Hi-Vis Futures: Art for Climate Justice

By Libby Robin*

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It is still not easy to talk about climate change in Australia. Publicly funded arts institutions in the “GLAM” sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) are struggling with major funding cuts, year after year, and even the Australian Research Council grants, which are peer-reviewed, have been subject to interference by ideologically-committed politicians, who regard both the arts and climate change as “leftist” causes. Governments led or controlled by vested fossil fuel interests, climate change denialists and their fellow-travellers, have been the norm for the past six years. 

When the Climate Commission was abolished by the Australian federal government in 2013, its scientific members formed a new Climate Council to undertake the important work of overseeing Australia’s contributions to planetary climate change. The new body started as a crowd-funded initiative with staff and board-members donating their time, as a service to the community. As the gap grows between the super-rich and everyone else, and trust in government is in decline, “public good” causes, including basic information services, need new ways to survive in Australia.

In the vacuum left by the national government, business and the arts are creating new partnerships. Guy Abrahams, a Melbourne-based former lawyer and art-gallery director, who also trained as an Al Gore climate change ambassador, has initiated a series of biennial Climarte Festivals, the first of which was held in 2015. Their motto is Art plus Climate equals Change. Climarte festivals work in partnership with public and private museums and galleries, and with business partners like Bank Australia, a smaller bank that has divested from fossil fuels and actively invests in new initiatives. One of the exciting aspects of the Climarte project is that it has moved beyond the big cities like Melbourne and Sydney, and now includes significant initiatives in regional areas, particularly regions that have traditionally depended on fossil fuel industries like coal mines and car manufacturers. 

For the 2019 Climarte festival, the Latrobe Regional Gallery in Morwell commissioned visual artists Mandy Martin, Alexander Boynes and composer-musician Tristen Parr to create Rewriting the Score, a 12-metre collaborative work combining traditional oil-painting with video projection and a music composition. Their work was both an exhibition and a cue for change beyond the gallery. Rewriting the Scorecombined the deep history of the region, captured through the beautiful Gondwanan ferns that still survive alongside the Latrobe Valley’s aging power stations east of Melbourne. The dirty brown coal mines that have been the source of livelihoods in the struggling community are closing as the Coal Era is reaching its end. The power stations are being retired and coal workers are facing redundancy. People are feeling pain in this place. As part of a gallery of grief, Boynes’s video includes Parr playing his own elegiac cello composition in a fading fern gully that has become an open-cut mine. He wears a worker’s hard hat while playing the instrument. This new cross-fertilization of arts movements allows space for people to mourn the changes in their local places. 

The work also underlines the importance of climate action working to support new livelihoods for the people displaced by necessary energy transitions. In this case, the local arts scene has taken up the challenge, and art participation is rising. Most new employment in this once industrial valley is in the arts industries, in new alternative energy industries and in businesses that have moved in to support the region, including Bank Australia, which has moved call centres from Melbourne and Sydney to Morwell, and sponsors many of the art initiatives that are now employing people in the region.

Mandy Martin, known to many ICEHO people because she was a plenary speaker and environmental artist at the World Congress of Environmental History in Guimarães in 2014, has been involved in many different Climarte events over the life of the festival. In November 2019 – February 2020, one small regional gallery, the Canberra Museum and Art Gallery[1] exhibited ‘Hi-Vis Futures’ a major exhibition of Art for Climate Justice work, featuring Mandy Martin a major Australian painter, and emerging artists Alexander Boynes, a video-artist and Tristen Parr, a sound artist. Importantly for CMAG, Martin and Boynes are local artists:  Boynes lives in Canberra and Martin in the country nearby. 

Hi-Vis Futuresis unusual in that it features three different collaborative projects exhibited at Climarte events in different years, in different regional places, each highlighting local issues. Alongside these focal works, several with their own soundspace for Parr’s art, there are more traditional solo works, developed in parallel, including sketches, complementary works and even a cabinet of curiosities – artefacts of art-making. Boynes is the video artist, but he also exhibits monochrome works, ink and enamel on aluminium that complement the fluoro-coloured energy of Martin’s big works. The collaborative and individual works hang together in this exhibition, together providing a strong sense of how the art-climate nexus has developed and shifted over its short history. 

