The Year 2020 in Climate Activist Art

On Saturday, September 19, 2020 at 3 o’clock pm, the public art installation Metronome, which includes a 62-foot-wide 15-digit electronic clock in Manhattan, displayed the message “The Earth has a deadline.” Then numbers showed up. 7 years, 103 days, 15 hours, 40 minutes, and 7 seconds until that deadline. The Climate Clock (2020), as the two artists Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd call their project, is a countdown to take decisive action to keep warming under the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold[1] at which the impacts of climate change become much more widespread across the planet and more extreme.[2] Golan and Boyd claim that the ecologically sensitive project–inspired by the Doomsday Clock, maintained online by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and the National Debt Clock in Manhattan–will remind the world every day just how close we are to the brink of burning through our carbon budget and will mobilize everybody to combat climate change.[3] 

At the turn of the new year, hellish fires were burning across Australia, which had just marked its hottest, driest year on record[4]. California also recorded its own worst fire season. Infernos scorched the landscape, devastating redwoods, sequoias, Joshua trees, which define the American West, and forcing many people to flee their homes to be swallowed up by flames. Ice caps melted, temperatures soared, and a record number of storms formed and made landfall in the United States. Many took to the streets to protest climate change, while others channeled their frustration into activist artworks that occupy a wide range of social, political, and physical landscapes. The Climate Clock is just one of many artworks from 2020 that tackle the climate emergency and engage the climate movement. 

The Climate Clock, which as I write this reads 6 years, 286 days, 16 hours, 36 minutes, and 58 seconds and counting until we burn through our carbon budget, or the amount of carbon dioxide that can be released while limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, plays into the familiar message of the climate movement that time is running out and immediate action is necessary. As the Climate Clock counts down second by second, the observer becomes distressed by their passivity to the passage of time and by the induction of an impending deadline. They are motivated then to consider interventions to slow or stop the countdown. The Climate Clock’s use of time as an indictment of the climate emergency contrasts to a normal clock in two ways. First, the Climate Clock signals to the speeding up of time compared to a normal clock, which allows slowness through the observer’s self-reflective awareness of their body at that time. Second, the Climate Clock situates the observer in the future and forces them to recall every second since checking the countdown that they have been inactive. The progression toward the Clock’s deadline also situates the observer in the future by reminding them that every second that passes is a second closer to the deadline. And every second without action suggests that an ecologically inhospitable future is already here. In contrast, a normal clock allows the observer to keep their distance from environmental collapse because they are more interested in the time in that moment and not in a looming deadline.[5]

Although the Climate Clock is a reminder to everybody to combat climate change, everyday people have little impact on slowing the ticking.[6] According to CDP’s Carbon Majors Database, just 100 fossil fuel companies are responsible for roughly 70% of global industrial greenhouse gases (GHGs) since 1988. The Climate Clock’s deadline is largely defined by these companies’ continuing and relentless exploitation of the planet’s oil, gas, and coal reserves. Golan and Boyd’s activist art project is misleading because it does not explicitly define these companies as the major contributors to climate change. Instead, it puts the burden of ecological recovery on everyday people without giving them the full story.   

Mary Mattingly’s Core (2020) is another public art project that experiments with the time-sensitive nature of climate change. Staged at the Brooklyn Public Library, the sculpture is a spherical metal cage filled with tropical plants found in the fossil records of New York.[7] People can walk around the interior of the cage and are encouraged to contribute their thoughts on and engage in discussions about what New York City will look like 40 years from now. The plants that sit in the interstices of the sculpture offer a glimpse of the prehistoric landscape of New York City. They form an ecological record marked by extinction caused by environmental destabilization (not necessarily anthropogenic climate change). As people roam inside the sculpture, they are challenged by the prehistoric plants to consider their role in ecological systems and history. More importantly, people are forced to confront the possibility that in 40 years or less, they will be remnants of a geological past much like the plants. The sculpture sends a bleak but important message about the local impacts of climate change: If you do not do anything, you will become extinct.

Core navigates the relationship between time and climate change differently than the Climate Clock by using the past instead of the future to encourage action in the present. Similarly, the installation of Core inside the Brooklyn Public Library situates New York’s fossil record alongside other important histories found in the library’s collection. Mattingly not only memorializes the planet’s geological past but also suggests, through the sculpture’s name, that the planet lies at the center of all these other histories. 

