Can Art Save Us?

Josh Landy
What can art do to tackle climate change?

Ray Briggs
Are science and politics not enough?

Josh Landy
How could movies, paintings, and poems help us redraw the landscape in our minds?

Ray Briggs
This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from the Stanford Humanities Center.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
We’re grateful to the Stanford Humanities Center for sponsoring today’s event.

Josh Landy
Welcome, everyone, to Philosophy Talk.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re asking, Can art save us?

Josh Landy
Can art save us? I mean, Ray, the world’s facing a heap of really bad problems. We’ve got fascism on the rise again, we’ve got any number of new infectious diseases, we’re on the verge of environmental collapse. You’re gonna tell me art’s gonna save us from all that?

Ray Briggs
Oh, come on. Just don’t be so pessimistic. We can’t give up now. We need the arts to keep us going.

Josh Landy
I mean, look, the arts are a nice distraction and everything. But if you want to be actually saved, we’re going to need better leaders better policies. Oh, and people who are willing to listen to scientists.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. And how are you going to get them to listen to scientists, Josh? You’ve got to engage their feelings, you know—talk to their imaginations. And that’s where the arts come in.

Josh Landy
So wait, you’re saying people who watch Game of Thrones are going to start reading Scientific American?

Ray Briggs
I’m not talking about Game of Thrones. I’m talking about art that’s, you know, actually about the climate. Like that movie “Don’t Look Up,” which shows people ignoring a an environmental catastrophe that’s just literally right above their heads.

Josh Landy
Yeah, but the trouble with didactic fiction like that, right, is it tends to be, you know, bad. I mean, I found the Rolling Stone review of don’t look up pretty refreshing. It said, “It’s not funny. It’s not insightful. It’s not even watchable. It’s a disaster movie in more ways than one.”

Ray Briggs
Yeah ok, so it’s bad. Who cares if it’s gonna save the world? I mean, what do you actually care about Josh?

Josh Landy
Okay, but look, the problem, Ray, is it isn’t gonna save the world. I mean, climate-deniers, science-deniers—they’re not gonna watch that movie in the first place. If they do happen to watch that movie, they’re just gonna feel insulted by it. Films like that are just preaching to the converted.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, well, you’re not supposed to talk to the diehard climate deniers. Those aren’t the people we’re gonna reach. But what about the fence sitters, you know, the people who kind of care but won’t get off their duffs to do anything? You know, climate art could really help mobilize them.

Josh Landy
I just don’t understand how it’s supposed to work. So you got a climate artwork that’s telling people who already believes science, that they should believe science? I’m with Blaise Pascal. He says look, beliefs are great and everything, but if you don’t have motivation, they’re useless.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but it’s not about changing people’s beliefs. I mean, you’re a literature scholar, right? Like you of all people should know that art doesn’t just help people grasp climate change intellectually. It also helps them engage at an emotional level.

Josh Landy
Okay, let me see if I understand you. You’re saying a viewer of “Don’t Look Up” already knows that climate change is real and dangerous. But once they finished watching “Don’t Look Up” they are completely devastated by it. They’re curled up on the floor in a fetal position, sobbing into their locally-sourced popcorn. And this is supposed to help the movement how exactly?

Ray Briggs
Look okay, some climate artists depressing but that’s not all it can be. It’s like that thing that the poet Louise Glcük says that poetry can become our companion in grief, our rescuer. It gives us the strength to continue our struggle and art can even help us imagine our way to a better future.

Josh Landy
You cheated by invoking Louise Glück—I find it hard to resist any any quote from her. And I love that quote, but do you imagine your way to a better future? I think you’ve got to bring it about, it’s not enough to imagine that, you’ve got to lobby your politicians, you’ve got to get out on the streets, you’ve got to stage a school strike,

Ray Briggs
Okay, it doesn’t stop with imagination, but it’s got to start there. You’re gonna need some vision of the better world you’re trying to fight for. Like that Kim Stanley Robinson novel “Pacific Rdge, right? That’s a story where people really get it together, they fight climate change, and then they build a realistic utopia.

Josh Landy
I mean, that’s a cool novel, right. But if my memory serves, it was written over 30 years ago, and as far as I can tell, world still hasn’t been saved. What went wrong?

Ray Briggs
Look, I’m not saying that one work of art is going to save us all from disaster. But if enough people make enough different kinds of art, and engage with the environment and an emotional level, that really could make a difference.

Josh Landy
And if enough people run for office, develop new technologies, move away from fossil fuels and take legal action against polluters, we won’t need climate art.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but people aren’t going to do any of that, unless they actually address their feelings about the climate. And that’s why we need art. You know, I bet our guest is going to help you see the value of art. It’s Harriet Hawkins, Professor of Geography at the University of London.

Josh Landy
Yeah, and maybe we’ll get some support from our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede. We sent Holly to talk to artists who’ve been creating music inspired by climate change. Holly files this report.

Holly McDede
Helen Prior remember staying up late at night in 2018, looking at her newborn son, and thinking about a new UN report showing the consequences of the planet warming two degrees Celsius,

Helen Prior
I kind of couldn’t understand why we weren’t taking more action.