Mandy has been well-known as an environmental artist: her work was commissioned for Australia’s new Parliament House, opened in 1988. Red Ochre Cove. (1987) was at the time the largest commissioned painting in the country. It still hangs in the Parliamentary Committee Room. The place it depicts was a site of importance to her ecologist father, Peter Martin, and inspired by sketches made on one of their last field trips together. 

Most of the Martin works held in the permanent collection at the National Gallery of Australia are strongly industrial. In the 1970s she worked closely with activists seeking workers’ rights, especially for women working in unsafe industrial environments. The rights of people and of “more-than-human others” to safe living places have always been a driving force for her art. In the 21stcentury, her art has increasingly explored justice and climate change: her newest partnerships are with Boynes and Parr, a generation younger than Martin. Their works explore the pain of the “new normal”. 

Martin’s art partnerships began in the 1990s with travels and fellowships in remote Australia, documenting environmental change, through words as well as artworks.  Over time her teams have included ecologists, farmers, Indigenous artists, and environmental historians. Her caravanserai of environmental thinkers has documented the history of environmental change in our times, in places that are often beyond the line of vision of the city-dwellers in the highly urbanized nation of Australia. 

Although Canberra Museum and Art Gallery is a small space, Hi-Vis Futuresis a big exhibition, building on a lifetime of making art.  The issue of climate action in Australia is big, so the works are big, the thinking is big and the partnerships with other artists, and with writers and curators make it much more than just a wonderful art show. It fills most of the gallery space available – two major halls – with Martin’s fiery colour and passion … and the funereal silver-greys and sad sounds from the younger artists. The soundscapes and the video projections give the exhibition filmic qualities, but the gallery is not a cinema: it is a place of reflection. The still works demand their own time. There is also a lively film about the philosophy of the show, featuring Mandy Martin and Alexander Boynes, and hosted elegantly by Virginia Rigney, whose thoughtful curation sets the tone.

The opening wall is striking: it is all words. Rigney offers direction to the visit; she slows it down to savour: Martin, Boynes and Parr’s work is offered ‘as a shared place to linger and reflect at a time when futures and consequences hover with iridescent certainty.’

The artists explain why the exhibition is called Hi-Vis Futures and how the fluorescent colours can distract us from the rise of danger in our midst:

‘As both a colour scheme and a warning system, Hi-Vis is designed to be at odds with the landscape. In doing so, it imposes a new type of control over the environment’.

The next few panels include works by environmental historians – engaging the partnerships of the humanities across different media, tying them together through the “fluoro” colour-scheme dictated by Hi-Visibility workers’ vests. German historian Christof Mauch’s idea of Slow Hopeis the focus of one of these panels.  The wall of ideas sends the visitor into the exhibition liberated from the need to attend to the works in a particular order, but rather encouraging meditation with quiet works between the major Climarte galleries, exploring the ‘stories of ecological alarm and stories of slow hope’ together, to use Mauch’s words.

This is an exhibition Australia has been crying out for. It takes climate change seriously, empowering viewers to engage at their own pace, and sends them out to take action, small and large, to do whatever they can do. As they step outside, the reality of climate change is all about them: Canberra’s air quality during this exhibition has been amongst the worst on the planet. This elegant inland city, without any heavy industry and with one of the best local renewable energy systems in the country (and the world), labours under its dual burdens of toxic smoke and failed leadership. The smoke from the unprecedented mega-fires that blaze in its hinterland stifles breathing and renders Parliament House invisible from the city centre. This year’s fires have deprived Canberrans of summer holidays. The coastal communities that are usually the places of respite in the hotter months are inaccessible. Every road is closed. This is the moment for Hi-Vis Futures. Right now, in “low-vis” Canberra, we need art that inspires new conversations about climate change and the future.

[1]CMAG is funded by the Australian Capital Territory government. It is not a “national” gallery.

* Professor Libby Robin FAHA is an historian of science and environmental ideas. She is Emeritus Professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University. She tweets at @LibbydeQ

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