As the artist Gavin Turk once said to me, art intercepts various paradigms. In one of such paradigms, art is the work of genius that abstractly connects with its viewer in different ways. In another, it’s a tool that aids in its viewers’ understanding of its nuance, acting as a segue to the conversation that surrounds it. The climate crisis, resulting from a paradigm of irresponsible consumption and excessive greed, is no novel discovery. After decades of blissful ignorance, acceptance is nigh and remedy requires a paradigmatic shift in how we conduct research, and again in how that research is communicated, translated and executed into effect. Art intercepts this paradigm too, and it’s this intersection that Serpentine reckons with.
‘How can art find meaningful agency in the face of climate breakdown?’ is the question that the General Ecology department at Serpentine asks. A question you may respond to maieutically, asking “Well, why should it?”
Serpentine’s Ecologies initiatives began in 2014 with a multidisciplinary festival, titled Extinction Marathon, that was co-curated with artist and environmentally-conscious Gustav Metzger. In 2018, Head of Ecologies and Founder of General Ecology Lucia Pietroiusti, who was then the Public Programmes Curator, developed a project called General Ecology which aimed to embed environmental principles throughout the organisation’s operations, infrastructure and programming. “This was the original intention,” she tells me, but the result was a far greater structural change which necessitated a change in the nature of her role. “General Ecology was and is very much a programming/curatorial project at its core; in my new role as Head of Ecologies at Serpentine, the mandate has extended to more fully embrace infrastructural interventions as well.”
In the summer of 1984, Robert Scott Root-Bernstein wrote On Paradigms and Revolutions in Science and Art: The Challenge of Interpretation for Art Journal in which he remarks on suggestions made by art historian E.M. Hafner and science historian T.S. Kuhn about the similarities between the history of art and that of science. “Art, like science, has paradigms that undergo revolutions,” he writes, concurring somewhat disquietly in Hafner’s major conclusion which goes as follows: “The more carefully we try to distinguish artist from scientist, the more difficult our task becomes.”
“From science, it is easy to learn about wonder: away from the papers and the formal aspects of the discipline, a scientist can take you on a journey of joy and enchantment that few others can,” says Lucia, on a similar matter. “And I love art’s syncretic and synthetic role in all this; how artists are experts of nothing, curious about everything. I’m exaggerating for effect, of course: some artists will become greater experts on a subject than anyone – but they will do so by having no boundary in their research, nothing that separates the disciplines from one another, and so forth.”
Root-Bernstein asks: “Is science a unique form of knowledge with a monopoly on truth, progress, discovery, problem solving and intellectual revolution, or do the fine arts, too, participate in a creative endeavour characterised by the same traits?” I agree with the latter, as does Root-Bernstein, concluding that “art can be a science and science an art”.
Scientific revolutions occur as a result of shifts in the paradigm, which are not only the result of discovery but wider revolution. An artistic revolution isn’t dissimilar, abrupt periodic changes lead to art movements that are aesthetically different in marked ways. The reason why artists forego previous traditions in favour of innovation is likely similar to that of the scientist, to find a more accurate way of depicting what we thought we knew but now know better.
It may be so that art is a science and science is an art, both realms pursuing perception; but how is it we perceive them? Our evaluation of art is emotional, that of science is intellectual. When it comes to the climate crisis, is it emotion that we’re missing? This might answer your question as to why art can – and should – play a role in the climate crisis. It can invoke an emotional response, quite different in nature to our intellectual responses which are possible to bypass. Our emotional responses are much harder to control, giving art – as a mode of communication that taps into our emotional psyche – great agency for leveraging change.
Serpentine’s ecological focus is revolutionary. The difference between an artistic revolution and a scientific one is that an artistic one doesn’t render past traditions as wrong or mistaken. Art can simultaneously support a number of thought schools. And juxtaposition can be harmonious, as is the case with ongoing research and archiving taking place at the galleries. “Public Practice & Civic Engagement; Technology and Ecology are indeed Serpentine’s three ‘hearts’, which guide our ongoing research and practice,” Lucia tells me.
Our surroundings – natural and human-made – have informed art for as long as artists have made it and art is a research tool, one that evolves with us, to help make better sense of these surroundings. Ecology is embedded within this.