Holly McDede
Life-threatening heat waves, water shortages, flooding, the loss of almost all coral reefs.

Helen Prior
And that prompted me to kind of look at psychology research in terms of environmental behaviors and behavior change.

Holly McDede
Prior is a music psychologist at the University of Holland, England, so she thinks a lot about how music can influence emotions and behavior. In her paper, “How can music help us address climate change,” she cites the Great Animal Orchestra, a soundscape of animal recordings captured in their natural habitats.

She also references a heavy metal song called “Amazonia” by Gojira, which laments the destruction of the rainforest.

And there’s also “How Long” by Vampire Weekend, a song about the demise of Los Angeles.

Research shows music can help people break habits and exercise for longer—but…

Helen Prior
There isn’t actually very much empirical evidence that links the power of music with environmental behavior specifically.

Stephan Crawford
That was my aha moment: let’s just use music instead of a sculpture.

Holly McDede
Artists like Stephan Crawford understand that music can communicate urgency in ways other mediums can’t and that can drive change. Crawford founded the Climate Music Project to make climate science personal. This is one of their commissioned pieces by Eric Ian Walker, called simply “Climate.”

Stephan Crawford
We’re here to really facilitate action to help people understand the urgency of action, and also understand that it’s only urgent because we can still do something about this crisis.

Holly McDede
The Climate Music Project brings together scientists, musicians and composers.

Stephan Crawford
The scientists we’ve worked with have all the souls of artists and the artists we work with tend to have a little bit of a analytical mind that as well, so it’s worked really well.

Holly McDede
This piece is called “What If We,” and it tells the story of climate change. Musician Wendy Loomis composed it.

Wendy Loomis
We came up with the idea of having the bass represent the landmass and the drums represent the water. Our drummer was thrilled to be able to wipe everybody out.

Holly McDede
It features original poetry by Royal Kent.

Royal Kent
Eagle leaves fire in her wake / Tiger’s life is at stake / Eagle descends with a crushing blow / Tiger defends, as you know, in a mighty leap.

Holly McDede
The piece ends on a hopeful note, reminding people we can still take steps to address climate change.

Royal Kent
What has been revealed to us all / we call climate change.

Holly McDede
Some climate change music is based on data points, like temperatures or changes in sea level. The music and sound pretty bleak.

Chris Chafe
It’s interesting to point your camera at issues of concern. And you know, that I think is partly what I find myself doing.

Holly McDede
Chris Chafe is the director of Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. He’s a composer and cellist. Here he is playing “The Metered Tide,” which uses sea level data from over 100 years of rising waters in San Francisco.

So cart save us? Chafe says art has sometimes preceded progress in science and propels us towards solutions. The electric guitar brings that point home for him.

Chris Chafe
Go back to the 30s. And you can say humanity started to learn chaos within years. And today, it’s ubiquitous in mathematics.

Holly McDede
But time is also running out. Antarctic blue whales are singing their own siren songs, their tones deeper now, possibly to cut through the noise of melting sea ice. Like whales, artists are also adapting creating music to make sure we hear and do something about the melting icebergs. Philosophy Talk I’m Holly J. McDede,

Josh Landy
Thanks so much for that melodious and inspiring port Holly. I’m Josh Landy, along with my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs. And we were the live audience at the Stanford Humanities Center, which has generously sponsored tonight’s event.

Ray Briggs
Our guest is a Professor of Human Geography, and co-director of the Center for GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway, University of London. She’s also the author of a recent book, “Geography, Art, Research.” Please welcome to the Philosophy Talk stage… Harriet Hawkins.

Josh Landy
So Harriet, you’ve written, and if I may say, you’ve written brilliantly about how artists can collaborate with scientists to solve big problems. But what first got you interested in the affordances of art?

Harriet Hawkins
I’m really sorry, this is absolutely not a cool answer. When I was a kid, I love doing jigsaws. And I kind of came across one of those jigsaws that has like 1000s of pieces. And it happened to be the kind of 18th century painting of when those big grand London art galleries with 1000s of paintings around the walls, landscapes, of, you know, portraits of pictures of war, and a gaggle of kind of men and women in the front talking to each other, dressed in nice clothes. These turned out to be the prime minister’s the philosophers, the technologists, scientists, that activists of their day and so a 10 year old me was kind of piecing together the corners and filling in the gaps and thinking, Wow, all this art is actually also in the midst of all this science and activism. So, you know, after that, for me, they were inseparable.

Ray Briggs
So Harriet, Josh has also been telling me how important politicians and scientists are to saving the world, where does art fit in?

Harriet Hawkins
I guess art fits in right alongside those. So those for me, it’s not one or the other, it’s actually kind of coming, bringing those together. And I think there’s kind of lots of different things that kind of art can do in that context. So as a geographer, one of the things I really like to think about is kind of space and time. So for me, art can help us kind of recompose space and time have kind of our problems. So it can be about, you know, rather than the problems being someone else’s problem somewhere else in the world in a different time. Or, you know, even in the other people in our cities that can bring it right here right now for us in ways that really make it matter to us. So that’s everydayness.

