S2E4 | Carbon Dioxide
Transcript
LK: Lutz Koepnick
AH: Amanda Hellman
MS: Mark Scala
ML: Maren Loveland
MJ: Marcell Jones
HSM: Hans Schmitt-Matzen
LK:
Carbon Dioxide is essential for life on Earth. Humans need it for respiration and maintain healthy PH blood levels; plants use CO2 to produce oxygen through photosynthesis; in the oceans phytoplankton convert it into sugars that feed marine ecosystems. But modern fossil-fuel culture has generated atmospheric CO2 levels that derail all these cycles of absorption, transformation, and regeneration. Climate scientist Charles Keeling started to chart carbon dioxide levels in the late 1950s and documented an alarming rise of atmospheric CO2 since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Since the late 1950s, levels have further increased by more than 50%. They now inch ever closer to what human lungs can tolerate and they by far exceed what plants and oceans can convert into building blocks of life.
CO2 isn’t the only gas enabling planetary greenhouse effects. Nor is it the only factor of what’s considered our carbon footprint. And our carbon footprint is not just about us emitting these gases when driving our cars, flying on planes, or heating or cooling our dwellings. It instead registers the fact that nearly all consumer products in our fossil-fuel economy derive from chemicals that themselves derive from fossil products.
Recent conversations tend to single out CO2 as a singular scape goat to explain global warming—the fall guy in a film noir of the 1940s. A framer framed. CO2’s bad rep today is certainly in order. Its signatures are all over the place in our changing world. But not because of what it is, but because what we have done to it and with it.
As we have seen in so many of our previous episodes already, there is a lot of great art today that tackles the challenges of global warming. Typically, our focus in this podcast is on artists who approach or embrace the elements as artistic collaborators, as co-creators within the artistic process. In today’s episode, however, instead of featuring pathbreaking artists whose work addresses climate change, we turn our attention to the carbon footprint of the art world itself: to what galleries and museums do and can do today to reduce CO2 emissions; to how curators and museum directors rethink exhibition and conversation practices to lessen their environmental footprint.
In today’s episode, we’ll speak with Amanda Hellman, the director of Vanderbilt University’s Gallery of Art, and Mark Scala, the chief curator of the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, about how climate considerations shape their respective approaches to preserving and exhibiting art at their venues, and how we can’t separate conversations about decarbonization from ongoing efforts to decolonize the art world. We’ll also take a look under the hood of the Frist Museum’s emissions management talking to two staff members about their work.
TH:
From Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, this is Art of Interference: a podcast about creative responses to climate change. In each episode, we talk with artists and experts who work at the intersection of nature, technology, and science today.
Today’s episode is hosted by Lutz Koepnick.
PART ONE
LK:
Art today travels as never before. Ever-more biennials attract ever-more audiences from many corners of the world. Curators jet-set around the globe to discover new voices or recover historically marginalized artists. Mega-exhibits parade work with complex international loan agreements while art that was looted during the age of Western colonialism finally begins to return to their lands of origin. NFTs eat up tremendous energy resources to trade art seemingly anywhere, at all times. And Jeff Koons, trying to top things as usual, now even installs his sculptures on the surface of the moon.
The last years have seen extraordinary efforts in the arts to address the effects of climate change. We have discussed some of them already and will explore many more in future episodes of our podcast. The carbon footprint of contemporary art, its practices, its institutional setups, its tremendous traffic, often remains in the shadow of all this—the glitz of art’s contemporary cosmopolitanism. And yet, museums and galleries today think hard about questions of sustainability—and how they can reduce their emission levels, their carbon footprint.
Amanda Hellman:
I’m Amanda Hellman. I’m the director of the Vanderbilt University Art Gallery. I’ve been there for not quite two years and I’m really coming in to think about the processes that the gallery is functioning off of and thinking about how to align their activities with best practices. It’s an interesting moment to have a conversation like this because we get to make every decision as though it’s the first time we’re making the decision and we really do think about how we are impacting the objects that we steward, the communities that we’re engaging, and some of the most pressing issues that we deal with, including our carbon footprint.
