New climate of opinion

For a couple of decades now, contemporary artists have embraced the playful, paradoxical world in which we live, and depicted its head-spinning complexities in a variety of original ways. Some of them have been banal, some insightful. But they mostly fail to make any serious points. Tracey’s tent, Damien’s carcases, Jeff’s glossy puppies: striking images, all of them. But they don’t do much to address the world’s problems. Contemporary art is like the high street coffee shop: a nice place to hang out, full of quirky novelties to keep the menu fresh, resounding with witty, oblique conversation.

That may be about to change. The most important issue of our time, climate change, has forced itself on to the consciousness of every nation’s people. And art, slowly, reluctantly, is coming to terms with it. It has to. However lost they become in their layers of irony and cheek, artists need to convince themselves, if no one else, that they speak clearly and seriously of their lives and times. The last judgement they would want delivered by posterity on their efforts is that they simply fiddled while Rome burned, or froze over, or did both at the same time. Suddenly there is something bigger and graver in the air than their own ineffectual micro-concerns.

The new exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, Earth: Art of a Changing World, is a small, tentative step in this direction. Thirty-five artists have been invited or freshly commissioned to produce work that is inspired by the climate change debate. The debate over whether climate change threatens the world as we know it is virtually won, but the discussion of what to do about it is far from over. Practical solutions are not among the traditional strengths of the artist, and they are few and far between here. Yet the work at the show is arresting and smart. It is as if a pack of hungry hounds, tired of gnawing at irrelevance, has been thrown a bone juicy with cosmic importance.

As in any intelligently curated show, context is everything. Antony Gormley’s army of terracotta miniatures, “Amazonian Field”, was created at the beginning of the 1990s, yet the artist’s brief – “I wanted the art to look back at us …as if we were responsible for the world that it, and we, were in” – has nowhere been better fulfilled than here. The figures, jampacked inside one of the Academy’s rooms, are turned towards the viewer at the doorway. They are passive and pathetic. They want us to look after them, to be released from their confinement, to be assured of a future. What kind of answer can we give them?

The piece is a compelling counterpoint to Gormley’s recent installation on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth, One & Other. There, live individual voices spoke clamorously on any subject they chose; at the Royal Academy, the clay figures stand crowded, expectant, mute. The dialectical tension between unfettered freedom of speech on the one hand, and powerlessness in the face of a grim, unfolding narrative on the other, is thrillingly conveyed. Gormley has captured the spirit of the times through nothing more complicated than the manipulation of the human figure, which can choose to stand proud and erect, or to be cowed by the grander forces of history.

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Other works in the show are similarly fraught with contradiction. There is a small, fragile diamond on display, by the duo Ackroyd & Harvey, which has been manufactured from carbon extracted from the thigh-bone of a polar bear. The object is intrinsically beautiful, yet the means of its metamorphosis is somehow disturbing.

In the Danish artist Tue Greenfort’s “Medusa Swarm”, a suspended shoal of beautiful pink jellyfish made out of Murano glass seems to celebrate climate change: it is a species whose population has increased because its natural predators are disappearing from over-fishing and water pollution. Can climate change have beautiful outcomes? Well, yes. But at what cost? The sting of a jellyfish, we scarcely need reminding, can be fatal.

More beauty in another corner of the gallery: Kris Martin’s golden sphere, placed innocuously on the floor, is perfectly realised. Yet once more, formal elegance disguises sinister intent: the sphere is a home-made bomb, primed to explode in 100 years. We can stand and admire it safely, its menace conveniently deferred to a time and place that is beyond us. Could there be a more potent metaphor for our attitude towards the earth?

In “Kings of the Hill”, a video by the Israeli artist Yael Bartana, a small crowd of figures is silhouetted against a sunset on a long, sandy beach. Yet rather than look out romantically to sea, they face the opposite way, enraptured by uglier matters: a contest in which drivers of powerful 4x4 vehicles rev their engines to the maximum as they attempt to climb the beach’s awkward dunes.

The whole affair is limp, pointless and unattractive – at least Formula One has a certain beauty to it – yet the Sisyphean futility of the game hypnotises us. Here is the throbbing soundtrack of environmental meltdown: the noise of dozens of engines spewing fuel fumes into the sea breeze as they head nowhere fast.

It is the highlight of an exhibition that bites, and bites hard. Art is rediscovering its ability to engage with the world’s larger issues, and very welcome it is too. Don’t miss it.

‘Earth: Art of a Changing World’, GSK Contemporary at the Royal Academy, London, until January 31; www.royalacademy.org.uk

peter.aspden@ft.com
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