Manifest Destiny sits squarely within the growing corpus of climate disaster literature and film. A subgenre of science fiction, climate fiction (cli-fi) has become a staple of popular culture, evidenced by the release of a veritable deluge of natural disaster films and docudramas that capitalize on our fear of such events and our morbid fascination with their aftermath. The iconography of the contemporary megacity plays a starring role in many of these films, continuing the long tradition of using cities to represent humanity’s moral and environmental ills. Rockman applies the same fictive device in his provocative image of a city in the sea.
Manifest Destiny extends twenty-four feet (7.3 meters) in length and is framed at left and right by the ruins of two bridges. On the far left of the composition, a reengineered Manhattan Bridge hovers just below the elevated waters of the East River. Rockman’s fictional structure includes a tunnel designed to contend with the city’s population boom and changing topography. Mirroring this futuristic artery is the obsolete architecture of the Brooklyn Bridge. Constructed between 1870 and 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge is a potent symbol of the unbridled drive for technological progress that defined the nineteenth century. Rockman also refers to the era’s expansionist spirit with the painting’s title, borrowing a phrase coined by the New York journalist John L. O’Sullivan in 1845. O’Sullivan used the term as a quasi-religious justification for territorial expansion across the American continent, asserting that the United States had a divine right to conquer and possess westward lands such as Texas, Oregon, and California. The ideology of manifest destiny is deeply rooted in the American sensibility, dating as far back as the Puritan settlers who sought to tame their new frontier and exploit its natural resources. Rockman’s painting suggests the persistence of such attitudes today and comments on the deleterious role of global capitalism and urban development in the Anthropocene. It is a damning indictment.
But the end of modern civilization does not mark the end of all life. On the contrary, Manifest Destiny teems with organic growth. Rockman uses the image of urban decay to demonstrate the resilience of certain ecosystems and the adaptive powers of nature. Local flora and fauna that have survived the climatic scourge are joined by migrant life from equatorial zones. Rockman’s compendium of aquatic creatures raises the question of exactly which species will survive the current biodiversity crisis brought on by humans.
Rockman recently completed two new paintings that explore the interconnected effects that humans have on Earth systems and species. Bronx Zoo (2013; plate 6) and Gowanus (2013; plate 5) picture two dramatically different sites in New York—one famous for its conservation stewardship and the other infamous for its environmental neglect. Like Manifest Destiny, both works imagine a flooded future for Manhattan and its surrounding boroughs. Humans are suspiciously absent, but their imprint is evident everywhere.
In Bronx Zoo, Rockman depicts a scene of anarchy amid the ruins of New York’s historic zoo. Animals have escaped from their neoclassical enclosures and overtaken the flooded park. Created shortly before Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, it is an uncomfortably prescient image of destruction. The exact cause of the destruction remains unclear, but the flooding suggests a severe climate event. The visual and conceptual parallels with Manifest Destiny are undeniable, in particular the allusion to nineteenth-century ideals.
Zoos are a product of the same nineteenth-century impulse that fueled westward expansion across the United States—the desire to conquer and impose order on the natural world. In the era of their inception, however, these constructs were important indicators of the growing acceptance of ecological science and the attendant concern over wildlife depletion. It is no coincidence that the first zoological parks were established in major cities, such as London, Paris, and New York. In these rapidly industrialized areas, “importing” nature satisfied the dual goals of reintroducing wildlife into an urban environment and rescuing endangered species whose habitats were being decimated in other parts of the world. Over the past century, zoos have evolved from places designed for entertainment and dominion over nature to centers geared toward education and species conservation. Centers such as the Smithsonian’s Conservation Biology Institute are critical indicators of the Anthropocene, symbolizing the impact that humans have already had on species loss and the role that humans must now play in protecting and preserving biodiversity on the planet.