Ray Briggs
So helping us connect ourselves to the problem is. Are there other things as well that art can do?

Harriet Hawkins
I think, you know, as we kind of heard in previous kind of introduction, can also be about that kind of expansion of the imagination. And sure, yeah, imagination is not going to be enough by itself. But it can also kind of lead the way for us and that’s imaginations as much of science and technology as about art.

Josh Landy
So yeah, I mean, one thing I think in that context is about something calendar cruise philosophy, holding the cruise talks about moving the anchor, right. So we’re all subject to anchoring bias, very hard for us to imagine a world that’s much different from our current world. But if you get really immersed in a utopian picture, then may be that sort of shifts your anchor your imagination. Are there other artworks in that vein that you think of?

Harriet Hawkins
Hmm, interesting. I love to think that that idea of almost like the double work of the imagination, so you have to imagine that future and the link yourself in the present. And I think there are things that art can do really well around that. So I’m thinking, for example, about this really powerful work that I really love. That’s about that kind of includes bringing art into our everyday world. You basically phone up a glazier. So glazier put hydrophones in the water so I had artists but hydrophones in the water, the glaze to lagoon and we could then kind of Darla mobile phone number. Her name is Katie Patterson, and you could listen in to the glaciers are melting. And there’s something really kind of powerful and fascinating about how bringing those blips and blurps and slurps of a melting glaciers into our daily lives. What that lets us do.

Ray Briggs
This is Philosophy Talk, coming to you from the Stanford Humanities Center. Our guest is Harriet Hawkins from the University of London.

Josh Landy
Have you seen any climate art that inspired you? Have you maybe made some yourself? What do you think is the best way to bring about a better future?

Ray Briggs
Creativity, collaboration and climate—along with questions from our live audience, when Philosophy Talk continues

Talking Heads
And as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention.

Josh Landy
Maybe one day, we’ll have peaceful oases instead of parking lots. Can beautiful songs help make that happen? I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program of questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Harriet Hawkins from the University of London, and we’re asking, can art save us? Special thanks to Stanford Humanities Center for sponsoring today’s episode.

Josh Landy
Got a cool question or warm comment? Join the discussion by raising your hand and Devon here will bring a microphone around to you when it’s your turn to speak.

Ray Briggs
So Harriet, can you tell us about maybe one of your favorite ways that artists are addressing climate change?

Harriet Hawkins
Oh, I think one of my favorite ways would have to be collaboration, because I think it just enables kind of so much different kind of semi different partners to become part of those discussions, some of that scientists, communities, or even perhaps the planet itself.

Ray Briggs
How do you collaborate with the planet itself?

Harriet Hawkins
Now, so I guess it’s about that sense that obviously land artists and Earth artists for kind of generations have worked with kind of soil, rock plants and animals as part of their practice. But I think we see kind of a new generation of artists, and I’ve got a great kind of colleague and collaborator, Sasha Engelmann, who works with an article to Sophie Dyer on this great project called Open weather. And they kind of sense with satellites, and in ways that working in sensing with satellites, they also sent with weather systems. And then the weather systems help them kind of CO produce sets of images, which they do with kind of collaborators around the world, human and non human. So you know, I think it’s a great example of how those kinds of sensing practices can really help us get to grips with the kind of forces of our world.

Josh Landy
So okay, so we talked about collaboration, we’ve talked about utopia, as we’ve talked about dystopian visions that issue a kind of warning. What about in champions, because one of my favorite pieces in this context, there’s, well, there’s a variety of them around. There’s one in San Francisco, or James Terrell sky spaces. And so the one San Francisco, you go into this little tiny building, and it frames the sky and the sky becomes an artwork. Now, the sky isn’t already great, but But what about enchantment? What about artworks that just remind us how incredibly beautiful the world around us is, you know, we sometimes notice its beauty. But oftentimes, we’re just in a hurry, and we’re walking right, by all the glory, are those kinds of artworks also doing the work that you think about?

Harriet Hawkins
I think they can do and I think that Terrell piece is another really great example of some of that kind of collaboration with the kind of natural world in different ways. I think there’s also kind of different sorts of aesthetic registers. So different registers of feeling that art can do really well. So a piece of art, like I particularly like about climate change is a project where an artist called vigil, Nelson got communities to knit some fuzzy birds. And so there’s a sort of fuzzy climate change that kind of people knitted birds, and then they sent knitting kits around the world. And that was about the different migration patterns that these birds have, as a result of changing kind of changing ocean temperature that changes food sources.

Josh Landy
And that’s a really interesting example. Because that’s not just you know, we have this picture of an artist, sitting alone in a studio and making something and then exhibiting IT people. But this is a hands on, this is art for the audience out for the public.

Harriet Hawkins
Yeah, it really is. It’s that question of participation. That’s a great phrase I really love about this kind of Making is Connecting. There’s lots of things we could talk about that and accounts can sound quite naive, right? You know, we make something that connects us. But actually there’s some really interesting work that talks us through exactly How making connections not just with the materials, but also with the people that we make with, whether that’s knitting or even things like gardening.

