The Canary Project serves as a research hub for artists with the goal of deepening public understanding of climate change. Using contemporary art to raise awareness about pressing environmental issues is not easy, but Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris do just that: they convey the urgent reality of global warming with landscape photography. Sayler and Morris target vulnerable areas, such as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the dying coral reefs in Belize, the melting icecaps in Antarctica, with more to come such as the Maldives. Revolve talks to the founders of The Canary Project about their work and reveals the thin line between art and activism in an age of looming climate disaster.
Glacial, Icecap and Permafrost Melting XXXVI: Bellingshause Base, King George Island, Antarctica, 2008. Source: Sayler / Morris.
Where does the name of your project come from?
The name refers to a canary in the coal mine. Canaries were used in mines to warn the miners of dangerous levels of toxic gases. Now the phrase refers to a harbinger of danger. When we started the photographic project, A History of the Future we thought of images as canaries in a coalmine warning of future danger.
What was the creative development of your project?
Initially, we planned to photograph landscapes to provide visual evidence that would move viewers to understand better what is at stake with climate change. From the beginning, we had a clear and ambitious goal to show the work to as broad and diverse audiences as possible. The first exhibition of the images was on the sides of buses in Denver, through a program at the Denver contemporary art museum called “Creative Acts that Matter”. They worked with us to do a series of billboards, and we collaborated with a very talented graphic designer named Dmitri Siegel to design the ads. That was very early on. We had maybe shot four locations at that point. Producing the bus ads was a transformative moment for the project because we understood at that point that we needed to collaborate with other people and foster other projects that were really rooted in these collaborations in order to reach broader audiences. Branching out from there, we were sponsoring other projects and forming The Canary Project.
How do you balance art and activism?
One of the reasons for establishing The Canary Project was to have avenues be more and less directly activist in addressing climate change. Much of the work in The Canary Project is on a spectrum of direct activism on one side and art on the other side, which can also have the capacity to work as activism, just in an indirect way. The question of how art and activism relate to each other is a big one. We have been influenced by the writing of Paul Chan, a self-described activist and artist who is often quoted for his firm distinction between his own artistic and activist impulses:
“Collective social power needs the language of politics, which means, among other things, that people need to consolidate identities, to provide answers … to make things happen. Whereas my art is nothing if not the dispersion of power… And so, in a way, the political project and the art project are sometimes in opposition.” The implication here – fleshed out else- where by Chan – is that:
Activist: singular, constructive, affirmative, un-nuanced, instrumental, common, contractual and with demands.
Art: manifold, deconstructive, interrogative, nuanced, purposeless, unique, free and unending.
Chan’s distancing of art and activism is still a broadly shared preference in the art world and comes from a desire not have art be ideological, instrumental, didactic. We totally agree that there should be a place in culture that holds apparently contradictory ideas in balance or speaks to our moral intuitions rather than our reason, that ask questions faster than providing answers. And that place is art.
Extreme Weather Events XV: Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, 2005. Source: Sayler / Morris.
However, we also think that Chan’s definition of activism requiring direct, consolidated efforts to achieve is too limited. I think we can speak more broadly about activism being about change and the way the change is achieved. And artists are involved in a kind of cultural production that without being directly activist in the way Chan discusses, can help shape what people think is moral, important, normal, intolerable, possible. We can also say it this way: Art makes a space for belief; and belief makes a space for change. Of course, it is much easier to see how an African-American sitting down at a segregated lunch counter in 1960 has an impact. My argument is not that art is better at changing the world than direct action. Rather that art contributes to the necessary work of laying the cultural foundation.
Tell us more about the Green Patriot Project
Green Patriot Posters is a messaging campaign centered on posters and graphic design that encourage U.S. citizens to take part in building a sustainable economy. Green Patriot Posters display an image of strength, optimism and unity.
Posters from the Green Patriot Project
Some focus on specific actions that anyone can take; some are general. The overriding message is that our individual actions do matter, that we can all be part of the sustainability movement, and that this can become a defining value of 21st century patriotism.
Screenshots from the website www.greenpatriotposters.org.
