Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei has mounted 1200 bicycles in a magnificent floor to ceiling installation as part of a solo exhibition in Taipei.

The artist likely has no environmental statement to make with this installation, but these days it is hard to look at so many bicycles without being put in mind of the energy and transport questions that so many people are working to resolve. Can we really build a successful energy policy on a huge installation of renewables just like this huge installation of bicycles? Or is the mountain to high to climb and talk about moving to a solely renewable energy policy simply the pipe dream of impractical idealists?

Ai Weiwei has gained global fame for his dissident attitude to Chinese authorities. This has earned him persecution by the authorities, destruction of his studios, charges of owing multimillion dollars to the Chinese tax authorities and recurrent arrests and periods of disappearance. The bicycle installation led me to look for any of the artist’s works that addressed environmental issues directly.

An installation entitled “Trees” & “Rocks” (image below) has been interpreted by some to be an allusion to the environmental damage being caused by China’s rapid rate of development. Others, have interpreted the work as the simple recreation of a meditative space.

This week The Guardian asked artists and writers to design images of money that would be appropriate for our times. As one can imagine, numerous themes have been explored by the artists concerned. John Gray (above) and Jonathan Frantzen (below) both take up the theme of endangered species, highlighting that, once gone, they will never return.

Others make broader social commentaries. Alasdair Gray (below) highlights the fact that, in the developed world, we have far more money than we need suggesting that the accumulation of money has gone far beyond satisfying our basic needs. Anne Enright (below that) designs the new currency for Ireland when it tumbles out of the Euro – a return to Celtic values with Yeats’s lines as the reminder that “we have fed the heart on fantasies”.

But my favourite of the lot is the simple, pointed and harsh commentary from British artist Tracy Emin.

Hermaphrodite Polar Bear

Gary Hume is a successful British artist who does not usually engage with environmental issues. He became involved with Cape Farewell and created some artworks in an attempt to engage with the issues.  As reported in an article in The Guardian, he found this a challenge:

“How do you depict global catastrophe?” he says. “I’m too selfish to describe the world’s dilemma, so I describe my own paltry dilemma of what it’s like to be alive.”

The image above – Hermaphrodite Polar Bear – is intended to bring attention to the significant changes affecting life on Earth as a result of damaging human activity. “The Industrialist” (below) is a lead tracing of smoke coming out of an industrial chimney. He describes it as an epitaph for industrialists.

But Hume is not really convinced by his own work. First of all he is wary of artists’ fascination with death, global catastrophe, etc. Depicting disaster is maybe the easy path to take. But most revealing is his take on the trip to the Arctic with Cape Farewell. Clearly he found the trip beautiful and was no doubt saddened by the prospect of the damage being done by climate change but found it ‘hard to relate to my life’.

So here’s the question: is all the talk of ‘global catastrophe’ making the problem seem so huge and insurmountable that it starts to be feel totally of reach – impossible for people to relate to their life? Is one possible result that people simply shut these issues out of their minds – the only coping mechanism they may have left to get on with their life?

Is it time for a new narrative?

For many people it is difficult to understand, let alone empathize with, technical statements like “loss of habitat”. This advertizing campaign from the charity Born Free aims to bring this issue into the more human terms of ‘homelessness’.

Using images of animals placed in the context of human homelessness, the campaign tries to make clear that ‘loss of habitat’ represents the same type of disenfranchisement seen in people who have lost their homes or have otherwise been rendered homeless.

A clever approach that moves away from the distancing and often incomprehensible techno-speak of the conservation community to frame the issue in human terms and, hopefully, make it more relevant. It would be useful if some information were to be collected on the impact of this creative campaign.

David Buckland: The Great White Sale. These images are made in a short window of time when the power of the video projector matches the light of dawn, when there is both message and ice. This fleeting moment of human excess is so short, two hundred years, but for the glacier it is barely a single breath taken.

Cape Farewell has already organized a number of art exhibitions as a result of the works created during the expeditions. The latest traveling exhibit – u-n-f-o-l-d opens in Chicago on March 16th. According to David Buckland, “We intend to communicate through art works our understanding of the changing climate on a human scale, so that our individual lives can have meaning in what is a global problem.”