Ray Briggs
So yeah, how do you get people involved? Not everybody is good at knitting or like a fancy artist, like if I want to make some climate art, but I’m not very artistic, where do I start?

Harriet Hawkins
I think that’s the great thing about things like Making is Connecting don’t have to be good, I certainly am not good. And I think there’s, there’s all sorts of different, different ways of doing that. And it can be about the kind of more craft practice, which also can also be incredibly skilled, but can also just be about doing things together. It doesn’t always have to start strike that spectacular sublime register, which comes back to what you were saying about the kind of enchanting, enchanting work.

Ray Briggs
So I want to hear more about collaboration, which, which has been a big theme. So you also mentioned collaboration with scientists, how does that work?

Harriet Hawkins
They might come back and really fascinating ways. And I think one of the things I saw working in these great organizations that put artists in laboratories was quite the range of ways that that works. So that’s not just about the artists taking the fully formed science idea and communicating it, but also finding ways to work kind of upstream of knowledge and helping actually produce the science and critique its form. So that’s really that’s really exciting to see.

Ray Briggs
So if I can ask like a skeptical question for a moment. So if I’m a scientist, surely what I’m doing is gathering like cold, hard data, and trying to build like a theoretical model, that gives me the best explanation for that data. Whereas I think of art as something where you don’t necessarily have to have a true explanation or even explanation that makes predictions but like, the explanation can imagine something false and still be a value. So how do you put that into science without sort of polluting the truth part of science?

Harriet Hawkins
I think you’ve gotta be careful not to do down artists or scientists in that formulation. So there’s been some great work I’ve been exploring where, you know, scientists have been doing kind of almost like kind of forensics, on animal bones and, and kind of flora remains from archaeological digs. And using that to construct past climate. But in taking those kind of tiny little remains, and constructing whole worlds, for us, they have to take those imaginative leaps. And that, to me, is also part of what makes our art. So that sort of distributed practice that makes artists of all of us in some way.

Josh Landy
Can we get back to something you were saying earlier about bringing climate change home? Cuz, you know, one thing I’ve been thinking about is that climate change is one of those things, it’s hard for people to get their minds around. Because the actors are too many, the scale is too vast, the time is too slow. And so it’s easy to pretend it’s not happening or just really not get them, it’s hard for the mind to get to grips with it. And so it made me think, well, you know, can narratives help? You know, because there’s a lot of novels that will take you through an entire life or even generation. Yes. So our narratives being developed, or, you know, TV shows, movies, novels, that allow us to kind of get our minds around these just this huge, huge issue that occupies the whole globe over decades and even millennia.

Harriet Hawkins
Yeah, I think that’s one of those really wonderful things that different forms of art can obviously do in different kinds of ways. So the novel can be very focused on a lot of detail, or it can cover huge expanses of time, but it can also do both of those at once. And I think enabling us to play and mix up those times. And spaces can be what arts can do really, really well for us and really make us feel those things. Yeah, so

Ray Briggs
I want to hear more about genres. Like what’s the opposite of a novel? Or like, what’s the genre that does? All of the things that novels don’t do?

Harriet Hawkins
Oh, what do you think novels don’t do?

Ray Briggs
There are lots of things don’t do. I think I think novels don’t give me a lot of sensory—

Josh Landy
I don’t knit a novel.

Harriet Hawkins
Hmm, maybe that’s the restriction of you.

Josh Landy
But that’s the thing, right? You don’t participate in the art. It’s not usually the stance that we’re in with regard to a novel, right? Usually, we’re kind of I mean, we’re not totally passive. We’ve got to do things with our minds. But we’re not doing things with our hands as we are in the, in the case of the people or knitting birds, we’re not directly connected to other people. So is that, you know, do you think of that as sort of the shortcoming of the novel slash the advantage of participatory art?

Harriet Hawkins
I guess I I like to think that what participatory art can do with communities with different types of communities, whether that’s, you know, people who might come across the art on the street, whether that’s people to go to workshops, whether that’s more kind of extended collaborations with kind of community groups in kind of frontline climate spaces, for example. You know, I think there’s lots of different ways that those kinds of connections can be built, but also lots of different ways that those kinds of participation words can become empowering ways to kind of amplify people’s voices.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, and we’re at the Stanford Humanities Center asking Can art save us with Harriet Hawkins from the University of London, and we have a question from our live audience. So hi, can you tell us your first name and where you’re from and then your question or comment.

Sarah Lai Stirland
It Sarah. I’m from England originally in Hong Kong, but I live in Los Gatos. So I’m really I think this is a really fascinating question. Because to the point of climate skeptics, I mean, the interesting thing is everyone consumed some kind of art, right, whether it’s music or anything else. I’m just curious, what is the whether you’ve thought or seen about how any artist might have tried to reach climate skeptics through whatever medium?