Mark Scala:
My name is Mark Scala. I don’t have the luxury of having been here for only two years. I’ve been here since 2000. I came to the Frist Art Museum when it was the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and had a chance to see the exhibition program unfold and to play an active role in the exhibition program. For the listener who doesn’t know this, the Frist Art Museum is not a collecting institution, so a lot of the things that Amanda is confronting regarding the impact of collections management It’s not really as much an issue for us. For us, it’s the sustainability of our building, it making sure that it is as energy efficient as possible. And also more critical from my perspective, because I’m the chief curator here, what is our impact as we bring in art from around the world?
LK:
As chief curator of this museum and as a gallery director who has worked extensively on African art, you have observed over the last decades an enormous globalization of the art world. To stay in touch with contemporary trends or, Amanda, to steward your collection, you need to be very attuned to all the traveling that’s taking place and the kind of carbon footprint that that has produced. At the same time, there’s so many artists working on issues of climate change. How does this go together?
MS:
There is something paradoxical about it, obviously, because we, in the arts in general, feel that we want to make a positive impact on the world, and we want to model responsibility for everybody, and yet we are not doing it. Quite clearly, any time you go to the Venice Biennale and you think of the extraordinary expense and the extraordinary use of energy to get the Arsenale filled, to get the various pavilions filled, you’ve got hundreds of thousands of people coming to this sinking island. That’s not responsible. I, I, I think a lot about this in terms of my own practice and, you know. I love to travel. I love that, that part of being a curator. You see things abroad that you would never see online, you’re not going to see in a gallery in the United States. You know, it’s really important if your vision is to open people’s hearts and minds to things that are happening out in the world, you’ve got to kind of know what you’re talking about.
LK:
Have you made certain kind of choices in the past about attending biennials and not others because of climate considerations?
MS:
Because of climate considerations, partly because of calendar considerations, because of budgetary considerations, um, because of need. If there is a, an art fair that it’s going to be just like all the other art fairs, you have to look at the value of the travel.
AH:
I think that the biennial and festival model is probably one of the most detrimental models that has come up. We’re constantly claiming that you have to see the art in person, and it’s something that I agree with, but at the same time, a lot of these festivals actually do look very similar. Getting work from all over the world into one space is not very efficient, and I think there are certain things that we could do to change those models. More broadly, the length of a show, how it travels within a region once it’s been created, things like that. We have to think almost like Costco, right? That is there some collection sharing that we can do that would also lower the environmental cost of getting objects in front of people? Be a way for collections to really be exposed in new ways. The majority of institutions only show a tiny, tiny percentage of their collection at any given time. So, is there a way that we could actually sort of reframe the way we think of getting objects out and making them accessible that’s not just a biennial model where you are expecting this influx of people into one space for one month. We’ve seen the impact of that in, in places like Kassel, Germany, with, Documenta or Venice, which has incredible issues. And so thinking just more broadly about how we create a more sustainable path for exhibiting object is needed. It was sort of shocking to sit down at one moment and realize how many air miles the objects I was bringing were racking up. It’s just not the way in which you think about a curatorial practice, maybe until you do. I think there’s a lot of space to kind of open up the way in which we have a curatorial practice that takes sustainability and environmental challenges into consideration.
MS:
I like a lot of what you just said. Interestingly, the founding principle for the first art museum and one of the rationales for not being a collecting museum is because there’s so many museum collections that are not out in view. And so the whole idea from the very start was to identify collections like that. They’re not always deep. They’re not always sufficient to make a whole exhibition out of. Sometimes you have to partner with two or three museums, but that notion of not necessarily having to create something new each time. Of course, the challenges are still there. I’ve been bothered for years by the issue of crates. The unsustainability of the shipping, the transport industry in general, the idea that you build a crate for $5,000 to protect this singular work of art, and oftentimes once the work of art returns to its owner, the crate gets demolished.
