Blink and you
would have missed it, but as art lovers rushed toward the entrance of Art
Basel’s Unlimited section, a small group of students and young artists were
staging a brief silent performance. Slowly moving around each other gesturing
at key words (heatwave, sea level, and drought) on their t-shirts, they aimed
to raise climate awareness, engaging visitors positively.
Meanwhile inside
the mammoth art fair, galleries had brought relatively few artworks with
explicit environmental messaging, but there were some, such as a series of
Olafur Eliasson’s pictures taken inside glacier holes, Doug Aitken’s aluminium
lightbox spelling the word THINK with chromogenic transparency in acrylic a
sunset over a bare landscape, and Jack Pierson’s ominous warning ‘There is
still time’ written on a wall.
The artistic
value of such efforts is being recognized (the Lithuanian Pavilion’s climate
change-themed opera “Sun & Sea (Marina)” won the Golden Lion award at the
Venice Biennale), but organisers need to do more. As it stands, promoting
artworks that have an environmental commentary in large-scale art events such
as Art Basel or the Venice Biennale may seem ironic after all, such events, by
their very nature, fly in the face of sustainability. From the well-heeled
visitors who travel from all over the world to attend, to the galleries
shipping artworks extensively wrapped in plastic with crates that are often
discarded after a single use, the art world has a high carbon footprint and
that needs to be addressed.
Catherine
Bottrill, head of the Creative Green Programme at Julie’s Bicycle, a non-profit
consultancy and environmental-tracking group, says that from an art world
perspective, the most damaging carbon footprint is that of the people: “not
only the movement of people, either the professionals that are creating and
enabling the work, but also the visitors coming to see the works. That is one
of the tougher challenges to deal with; and there is no silver bullet to deal
with this, unfortunately.”
Bottrill
believes artists need to start thinking about the environmental impact of their
work and its presentation to the public right at the beginning of conception:
“It’s a difficult one, but there are lots of things you can do around your travel
in terms of efficiency.”
Olafur Eliasson agreed
to have the carbon footprint of his Ice Watch project tracked last December
when he brought 30 ice chunks from Greenland to London’s streets where they
were then allowed to melt in order to raise awareness about climate change. The
report assessed the project’s overall carbon footprint totalled 55 tonnes of CO2
emissions, and while the bulk of the emissions (82%) came from the
transportation of the ice, an estimated 16% were generated by the travel undertaken
by the team from Studio Olafur Eliasson to London.
The report also made recommendations pointing out that
calculating the estimated carbon footprint from the outset of the project could
have helped make decisions that would have further mitigated the environmental
impact. For example, while there were limited opportunities for reducing the carbon
footprint involved in the freighting of Ice Watch, the report noted, using
highly efficient refrigeration and trucking, and reducing the length of time the
ice was stored between collection and exhibition would have reduced the energy
demand for refrigeration. Significant carbon savings could also have been made
by using train travel within Europe and selecting hotel accommodation with
strong sustainability credentials.
The report stated carbon savings could also have been
obtained through the use of LED technologies to light the installation,
ensuring optimisation of lighting technology and design, while the Studio’s carbon saving endeavours could also
have extended to requesting
information from suppliers and partners (shipping and trucking companies, the Tate museum
etc.) on their environmental policy
and initiatives.
Still, the report also noted that the project’s carbon
footprint was the equivalent of 52 return flights from London to witness the
icebergs melting: “This is opposed to the thousands of visitors that
experienced Ice Watch and the hundreds of thousands who connected with the
issue of climate change through the digital platforms.”
With trees
playing a crucial role in regulating carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in
the atmosphere, Studio Olafur Eliasson made a donation to the Woodland Trust,
the UK's largest woodland conservation charity to help mitigate the carbon
impact of Ice Watch London.
Eliasson’s
commitment to ‘greening his exhibitions’ continues with his major retrospective
at the Tate Modern, running until January 5, 2020. Most of the 40 works were
selected from European collections to minimise transportation and a conscious
effort was made to avoid airfreight in order to reduce the exhibition’s carbon
footprint, said the exhibition’s co-curator Mark Godfrey. Eliasson’s studio
also worked with the Tate Modern to create a lunch menu that is vegetarian,
organic and locally sourced.
Right after the opening of Eliasson’s exhibition at Tate
Modern, the Tate’s Directors pledged to respond to the climate emergency with
actions across all four Tate galleries and their stores. A statement released
by the museum noted, “Tate is committed to reducing its carbon footprint by at
least 10% cent by 2023 and is switching to a green electricity tariff across
all four galleries. We have helped shape international green museum principles
for the care of collections and are sustainably sourcing food in our
restaurants and bars, offering greater emphasis on vegetarian and vegan
choices. We are auditing our travel and are adopting a train-first policy.”
While promising to look for ways to become more adaptive
and responsible, the statement acknowledged, “There are, nevertheless, some
hard truths to face about how we operate; about the sustainability of public
institutions, like our museums, and about the future of culture. Large public
buildings, attracting millions of visitors from the UK and overseas, require
energy. We see caring for and sharing a national art collection as a public
good, but it also consumes resource. We are rooted in the UK but international
in outlook: making art accessible globally depends on the movement of works of art across the world.”
Elsewhere in the
art sector, art fair and art event organizers can also make more effort to
reduce their carbon footprint. Bottrill notes, “The key is probably working
with the concessions, suppliers and contractors; in particular if it’s a venue
being regularly used, like at Art Basel where you have an opportunity, because
you’re an important client, to the city, to the facility, to develop
partnership agreements with them. We always say, in the first year, tell them
you are keen on an environmental policy and working on it, in the second year
put it in the contract that you would expect them to do this, and the third
year, if they are still not playing ball, you should look for an alternative.
Now with the green economy, lots of alternatives are coming to play.”
One important
area to focus on is packaging. Currently artwork crates are constructed of wood
while museum-quality crates contain a second inner pack nestled inside a deep
foam lining, into which the artworks are fitted, wrapped in sheet polyethylene.
All crates are made-to-order and reconfiguring them for diļ¬erent artworks is
time-consuming, plus with the wood often varnished to protect against moisture,
it cannot be recycled and ends up in landfill.
But alternatives
are available. Rokbox is pioneering a new reusable shipping crate system that
won the most recent Red Dot: Best of the Best in Product design, one of the
world’s largest design competitions. The case is made of waterproof, inert
materials, and is 40% lighter than a similar size museum crate, with no
compromise to the safety of the art works, and the company notes they do not
require any additional packaging inside.
Andrew
Stramentov, CEO and co-founder of Rokbox, argues the new packaging system not
only protects the artworks better, but also helps combat the huge waste with
art packaging in the art handling industry.
He points out
art collectors have an important role to play in the ecosystem to ‘green the
art world’ by starting to ask questions to their galleries and shipping companies;
because unless they do so, he notes, “there is very little imperative for the
system to change.”
This story was first published in A: The First Of October edition
This story was first published in A: The First Of October edition