In his essay accompanying apexart’s present-day on the internet exhibition, Goodbye, Entire world, curator Raimar Stange miracles, “What solutions do the visual arts have in the confront of the weather catastrophe?” He responds with quite a few platitudes about art’s capability to elevate consciousness, but the exhibition’s valedictory conceit proposes a more first, if much less comforting, response. Stange and his co-curator, Andreas Templin, have collected 10 artworks, by 10 artists, and installed them on an ice floe in arctic Sweden, in which the works will stay right until the floe melts and they sink into the ocean with it.
Even though its spirit of withdrawal is promising in techniques I’ll focus on, the conceit as recognized is ineffectual and melodramatic. Comparable to Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Enjoy installations — grandiose arrangements of melting iceberg chunks supposed to prick our species’ local climate conscience but that as an alternative evinced weather fatalism — Goodbye, Entire world fixates on the idle symbolism of its farewell gestures. Each spot much too a lot religion in the efficacy of inventive consciousness elevating, even though at the same time lowering consciousness raising to an workout in confronting audiences with symbols of what they presently know.
Just take, for case in point, Nika Fontaine’s Bread of Shame (2020), which embeds tragicomic looking skull sculptures, fabricated out of bread, in a charcoal-dusted snow mound. In video footage of a ritual done during the installation, Templin reads a hearth-and-brimstone artist-authored invocation — “I welcome [the earth’s] wrath as an act of self-treatment and preservation. One particular much more swing of the everlasting pendulum of daily life and death” — then pours wine in excess of the blackened, skull-studded mound. Jonathan Monk’s “The Tragic Tale Of” (2020) is fewer theatrical but equally flat-footed. On a tombstone-shaped wooden board, the artist has spray-painted the stenciled words and phrases “OCEAN WAVE,” in reference to the eponymous sailboat that artist Bas Jan Ader rode on his sick-fated last voyage in 1975.
The show’s much more productive symbols have bigger nuance. The mannered formality of the position placing in Olaf Nicolai’s “Picknick, égoiste” (2020), for instance, appears knowingly absurd given the desolate arctic environs. Stefanie von Schroeter’s multicolored painted animal bone, “Großer Knochen (animal bone)” (2012), is a persuasive mix of the primal and the artificial. Eliana Otta’s wraith-like “Vicarious fragile pilgrims” (2020) — three white paper streamers hanging from a rectangular gateway made out of tree branches — alludes to the yearly Peruvian Qoyllur R’iti, or “bright white snow,” pilgrimage. Otta’s makeshift composition, a portal to nowhere, loosely recalls the form of the draped orange gates that comprised Christo’s and Jeanne-Claude’s notorious 2005 challenge The Gates, minus the latter’s sturdiness and self-certain pomp.
But it’s the exhibition’s farewell premise, much more so than the intricacies of any particular artwork, that raises the most exciting inquiries. The final decision to install an artwork exhibition on an ice floe is an act of withdrawal on many various degrees: geographical, industrial, ontological. As a just one-off symbolic gesture, these withdrawal is mildly intelligent and typically apparent. As an eco-minded ethos, nevertheless, it has significant probable.
What could possibly it search like for artists and curators to pull back again from capitalist expectations of manufacturing on environmentalist grounds? What artistic prospects exist for eco-minded withdrawal that are not fatalistic? What varieties — aesthetic, interpersonal, institutional — could make this kind of withdrawal viable as an ongoing practice fairly than an isolated gesture? What would be a meaningful but sensible scope for these techniques? Admittedly, these are tough, typically counterintuitive inquiries, whose potential solutions can conflict with artists’ and curators’ fundamental have to have to get paid a dwelling. But if your inventive reaction to the weather crisis is likely to be impractical anyway — and it does not get a great deal less functional than putting in an artwork exhibition on an arctic ice floe — half-steps make tiny feeling.
Templin intuits as substantially in the conclusion to his possess curatorial essay. To make the circumstance for “radical hope,” he estimates gadfly thinker Slavoj Žižek’s reply to an interviewer’s problem about hope in the write-up-COVID entire world. “One can hope,” Žižek contends, “but in a paradoxical way! I advocate a bravery of hopelessness. If we want to hope, then we must acknowledge that our old everyday living is about. We need to invent a new normal.” That feeling of vital creation, that research for choices to extant, failing structures, is exactly what’s missing from Goodbye, Planet. Individual artists and curators may well not constantly have their arms on the levers of institutional electricity, but what’s essential to any one in the arts concerned with weather alter is finding means to think about what planet may come immediately after the current one particular.
Goodbye, Planet, curated by Andreas Templin and Raimar Stange, continues on the web at apexart until eventually March 13th.