The Aesthetics of Climate Change

Climate change is an evolving, growing, and compounding force that is often too difficult to fully comprehend in its entirety. Increased natural disasters, rising temperatures, and rapidly melting ice caps often occur in geographical and temporal locations that prevent humanity from fully grasping the world-altering changes that are unfolding around the world. This is where Danish and Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson steps in with his installation art piece Ice Watch. This work took place in Copenhagen in 2014, Paris in 2015, and two locations in London in 2018. Each installation consisted of nearly 100 tons of ice harvested from the waters of Greenland that were placed on cargo ships and trucks before being laid to rest in these town squares (Image 1,2). It is also important to note that these exhibitions were not ticketed nor did they have any type of boundary. Each was open to the public, allowing its audience to move freely through the ice blocks, touch them, and even lick them, for as long as wanted. The exhibitions lasted as long as the ice did, ranging from three to ten days (Image 3). These installations were meant to raise awareness about climate change and provide a visual representation of the arctic ice melting. This work, however, raises a lot of alarming questions such as the origin of the ice, the emissions spent on its transportation, the efficacy of attempting to educate populations largely unaffected by previous, current, and future climate change consequences, and the informative aspect or lack thereof of the exhibition. This paper will attempt to answer these questions through the literary work of multiple theorists and authors in order to decide whether or not Eliasson’s Ice Watch achieved the political work it intended to.

French philosopher Jacques Ranciere will provide the basis for the relationship between aesthetics and politics on which this installation is based. Journalist and author David Wallace-Wells and his work “The Uninhabitable Earth” will supply the grounding facts needed to comprehend the positive and negative effects that a work such as Ice Watch might have on audiences. Professor and author Rob Nixon’s theory of slow violence will illuminate the effects that slow melting ice has both physically on the global population as well as conceptually on Eliasson's audiences. Eliasson attempted to create a way of engaging with Ranciere's Distribution of the Sensible, an artistic representation of Wallace-Wells statistical projections of warming, and ultimately a portrayal of Nixon's Slow Violence with slow melting ice. In applying the work of Ranciere, Wallace-Wells, and Nixon’s literature will determine the effectiveness of the political work, or the lack thereof, that Olafur Eliasson's Ice Watch aimed to achieve.

Eliasson’s Ice Watch acted as an invitation to all the senses; touch, taste, sound, smell, and sight. As the blocks slowly melted away, their weight cracking and groaning as it shifted, the ice could be seen and heard from afar. Inching closer, children stuck their tongues out, adults approached them with outstretched arms, and passersby breathed in the scent of cold and familiar arctic air (Image 4,5). Engaging in the audience's senses formed a bridge between them and the larger issue: climate change. If, as environmentalist author Aldo Leopold suggests, “we can only be ethical towards what we can see” then we as audience must see climate change in order to be ethical towards the environmentalist movement. In this sense, art and “artistic practices” are a way of engaging with the senses to “intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility” (Ranciere, 8). This is to say, in the instance of Ice Watch, that walking through a field of ice blocks rather than the empty square you cross each morning on your way to work is an intervention in generality. This disruption in the relationship with the normal and maintenance of visibility is meant to provoke audiences to widen their narrow perspectives. Using the ice to engage the senses in a foreign way, to disrupt the general ways of seeing and doing, provokes what Ranciere would call a new form of visibility. Specifically, one that is ethical towards issues not previously acknowledged.

