Water exhibition in Brisbane proves a wellspring of ideas for positive action against climate change.
Dee Jefferson. ABC Arts. December 30 2019.
I'm lurching around a white-walled, fluorescent-lit space in Queensland's Gallery of Modern Art, trying to maintain my balance.
The floor is the problem: it's covered in rocks the size of your fist or larger, that shift and roll underfoot — and it's on an incline.
I'm doing better than some because I'm in trainers; the women wearing heels are struggling. I watch one in wedges step carefully across a small stream flowing from top to bottom of the incline. Other people have reached the top, where they're crouching or standing. I'm making a bee-line for a couple of small rock cairns at the top of the slope, stacked by a previous visitor.
Everything is taking a lot more effort than you'd expect from a gallery.
I recall artist Olafur Eliasson's talk from the night before, in which he advocated the potential, in art, of just this kind of "slight physical destabilisation", which forces the gallery goer to "recompose the rules" by which they navigate an otherwise familiar space.
Delivering his talk on stage in one of the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) cinema theatrettes, Eliasson mimed the average visitor moving through an exhibition of paintings, stepping almost on autopilot from one painting on the wall to the next: "There's a highly synchronised behavioural pattern," he summarised.
He's describing the opposite to my experience in the room with the rocks and the water running through it — which is his artwork, Riverbed.
Eliasson's rockscape is headlining GOMA's summer exhibition, Water, featuring almost 100 works — from paintings and photography, to textiles, videos and installations — that reflect on that precious natural resource.
Riverbed, and the exhibition, contain a stream of environmental concern, but they do more: both are designed to engage viewers on a deeper level of consciousness — and act as a sort of wake-up call.
For Eliasson, art starts with waking up the senses: getting the viewer lost in a smoke haze, hugging a boulder of arctic ice, chasing the rainbow in a waterfall of mist, or — as at GOMA — navigating a rocky terrain.
These immersive, interactive experiences catch the viewer off guard, make them an active participant in the work, and engage their senses in a way that highlights how subjective they are: no-one sees the same rainbow, or experiences the smoky maze in the same way (depending on your sense of equilibrium, hearing and sight, for example).
Passers-by in Paris, finding 12 'boulders' of ice had mysteriously materialised in a circle outside the Place du Pantheon in December 2015, were taken by surprise — and were perhaps unexpectedly emotional in their response.
"People are coming by fascinated, most needing to touch the ice," American essayist Rebecca Solnit wrote on Facebook at the time.
This is the sweet spot for Eliasson.
"You could argue that if you understand that the way we see the world is actually not necessarily representing reality but [instead] how you select to choose and understand the world, then you're also probably capable of actually saying, 'Well, I might change my way of seeing the world', which is also a way of changing the world," he tells an audience at GOMA.
"So the world as such is not solidified, defined, given by God … maybe the world is really much more up to how you choose to conduct it."
Wellspring of ideas for positive change
Curator Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow chose Riverbed — of all of Eliasson's many works involving water — to headline GOMA's exhibition.
On an obvious level, it speaks to the scarcity of water; it's hard for an Australian not to think of the Murray River — or one of many other waterways reduced by drought.
Even without an Australian context, Eliasson's landscape foregrounds the absence of a greater body of water: it's a room-wide riverbed, dwarfing a 30-centimetre-wide stream. The optimistic might see a spring with potential for more water yet to come — but many will deduce a 'drying-up' that has left this landscape reduced, less habitable.
For Barlow, it was a "show-stopper" work of scale and spectacle (featuring more than 110 tonnes of rock, locally sourced) that could be enjoyed by a broad range of ages, backgrounds and levels of art experience — but which might also address the very real water crisis outside.
"We do live in a time when we need to engage people and give them a sense of fun and a sense of event — but how do you do that and also contribute to a dialogue about the challenges that people face [in connection to water]," she explains.
Water was conceived about two years ago, but on the day it opened in early December, it was 30-plus degrees outside the gallery, Brisbane was blanketed in a smoke haze from bushfires that had lasted several days — and GOMA felt like a timely oasis.
But without that thread of environmental concern, it might have also felt like a cruel joke — not least because of the smiling permafrost snowman sitting in a fridge overlooking Maiwar (Brisbane River), courtesy of Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss.
Some of the works selected by Barlow and her team directly engage with water crises: photographs of the Murray River, taken across 32 years by artist Bonita Ely, draw attention to its deterioration — through framing details such as the cracked, dry riverbed, or the sludge of algae; a video work by Samoan-Australian artist Angela Tiatia documents the sea encroaching into everyday life on the island of Tuvalu in the Pacific.
Her conceptual video work Holding On, on the adjacent wall, makes a more subtle (but equally powerful) statement on climate change: Tiatia is seen lying on a concrete plinth in the ocean, like an inverted crucifix, as the waters lap ever higher.
These works remind us that people in the Pacific are putting their bodies on the line in facing the rising sea levels.