Harriet Hawkins
Yeah, you know, thanks for the question. It’s a really great and obviously really important one, for those of us who kind of care deeply about these issues. I think it comes back to that thing you were kind of we were raising about the everyday actually. And so kind of thinking about, you know, the climate skeptic around the kind of dinner table, you might be one of your relatives. There’s some kind of great examples, I think of artworks that try to do things like predict what our back gardens what we might not grow in our back gardens in kind of 100 years time, so it’s not good. We need to save for Mueller who’s done a great work for 2085 That tells us what plants we could grow in Swiss back gardens in 2085. And what we couldn’t, and that can really help people understand, I think and show the climate skeptic in ways that mean will will affect their gardening, what can and can’t be done.

Ray Briggs
So we’ve got another question from our live audience. Can you tell us your name, where you’re from, and your question or comment,

Josh Landy
My name is Kayo. I’m from Planet Earth. And I see, art works as a verb, and want you to consider people like women in equal Arts and Design. Ravindra Singh, kissed the ground and the water stories, people that are working collaboratively with the planet and are making positive, creative changes to the environments they’re working in.

Harriet Hawkins
Thank you, I think that’s an absolutely brilliant examples to bring into the discussion. And I think it’s that wonderful kind of phrase, you’re collaborating with the planet to bring about change, they think, you know, has so much potential within it. And I think the way that you kind of centered that work is really, really vital. So thank you.

Josh Landy
And you’ve talked in your work about non western and non hegemonic epistemology. So can you say a little bit about that about, you know, not not just art practices, but about other ways of thinking about, you know, human beings and the relationship to the planet?

Harriet Hawkins
Yeah, I think that’s, that’s really important. And I think when we think about some of the challenges that are kind of Western environmental imagination, and that, you know, parents separation that rules our lives between nature and culture, looking to other kinds of communities, in places where already, we don’t need a new imagination, it’s already right there for us. And I think one of the things that art can do really well, especially in collaboration, is really work out how to help us in the West understand and amplify some of those kinds of perspectives.

Ray Briggs
So when you’re, when you’re doing a project like that, how do you make sure you’re not just sort of extracting things from the community that you’re visiting and not giving back?

Harriet Hawkins
Yeah, I think that’s absolutely vital. And I think we’re so used to that word extraction being associated with kind of minerals and resources that we forget. Cultural extraction is a very real thing. And I think that’s where collaboration can be so vital, but really thinking collaboration through not only as going there and taking, collaborating and making things, but then collaborating on how those things circulate in the world where they circulate what what places should they show up in? Maybe they shouldn’t just show up in western galleries, but in other spaces as well, spaces that those communities might care about?

Ray Briggs
Do you have an example of like how how like, somebody might make those kinds of decisions?

Harriet Hawkins
So there’s a great collaborator I work with called uncon, Geezer who’s done this really wonderful work, called climates of listening, which is working with Pacific women, queer and transgender artists, thinking about kind of how to amplify their frontline experiences of ecocide and kind of extraction that’s happening in Pacific in the Pacific. And that’s a really wonderful example. And it’s online for people to look at.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I mean, you know, of course, another possible relationship to that kind of art is also just to sit and listen, right for those not members of the community to go and experience it and just listen. And one of things I’m interested in the way that you talk about the value of many different kinds of values of art in this context, is about a certain kind of epistemic modesty, right about acknowledging the limits, right? Being a little less confident, a little less arrogant, smug, right? We we often like to think, oh, yeah, I know all of that. I know what we’re doing. But but the idea that one of the things art can do for us is knock us off of our you know, high perch, which is Ed Smith talks about beautifully in relation to the novel, get uncomfortable with uncertainty and not knowing and and George Saunders also talks about the value of arts and make us slow down and you know, beat We’re so grateful. So is that? How does that figure into climate change? Is there such a thing as an experience of art that would be sort of salutary humiliating? It would just kind of knock us down a peg or two.

Harriet Hawkins
I love that love that Enlighten me. I think I’ve always been very struck by that discussion of some of these problems is like kind of wicked problems, wicked here, obviously, the moral economy, but also kind of complexity and you know, not a one size fits all solution. And certainly not a kind of certain mastery. And I think art can really encourages me, certainly to spend a lot of time sitting in the uncertainty. And with that complexity and refusing a singular answer, I think that that feels to me to be really, really productive.

Ray Briggs
So I feel like one of the reasons that people don’t engage that much emotionally with climate change is because it is overwhelming. And so I love the idea of being able to sit with ambiguity and not be overwhelmed. Do you have thoughts about like, so I would like to feel a feeling other than despair. And I would also like to understand the world around me. And these things are intention like, are there other feelings I could be exploring through? Are they still appropriate?

Harriet Hawkins
Yeah, I think that that Yeah. tendency for thinking about the spare. There’s been some really wonderful work recently thinking about how we can think about the enchantment that you were speaking about, about art, but also about the kind of narrative isolation as well and looking elsewhere in the world for different kinds of indigenous communities or to communities of doing practice of self determination to find the stories of existing positive lives and hopeful futures.

Ray Briggs
So we’ve got another question or comment from our live audience. Can you tell us your name, where you’re from, and your question or comment, please?

