top of page

Updated: Oct 20, 2023

Young, Liam. 2023. The Great Endeavor. Video. National Gallery of Victoria, Australia.

Photograph by Elizabeth Cole of Liam Young's The Great Endeavor, 2023.


Continuing my effort to find works with a positive stance on our ability to remediate climate change, I saw Liam Young’s Planetary Redesign exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria on 5 October 2023. The exhibition featured his video work The Great Endeavor 2023, which depicts the utopian premise that the world had united to develop a global network of machines to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.


The video fuses real footage of roiling oceans and dust storm shrouded deserts with digitally rendered images to show the gigantic machines being built and deployed on land, at sea and in the sky. The quasi-documentary result suggests a form of mechanical territorialisation (Leach 2006, 92-94), an impression enhanced by the almost complete absence of people in the work. While the images of relentlessly advancing machines call to mind the familiar science-fiction trope about the domination of artificial intelligence, traces of humanity echo in the faint melodic chanting of the soundscape.


Projected on a large screen in a darkened chamber, the 10 minute video looped continuously. The audience was offered bean bags or a bench. While I was there most people stayed for only a few minutes. I stayed for two cycles of the video, in part for research but also due to the compellingly realistic visuals. The affect (Hickey-Moody 2013, 85-86) was that I suspended my disbelief, and wondered if this could in fact be achieved. From the wall text this seems to be the artist’s intention.


I am contemplating how to infuse my works with hope as a way of initially engaging and then retaining the viewer. Young’s work offers useful lessons.


Bibliography:

  • Hickey-Moody, Anna. 2013. "Chapter 4 Affect as Method: Feelings, Aesthetics ad Affective Pedagogy." In Deleuze and research methodologies edited by Rebecca Coleman and Jessica Ringrose, 79-95. Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, United Kingdom).

  • Leach, Neil. 2006. Camouflage. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Updated: Oct 20, 2023

Dion, Mark. 2014. Cabinet of Marine Debris. Installation. Natural Wonders: the Sublime in Contemporary Art: Rizzoli Electa.

Photograph by Elizabeth Cole of marine debris at Hampton Beach, December 2017.


Mark Dion is an American artist who works with issues related to natural history and the environment, with works often presented in a museological context.


The image accompanying this post is a photograph I took a few years back, of a navigational buoy, washed up on my local beach. This type of marine debris seems almost sculptural in isolation, until one considers the compounding effect of all this pollution in our oceans. Hence I found Mark Dion’s Cabinet of Marine Debris 2014 very poignant, with its thematic collection of bottles and flotation devices. The work is a symbolic representation of our disregard for the sea, as evidenced by the careless pollution of Dion’s flotsam relics, through to current-day attempts to strip-mine the sea floor (Bryan 2023).


This installation reminds me of the many, post-modernist ways a viewer can consider a work, from a superficial interpretation (e.g., this is a collection of marine artefacts) through to a more contextual consideration (e.g., these artifacts are indicative of mankind’s lack of care for the sea).


Bibliography:

Updated: Oct 20, 2023

Laurence, Janet. 2016. Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef. Installation. The Aesthetics of the Undersea: Routledge.

Elizabeth Cole, screen shot of images from the ARC ONE website for the installation Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef 2016.


This work takes the form of a quasi-scientific/medical installation, set up to care for ailing reef.


Janet Laurence is a highly regarded Australian environmental artist, as evidenced by the many awards and accolades listed on her website. While having seen her work over the years at her Melbourne gallery, ARC ONE, it was only when I started to research environment artists for my current Studio 2 work that I fully appreciated both the aesthetics of her work and their intended affect.


A chapter reviewing her work Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef 2014 in the publication The Aesthetics of the Undersea (Cohen and Quigley 2019) reinforced this for me. The text included the observation that Laurence intends for her installations to prove that an aesthetic encounter can disrupt climate change blindness (Cohen and Quigley 2019, 191). In this regard Laurence has adopted the view of Giles Deleuze, that art address problems through sensation and affect (Grosz 2008).


However, as exemplified by this installation, Laurence creates order from chaos (Emmett 1998, 11) to construct new realities (Hickey-Moody 2013, 85), and thereby open our eyes.


This works remind me of the power of aesthetic affect.


Bibliography:

  • Cohen, Margaret, and Killian Quigley. 2019. The Aesthetics of the Undersea. 1st ed.Routledge Environmental Humanities Series. Milton: Taylor & Francis Group.

  • Emmett, Peter. 1998. Janet Laurence.An Art in Australia book. Sydney, N.S.W: Craftsman House [distributor].

  • Grosz, Elizabeth. 2008. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth.Wellek Library lectures. New York: Columbia University Press.

  • Hickey-Moody, Anna. 2013. "Chapter 4 Affect as Method: Feelings, Aesthetics ad Affective Pedagogy." In Deleuze and research methodologies edited by Rebecca Coleman and Jessica Ringrose, 79-95. Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, United Kingdom).


bottom of page