At the exhibition's entrance, a mound of 12,000 concrete-cast oyster shells and black silica, by Quandamooka artist Megan Cope, recreates an Indigenous shell midden in order to point visitors backwards in time to the colonisers' destruction of these ancient middens (some, on Cope's country, as old as 22,000), which were burned to make limestone for buildings just like GOMA.
The piece is named RE FORMATION (Noogoon/St Helena Island), after a site on Quandamooka country, near where Moreton Bay meets Maiwar, where lime-burning took place in the 19th century.
Cope wants visitors to Water to become aware of this history so they can address the present and change the future: "Once we learn that and assess how we feel about that [history], then we can make decisions about what we want to happen to change it."
The wall text for RE FORMATION also draws visitors' attention to the role of shellfish reefs, one of many forms of pre-colonial aquaculture, in maintaining clean water, a healthy ecosystem and abundant food.
Cope's next project will be working on regenerating shellfish reefs around Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island), where she is from.
"For Indigenous people, art is one of the only places that we have an empowered position to share what we're doing and why we're doing it," says Cope.
"In this context [the Water exhibition] we're sharing our knowledge and culture and history and our relationships with water, and hoping that people will be able to share in that, and connect with the things that drive us to make work."
From the gallery and into the waterways
Riverbed, and Eliasson's presence at the opening of the exhibition, was a gateway for a discussion about the role of art, and its institutions, in effecting change.
The first part of Eliasson's strategy, his engagement of the senses, is about arming people with basic critical thinking skills.
He believes that, "how we navigate the information we take when we see things can be made [use of] — in terms of critically evaluating what is important to you, in terms of your values and so on".
"We are, to a large extent, probably biological stuff, but the way we see and how we see and how the brain organises what we see … is actually highly dependent on the culture."
He says much of the way we currently experience the world is being mediated by, "the highly subjective political power structures and all the other stuff that is everywhere [around us] — the branding, the commerce, the way that things are being presented to us far beyond the objective [reality]".
"You know, we are letting the experience of everything into the hands of people with not honest interests," Eliasson says.
He thinks art can arm people with, "the tools to re-evaluate our value system … I have confidence in people being able to [re-evaluate our value system], once they at least understand that things are actually much more relative than they appear to be".
The second part of his strategy is about creating a neutral, or safe, space for people to have experiences together, without necessarily agreeing with each other.
In his ideal art environment, a variety of human responses to the work will be coexisting — as in his 2003 Tate Turbine Hall commission, The Weather Project, where individuals, couples, families and groups responded in joyous, anxious and activist ways to a yellow-lit cavern dominated by a huge 'sun'.
The third prong — the area of his strategy that he is least able to control, as it relies on the institution hosting his work — is Eliasson's hope that public art museums and galleries can become hosts of complex, difficult conversations about our collective challenges.
"The cultural sector always claims to be the place to have difficult conversations … so why don't the cultural sector then actually create the platform on which these [issues] can be debated and potentially solved?
"We need to open the doors and invite the people who are disagreeing with us to our tables, to have conversations on our terms."
In August, the day after Iceland's Prime Minister presided over a funeral ceremony for the first glacier to 'die' as a result of climate change, Eliasson hosted his own event to mark the occasion.
"We in particular invited the leaders of the liberal parties, who are to a greater extent climate sceptics," he says.
"The general perception was that they were happy to be invited … we had a proper chat and a discussion. There is something there I think."
Angela Tiatia and Megan Cope echo Eliasson's optimism about art's capacity to fuel change; they also feel that their artworks, and the Water exhibition more broadly, might be a springboard for action by gallery visitors.
"It's really critical for art to provide the space to discuss things freely and safely and autonomously … but then where do people go to act on what they know?" says Cope.
Tiatia, who appeared on one of GOMA's opening-weekend panels for Water, says public programs are crucial.
"But maybe they [institutions] also need to think about providing resources online that they can direct people to — [people] who want to make changes but they don't know how."
In her panel discussion on Saturday morning, when an older audience member asked what changes visitors could make to impact climate change, the artist suggested a first step was to invest superannuation in funds that had divested fossil fuel interests.
She worries that without these kinds of suggestions for immediate, positive change, individuals will have a sense of being "overwhelmed, and inertia".
Cope also thinks institutions can provide more of a link between artists, their ideas, and the public, and speaks of an older man who approached her after a panel discussion on the opening weekend to say he wanted to help with reef regeneration.
"I'm interested in the idea of the institution partnering with artists who have a socially engaged practice, or are thinking about making work outside of the gallery, [to manage audience involvement]," says the artist.
"Because you find that a lot of people are really inspired and moved by art — and perhaps more so now … and I think if they are moved by the works [in Water] then they are likely to want to do something about that."
Water runs at Queensland's Gallery of Modern Art until April 26.
The writer travelled to the exhibition as a guest of Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art.