Carmen
Sure. My name is Carmen. I live in Woodside, California, and to your point Ray about something that evokes something besides despair. About a year and a half ago, at the what was known as the Cliff House, which is a San Francisco landmark after it closed, the foresight Foundation put on an exhibit called lands and, and one of the more memorable, they were just beautiful each. Each room or area of the Cliff House was taken over by a different artist. And they had these cylinders of water and members of the community helped carry the seawater, carry it literally from the end of the cliff into the cylinders, and it was a fire brigade. And it also brought to mind okay, yes, we’re having rising sea levels. When at the booth, the tables were covered with this precious clay. It was just, it made you think about it, but it also inspired respect and awe of the environment at the same time. So it was that beautiful balance of despair and hope and making you want to do something.

Ray Briggs
I’m impressed with how many more artists lately are making climate art. Somebody emailed us about Palo Alto, Palo Alto Community Arts Center has a climate exhibit coming up as well, which I didn’t realize.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re asking Can art save us with Harriet Hawkins from the University of London.

Ray Briggs
How do you persuade the climate skeptics in your family? What movie painting or poem might open their minds? Or is there some other creative strategy that you’ve tried?

Josh Landy
We’re coming to you from the Stanford Humanities Center, who have generously sponsored tonight’s event. We’ll take more questions from our live audience when Philosophy Talk continues.

Midnight Oil
The time has come to say fair’s fair, to pay the rent now, to pay our share.

Josh Landy
Can we dance our way to solving climate change? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Harriet Hawkins from the University of London and we’re at the Stanford Humanities Center asking, Can art save us?

Josh Landy
And we’ve got another question are coming from our live audience.

Brian
Hi, I’m Brian from San Francisco. And I’m an artist myself. And I was wondering, I know that you’ve talked about this a little bit, but I was wondering if you could elaborate on some effective strategies for artists to create impactful artworks that can inspire social, environmental or cultural change on a global level.

Harriet Hawkins
Thanks. That’s a really great question. And I guess it’s making the work that you want to make as an artist would be one of the parts of the answer but I think some of the stuff passages I’ve been most kind of struck by aside from the kinds of discussions we’re having about collaboration have been the ways that kind of different forms of sensing practice can be kind of used to kind of bring, again, bring those kinds of things like the scale kind of problematic into the here and now and into the everyday lives. So thinking about the ways that we can help a sense those vast scale things kind of bring climate change out of the abstract can be, I think, really, really valuable. And I think also kind of questions around that sort of different kinds of imaginations. So rather than the kind of imagination that’s about kind of separation and distance, how can we think about entangling ourselves with with the kind of world in different ways not because that necessarily makes us kind of care. But but might take us some way towards doing that if we recognize our kind of engagements in different ways.

Ray Briggs
So have a kind of strategy question, which is about audience I guess. So there are various things you might want your climate art to do. So one is galvanize people who already care sort of protest or for the troops. And one is like open the minds of diehard skeptics. And in between, you’ve got like fine people who sort of care but are sort of apathetic and get them to care more, where are the places that are can or should fit in best, as far as finding an audience? And how do you figure out what your audiences is.

Harriet Hawkins
I think there’s, there’s obviously really big differences between the kind of art that exists in kind of gallery spaces and certain kinds of work, because, you know, we all know only certain kinds of people necessarily find their way into gallery spaces by choice. But then there’s also all that kind of broad kind of culture that exists in the world. That’s what we listen to when we kind of drive to work, what we kind of walk along what we can see almost passively on the radio, or on podcasts, and some of that kind of work. I think those sorts of spaces. And the work that might turn up there can also change our imaginations in ways we don’t necessarily realize, but a swan was the cause of Gnosis.

Josh Landy
So if you want to get your climate sensitive art in front of people don’t necessarily put it in a gallery. But But what do you do? I mean, what’s the what’s the way to reach the most people, including people who aren’t necessarily already that enthusiastic about tackling the problem?

Harriet Hawkins
I think we’ve seen some great examples of work related things, artwork at places like cop, for example, where you have artists kind of bringing large kind of icebergs or kind of balls of ice into the center of our cities, and just letting them melt there. And so people are going about their daily lives and suddenly encounter blocks of ice just sitting there melting in public spaces, I think work like that can be incredibly powerful. People don’t really know they’re experiencing art. They’re just going about their lives, and it’s there, but it’s doing something.

Ray Briggs
So we’ve got a question or a comment from our audience.

Jean-Pierre
Jean-Pierre, Paris, and Stanford. So let’s not be naive, climate change has a lot to do with power, and capitalism. Think of Naomi Klein’s book, climate versus capitalism, including, of course, state capitalism, etc. As for America, the fact that America continues to burn, shale gas, and shale oil, okay, and contributes a lot. So what can art do vis à vis of power?

