The video below is very funny – but the reality of the message is enough to make you despair.  Enjoy – it only lasts 7 minutes.

Watching this sort of thing, it is easy to sit back smugly and blame incompetent, lying politicians for all the issues.  The reality is that the environmental movement, whose mission it is to encourage us all to move forward, has also spectacularly failed to fulfill its mission.  Last year I was in a climate change summit where, after 3 days or pretty ineffectual hot air, one delegate got up and said “We’ve been saying the same thing for 25 years.  Now it’s really urgent and we have to say it louder.” Does that make you laugh or make you cry?

I have been wondering how long it would take for the biggest environmental disaster in history to inspire the creation of some art. Digital artist Ubermorgen has created a series of works entitled Deep Horizon.

25 Million Liters

The images are created from photographs of the oil spill itself, digitally manipulated to create abstract images with various liquefied effects.  Some images (above and below) are part of the “Aerial Series” and, to my eye, manage to convey a sense of the overwhelming immensity of the disaster that is truly frightening.

17 Million Liters

The second “Liquid Series” plays with color and light. Here all evidence that this is a major industrial, environmental and human catastrophe disappear and we are left with bright, happy images that disguise the reality of what is going on. The disconnect between the feeling created by some of these images and the image titles could not be greater.

2 Million Liters

Other Art

Of course the disaster has inspired the more usual forms of artistic endeavours.

From political cartoons…….. (see here for more political cartoons)

Matt Davies political cartoon

To take-offs of what now seems like a laughably cynical BP “all green together” logo and corporate image.

In ‘From Art to Politics’, Murray Edelman argues: “Together art, the mind and the situations in which they are applied construct and transform beliefs about the social world.  …  But for the most part they do so in a masked fashion, leaving the impression that these beliefs are based upon observation.”

Contrary to the didactic nature of scientific or ‘factual’ communication, the most effective art is that which is ambiguous, allowing the viewer his own interpretation.  It is this ‘free-learning’ combination of the artwork and its open interpretation that makes art such a persuasive and culturally powerful force for change.

Effective art does not attempt to provide answers.  Rather its role is to raise questions, launching a journey of the mind that finds its own answers.

Many questions swirl around the issue of how humans can live successfully without destroying the world around them.  Many artists are producing work that provokes debate and discussion by challenging conventional thinking in a way that engages audiences.  Art that goes beyond the narrow confines of conservation and environmentalism to the broader debate around sustainability.

“It is widely acknowledged that the shaping and reshaping of the social world is accomplished in large part by cultural representations – those depictions, illustrations, likenesses, icons, pictures and portraits that are produced by a culture.” (Linda Kalof: Looking at Animals in Human History)