Playful Protesters Use Art to Draw Attention to Inadequacy of Paris Climate Talks
By TJ Demos, excerpt via Truthout
An additional candidate for a Climate Games award, even though unaffiliated with the project, would be The Natural History Museum, the work of the New York-based art collective Not An Alternative. Also bridging the divide between art and activism – itself a necessary emergency measure in today’s climate-catastrophe environment – the project attempts to pressure arts, culture and science museums across the US to reject fossil-fuel-based corporate funding (they also connect with groups like Liberate Tate in the UK, protesting BP’s funding of cultural institutions such as the Tate Galleries).
Calling attention to the fact that oil mogul David H. Koch sits on the board of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, and has museum wings named after him, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Not An Alternative challenges this economics of corporate greenwashing whereby climate change deniers and corporate carbon polluters like Koch, who has spent over $67 million since 1997 to fund groups denying climate science, can mobilize public institutions as vehicles for their own publicity.
In March 2015, the group organized an “Open Letter to Museums,” signed by nearly 150 scientists, including several Nobel Prize winners, calling on US museums – and it turns out that there are more museums in the US than McDonald’s and Starbuckscombined – to “cut all ties with the fossil fuel industry and funders of climate science obfuscation.” As such they are part of an increasingly global cultural divestment movement.
Activists associated with #FossilFreeCulture performing outside the Louvre, Paris, 2015. (Photo: Lucky Tan / #FossilFreeCulture)
Currently in Paris, the group has linked with an international coalition – including the US-based GULF, Not An Alternative and Occupy Museums; the UK’s Art Not Oil, BP or not BP?, Liberate Tate, Platform London, Science Unstained, Shell Out Sounds and UK Tar Sands Network; and Stopp Oljesponsing av Norsk Kulturliv from Norway – to undertake an unauthorized divestment protest at the Louvre, an institution sponsored by oil and gas corporations Eni and Total. Outside the museum’s I.M. Pei-designed iconic glass pyramids on December 9, performers carried black umbrellas spelling out the words “Fossil Free Culture,” and spoke of their support for a culture beyond fossil fuels, both at the COP and in our museums. According to Beka Economopoulos, of Not An Alternative, “On the occasion of the UN climate summit in Paris, we’re urging the Louvre to stop sponsoring climate chaos.”
At the same time, a smaller group created the scene of what appeared to be a small oil spill in the atrium of the museum, and then proceeded to walk through it barefoot and then around in concentric circles, their footprints on the marble floor visualizing the fossil fuel corporations’ despoilment of the museum, and more broadly our environment. A number of participants were arrested by the French police and held for a short period for the “degradation of cultural property.” But for writer and activist Yates McKee, of GULF, the police had apprehended the wrong suspects: “The oil footprints mark the scene of crime, implicating the institution in the fossil fuel system and the climate crisis.”
Activists associated with #FossilFreeCulture performing inside the Louvre, Paris, 2015. (Photo: Clara Paillard / #FossilFreeCulture)
What we witness with these models is a shift in artistic practice toward an activist creativity directed at challenging the very structures of climate governance and finance, as well as the political economy of cultural institutions. The goal is to reinvent democratic self-determination through direct action, by contesting corporate power and its capitalist imperatives. In other words, artists are opposing what they view as a petrocapitalist tyranny that decides how we address environmental crisis, which is now widely seen as a threat like no other, as complex and interconnected as it is singularly grave and consequential. The artistic element of these actions involves injecting playful theatricality, collaborative energy and the spirit of positive fun, as well as the revelations and demands of an emergent eco-art-institutional critique, into what otherwise might be another dour mass protest march, which is at any rate currently prohibited in Paris.
That said, the activists, who have formed alliances with dozens of organizations, Indigenous movements and governments of global South nations assembling in northern Paris, such as Coalition Climate 21, have no naïve expectation of immediate success. Rather, the struggle is long-term, though the stakes have an immediate urgency, and the motivations are multiple: to invent creative tactics that will at the very least symbolically pressure UN delegates to finalize a viable and socially just plan, and to design creative models of activism that are nonviolent and capable of generating a collective source of infectious joy for participants. That joy is particularly needed if we are to overcome the cynicism and depression that results from the international dependency on the failed solutions of the COP system.
At the Louvre action, yet another red line was drawn before the umbrella-wielding protesters, this one meant to catalyze solidarity with front-line Indigenous communities fighting for climate justice. Daniel T’Seleie, from the Dene First Nation, Canada, explained:
In the Arctic, we are seeing severe impacts from global climate change; simultaneously we are defending our traditional homelands and culture from aggressive assaults on sacred and important subsistence use areas, such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. How are we to survive if the fossil fuel industry, companies such as Eni and Total continue to impede our rights? They are committing climate genocide on us, there is no way that we can allow corporations to continue to generate a social license to operate by sponsoring our cultural institutions such as the Louvre.
No Comments