“The first, and probably most visible, project which was part of General Ecology has been The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, a multi-year festival and research project which took more-than-human consciousness as its starting point, that I co-curated with writer, editor and curator Filipa Ramos,” Lucia tells me. This project is still ongoing, and after five editions – and counting – of the festival, the duo are working on a publication. Another research project, Microhabitable, with INLAND/Campo Adentro and Fernando García-Dory, started with a reader on interoperable skills and knowledges between microbiology, microeconomics and micropolitics. It soon gave rise to a series of pedagogical experiments and residencies.
I wonder why Lucia uses the term ‘ecology’. “I have heard before people say that ecology, by now, means everything and nothing. Everyone refers to the ecology of something; or maps the working of ecosystems on pretty much anything. I like that. That looseness, for me, generates creative space within a field – environmental action – that so often can remain the domain of specialists,” she says, continuing: “Plus, I have a fondness for the legacy of cybernetics. The idea of “General Ecology” was precisely to think about “ecology in general” as well as following a methodology of “generalising ecology” (or ecological principles, if you like).”
In its broadest possible sense, ecology is the interaction between beings; and between those beings and their wider environment. Lucia likens her position as a member of a cultural institution to microbes in the gut or cetaceans in a marine environment. “We share certain fundamental principles,” she says. “And perhaps the most important principles are balance; and the notion that thriving systems are systems in which all beings within the system thrive,” which, she points out, is “very, very different from, for example, “trickle-down” economics or individualism.”
Lucia fascinates me. We first met at a reading room where, over a glass of wine, we passionately exchanged thoughts on the crisis that prevails – all the way from the role that language plays to that of death and our inability to accept that planet earth is our only viable, habitable option. With an academic path predominantly in literature and an M.Phil thesis on mourning, material and monuments within the context of Gender Studies, she finds herself fearful of getting stuck in semantic debates which could put the motive at risk.
That being said, she insightfully notes something that has come to her through the medium of language. “For example, the idea that in times of environmental collapse, metaphors also collapse back into the material reality that generated them: if you think of devastating monocultures – and the devastations brought about by the imposition of a hegemonic culture in, say, the unfolding of empire; those two things happened together, and continue to happen together. Alienation, “burn out” and wildfires – they are also simultaneous. And so forth. For me, this is no surprise, because symbol and matter were never separated. The anthropologist Eduardo Kohn speaks about this beautifully. But many humans have spent so much time pretending like our species is not part of the planet, that they, – we, I, belong to that hegemonic culture, too – have forgotten that the symbolic is part of the planet too…”
Earlier this year, Lucia, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Kostas Stasinopoulos co-curated the Infinite Ecologies Marathon’s Prelude event, a day of conversation, creativity, performance, music. The Marathon is a historical format for Serpentine, emerging from the brain of artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist. Continuous and interdisciplinary in nature, fast-paced and theoretically-driven, tough and fascinating, the Marathons were originally 24-hours long. In 2018, after the Work Marathon, the team took a break. “It was oddly timely given that Covid-19 would have stopped us in our tracks shortly after anyway,” Lucia tells me.
During this period, the team commenced on a project called Back to Earth between 2020-2022, which invited sixty artists, architects, poets, filmmakers, scientists, thinkers to present artworks that are simultaneously an environmental campaign, intervention or prototype.
“The Infinite Ecologies Marathon’s Prelude was an experiment, a way of reviving part of what the Marathon was in 2018, and to see how it feels, what it reveals, today. The ‘full’ Infinite Ecologies Marathon which will take place in July 2024.” In an era where revolutionary thinking is necessary, Serpentine’s Hans Ulrich Obrist, Kostas Stansinopoulos and Lucia Pietroiusti, continue to explore shifting paradigms while searching for an answer to the question at hand: How can art respond to the climate crisis?
Robert Scott Root-Bernstein, (1984). On Paradigms And Revolutions In Science And Art: The Challenge of Interpretation. Art Journal. Vol.44, No.2. Art and Science: Part I, Life Sciences (Summer 1984). p. 109-118 <https://doi.org/10.2307/77675>