While Bronx Zoo alludes to the dangers of neglecting our environmental responsibilities, Rockman takes this thought experiment even further in his terrifying depiction of New York’s Gowanus Canal. Once a thriving tidal estuary nestled in South Brooklyn, the Gowanus Creek was converted into a canal in 1869 to aid transportation and promote industry. Since its completion, serious contamination problems have plagued the canal and surrounding areas. Designated a Superfund site by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2010, it is one of the most polluted bodies of water in the United States. A putrid reminder of New York City’s industrial past and a cautionary tale for future urban development, Gowanus epitomizes Rockman’s artistic response to the Anthropocene: dark, toxic, apocalyptic.
The taint of our modern megacities will leave an indelible mark on Earth’s geologic record long after they have crumbled into the sea. The question is: how can we forestall the environmental and societal decline that Rockman portends? The answer may reside in the very same cities, where problems of the Anthropocene are most acute. By harnessing their creative and intellectual capital, along with economies of scale that promote efficiency, cities are poised to devise innovative solutions for sustainable living. Artists such as Rockman who work at the intersection of art, science, and imagination will be essential to this process. Rockman’s monumental paintings bring the future into the present, helping us grapple with current planetary changes and serving as a catalyst for social and environmental reform.
AFRICAN ART AND THE ANTHROPOCENE
KAREN E. MILBOURNE
While on a short-term residency in Vermont in 2005, the Nigerian painter Jerry Buhari poured pools of color that reflected the autumnal splendor outside his window onto a stretched canvas and upended it. Sage, gold, burgundy, and brown flowed down the surface of the canvas as the artist moved his brush back and forth with feathery motions to create an effect that evokes the prismatic sheen of an oil spill on the waters of Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger delta. With this gesture and these colors, Buhari collapsed the five-thousand-plus miles that separate Vermont from his homeland and the mental barriers that segregate the pollution and human rights violations of southeastern Nigeria from the warmth of New England homes heated with Nigerian crude. Fall and Spill History (plate 7), Buhari’s visually lush and intellectually charged painting, is emblematic of artworks by artists consciously and conscientiously engaged with living in the Anthropocene—artists who are, to borrow the words of Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, concerned with “environmental justice thinking, asking what worlds we are intentionally and unintentionally creating, and what worlds we are foreclosing while living in an increasingly diminished present.”
Jerry Buhari’s commitment to addressing environmental issues with his paintings, prints, installations, performances, and writings is long-standing. To accompany a 2009 solo exhibition, Man and Earth, at the Goethe-Institut in Lagos, the artist wrote, “Today the talk of the world is about an endangered Earth. One often wonders how much of the talk is backed with genuine concern and the will to take positive steps. But it should not surprise the world that artists are on the forefront of the discussion of the environment. They have always been.” For Buhari, as for other artists around the planet, his artworks are the products of years of research and concerted effort to create sustainable practices and understandings that cross geographic, linguistic, and cultural divides.
Like Buhari, South Africa’s Georgia Papageorge feels driven to make works that document environmental change and advocate for new policies and behaviors on an emotional level. In 1996, this passionate activist and grandmoth
er climbed Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro (“Mountain of greatness”)—the world’s tallest freestanding volcanic mountain, which supports a unique, self-contained ecosystem of arid plains, savanna, mountain forest, alpine desert, and glacial ecological zones. When Papageorge returned there nine years later, she was shocked by the rapid and dramatic changes it had undergone. Over the next eleven years, she returned to the mountain numerous times—climbing it four more times and twice hiring biplanes to film its crater from above—and has meticulously tracked down and reviewed photographic and documentary evidence of its condition dating back to 1898. The resulting artworks include an immersive video, dramatic installations, and subtle mixed-media collages, including Maasai Steppe Ascending—Convective Displacement (1997; plate 1), in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, that reveal this mountain to be a barometer of climate change. In Maasai Steppe, the artist reproduces images of Kilimanjaro across the decades to illustrate the shrinking of its glacier. Papageorge interrupts these images with vertical striations made with volcanic ash from the mountain, which she refers to as “running tears for an irreparable loss.” The vertical lines also evoke a ladder, to suggest the human capacity to transcend or overcome our mistakes.