You know, there’s so much to talk about. I don’t think we are going to necessarily come up with any sort of draconian thing, but your notion of extending the length of a show. So you do two shows. Our audience is very accustomed to seeing three shows in our main gallery, three shows in our upper level gallery, the spring, summer, fall. Those seasons are what people come to expect, but it’s not cast in stone. It doesn’t have to be that way.
AH:
It will require a shift in how we consume our art. I grew up in a place where I was lucky enough to have a large semi-encyclopedic collection that was free and open to the public. And so, I build these relationships with works of art. It didn’t have to be the most impressive work of art there was because it was just this sort of friendship that I was building. And in some respects, it’s the best kind of friendship, right? Where you feel really good when you’re close and you get to see it all the time, but then you go away. And when you come back, you come and have a moment with your old friend. And what’s nice is you, you’re very comfortable in that sort of familiarity of what you recognize, but also you’re changed and you start to recognize new things in that piece. Maybe we have to teach people that you have to come and see an exhibition that’s coming through three times over the course of its run which is not an easy challenge, but the idea that it’s really about building that relationship with that object or the idea behind the show and really understanding it deeply I think is really where we’re going to see more meaning and more value and more respect for art institutions and art spaces and places in which you get to connect with art.
MS:
I had the real joy of being at the High Museum in Atlanta and they do a wonderful job of Shaping the visitor experience of their collections through juxtaposition by kind of shuffling things around a little bit putting really interesting and compelling objects next to other interesting and compelling objects that one wouldn’t think connect But then you see oh, you know, there is that connection. So I completely get what you’re saying I think visitors do like to have the comfort of seeing the things that they love, but they also love seeing them recontextualize sometimes.
LK:
Much of contemporary art, however, is no longer necessarily object or work based, performance based artistic practices, video installation art. You mentioned earlier this need to see art in person, and there is something in contemporary art that really produces that need, because it is so ephemeral. Does this trend towards more performative practices actually worsen the carbon footprint of contemporary art–because you need to go in order to see them?
AH:
Maybe it’s this moment in my life, I’ve got a lot going on, I feel like we have to relinquish some of the control that we want, right? I think about a garden, which actually has a very similar mission as a collecting institution. It’s about research and preservation and stewarding, but as part of that, you have to be very comfortable with change, with growth, with decay. I say this feeling very strongly that the preservation of objects and stewarding collections is a very important part of my job. But I think if we are able to approach things with a little less FOMO, fear of missing out, right? That we will all of a sudden change our relationship to the work and change our relationship with consuming art.
Museums cannot care for an indefinite amount of objects for an indefinite amount of time. And I think we do have to make hard choices about how we care for these objects and how we make decisions about their well-being.
MS:
I think we’re in consensus that there really is no substitute for the genuine experience of being with a work of art. I’m old enough to remember back in the 90s when museums were debating whether to digitize their collections and make them available to the public. And there was one school of thought that said, no, let’s not do that because then they won’t come. They will have seen that van Gogh, they won’t come and see it in person. And of course the exact opposite has happened. Because people realize that any kind of facsimile reproduction, replication of a work of art or performance, anything, is only, like, you’re not getting the air around it, you’re not getting the light around it, you’re not getting the scale, there’s so many things that you’re not getting. But by the same token, we have to ask, how much is enough? I’m working with some artists working with VR and AI now, and those are mediums that are infinitely replicable in many ways, but you still expend a lot of energy to make them and to present them, and so, so you’re not really solving any problem necessarily, any kind of environmental or ecological problem by focusing on those sort of ephemeral things.
I do like the curatorial gardening thing, you know, because you do make selections. You weed out the garden, or create the experience that you want to create for people. I think you’re right. Things are certainly not sustainable. There is that fear of missing out. It’s taken me a long time to, to almost get over that. You know, it’s like I don’t, I don’t mind not going to things, you know.
LK:
Will you be on that plane to Venice this year?
MS:
That’s the question I’m asking myself. I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll, if I’ll need to, but I’ll be on other planes.
INTERFERENCE 1
LK:
Hi, Maren, thanks for joining me today.
