Janice Baker‘s Museums, Art and Inclusion in a Climate Emergency considers how museums and galleries represent, or often fail to represent, the scale of humanity’s adverse impacts on the environment. Drawing on curatorial, philosophical and scientific perspectives, Baker convinces us why museums must eschew comfortable memorialising to provoke critical thinking and action around the climate crisis, writes Yaroslava Kutsai.
Museums, Art and Inclusion in a Climate Emergency. Janice Baker. Routledge. 2023.
With human-induced global warming and the shadow of the sixth mass extinction looming over our planet, humanist ideas of civilisation and progress are coming under scrutiny. In Museums, Art, and Inclusion in a Climate Emergency, art curator Janice Baker critiques how images of such ideas are presented in exhibition spaces. She discusses museums and galleries’ major shortcomings in addressing the climate crisis and calls for a more holistic and nuanced understanding of the environment and humanity’s detrimental impact upon it, for perspectives that could shift us towards a less precarious future. The book’s critical premise is that museums must go beyond conventional reasoning and challenge what we’ve come to regard as common sense.
The book was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, as devastating bushfires and massive destructive floods ravaged Australia, where the author lives. These tragic events were followed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which exposed Europe’s “disunity in the transition to adequate and sustainable energy sources” (10). Largely influenced by calamity and losses of recent years, her text reads as an appeal against the complacency of cultural institutions. Baker contends that museums must “loudly detach” (46) from the fossil fuel industries’ funds and communicate the impact of not switching to renewables (89). Epistemologically, most of them are yet to embrace outside-the-box thinking: this would imply dealing with the Kantian judgment “that nature only exists because humans conceive it as such,” which Baker deems a hurdle for genuine inclusion (57).
This exploration of the areas “outside the familiar and assumed ways of knowing the world” (98) begins with the role of soils in supporting life on earth. In Chapter One, we are reminded that though they remove about a quarter of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions, their representation in museums is often reduced to pedometric characteristics (such as texture, structure, and bulk density). Recently, those incredibly complex and teeming ecosystems have gained more attention in the realm of popular science such as Robert Macfarlane’s acclaimed Underland (2019) and mycologist Merlin Sheldrake’s wondrous study of fungi and their symbiotic association with plant roots, Entangled Life (2020). Referring to this kind of literature that demystifies and turns the spotlight on subterranean landscapes, Baker argues for an approach that emphasises the lively interrelations inherent in them.
Seeing ourselves as the main villain gives us what philosopher Slavoj Žižek characterised as a deceptive reassurance that we are in control.
In Chapter Two, the author further delves into “weathering of the Anthropocene” (35), a thesis based on the assumption that humanity is the physical force that, similarly to asteroids and volcanos, shapes the context for evolution and defines our era. The concept gained traction in the early 2000s owing to Paul J. Crutzen, a Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist. Although it has been widely debated and ultimately rejected by the International Union of Geological Sciences, it will likely remain in use. Baker considers its limitations, bringing up the research conducted by anthropologist and geographer Lotte Isager and her peers. The team surveyed 41 exhibitions dealing with the Anthropocene and identified a lack of specificity glossing over the core problem that “what must end is burning fossil fuels and, relatedly, the structures underpinning economies of limitless growth” (36). Their analysis demonstrated that while trying to make the topic accessible to the general public, overwhelmingly, these spaces did not incentivise the audience to act on climate change.
Centring humanity is a grave problem, Baker asserts: seeing ourselves as the main villain gives us what philosopher Slavoj Žižek characterised as a deceptive reassurance that we are in control. Such “profound species narcissism” (65) doesn’t necessarily translate into meaningful action allowing us to believe that technological innovations can fix the problems we create. In Baker’s opinion, museums should help their visitors recognise that pursuing a hypermodern future and an enhanced version of humanity – “humanist/post-humanist techno-utopian fantasies” (42) – is not a panacea. She suggests a humble anti-humanism (although there probably should be a more positive term) and, as historian Dipesh Chakrabarty advised, it is time to combine our natural histories with our cultural and technological ones in one museum – in the same place, within the same narrative – instead of habitually compartmentalising them (47).
Frustration over the Anthropocene thesis is increasingly noticeable in the humanities that, as Baker puts it, are focused on intersections rather than simplistic notions of connectivity. Chapter Three provides a thorough overview of this discourse. The author critiques the commodification of inclusion practices, which seem to be adopted by museums superficially, primarily to enhance their public image, rather than to expose inequality and transform the status quo (54–55). As a result, the deeper injustice and exclusion may remain obscured. She elaborates in Chapter Four, citing researcher Elizabeth DeLoughrey, who noted that the failure to incorporate Indigenous perspectives has led to a framing of the crisis as a novel phenomenon, overlooking the historical continuity of dispossession and exploitation caused by imperialism (69). Among the alternatives we are offered is the Chthulucene. Coined by feminist philosopher Donna Haraway, this concept advocates for replacing human exceptionalism with multispecism, comprehending and valuing interconnectedness of human and not-us, or more-than-human, which includes both biotic and abiotic.
Museums must tell these uncomfortable truths and strive to become something more than merely ‘comfortable memorialising spaces’ where nostalgia and glorification of the past reign supreme.
Chapter Five focuses on the latter, inviting the reader to reflect on the fate of remains, minerals, and rocks through the lens of White Geology, which studies how traditional geological knowledge has been constructed by colonial and Eurocentric perspectives and brings to light previously marginalised non-Western understandings of the earth and its processes (78). In Chapters Six and Seven, coal and oil are framed as being hazardous not as materials in themselves, but how they are exploited to facilitate the convenience of modern life to which humans have become accustomed.
According to Baker, museums must tell these uncomfortable truths and strive to become something more than merely “comfortable memorialising spaces” (98) where nostalgia and glorification of the past reign supreme. This, she argues in Chapter Eight, involves responding to difficult questions, such as “Where are the links between nationalism, war, and climate?” (119–120). The author observes that museums’ displays of treasures lack essential stories. Gold, she notes in Chapter Nine, is associated with adventure, crime, madness, and horrendous violence rarely mentioned in exhibits. And so is the toxicity and exploitation involved in this precious metal’s discovery, processing, and trade and its huge carbon footprint (131).
This multifaceted, highly informative and thought-provoking investigation culminates in acknowledging the significance of museums as sites of hope despite the hubris (a word frequently repeated throughout the text) that needs to be shed. Baker insists that the museum that retains a stance of neutrality will be increasingly irrelevant (51) and even harmful (138). Museums, Art, and Inclusion in a Climate Emergency does not provide a summary of museums’ management around climate awareness, although it touches on some aspects of this. Instead, it seeks to familiarise us with theoretical and creative frameworks for tackling the climate crisis by looking into what these well-established institutions should not be, and envisioning what they could become.
Note: This review gives the views of the author, not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Main image credit: frantic00 on Shutterstock
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