This blog has reviewed the work of a number of artists that have collaborated with Cape Farewell. These include Lemn Sissay, Iain McEwan, and Lucy + Jorge Orta. Buckland also curated the highly successful EARTH exhibit at the Royal Academy in 2009.

Adriane Colburn: Forest for the Trees is a meditation on the complex relationship between nature and industry; sustained land vs. commodified land; matter on the surface of the earth vs. the matter below ground; the morphing of the forest into an industrial landscape; and the fine lines between use and exploitation.

Cape Farewell is probably the most important undertaking to date that, in an organized and concerted way, engages the arts in issues of climate change and the environment.

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?

Barbara Kruger asserts that her art may not be social commentary but simply ‘observation’.  Intentional or not, it comes across as commentary to most people – and pretty pointed commentary at that.

The artist has, over the years, addressed many issues including women’s reproductive rights, how development squeezes out lower income people, etc., etc.  Our culture of consumerism and excess consumption has, however, occupied a central role in her work. The “I shop therefore I am’ image (above) is from the 1980s, but the theme is continued and expanded in her exhibit entitled “Plenty”, currently showing in East Hampton, NY.

“You want it/You need it/You buy it/You forget it.” are the words plastered on the ceiling in large, squeezed letters.  On the walls “Money makes money and a rich man’s jokes are always funny.”

As this review in the New York Times points out, it is difficult to see this exhibit as anything other than cutting criticism of the very audience likely to be visiting this exhibit in The Hamptons.

But perhaps the best commentary on our unsustainable consumer lifestyle emerged by accident; an artwork that was not an artwork at all but can hold its own with the best of Barbara Kruger’s work.  Her exhibit “Plenty” came to an end (as exhibits do) after running in LA.  I came across the announcement below on an LA culture web site.  Maybe our age of plenty has indeed come to an end and we haven’t yet noticed.

Bullfighting has recently been banned in Catalonia (the ban to take effect in 2012) and has been banned in the Canary Islands since 1991.  The above-referenced article was arguing that there are significant cultural differences between Catalonia and the Basque Country making a ban in the latter highly unlikely – however imaginative the protests.  A recent poll suggests that 60% of Spaniards do not care for bullfighting but that 57% do not want to see it banned.

What’s this all got to do with environmental conservation?

My own belief is that it is difficult to build a sustainable conservation effort unless we also manage to change the relationship between man and nature (and here I am including animals as part of nature) to go beyond seeing nature as simply that which is to be exploited for human gain – however small and frivolous that gain. My question is: can reasonably protect species and our natural environment while culturally embracing practices like bullfighting, fighting with dogs, cock fighting, hunting with dogs, and other traditions that reduce the maiming and killing of animals to a mere entertainment for the few? Any and all opinions welcome.

In a final twist, it bears noting that bullfighting proponents have their own conservation argument. If bullfighting were to be abolished, there would be no need to continue to farm the special species of bull that is used for bullfighting and that species would likely become extinct!

One of the issues with getting the environmental message across is that everyone is just too earnest and, frankly, often just plain boring.  Maybe it’s time for a few smiles and laughs to oil the wheels.

The art of the political cartoon and political caricature is an old one and it is a pleasure to see it being applied to the difficult environmental issues we all face.

From the carbon footprint of the earnest environmentalist criss-crossing the globe to spread the environmental message to the hopelessness of the political stalemate we have reached to the meaningless greenwash of The Modern Corporation; all are being lampooned through the art of the political cartoon.

Maybe it’s time that the environmental movement supplemented it’s serious earnestness with a bit of humor – the ability to laugh at its issues and even laugh at itself once in a while.  That may bring a few more people into the fold.

It’s good to see that someone is taking the lead.  Take a look at The Grinning Planet – a web site that is “Saving The Planet One Joke At A Time”

And for some more cartoons, take a look here, here, and here.  Or do your own search, see what you can come up with and share with friends who will appreciate a bit of lightening up.

David Brooks at MOMA PS1. Photo: New York Times

David Brooks has, it seems, been intrigued by deforestation for some time. The work below was presented in an exhibit entitled “New Perspectives in Contemporary Art” organized jointly by Affirmation Arts and Columbia University. The piece is entitled “Breathtaking Vistas of Deforestation” and the medium described as “60 laser copies laminated and sanded’ (yes, truly).

With the increasing importance being given to deforestation as a contributor to climate change, such work may acquire increased relevance.