ML:
Of course. My pleasure.
LK:
I understand you want to share some thoughts about Carbon Dioxide, the villain in so many recent discussions about climate change.
ML:
Right. As you know, I have a strong interest in what, for lack of better words, is often called the digital humanities. And how methods of digital visualization, in scholarship and the arts, can reveal things that often remain unnoticed.
LK:
There’s a ton of visualizations of our carbon footprint already available online—but it doesn’t always seem to sway policy makers. Despite their impressive graphics.
ML:
Correct. Sometimes, I feel, it seems as if Al Gore is still stuck on that lift they used in Inconvenient Truth (2007) to visualize the increase of greenhouse gases. Which is why I’m interested in new ways of representing climate data—especially through sound.
LK:
I think they call it sonfication, right?
ML:
Listen to this project for instance. It’s from 2016, put together by two researchers—Judy Twedt and Dragan Frieson–at the University of Washington to sonify the so-called Keeling curve, one of the most famous indicators of rising Carbon Dioxide levels measured since the late 1950s.
LK:
I can’t call this easy listening.
ML:
It isn’t meant to be. They assigned each monthly CO2 measurement a different pitch, the higher the note the higher the carbon dioxide concentrations.
LK:
And the longer the piece, the more it seems to drill itself into my brain
ML:
Which is the point. But you can also nicely hear the annual up and downs in level, caused by seasonal differences. Twedt has gone on to do all kinds of work on music and climate change, even gained some prominence giving TED talks about this issue.
LK:
What else did you come across?
ML:
Here’s another project. It was put together by the staff of KQED. What they did was to correlate rises in CO2 levels with increased average temperatures of the past 400 years or so.
LK:
What do we hear here?
ML:
The pitch of the electronic sounds represents CO2 concentrations, while the pitch and intensity of the plucked strings represent temperature averages.
LK:
Wow. The closer you come to the present, the more this piece really seems to burst your eardrums.
ML:
Which isn’t perhaps the point. But it certainly doesn’t leave you unaffected.
LK:
Meaning it has more of an impact than yet another splashy visual graphic?
ML:
Right. And it exemplifies that there are so many creative ways in which artists, designers, media makers, and even digital humanists can participate in current conversation about climate change—and make sure scientists and others get their knowledge across.
PART TWO
LK:
It takes a lot of energy to move art objects and viewers from one place to another. It also takes a lot of fossil fuel to preserve art objects, in a vault or in a gallery space. Most viewers don’t typically think about this. Unlike airlines tickets, exhibition labels don’t show the amount of carbon dioxide that objects require by virtue of their sheer presence. Though the challenges for collecting museums differ from those of non-collecting venues, I was curious to hear from Amanda and Mark whether we should preserve the precious things of art at all costs, no matter the carbon footprint? This is obviously a touchy question.
LK:
Can one have those kind of conversations in your institutions about letting go, as you called it earlier?
AH:
I think deaccessioning is a very important part of caring for collections and stewarding them. I think about our own collection at Vanderbilt, which is a classic university collection where there are some clear focuses that were generated by the interest of faculty. And then there are other random pieces that somebody said, we feel like you should have this. And some of the issues that we’re dealing with as we go through our inventory is really thinking about: are we the best place to care for this particular object? We’re actually participating in a much bigger project of stewarding visual culture.
So part of what we’re doing in our efforts to be more attuned to the energy required to care for these objects is thinking about the space that we have and how it’s used. We will treat the objects that actually are used by our community much more effectively if we have a better control over how we’re storing what we’re storing. This requires, again, that sort of shift about what ownership is. This is unique to museums because they have a very complex mission, which is to preserve the integrity of the object and make that object accessible to the public. So as you’re saying, is the energy that’s consumed to do this really worth it?
And I would say yes, and we should have more resources to make sure that we’re using fewer resources in order to do this. If the goal was just to preserve the object. That’s easy. You put it in a small climate controlled space, make sure the lights are off. But as soon as you have to also make that object accessible to the public, every time you make it accessible to the public, you’re also degrading the object.