We have commissioned posters from design leaders like Shepard Fairey and DJ Spooky, and developed an online community for sharing and voting on original designs submitted by anyone who would like to participate. The favourites are distributed through multiple channels – print, exhibition, web, bus ads, licensing, etc. – to reach the widest audience possible. In 2010, we also published a book from the project.
“Art makes a space for belief; and belief makes a space for change”.
What about “A History of the Future”?
A History of the Future still consists of a set of photographic images, all landscapes, taken in places around the world where scientists are observing the impacts of climate change, vulnerability to future impacts and/ or attempts to mitigate and adapt.
The photographs have been and are still exhibited in diverse venues, including: science and art museums, the sides of buses, billboards, city halls, school presentations, galleries, magazines, NGO publications, etc. Standard exhibition size is 40×50 inches. Often the photographs are displayed along with archival images, contextual research, installation elements and other media.
Screenshot from the website www.history-of-the-future.com.
To date, we have photographed 14 locations – the most recent being the after- math of Hurricane Sandy in New York. We are returning to several locations (Peru, The Netherlands, New Orleans, Niger) for more in-depth studies. The meaning of the images depends on their context within a larger discourse about climate change – a discourse with many registers: scientific, journalistic, activist and artistic. In the aggregate, the photographs form an archive and can be positioned as evidence. Viewed individually, the images form a blank stare.
The basic idea was to work in varied latitudes – not just focusing on the extreme polar or equatorial regions, where much climate change imagery is generated, but also giving extensive treatment to the middle latitudes where populations are more dense. We wanted to look at a variety of types of impacts, including melting glaciers and icecaps, droughts, extreme storms, rising sea levels, and disrupted ecosystems.
Will you photograph another location soon?
At this stage, we are adding one location about every two years. For the next location, I am interested in looking at one of the islands in the Pacific, like the Maldives, where the rising sea level is going to force the current generation to relocate. These are whole nations that will disappear within our lifetime.
How have people reacted to your projects?
Our mission is to deepen public under- standing of climate change with the implicit ultimate goal of affecting culture. Is this happening? The short answer is obviously yes and obviously no. We, as a society, do not appear any closer to taking serious action on climate change than when the project started. There are important transformations going on in the sub- stratum of society that will suddenly erupt. Climate change is not an isolated issue; it is connected with fallacies and shortcomings of Integrated World Capitalism and the relentless pressure for infinite growth on a finite planet. So the Occupy movement, the movement in the U.S. led by Bill McKibben (350.org), are signs of some- thing stirring. How much did The Canary Project have to do with that? Obviously, very, very little, but also not nothing. We do feel we have made a very positive impact on those that have come into contact with our work, who have told us that it inspired them or encouraged them or made them sad or even changed them. We have certainly made a direct and positive impact on kids, students and adults who have been participants in various workshops and classes that we taught or designed. We think we are changing the culture and it is clear that on some level – no matter how small – that, to quote David Harvey: “our mental conceptions move into an external relation to the material world we seek to reshape.” In other words, an act of culture necessarily alters culture. It changes the dynamic.
Glacial, Icecap and Permafrost Melting XLVII: Cordillera Blanca, Peru, 2008. Source: Sayler / Morris.
What do you think of the climate change sceptics in the United States?
Poster Simplicity Is The Key To Successful Living. Source: Nick Dewar.
The amount of power that the sceptic minority has in the U.S. is very frustrating. Like most activists, we think that the climate change impacts scientists have warned of for years are being seen already and that there is likely no turning back the tide, rather only the possibility of lessening the severity of impacts and preparing for the changes already being seen and felt. This has lead to a new project that is focused on resiliency. It was inspired during the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy when a huge number of people were without the modern convenience we are so accustomed to like power, connectivity, etc. The new project is called Modern Primitive Exchange: “a forum to sort out what of the Modern and what of the Primitive are useful for living in the End Times.” There is both a satirical and a serious side to the project. We will maintain a blog, collect media and support programming on this theme. The blog content will ultimately be edited into a book. Among the programming we are developing is a series of photography and documentary projects that will have their own life.
For more info: www.canary-project.org; www.history-of-the-future.com; www.greenpatriotposters.org
Writer: An interview by Laura Beltrán Villamizar, an independent contributor to Revolve. This article appeared in Revolve#9, Fall 2013 pages 92-98
