On Arte (a French public TV), you can watch some very fine wildlife or ‘natural’ reports, such as the one devoted to Australia’s subtropical zone on Monday 25 January (i.e. this was the year 2021, and the programm is no longer available online). Beautiful images of marine flora and fauna. And then, all of a sudden, the first apocalyptic sign: here’s the half-bone/half-plastic corpse of a bird:
It’s no fun or death rite, nobody filled the bird’s rib cage with plastic, this was ingested as current food, until it starved to death, or couldn’t swallow anything else. It’s an image of the Technological Apocalypse.
Millions of years of Evolution to come at this: birds ingesting plastic, which they catch on the surface of the water, ‘thinking’ it’s food, and, as if horror wasn’t enough on its own, it’s these same but smaller fragments of plastic that they feed their chicks with. And that’s what happens. There’s plastic in my body, and in yours, but not to this extent. This is one kind of apocalypse, never written ever before. As we all know, the word is of Ancient Greek, meaning “revelation”, “unveiling”. The revelation which is unveiling is that we, globally, wordly, are moving on to Something else. We knew that the planet was increasingly taking on the appearance of a gigantic toxic dump, but until last Monday (I’ve started this article originally in French on Monday the 1st of Februrary 2021), I didn’t know that plastic was a deadly food for the seabirds of Lord Howe’s Island, whose existence I was equally unaware of. People might say that this is an isolated case, that things are better elsewhere. Answer: No. To convince us, we are shown maps of the plastic slicks on the surface of the oceans.
If I count correctly, there are five plastic slicks on the surface of the oceans. You might think that this is just an animation, that we don’t see that much from space, but you might also wonder whether this metastasis of the Anthropocene is visible from our great cosmic matrix? The answer is: Yes. Specialists have had to develop new softwares to detect floating objects on the surface of the oceans, and here, for example, are some images from ESA (European Space Agency), from the Sentinel satellite (Copernicus Programme), taken in 2018:
So yes, we can see this abomination from space; it’s not just a figment of the imagination, or an artist’s view (as is said of drawings of black holes, for example, which are obviously inaccessible to any properly defined image).
Axiom princeps: Catastrophic aesthetics (or “aesthetics of the end of the world”) must ackowledge its contribution. It goes against the fascist aesthetics denounced by Walter Benjamin (1936): Here, we are surrounded-contaminated by shit, and we don’t enjoy it.
People are talking more and more about the Anthropocene, and yet, not as much as about ‘ecology’, which is now dead. Either way, there are countless books on these subjects. And, of course, if they are attempt of an ecological art, quite outdated from Bayer’s “Grass Mound” (1955), there is a need of something, say, stronger. Whatever be the case, the notion of the Anthropocene has been adopted as quickly as expressions such as ‘political correctness’, ‘fake news’, ‘cancel culture’, and so forth. But one of the problems with this term is that it reinforces the idea that this is an era where ‘from now on, we’re in, and where we’re good to to stay’; while specialists in systemic upheavals (notably the Stockholm Resilience Centre) tell us that we need to get out of this state as quickly as possible — the ‘famous’ 2°C that we must not exceed — while the effects of the Anthropocene are increasingly visible, active and ongoing. It is important to understand that the Anthropocene indicates an era that can be subsumed under nine planetary limits, which must not be exceeded (seven have already been crossed in 2024). It is within these nine limits, defined by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, that we must act. But curiously, neither nuclear energy and its waste, nor endocrine disruptors are taken into account in these limits. But I’m not blaming these researchers, of course, because, as I said, they are working on ‘planetary limits’, in terms of propagation, thresholds and scenarios. It’s worth pointing out what the notion implies, geo-planet-wise. It’s worthwhile, because a lot of nonsense and inaccuracies are still being written here and there.
