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Abstract
Within the expanded field of contemporary art, there is an increasing sense of urgency to engage with the politics of ecology in the face of accelerating environmental crises and widening social inequality. In recent years, much of contemporary art’s response to socioecological issues has been framed by the concept of the Anthropocene. However, the notion of the Anthropocene has been criticised for its limited political agency and direction, indicating that there is a need for alternative interpretative frameworks. This paper proposes the notion of the planetary commons as a tactical and interpretative framework for curating art-led projects in the realm of eco- and geopolitical concerns. It discusses my curatorial interests and role in several interdisciplinary art projects that have engaged with the Polar Regions and Outer Space. It outlines artistic strategies, including critique, inquiry, representation and sociopolitical intervention, and how the projects address issues of spatial politics, environmental stewardship, and local-global governance structures. I argue that the perspective provided by this framework enables meaningful knowledge crossing different disciplines and reveals insights into the complexity of governance in the global system, highlighting the roles that art and cultural practices can play in shaping our understanding of complex societal-environmental-technological assemblages.
Notes
1 Elena Glasberg calls Antarctica “the most mediated place on Earth”. Glasberg, Antarctica as Cultural Critique.
2 In using the term “tactical”, I draw on the ideas of tactical media, a form of activist art practice, originating in the 1990s, that intervenes actively within a system, discussed in Garcia and Lovink, “The ABC of Tactical Media”.
3 Technically, Antarctica is an international commons rather than a global commons, since membership of the governing regime is limited.
4 For more on the global commons, see Buck, The Global Commons.
5 Elias and Moraru, The Planetary Turn.
6 Spivak, Death of a Discipline.
7 Elias and Moraru, The Planetary Turn, xxiii.
8 Rockström et al., “Planetary Boundaries.” The boundaries relate to climate change, biodiversity loss, biogeochemical measurements, ocean acidification, land use, freshwater consumption, ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol particulates in the atmosphere, and chemical pollution.
9 See Latour, Reassembling the Social.
10 Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye.
11 Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet.
12 Deloughrey, “Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth,” 265.
13 For instance Davis and Turpin, Art in the Anthropocene; and Tsing et al., Art of Living on a Damaged Planet.
14 Delanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.
15 Latour and Davis, “Diplomacy in the Face of Gaia”.
16 Ibid.
17 Waters et al., “The Anthropocene is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct”.
18 Scourse, “Enough ‘Anthropocene’ Nonsense”.
19 McFarlane, “Generation Anthropocene”.
20 Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.
21 Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene.
22 Purdy, After Nature.
23 Demos, Against the Anthropocene.
24 Malm, “The Anthropocene Myth”.
25 Gray, “This Changes Everything”; and Kingsnorth, “The Four Degrees”.
26 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life.
27 McFarlane, “Generation Anthropocene”.
28 Vansintjan, “The Anthropocene Debate”.
29 Thompson, Living as Form.
30 Such as 2017s Antarctic Biennale, convened by artist Alexander Ponomarv, the UK organisation Cape Farewell’s eight sailing ship expeditions to the Arctic between 2003 and 2010, and artist Pierre Huyghe’s sailing trip with invited fellow artists to Antarctica in 2005.
31 See, for example, artists’ works in Marsching and Polli, Far field, the Antarctic Biennale 2017, and the Antarctic Pavilion at the 56th and 57th Venice Biennales of 2015 and 2017.
32 Doyle, “Picturing the Clima(c)tic”.
33 Triscott, “Critical Art and Intervention in the Technologies”.
34 Salazar, “Mediating Antarctica in Digital Culture”.
35 Miles, Eco-aesthetics.
36 Including @rt Outsiders: Space Art (Maison Europeene de la Photographie, Paris 2003); Return to Space (Hamburg Kunsthalle, 2005); Stardust ou la dernière frontier (MAC/VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine, 2007); Space is the Place (ICI, USA, touring, 2006–8); Space: About a Dream (Vienna Kunsthalle, 2011); Tom Sachs’ Space Program: Mars (Creative Time, NY, 2012); Space Odyssey 2.0 (Z33, Hasselt, 2013).
37 O’Reilly and Salazar suggests that Antarctic human habitations deserves attention as experiments of human dwelling in extreme environments in ways that might pre-empt human inhabitation of Outer Space. O’Reilly and Salazar, “Inhabiting the Antarctic”.
38 MacDonald, “Anti-Astropolitik”.
39 Ormrod and Dickens, The Palgrave Handbook of Society.
40 Albeit with the potential for misapprehension if people confuse fact and fiction.
41 Lind, “Active Cultures”.
42 Some examples are given in Marsching and Polli, Far field.
43 Polar Field Stations and International Polar Year History research group, Scott Polar Research Institute, AHRC Material Culture of Polar Exploration Workshops.
44 The exhibition Ice Blink was shown simultaneously at Stills Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland, Cell Project Space, London, UK, and Parker’s Box, New York, US, in 2006.
45 Simon Faithfull, personal conversations.
46 Faithfull, Ice Blink.
47 Yusoff, Bipolar.
48 Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons”.
49 Ostrom, Governing the Commons.
50 Peljhan’s goal for Makrolab was ultimately to set up two permanent stations, one in the Arctic and one in Antarctica, providing a research facility for autonomous researchers and progressive activists in the polar regions, connected by a polar orbiting nanosatellite. Following research trips to both poles in 2006 and 2007, Peljhan’s interest shifted to working with communities in the Arctic. This work evolved into the Arctic Perspective Initiative.
51 Haskel, “Pretty Good Pirates”.
52 The body that awards the rights to use parts of the electromagnetic spectrum is the International Telecommunications Union, a specialised agency of the United Nations. User rights are awarded to countries on a first-come first-served basis, free of charge.
53 Wijkman, Managing the Global Commons.
54 Birringer, “Makrolab: A Heterotopia”.
55 Ibid.
56 MacDonald, “Anti-Astropolitik”.
57 Griffin, “Hitchhiking to the Moon”.
58 Ibid.
59 Geostationary orbits are hugely important for communications satellites that have revolutionised communications and have important defence and intelligence applications. Since telecommunications technology developed in the industrial countries first, it is unsurprising that ninety per cent of existing user rights have been allocated to the richest ten per cent of the world’s countries.
60 Initially co-curated with Arts Catalyst’s associate curator Nahum Mantra, KOSMICA has since become a separate and independent entity from Arts Catalyst, based in Mexico City and Berlin.
61 Battaglia, “Cosmos as Commons”.
62 Elias, “Art and the Commons”.
63 Ibid.; Casarino and Negri, In Praise of the Common; and Roberts, “Art, Neoliberalism and the Fate of the Commons”.
64 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics.
65 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics.
66 Roberts, “Art, Neoliberalism and the Fate of the Commons”.
67 Dodds, “Post-colonial Antarctica”.
68 Brady, “Opinion: Democratising Antarctic Governance”.
69 Ostrom, Governing the Commons.
70 Ostrom, “Managing Resources in the Global Commons”.
71 Jasanoff and Martello, Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance.
72 Ibid., 4.
73 Malm, “The Anthropocene Myth”.