And so part of it is understanding how complex this effort really is. And why there’s a lot of tension in these spaces, because there are some people in the museum that are tasked solely with making that object accessible to the public, and some that are solely tasked with preserving its integrity.
LK:
The Frist doesn’t have the issue as far as preservation is concerned, but when it comes to exhibition, thinking about shows, thinking about how to put objects together and display them for the audience. Are there ever considerations that for this particular object, we need too complicated a climate control system, we better let go of this?
MS:
Yeah, these are things that we talk about. I don’t think that, um, I can remember any instance where we had to have a very radically changed environment, you know, climate controls. To your point, Amanda, about deaccessioning, in the museum field, of course, that is considered to be one of the most challenging kind of problematic issues because it involves so much more than just the object. It involves the terms of a bequest or the terms of a gift. It involves the idea that we all think of ourselves as temporary caretakers.
LK:
You must be visiting a lot of artists and seeing all kinds of studio practices these days. Can you tell us a bit about artists that you came across that really think hard about the environmental footprint of the work that they’re making?
MS:
I love working with artists who are crazy ambitious, who are smarter than me, who know more than me, who are taking on things that I can’t begin to sort of fathom, but a lot of these ambitions are, I’m not sure that the artist is always thinking about its environmental impact. I’ve talked to artists who wanted to be the American representative in Venice and they wanted to do this thing in the lagoon, you know, it’s just like, okay. What is that going to take? Maybe it’s part of the responsibility of the curator to encourage artists to think more about environmental impact.
LK:
Doesn’t mean to be less, less ambitious, or?
MS:
It can be more ambitious. It’s one thing to address issues of climate change in your work, but does your work itself contribute to climate change problems?
LK:
Museums, galleries are about objects and works of art, but they’re also about visitors, and visitors always come with certain kind of expectations as far as comfort and convenience is concerned, and some of these expectations have a pretty high carbon footprint. The future of our conversations about climate change also needs to be one that somehow addresses our comfort levels. We need to kind of recalibrate what is comfortable and what isn’t comfortable in order to prepare ourselves for. Do you ever think about the comforts of the audiences in your spaces?
Mark Scala:
Audiences are often complaining that it’s too cold in the galleries because we keep a temperature level that’s pretty consistent because that’s sort of the standard. But it’s a standard that is being questioned. Is it really necessary to keep things at 72 degrees? Is it really necessary to keep the relative humidity range as it is?
For some objects, yes, it is. And for other objects, no. And how do you strike the balance? When you were asking that question, I was thinking about an Italian museum that I went to, and it had great works of Renaissance and Baroque masters. The windows were open, the birds were flying in and out of the museum, there was natural lighting coming in, and those works had survived for a very long time, and the visitors didn’t feel any differently than they would have felt if they were outside, maybe a little cooler because it was in the shade. We are very precious, and I think we need to be precious. I was kind of appalled by birds flying around in the museum. But maybe we need to reassess our standards of care a little bit. Maybe they don’t have to be quite as draconian as possible. Now, if you have a Mark Quinn frozen head, you’re going to have to keep it frozen. But for a lot of things, especially in the digital realm. You don’t have to have 72 degrees in the galleries.
LK:
And I think also recent research on this issue shows that for preservation purposes, you don’t always need temperature in the 60s or a humidity that is around 50%. Objects can actually take very different things in order to withstand the pressure of time.
AH:
Certainly, let’s say, most of the work that’s produced in Africa was not produced in an environment that had consistent low humidity. The biggest problem is really the big fluctuations in temperature and humidity for a lot of objects. That’s problematic. I have to say I never ever thought about the physical comfort level of a visitor and I agree that most spaces are just much too cold. I have always been much more concerned about their comfort walking into a space and, and whether or not they feel they know the rules, they know that there really are not that many rules. Don’t touch the work. That’s pretty much it. Eating and drinking is frowned upon. The idea that they’re actually just comfortable to talk about the work, to express joy, even if that’s loud. I think that all of the environmental controls should be very much taken into consideration, but I also think that we need to use real data and real information to make those decisions and not think that we have to hold on to that kind of control.