Harriet Hawkins
Thank you, I think it’s a really, really important point, I think we can look to history to see where different sorts of activist groups have directly enrolled art and aesthetic strategies I thinking of the kind of slogan from the 1960s, European avant garde All power to the imagination, which directly kind of stages first, that potential of the imagination, relation to power, we can also think of the ways that of activist groups. I’m thinking of kind of large kind of anti oil activist groups that work around galleries, like the National Gallery in London, or extinction, rebellion have enrolled kind of different sorts of aesthetic strategies. So I think there’s some ways that kind of artists taking the kind of discussion, right to those kinds of large questions of power and have done for for many, many years. But I think also, there’s ways that art can work in those kind of gentle politics, and we shouldn’t, I think, overlook some of the value and importance of kind of gentle politics too. And the ways that that can kind of also have real force amongst kind of state power.

Josh Landy
This actually brings me to a question that I have. It’s not directly tackling the engines of capitalism, but But I wonder about whether we can start to calm down the consumerism in ourselves? Yes, Arthur Schopenhauer does interesting view about at least some are that it kind of takes our will offline. And Wendell Berry had a kind of eco version of this. You might have a favorite novel, you just read over and over and over again, you’re not consuming any fossil fuels doing that. So is there is there a place for us to do that to basically tamp down on the kinds of desire that consumerism wants to ramp up and that we’re just buying more and more and using more and more resources?

Harriet Hawkins
Yeah, I think that’s is a fascinating question. There’s been some really interesting kind of ideas around the kind of coming back to that making and connecting idea, that sort of doing that kind of thing can be very good for things like eco anxiety, and kind of depression and isolation and loneliness, which I think speaks to some of those kinds of questions. But I also think some of those kinds of, you know, our sense of kind of the imagination and creativity need not necessarily involve us in some of those kinds of consumers logics that we’re so easily caught within.

Ray Briggs
So we’ve got another question or comment from our live audience.

Jess
Jess, I’m from San Francisco originally, I live in Chicago now. I’m wondering, so as you’ve been talking about different artworks, dealing with climate change, I’ve heard a lot of examples about losing something valuable seeing something irreparably damaged things that try to teach art and hope and this sort of elegiac, like, love of the environment. But one of the things that I’m wondering about is, like, the consequence of climate change is mass misery for the whole planet, right? Like we’re destroying our own house. Are you aware of any artists who are working in the medium of misery who are trying to sort of convey that consequence?

Harriet Hawkins
Yeah, I think there’s, there’s huge amounts of work that’s done really, really fascinating kind of explorations. And I guess that kind of pair of the enchantment, the kind of disenchantment and the misery and a kind of lack of hope. And I think those kinds of works are really important for making sure that we don’t get carried away with hope. Resilience can be a powerful word, but it can also be a dangerous word. And we need to kind of be aware of not kind of trying to make people become too hopeful when actually, yes, they live in kind of condition. Conditions are not good, and they’re going to potentially get very get a lot worse.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, a couple of years back, we we had Jane Hirshfield, the poet on the show, and she’s got a book of very despairing and I felt very moving climate poems. And I think that’s one artwork that captures that ethos.

Josh Landy
Yeah. I mean, how do you how do you strike that balance? And it’s something that Carmen was talking about a moment ago, read an exhibition that manages to strike the balance. But do you have any general thoughts? You know, if an artist wants to embark on this, or how do they how do you how do you balance the hope, against the despair, get the right balance?

Harriet Hawkins
I think you possibly sit with the fact that as human beings, we all go through those cycles of feelings and different kinds of ways. And it could be that you’re making work that suits you at a particular point in time. And that’s because you feel hopeful. It could be you’re working with communities, who want to tell hopeful stories, who don’t only want to have negative stories about their lives told in the world. And I think that’s very important to honor too. So I think, you know, being sensitive to the sort of place you’re working with, maybe your collaborators, and also your own feelings at that point in time.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I mean, I kind of just like the idea that there’s just one way to feel about something as gigantic as climate change. Like, it seems like a bunch of incompatible emotions are all appropriate. And maybe each helpful in some context.

Harriet Hawkins
Yeah,I’ve been thinking quite a lot about art, not just about uncertainty and complexity, but also about ambivalence, and how it can kind of let us sit with that kind of dynamic interplay and find power in that, rather than always having to kind of settle for the singularity, which reproduces some of the kind of mastery and sovereignty that surely we’re also trying to get away from, when thinking about what got us into this mess.

Josh Landy
That’s a really powerful thought. I want to ask about one thing before we run out of time. My wonderful former colleague no longer with as Michelle said, once talked about an experience he had he got stuck on the side of a mountain use mountaineering, it was gonna take hours people to come rescue him. And he started thinking about how old everything was. He could see the moon billions of years, the Alps, hundreds of millions, this house down there, yeah, maybe 200, that cow 10 years blade of grass maybe month. That’s an incredibly enchanting picture their world that really, you know, it transforms our engagement with it. Is there art that can do that? That can turn us into geologists basically?

Harriet Hawkins
Absolutely. There absolutely, certainly is. And I think that’s one of the things that we kind of see over and over again, so an exhibition I’ve been involved in recently has been called Hollow Earth. And that was really about trying to get us to rethink the subterranean, both in terms of those classic sublime images of magma and volcanoes, but also kind of geologic intimacy, kind of proximities to rocks, stone and forces of the earth in different kinds of ways. So I think absolutely, it can do that.