For Ranciere, there is an “'aesthetics' at the core of politics” (Ranciere, 8). This type of aesthetics, however, is to be understood as a “delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience” (Ranciere, 8). The delimiting being the breaking of temporal and psychical distance from the melting ice of the arctic. By eliminating such space, the previously invisible becomes visible and the noise and taste and feel of the ice becomes a tangible experience. Ranciere ultimately believed that “politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak,” (Ranciere, 8). If Ice Watch is doing political work then its impact lies not only in what can be seen in the piece and what audiences said about its impact, but in the type of person who saw the piece both in a physical sense and in an emotional sense. A work such as Ice Watch in its abstraction and obscurity, cannot be seen just with the eyes, but with the mind. Anyone can look at ice and see what it is slowly slipping away. What must happen in order for this work to be political requires is a deeper form of visibility. One which provokes real thought, introspection, and change. In order to perform political work, the relationship between politics and aesthetics must perform at the same level as the level of “the sensible delimitation of what is common to the community, the forms of its visibility and of its organization,” (Ranciere, 13). As an artist attempting to make “political interventions”, Eliasson aimed to align his installation work with that of all political work that has attempted to reconstruct visibility in society (Ranciere, 13). While Ice Watch engaged the senses, provoked visibility, and attempted to build a relationship between aesthetics and politics, we as the audience of the work must question the common ground we stand on, the limits of our delimitation, and if this work is being seen by those who are able, willing, or in need of change. The cities and countries in which these installations took place; Copenhagen, Paris, and London, are not necessarily home to populations who have, are, or will be predominantly affected by the global consequences of climate change. Ice Watch raises questions of privilege, the audience's access to education, and the informative nature of a borderless exhibition void of pamphlets, poster boards, and plaques.

When Wallace-Wells published the initial “The Uninhabitable Earth” essay in 2017, later turned book in 2019, he nearly broke New York Magazine as it was the most read article in the history of the publication. The work scared readers. For some it instilled a type of paralyzing fear, for others a motivating one. The stories even scared Wallace-Wells himself, “many of them terrifying, gripping, uncanny narratives, with even the most small-scale sagas playing like fables: a group of Arctic scientists trapped when melting ice isolated their research center, on an island populated also by a group of polar bears; a Russian boy killed by anthrax released from a thawing reindeer carcass, which had been trapped in permafrost for many decades” (Wallace-Wells, 7). He confessed that the horrific stories strung together seemed to resemble a new type of genre, “a new genre of allegory” he writes, “but of course climate change is not an allegory.” (Wallace-wells, 7). Climate change has no hidden meaning. In fact, it's not something to be believed or not-believed at all, because it is undeniably true and terrifyingly inevitable. This may serve as an explanation for the obvious nature of Ice Watch and therefore the lack of informative materials surrounding the exhibition. There is no deeper meaning beyond the melting ice, it is simply a visual representation of something occurring in a geographically remote location. Eliasson brought climate change to the audience, rather than the audience to it. He believed this was political work in that it shed light on the changes that are “so large their effects will seem, by the; curious legerdemain of environmental change, imperceptible.” (Wallace-Wells 21-22). The melting occured in such small increments that they can only be seen over the course of days, not the seconds in which they are slowly but surely dissipating. The argument against the so-called political work of Eliasson's art lies in his failure to present scientific facts alongside the exhibition.

Wallace-Wells presents this type of scientific backing in abundance. As he puts it, “a warming planet leads to melting Arctic ice, which means less sunlight reflected back to the sun and more absorbed by a planet warming faster still, which means an ocean less able to absorb atmospheric carbon and so a planet warming faster still.” (Wallace-Wells, 21-22). More than this, a warming planet “will also melt Arctic permafrost, which contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the earth's atmosphere, and some of which, when it thaws and is released, may evaporate as methane, which is thirty-four times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is eighty-six times as powerful.” (Wallace-Wells, 22). What Eliasson failed to mention is that his melting ice was not simply about water displacement, rising sea levels, and lack of reflective surface area on Greenland, but was also about the horrific chain reaction it will set off into the world. The warming, and consequential melting, will set off a deadly feedback of "forest dieback" which refers to “planet's natural ability to absorb carbon and turn it into oxygen, which means still hotter temperatures, which means more dieback, and so on.” (Wallace-wells, 22). Yet, Ice Watch, as I established earlier in its lack of deeper meaning, was just about melting ice. There was no more for audiences to glean from the barebones minimalist structure of the exhibition. While the work might have been a visual representation of the statistical projections Wallace-Wells writes of, facts and figures did not appear in physical form on or near the exhibition itself nor do they even appear on Eliasson's curated website. It can be argued that what Eliasson has done by harvesting ice from the vulnerable arctic waters of Greenland to display it for an ambivalent and possibly uninformed or overly informed audience is exactly the type of behavior that feeds Wallace-Wells dieback loop. Humanity has remade the planet in its own vision, “so that it is undeniably ours, a project whose exhaust, the poison of emissions, now casually works its way through millennia of ice so quickly you can see the melt with a naked eye, destroying the environmental conditions that have held stable and steadily governed for literally all of human history.” (Wallace-Wells, 29). Thus the hypocrisy of Ice Watch reveals itself. A white Nordic man with a sense of all knowing entitlement and an obligation to share such coveted knowledge of the melting ice caps added a few drops to an ever growing bucket as he removed precious ice from its home and burned fuel to ship it to foreign cities simply to watch it melt. And yet, Ice Watch fulfilled its goal perfectly as it showed us those millennia old ice formations melting in our hands; dying from the poison we fed it ourselves. Ice Watch presented audiences with humanity's next task: “the project of preserving our collective future, forestalling that devastation and engineering an alternate path” while simultaneously contributing to the destruction of that collective future (Wallace-Wells, 29). In achieving its desired political work, this art contradicted the political work that needed to be done.