The engineering of the world, starting with the Industrial Revolution, has produced avatars that have become autonomous agents, chemical entities for the most part, that have totally escaped any anthropic control whatsoever. For the time being, no one can put a stop to the acidification of the oceans, which, if it continues, will extinguish all forms of life in them (it is already attacking coral reefs and piercing the shells of all living creatures that have them). To put it another way, we have built giga-locomotives that are hurtling towards Nothingness, but no one is in charge because they are inaccessible and anyway there are far too many of them. This is the Anthropocene, a polymorphic, tentacular, protean monster, and in every way deleterious, the offspring of the Industrial Revolution and turbo-capitalism, a child who doesn’t recognise us and wants to kill us and everything else that is doted with an integument. In this respect, the ‘green’ propaganda of eco-responsibility and local ‘ecological transition’ is a kind of blind smoke and mirrors. It’s a posture, and I use the adjective reluctantly. Thus, some propaganda focuses on the local to ‘get out of it’, and another on the clean energy of nuclear power. So, while marine animals and birds are dying from eating plastic, we can always assert that, in a given region, at least here ‘we eat organic beef’…
Once we have clarified this, what would “Anthropocene art be”? It would be an art form that differs from both environmental and ecological art in that it would show us examples of disasters that are not foreseeable or future, but present. It is an art of catastrophe, which shows or sublimates one or more disasters in progress. I do think that certain attempts can be included in this “new” form. For example, the image by the artist and activist Chris Jordan (which can be found on the Smithsonian Institution’s website) could very well be described as ‘anthropocene art’. Here, we are no longer in ecological art, which was intended to ‘prevent’, nor in ‘environmental art’, which was intended to heal and increase; no, we are here, if ever, in ‘catastrophic art’, that is, Anthropocene art:
Chris Jordan is a ‘committed’ artist who photographs or stages the planet’s energy production. In his series of albatrosses and birds destroyed by plastic ‘food’, we can’t say that he emphasises his aesthetic, but the aim is quite different, it’s educational. But, to be coherent, we must say This is the aesthetic of the Anthropocene. But is it art? Why not? Could it not be labelled, as a sort of acid irony, “A ready-made dead bird”? But the asthetic of Jordan is also informative, as he creates works which are an assemblage of rubbish that, at first glance, reveal something other than what we perceive, for example :
On the face of it, a monochrome. It’s staggering. However, it’s hard to see the connection between litres of oil consumed every second and plastic spoons, except that the latter are the offspring of the former. Either. On Jordan’s page, on each image shown, you just have to click on it to zoom in; and that’s where it gets… (I can’t find the words):
At first glance [Fig 1], we might think of a photograph of the Milky Way, for example. But zooming in very quickly disabuses us of that notion: all of a sudden we realise that this is indeed a conglomeration of plastic spoons. Admittedly, the caption tells us what it is, but once again, at first glance, it’s not at all recognisable — if, indeed, you can instantly recognise 48,000 plastic spoons all assembled in bulk. In ‘real life’, it should be fairly obvious, given the dimensions of the work (152.4 x 152.4 cm). But let’s suppose that, in the scenography, the work is far away from the visitor; the time it will take to find oneself in front of it will be equivalent, in a way, to the first view on the website and then the zoom…
What I call catastrophic art could also be called ‘the art of catastrophe’, or ‘how do you make art with what is catastrophic?’ It’s not easy, and it’s not self-evident. The ‘Art works for change’ website, among other initiatives, showcases artists who are trying to make art out of the countless disasters that occur every microsecond on the Blue Planet and, it should be noted, some of the work is magnificent, some stunning, and some quite mediocre, if not worse. But then again, we know how difficult it is to ‘make’ art. Certainly, there is one very famous photograph on this site, by Edward Burtynsky
It looks like one of the rivers of hell (Lethe). A typical example of what is called ‘ecocide’. Here, art, as a categoy, a discipline, shows that it’s too late, it no longer denounces, it no longer wants to prevent, it doesn’t preserve, it shows that it’s ‘too late’, the shit has passed, it’s passing. It’s the nickel mine tailings in Sudbury, Ontario, that is giving the river its monstrous colour. These are not natural rivers, but liquid waste directly from prospecting, dumped in the middle of nature, creating swamps.
Above is an image captured from the animation (here) which provides more information about the context of Burtynsky’s shots, where we learn that the discharges continue, but that they are no longer available to the public eye…
Excursus. Calling “river of hell” this stream, or any ruined part of the world might be subsumed under the category of Lethean Regions, that is, regions where, as far as we know they exist, we at once forget them, just like the water of the Lethe river, in Greek hell, produced oblivion once anybody had drink a sip of it. In the same way, we breeze a sort of Lethean air; which make us see and forget at once, while the hellish rhythm accelerates.
Just look at this artificial stream full of nickel, accompanied by this zombie land totally hallucinated from the inside; mutated land, red nickel stream, and the dying trees in the distance.
One wonders how it’s possible for such an apocalyptic display to go on for such an indefinite period of time, without any authority stepping in to put a stop to it. It’s simply irrational. But once we’ve said that, we can always make the point that there are two kinds of pollution: the kind you can see, and the kind you can’t.
Terminology:
For the most part, ecological art has had its day. The idea was to prevent, to warn. It’s done.
Environmental art is distinguished from ecological art by Gyorgy Kepes, in 1972, in his essay ‘Art and Ecological Consciousness’. It involves, for example, planting trees, as Beuys did in 1982 at the Dokumenta in Kassel (the aim was to plant 7,000 oak trees, each with a column of basalt).
Anthropocene’ art, if it can be called anything else, is art that depicts catastrophes without embellishment or sentimental nonsense.
A provisional conclusion
‘Can we think of an Anthropocenic aesthetic?’ Admittedly, there are places in the world where these effects are already visible, and are having a dramatic impact on all those who inhabit this or that biotope, but for us, let’s say, in Europe, we don’t seem to be taking the full measure of the demiurgic force of these anthropocenic avatars because, so to speak, we are not directly witnessing them, or those who are are only a minority. But this minority, let’s not kid ourselves, is destined to grow and become a majority. But we’re not there yet. The difficulty is that this ‘process of happening’ does not have a definite time frame; it is only just the beginning. Think of the melting permafrost in Siberia and Scandinavia, the albedo of the glaciers, the polar ice caps that are becoming covered in black soot, the dismantling of the ice pack… these are processes of happening and, rather, processes of becoming. And yet it’s not already possible to fully identify what is happening, because everything is changing so fast, and every catastrophic latest flood is just another news, waiting to be forgotten in the Lethean ether. Art has always accompanied disasters, and it continues to do so today: But what kind of art, or, rather, what kinds of art? This article has tried to provide some insights.
PS. I would like to thank Victoria Sloan Jordan, Studio Manager & Producer, of Studio Chris Jordan, for her clarifications and information.