Both Buhari and Papageorge were included in two high-profile exhibitions that traveled the United States: Environment and Object: Recent African Art (2012) and the Smithsonian’s Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa (2013). Earth Matters united more than forty artists from across the vast African continent to explore ways that African individuals and communities have drawn power from, interpreted, and protected Earth. As a result of this exhibition, the artists have joined forces and plan to petition for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization recognition of their efforts. And both Environment and Object and Earth Matters were preceded by Rencontres, the pan-African photography biennial held in Mali in 2011, which took as its theme “For a Sustainable World.” Each of these endeavors points to the increasing attention being paid to issues of sustainability by both artists and the art world, and the mounting pressure from African voices to be included in global conversations on the issues defining life in the Anthropocene. Established artists such as Buhari and Papageorge are being joined by a new generation of artists whose visions and approaches suggest the increasing power of the arts to effect change in locations such as Dakar and beyond.
Fabrice Monteiro and Sam Hopkins exemplify this new generation. A former professional model raised in Benin, Monteiro moved to Dakar in 2011, bringing his fashion-world knowledge and aesthetic to the problem of waste management in Senegal. Working with the fashion designer Doulsy (Jah Gal) and the crowdsourcing site Ecofund, the artist released The Prophecy (2014), a series of photographs in which disturbingly beautiful spirits, or djinns, emerge from damaged landscapes, as part of an effort to teach sustainable practices to local populations for whom djinns are a guiding force. In Untitled #1 (plate 2), a majestic figure in a rainbow skirt made of discarded plastic bags, drink cartons, snack wrappers, and other trash towers above the smoking field of rubbish that has transformed the formerly green marshes of Mbeubeuss in Dakar. In Untitled #2 (plate 3), an aquatic creature with features occluded by black plastic emerges from the once-pristine Hann Bay, where abandoned ships now mix with spilled oil and the blood and offal from a nearby slaughterhouse. In addition to hanging in galleries and museums worldwide, these images will appear in children’s books and outreach programs in Senegal. As the artist says, “When it comes to speaking about environmental issues, either you get alarming numbers and statistics or pictures of devastated landscapes. But with projects such as The Prophecy, you can speak to the hearts of people by mixing facts and art. Giving this issue a mystical element helps with awareness, and pushes people to change—and change now.”
Plastic also features centrally in the work of Kenya’s Sam Hopkins. In his 2016 performance and exhibition The Rubbish Companion, at Galerie Börgmann in Cologne, the artist imagined a future in which plastic bags are so rare that there are educational campaigns related to their forms and uses. With savvy humor, the artist compels us to think about what we value, what we save, and to whom we listen. And, importantly, he forces us to think about the future—a period often denied to Africa’s artists and citizens when they are, all too frequently, associated with ideas of a romantic past or a troubled present.
Whether bridging cultural distance, recovering valuable historical documentation, speaking to local populations, or envisioning an alternative future, many works by Africa’s artists align with what the psychologists Thomas Doherty and Susan Clayton call “a ‘beyond toxicity’ perspective,” in which “the challenges of climate change may also ‘galvanize creative ideas and actions in ways that transform and strengthen the resilience of and creativity of community and individuals.’” For as the writer and activist Susan Sontag taught us about images of trauma, it is not the job of these artworks to make us feel nobler for having looked at them or to absolve us of further responsibility; they are a call to action.
WHY POLAR BEARS?
SEEING THE ARCTIC ANEW
SUBHANKAR BANERJEE
In the long list of social-environmental threats that the hotly debated and controversial term Anthropocene attempts to hold together, climate change looms large. The Arctic is its bellwether, which is no surprise, as the top of Earth continues to warm at a rate of at least twice the global average. Igor Krupnik and Dyanna Jolly’s 2002 edited volume, The Earth Is Faster Now, highlights how climate change was already causing significant social-ecological disruptions in the Arctic at the turn of the twenty-first century, even though it was not yet having that troublesome effect on most of the rest of Earth’s inhabitants.