Ranciere has unpacked the sensory and aesthetic experience of Ice Watch while Wallace-Wells has revealed its failures as a factual and productive resource for awareness. Nixon will shed light on both an effective aspect of Ice Watch as well as another misstep. In his work Nixon focuses largely on a concept he calls slow violence. It is a type of violence that “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” (Nixon, 2). Ice Watch depicted slow violence as it revealed the slow nature of melting ice rather than attempting to display “an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility.” (Nixon, 2). According to Nixon, Eliasson's engagement of an “incremental and accretive” violence was more productive for raising awareness “across a range of temporal scales” (Nixon, 2). Which is to say that while Nixon might take issue with Eliasson having watched 100 tons of ice slowly melt away in small increments, has also aware that this is the same amount that melts every 1/100 of a second in Greenland. Thus Eliasson showed accretive violence, but one that only hinted at a temporal landscape that the audience can’t even fathom from this limited perspective (Ice Watch Installation Video). The true purpose of this exhibition was in its attempt to chip away at the larger, seemingly immeasurable, disasters that will come as a result of climate change.

Ice Watch hints at the threat of climate change and the consequences “that remain imperceptible to the senses, either because they are geographically remote,” or “are played out across a time span that exceeds the instance of observation or even the physiological life of the human observer.” (Nixon, 15). Viewing climate change in its entirety can be debilitating. By bringing the ice to the audience and condensing the timeline into just a few short days until it's completely melted away, the installation exhibited a miniature model of climate change. Changing its proximity and observable nature helps “make the unapparent appear, making it accessible and tangible by humanizing drawn-out threats inaccessible to the immediate senses.” (Nixon, 15). This raises the question of effectiveness. Just because an art piece engages your senses and makes a concept such as melting ice more apparent does not automatically mean that there will be a greater awareness of climate change as a whole, nor does it promise actionable change. Just because audiences become aware of the consequences of climate change does not mean that they will begin to mobilize or act decisively (Nixon, 2). According to Nixon and his conceptual slow violence, Ice Watch may have done political work to display our society's slow violence against ice, but did not bridge the gap to display how the melting of the ice enacts slow violence onto the global vulnerable population and the entire global population on whole for that matter.

The question I have come to at the end of all this analyzation, is beyond whether or not Ice Watch is doing political work or not. The answer is still unclear. Ice Watch did distribute to the senses of its audiences and create a tangible experience of climate change that could be seen and felt as well as heard, smelled, and tasted. The installation did not, however, display real facts and statistics to show that it had a real effect on audiences' awareness nor did it touch on the consequences of melting ice in an impactful way. In the end, it was simply a means of bringing climate change into conversation, a way to place it on peoples paths to work, to make them stop and think about how arctic ice is melting, but not what to do about it, not who it will effect, and not the consequences of that melting ice. The real question bears asking if it is the small and private audiences of Ice Watch that ought to carry the weight of awareness alone. Individuals must, of course, carry some of the weight. It was, however, presumptuous and foolish to place a block of ice in front of a Nordic audience, one who will remain virtually unaffected by a changing climate or will at least have access to the resources to battle it, and ask them to do something about it. Ultimately, I do not believe that Ice Watch accomplished any political work. The installation was not informative, the emissions a waste, and it does not seem that watching ice melt was impactful in any meaningful or actionable way. Not only does Eliasson’s Ice Watch fail to do political work, it failed to aim its attempt at political work in any one direction, at any group, or at any real fundamental goal for change.