Just like facing the onrushing tide of our rising seas, London’s been absolutely drowning in ecological art recently. All of it has sucked, but ‘Re/Sisters’ at the Barbican is trying to be the first one worth the carbon emissions of its multiple video installations.
Where the others have failed (‘Back to Earth’ at the Serpentine, ‘Dear Earth’ at the Hayward) is in making art that lectures viewers and sloganeers while actually doing nothing about climate change. But much of ‘Re/Sisters’ is about actual real life resistance. It focuses on how indigenous communities, women and gender nonconforming people have been at the centre of ecological activism, and how if anyone’s going to save the planet, it’s them.
It starts with brutal exploitation of natural resources and destruction of landscapes. Simryn Gill and Mabe Bethonico document open pit mines like sores on the land, Taloi Haviini creates a moving portrait of life in the shadow of a copper pit in Papua New Guinea and Sim Chi Yin documents the building of luxury artificial islands. This is art as witness.
Then there’s active resistance: zines and images from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, JEB’s photos of anti-nuclear demonstrations in New York, pictures of women saving trees in northern India and protesting against contaminated water in America.
Throughout this first chunk of the exhibition, women are shown as essential to the fight for climate justice, ecological rights and the resistance to capitalism, extraction and exploitation. Not all of it is good art, and not all of it is even good resistance, but at least it’s all doing something; fighting, documenting, highlighting.
At least it’s all doing something; fighting, documenting, highlighting
Upstairs, things get a little freer and more esoteric, looking at artists who use their work to draw links between bodies and nature, gender and water, feminism and land access. It’s basically a totally separate exhibition that feels only barely linked to the rest of the show. There are amazing photos of Ana Mendieta covered in mud and melting into the landscape, Francesca Woodman becoming a tree, Judy Chicago’s desert filled with coloured smoke. It’s all about the relationship between bodies and nature.
The art here isn’t the problem, plenty of it is great. The problem is the language, the approach and the forced, patronising conceptual framework of the show. Every work is accompanied by an endless spiel of nonsensical cod-philosophical undergrad bollocks. ‘By deploying camouflage strategies, the artists here resist demands for gendered and racialised bodies to be constrained by settler-colonial politics or extraction logics’, says one blurb. Which isn’t just pseudo-intellectual guff, it’s not even true. Plenty of the artists described would object to being so reductively confined. Other works apparently ‘call into question the heteropatriarchal tradition of landscape photography’ or ‘resist the phallogocentric logic of extraction’. Just a load of self-aggrandising art waffle.
Worst of all, there’s a Barbara Kruger work that says ‘we won’t play nature to your culture’ across a photograph of a woman’s face, which according to the wall text ‘signals how women have been straitjacketed by reductive Cartesian dualisms and dichotomies’. People, it’s Barbara Kruger, she literally says what she means on the actual artworks, you don’t need to take her direct, intelligible message and turn it into bullshit.
Even though there’s lots of good art and plenty of good ideas here, the whole thing’s like being vomited on by a million curating undergrads. But at least that’s a renewable resource.
