscription to this Substack between now and the end of September and I’ll throw in a signed copy, sent to wherever you are in the world.

ZOOM CALL – SUNDAY, AUGUST 18 – 2PM EDT

On September 10, I’ll set off on a tour of (some parts of) North America. Experience has taught me that it's the enthusiasm and support of people who already know my work that brings together the best events – and this feels doubly important as I head into a part of the world where I haven't set foot in fifteen years.

With that in mind, I'm inviting anyone who thinks they might be able to help with organising or spreading the word to join me on a call this Sunday. I'll share some more about what we have planned – and we can talk about ways to make the best of this long journey and the places that it is taking me.