Art and popular visual culture can help us apprehend how climate change has transformed the Arctic. In 1973, the acclaimed Inuk artist Pauta Saila made an exuberant stone sculpture, Dancing Bear. It depicts a polar bear standing on one of its hind legs, with the other one up and truncated, its front legs slightly stretched to the side and truncated, its face aslant, looking up—a jubilant anthropomorphic portrayal of the animal dancing, with a touch of humor. Almost a quarter century later, on the cover of Thomas Mangelsen’s 1997 photo-essay book on polar bears, Polar Dance, two bears face each other standing upright on their hind legs, with their front legs stretched to the side—immediately bringing to mind Saila’s iconic Dancing Bear. Visual depictions of the Arctic produced during the second half of the twentieth century primarily celebrate the Far North and its diversity of life and cultures. But as the new century arrived, visual depictions began to transform—from celebration to mourning and a call to action.
Three years after Polar Dance was published, I went to Churchill, in subarctic Canada, where Mangelsen had taken most of the photographs for his book. There I photographed a rather ghastly scene—one bear eating another, behavior not normal for polar bears, the local people said. Because of rapid warming, the sea ice in Hudson Bay is forming later in autumn and melting sooner in spring, which forces the bears to spend more time than usual on land, with a greater risk of starvation. While it is difficult to ascertain a cause such as climate change for one particular incident like the one I witnessed, it is possible that starvation brought about by warming might have contributed to the killing of one polar bear by another. The following year, along the Beaufort Sea coast in northeast Alaska, I photographed a polar bear approaching a whale bone left from the previous year’s hunt by the Iñupiat people of Kaktovik. On March 19, 2003, the U.S. senator Barbara Boxer used that photograph to argue successfully against oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. At the time, the subarctic polar bears in Churchill were suffering from starvation, but the Arctic polar bear population in the Beaufort Sea was thought to be stable.
The following year, however, the scientist Charles Monett and his colleagues observed four drowned bears in the southern Beaufort Sea. In 2006, Polar Biology published
their research, the first on the plight of polar bears in a warming Arctic sea. The rapid melting of Arctic sea ice was creating vast areas of open water during summer months, which forced the bears to swim much longer distances, in some cases leading to their death by drowning. That year brought wide attention to polar bears: the former U.S. vice president Al Gore and the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim turned the science of polar bear drowning into an animation for their Academy Award–winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, and an image of a polar bear on thin ice looking tentatively at what lies ahead made the cover of Time magazine. Likely aware of the media coverage, the Inuk artist Bill Nasogaluak made an affective stone sculpture, Arctic Angst (formerly Bear Falling through Rotting Ice; plate 4), that year. Instead of standing on a chunk of sea ice (as on the cover of Time) or looking for a piece of sea ice to rest on (as in An Inconvenient Truth), Nasogaluak’s bear is inside the ice; the artist compresses the vast space of the Arctic Ocean into something intimate, reflecting the inextricably linked fates of the bear and the sea ice. Only a small part of the bear is visible through the disintegrating ice, as if the animal were trapped inside a cage from which no escape was in sight. Arctic Angst is an extraordinary work of art, in which the entrapment of the bear in its own collapsing home is not unlike the entrapment that many poor and marginalized human communities are already beginning to feel as rapid warming challenges survival and migration is not always a viable option.
While the image of the polar bear was transforming from dancing to drowning, the celebrated Inuk artist Annie Pootoogook created Bear by the Window (2004), an unsentimental ink and pencil crayon drawing that challenges popular depictions that romanticize, exotify, or dramatize the animal. She portrays the bear as a scavenger, reaching toward a toppled trash can outside a government-built home, but as it looks up it sees the partially visible face of a child through a crack in a window curtain—the curiosity of the bear meets the curiosity of the child. The drawing depicts the bear as a part of contemporary Inuit life and resists any attempt to turn the animal into an object of spectacle, which happened in Churchill and is now happening in Kaktovik. There is an irony in the rush to see vanishing polar bears, as long-distance Arctic ecotourism contributes to further warming of the Arctic. And such a rush can last only until there are no bears left; in the part of the Beaufort Sea near Kaktovik, their population already declined by 40 percent between 2001 and 2010.
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