Ray Briggs
So if you had one kind of thought to leave our audience with about, like carrying lessons from art forward into their own response to climate change, what would you say?

Harriet Hawkins
Um, I think I would say, if you think about art, for me, that’s ideas of creativity, as ideas of imagination, and those ideas of knowledge politics, that we’ve talked about that kind of humbleness, that ability to sit with complexity and uncertainty. I think those are lessons that certainly teaches me that I try and carry into all areas of my life, whether that’s about climate change or beyond.

Josh Landy
Well, Harriet, this has been not just a comforting conversation but also really inspiring when thank you so much for joining us today.

Harriet Hawkins
Thank you very much for having me.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Harriet Hawkins, Professor of Human Geography, co-director of the Center for GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway, London, and author of “Geography, Art, Research.”

Ray Briggs
We’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and immerse yourself in a library of more than 500 episodes.

Josh Landy
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed on today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature your question on our blog.

Ray Briggs
Now… faster than a melting iceberg, it’s Ia Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ia Shoales… For a few years there, there were articles in magazines, remember those, airline magazines, remember those? About how we might evolve into a society that no longer needed to work. Not too sure how that was supposed to work, without work, robots, artificial intelligence, yadda yadda, there’d be no NEED for money, or we would all just have it, kind of like social security. Well, that wasn’t the important part, the important part was how much time we’d have, time to do the things denied our souls because we were busy mixing cement or crunching numbers or shouting at underlings. We’d make trips, learn Italian, make art. Art. I gathered this was kind of like outsider art in the last century. Guys who got laid off at the lumber mill would take their chainsaws out of storage to make mermaids and Presidents out of redwood trees. There was a guy, a janitor, out of DC. who in his spare time made a gathering place for the second coming in a garage. He made thrones of glory out of folding chairs and aluminum foil, with a seating chart, for the Lord, Jesus, various figures from the Book of Revelation. The artist, James Hampton worked on it for years, and kept a notebook, in which he referred to himself as St. James with the title “Director, Special Projects for the State of Eternity.” Nobody knew about it until after his death, but his conference room, as it were, is now on display at the Smithsonian. Today we think he’s nuts, but all art began there. Hymns and chants and plays of god and saints, their glory and suffering, and the baby Jesus and Jesus on the Cross. Dukes and kings would pay for these things to hang in their castles. Pictures of saints right next to the portrait of the Duchess. Museums rose up, orchestras, coliseums, vast halls. Pictures of gods gave way to generals. And then on to Dada and cubism, away from glory and on to personal expression. Later, Andy Warhol put art on the assembly line. Now we save money with reality. With true crime. We have shows on television right now, even as I speak, that are basically surveillance camera footage. It’s like Candid camera only paranoid. We still have art for the common people, but it’s found in décor, true crime, outfits. We still build coliseums, but our leaders are indifferent, and sports teams won’t pay for them. So bond issues are the new emperors, dispensing largesse on buildings that will be obsolete at about the same time the baseball team decides to move to Vegas, where large buildings devoted to sport are just so much pocket change really. The point being, art is something you’re driven to do. The pandemic showed us that we don’t have that drive, if we ever did. We spent our lockdown watching undercooked movies on Netflix. We stewed in our juice, emerging to moan about vaccinations and entitlement and wokeness and Maga and cancel culture and mandates. Things are kind of okay right now, except for the global warming, yet everybody is fearful, angry, and anxious. We’re bored of our own affluence, and angry at the homeless and trans for being where we’re looking. By to individualism, now it’s all about family, community, diversity, team building. Even people who got out of the rat race don’t spent time learning to throw pots, or make their own pigments out of squid they raise themselves in octopus farms. That’s the Millennial dream, they say. To carve your own ukulele out of the shattered yet silly dreams of Baby Boomers, turning the bitter songs of Gen X into twee little ballads sung breathlessly and yet without affect, like psychopathic lullabies you can dance to, kind of. That’s harsh. Well, okay, we ARE excited about artificial intelligence. We use it to make grotesque machine driven images, and then have another AI write amusing captions for them. That is our future, America. Curating the whims of robots, and then tweeting about them. At Elon’s whim. And creative is now a noun. A creative is the person on your team who knows what a pencil is, and why there’s no need to have one. A thought leader for the thoughtless. First fired, I believe, when the layoffs come. But the first to do a ted talk, if we still have those in 2020. Oh wait, did that already happen? Director, Special Projects for the State of Eternity. Is that job still open? I gotta go.

Ray Briggs
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco Bay Area, and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2023.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
Special thanks to Merle Kessler, Conchita Perales, Becky Barron, Karen Adjluni, Linda Fagan, Emily Huang and Elizabeth Zhu.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Roland Greene, Eric Ortiz, Bob Cable, Patricia Terrazas, and all the staff here at the Stanford Humanities Center, which has generously sponsored tonight’s event.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
And from the members of KALW San Francisco where our program originates.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed—

Josh Landy
Or mis-expressed!

Ray Briggs
On this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or our other funders,

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation can continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.