In Florida, artist Bob Partington collaborated with the CLEO Institute, a Florida-based nonprofit dedicated to climate change education and advocacy, to sculpt and install wax sculptures across the state to raise awareness about the dangers of extreme heat caused by climate change. The sculptures, made from biodegradable candle wax and wax-based stage makeup, slowly melted over several days to reveal different messages.[8] For the panther sculpture at the Tampa zoo, the message read “More Heat, Less Wildlife.” In addition to the panther, a lifeguard house melted at the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science in Miami to expose the message, “More Heat, Less Beaches.” And lastly, a statue depicting a grandfather and grandchild eating ice cream in front of Orlando’s City Hall dripped away to warn “More Heat, Less Health.”

Unlike the Climate Clock and Core, Partington’s program of wax sculptures is much more straightforward. The sculptures achieve exactly what was intended–to express the severity of rising temperatures brought on by unregulated climate change. The didacticism of the project allows everyday people to be informed about the impacts of climate change compared to the Climate Clock and Core, which require more analysis and research. The sculptures are also confrontational in that their messages resemble the language of protest signs, which communicate the demands of often marginalized and forgotten groups. The messages of the wax sculptures not only read as demands for climate action, but also recenter discussions about climate change onto the most vulnerable groups, such as animals, children, and the elderly.  Additionally, the locations of each sculpture[9] function as resources for information about climate change or for supporting and enacting policies that address climate injustice.

Climate activist artists also turned to social media to direct attention to the impacts of climate change. Photographer Jeff Frost, who has been capturing California forest fires for years and claims that the 2020 fire season is the worst he has ever seen, used Instagram and Twitter to exhibit images he took of the fires. As fires raged across California, forming thick smoke clouds that blanketed the landscape and coloring the sky in a haunting blood orange, Frost grabbed his camera and headed for the flames. In one picture, Frost captures the Morongo Casino in Palm Springs backdropped by the Apple Fire that burned in the mountains east of Los Angeles and destroyed more than 30,000 acres of land.[10] The central point of the picture, the Morongo Casino, stands undisturbed by the curtain of dense smoke and growing flames behind it. The picture reads like an advertisement for the last place on Earth: We’re all going to die from the fires anyway, might as well go scorched-earth on the slots at Morongo Casino! 

Another picture by Frost posted to social media captures a Trump flag violently waving in the light of the Lake Fire in San Diego County. Both the Morongo Casino and the Trump flag pictures use central objects to implicate causes of the fire. The Morongo Casino, for example, reflects the environmental destruction, such as deforestation and exploitation of natural resources, committed in the interest of capitalism. This picture is an indictment of corporations that literally fuel the flames of climate change. It does what the Climate Clock could not, which is hold corporations accountable for their disproportionate contribution to climate change. The Trump flag picture implicates Trump. The delectable contrast between the fire and brimstone sky and Trump’s “Keep America Great” flag as it juts out from a working-class house condenses the intricacies of climate change into a legible image about who causes climate change and who is hurt by it.

Finally, performance was another strategy that climate activist artists adopted in 2020. High school students in Extinction Rebellion’s Youth Group staged a fashion show on the sidewalk outside some of New York’s biggest shows during New York Fashion Week.[11] They dressed in upcycled and pieced-together secondhand clothes. One model wore a dress made of nonbiogradable bubble wrap, another wore a patchwork frock of shopping bags from bodegas and McDonalds, and a male protester wore a tube dress that read, “Please pay attention.” After their fashion show, the students addressed the crowd with their demands for the fashion industry, which included that brands stop using virgin polyester, that they achieve carbon neutrality by 2025, and that the fashion industry adopts a circular supply chain and stops extracting nonrenewable resources from the earth.[12]

The fashion show is an important work of climate activist art from 2020 because it is an example of grassroots protest. Performed on the sidewalk outside New York Fashion Week, the fashion show is situated outside corporate associations and the institutionalization of art. Its informal style and external position allow it to be accessible to more people and to launch a more pointed attack on the fashion industry. Additionally, the incorporation of recyclable consumer objects into the looks situates the work at an interesting point within the discussion of the time sensitivity of climate change. Each upcycled object has a history from its production to its first use and then its re-use. The re-use of these objects in the fashion show challenges the treatment of consumer objects as disposable and suggests that there are many opportunities for recycling. The fashion show’s program of secondhand and upcycled looks asks us to reconsider and adjust our consumer practices to extend the lifespan of objects and the planet itself. 

Looking back at the year 2020 in climate activist art puts us in a difficult position because it forces us to consider if the planet and our society have changed at all since then. If, at our current point in time, climate activists and artists are still stressing that time is running out, then we have failed to learn from our past. This archive of climate art from 2020 should not be another fossil record of extinct climate initiatives and projects. It should serve as a guide to the future, not a gesture to the past.