From soup to soap opera: how art is bringing climate change to a new audience

Protestors throwing soup at Van Gogh’s paintings or defacing Andy Warhol's soup cans have made art an urban climate change event. Now a new exhibition of images of human climate destruction may ask tougher questions.

As the climate emergency worsens, many of us feel we are seeing more frequent representations of the worst outcomes in popular media such as film, music and visual art. Recently protestors have targeted priceless works of art held in major cities’ galleries to call attention to the climate crisis.

Some commentators say the interventions are themselves a kind of protest art. In other words, the vandalism is a way of rehearsing the destruction of what we cherish as most beautiful and most worthy of preservation.

The protests come at a time when art is really being increasingly used as a tool by artists to communicate and respond to climate change. It may be that more artists are drawn to the crisis, but it is equally likely that the average person is more likely to notice it right now — and that artists have been focused on nature, climate and the environment for decades.

The breathtaking photographs taken by Edward Burtynsky over his 40-year career that are on display at London's Saatchi Gallery until early May this year are the latest to attract headlines. That attention is utterly deserved as his images are both astonishing in their own right but at the same reveal some of the implications of our globalised and industrialised patterns of production, transport, trade and consumption.

Whether it is a winding river of polluted water or almost perfect conical giant piles of coal in China, the images may provoke anger among viewers, but should also force them to question their role in supporting the polluting activity through their purchasing decisions.

But this not a new phenomenon. There is a clue in Burtynsky's CV — now aged 69 he has been recording industrialisation and its impacts on nature and the collective human existence for more than four decades. LS Lowry was depicting the human side of industrial life in northwest England in the mid-20th century. Indeed, a print that has hung on my wall for 30 years, by the Austrian visual artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, is a reminder that art as a climate campaign medium has been around for many years.

Give art a chance

The important question is whether art can be an effective medium to communicate messages about climate change to the viewing or listening public. Academic research has shown that when people are confronted with climate art, that tends to lead to increased support for climate-friendly policies. Interestingly the authors found that the emotional response might be easier to achieve if the art does not try to claim to be the truth about climate change but instead just raises the topics and leaves it up to the viewers to come to their own interpretation.

The climate protestors are clearly framing the whole debate around the need of people to take climate change seriously, while Burtynsky has shared images with us, allowing people to draw their own conclusions. The researchers might be right that the latter is more effective; indeed Aesop’s fable about the battle between the Sun and the North Wind to get the traveller to abandon his coat comes to mind.

The recent emergence of climate change as a story line in the BBC Radio 4 soap operate The Archers is another example of the potential of placing the idea in front of viewers or listeners and let them decide on the merits of the fictional example.

Art can also be used as a way of tracking past changes in climate patterns. There is a huge reliance on scientific data as the key lens through which to prove and display long-term changes in climatic patterns. However, academics are now keen to highlight the role that information such as diaries can play in tracking those changes.

Art fits into that latter pattern. An article in the Journal of Art in Society argues that the range of animals depicted in prehistoric paintings gives pointers to the nature of the climate at the time, while drawings of glaciers in the mid-19th century provide a “useful benchmark” against which more recent glacial retreats can be measured.

Some cynics might say that art can only ever entertain rather than promote actual change. But given the parlous record of politicians, policymakers and scientists in moving the world towards action is reason enough to say “give art a chance”.