LK:
A lot of museums in, in recent years work together in order to develop some standards and best practices to address issues of, of climate change and preservation practices in exhibition practices and curation, acquisition and deacquisition, storage. So it’s something your institutions look at. How can we do this? How can we solve this together?
MS:
Yeah, it’s actually not been a topic of conversation so much at the Frist, to be quite honest. I will be now. In preparation for this conversation, I was able to research, well, what does the American Alliance of Museums say? What are they doing? What is the Association of Art Museum Curators doing? And they’re all sort of at least talking. There’s some museums that have curators of sustainability, which I think is really fascinating. You know, I’ve got to figure out what exactly that means in practice. But this is something that we can’t, especially as a non-collecting museum, we can’t not pay attention to.
AH:
I agree. And I also think that the big thing that’s missing is money, right? If you’re in an old building, you have a terrible thermal envelope. You don’t have a thermal envelope. And that’s the biggest thing that’s going to reduce. If you do need to have climate that is controlled, that’s the biggest thing that’s going to change the outcome of it. There isn’t very clear standards from our professional governing bodies about the absolute emergency of addressing so many of these things. So it really is about an institution taking it upon themselves to do their own audit and to look at their resources, both what they are knowledgeable about, and what kind of change they can fund because everything from reducing the waste in your cafe, that’s a big investment, and if a cafe is already losing money for a museum, then all of a sudden that’s really not necessarily a switch that you can make. These are intensive institutions, and we can make very small changes. Instead of using vinyl for your exterior signage or for your interior wall label or plastic labels to switch to paper or in the last exhibition I did at my previous institution, I hired a sign painter to come in and paint the signs and then we use paper labels for everything else. And the cost was actually quite comparable. So you have to say that I’m okay with my branding being altered a little bit in order to make those changes.
MS:
Yeah, money. How about that? Your thoughts made me think about insurance and made me think about shippers and the idea of exclusive use shipping and the idea of last on, first off and all of these things, these kind of limitations that a lender might insist on if you’re bringing something from Europe, from Berlin or London. And you want to have the federal indemnification, they’ll oftentimes require that the shipments be like three shipments or five shipments instead of one, because then the risk mitigation, if one plane goes down, at least four of them didn’t. So that’s, that’s really pricey. Insurance would have been astronomical if you didn’t have federal indemnity. So part of the argument for a communal response is to put pressure on companies, on the government to reconsider some of the standards.
AH:
I don’t think we’re going to see big regulations from our governing bodies for a long time. So, you know, it has to be based on the initiative of the individual and the institution.
MS:
Yeah, I don’t think we’ll see regulations, but certainly recommendations would be welcome. That would be a good step forward.
INTERFERENCE TWO
LK:
The carbon footprint of art museums in the twenty-first century is astounding. Among cultural institutions and exhibition venues, art museums rank second right after zoos. To keep art works alive produces almost as much carbon emissions as to show tigers, elephants, and monkeys. The Bizet Green Protocol, endorsed by numerous international museums, has identified a good number of benchmarks and best practices over the past 15 years to lower the carbon emissions of art venues. Based on a great deal of research, it makes clear cases that blanket conditions for the preservation or exhibition of entire collections should no longer apply and calls for more flexible methods in terms of light, temperature, and humidity, to care for individual objects. It advocates low-energy methods of art transportation, the use of more passive and differential methods of cooling and humidifcation, less waste production and more recycling.
People at the Frist Museum of Art work hard to lower the museum’s carbon footprint—even though the state of Tennessee doesn’t really push for advanced climate measures. Plus, visitors are typically more interested in the art itself than museum logistics. I met with Marcel Jones and Hans Schmitt-Matzen to learn more about some of their particular challenges:
Marcell Jones:
My name is Marcell Jones. I’m the Facilities Director here at the Frist Art Museum. I’ve been here coming up on six years now, and it’s a great place to work.
