Sensing, Sensitizing, and Speculating: The Work of Artworks in the Climate Crisis Era

The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, edited by T. J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, and Subhankar Banerjee, is a stunning achievement. It brings together fifty-five contributors from diverse backgrounds—including the Cherokee Nation, Lebanon, and South Africa—to think through climate-change-themed art and visual culture from regions ranging from Chiapas to Hong Kong. No comparable volume exists; as the editors point out, “within the environmental humanities . . . the visual arts are seldom foregrounded and sometimes sidelined,” while “art history as a discipline has . . . been slow in considering ecology and related environmental studies” (2). This achievement emerges at a curious impasse: climate change has advanced so as to become palpable to even the most privileged, while public responses—where they exist—often seem crushingly inadequate. Art and visual culture seem both necessary and dubious in this moment. To begin with, “climate change . . . presents profound representational dilemmas” (2) because of its lifetime-exceeding timescales but also because evidence of its violence regularly gets hidden, manipulated, or managed. As Caroline A. Jones points out in her chapter, “Atmospheres and the Anthropogenic ImageBind,” “idealistic images (the volunteer helping the oil-covered shore bird) were actively produced” by BP in the period after its Deepwater Horizon disaster, “as the corporation tripled its advertising budget” (247). In such a context, art and visual culture can function to reveal or counter-represent— though usually on much smaller budgets, if any. And yet such functions may prove to be a trap; images of climate disaster, particularly the more spectacular, can, as Birgit Schneider points out, “immobilize observers and put them in a state of sublime amazement” (271) rather than fomenting action. Further, those “representational dilemmas” may in fact be moot, given the aforementioned palpability of climate change: as contributor Sarah Kanouse narrates, “A few years ago, artists