Hans Schmitt-Matzen:
And I’m Hans Schmitt-Matzen. I’m the Director of Internal Affairs and I’ve worked here at the museum, since 2003 in varying capacities, some of which involved design, but the built environment has been at the core of my interests.
LK:
Among exhibition venues art museums have a really high carbon footprint. why is that the case?
HSM:
We often have these amazingly strict humidity and temperature controls that we have to maintain for the collections that are loaned to us. It was not a common thing, hundreds of years ago that, that you would have had those tight controls. Obviously, we know masterpieces used to hang in churches and, uh, that were not climate controlled. When I started my career, it was just sort of handed to me you just didn’t question it. This was absolutely the thing that you did if you wanted to be a good steward of these art objects and not have them. deteriorate before your very eyes, right? Some of these conservation teams in the Bizot group, um, the Green Protocols group, are signing on to, to more wider set points between 40 and 60 percent relative humidity. and focusing on not having there be radical swings between the relative humidity over a 24 hour period. , but they’ll allow the temperature to drift between 60 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit, which is far wider than what the typical set points are that we get handed.
MJ:
The humidification that we use in our museum. We have five of them, controlling our spaces and everything. It can be a tremendous amount of energy use. to try to make this 50 percent relative humidity control in our galleries. But now knowing that we can kind of have this wider parameter, we can see some of those KWs come down a little bit, which will be good. And with that building management system that we do have here, we’re able to actually see each individual meter so a lot of the controls we have here are giving us more data points that we can also see how temperature and certain prices and changes all correlate together. So we’re keeping a good look at that right now.
LK:
And a good look they take indeed at the Frist to figure out how to meet the standards and expectations of the Bizet Protocol. This includes using advanced digital tools to readjust the museum’s cooling and heating patterns, develop more differential light and humidity levels for individual pieces on display, respond more flexibly to lender demands and audience concerns, ensure gift shop and restaurant do not to produce unwanted carbon emissions, and even think about more EV-charging stations to warrant greener commutes to downtown Nashville in the absence of a reliant public transport systems. One of the biggest challenges, however, is the building itself: a beautiful 1934 former post office certainly not built with climate on the minds of New Deal architects.
HSM:
We’re trying to reach these tight parameters, with a building that was designed for ventilation and to breathe, right? To not be, completely, hermetically sealed the outer perimeter of our, of our building is a little bit more permeable, but then we keep the galleries in the inner sections of the of the footprint in part because it’s easier for us to, to maintain the tighter parameters and have this buffer of zones of climatized air that surround the art galleries.
LK:
What isn’t helpful in all of this is how state regulations tend to favor historical preservation over climate adaptation, or don’t even have climate consideration on their radar at all.
HSM:
We have covenants with the Tennessee Historical Commission for us to maintain a certain consistency in the aesthetics from the outside. and we always have to run renovation projects through them for design, review, and comment. We might have wished in some instances that we could have added a little bit more insulation on a recent roof renovation project that we undertook, but there were times when it, the design just wouldn’t really work with that.
MJ:
I would definitely love for the building to be able to meet this LED green lead certification but I just know with the type of building that we have, that will be, a lot, lot of work to get there. But it would be nice to have a stamp of some type of approval from some green initiative to show that we’ve done these things to meet code and standard and make the big improvement for our facility and the sustain, sustainability and just going through for future, For kids and everything like that, that we’re doing stuff to, everything we need to for our own ecosystem.
HSM:
In some ways, this building itself is an amazing sustainability project we don’t need to get rid of this 1934 building and fill up a landfill and then erect something completely new and have all this massive construction waste, right?
LK:
The greening of museums isn’t just a matter of individual will and local ambition. It takes a lot of different players and elements to lower one’s carbon footprint. And, as Hans Schmitt Madsen is eager to recognize, a good amount of patience:
HSM:
But even if we just can make, , the whole system 20 percent more efficient, even if it’s that, it’s amazing what the, what the change can be, you know?
PART THREE
LK:
We started this program’s conversation with Amanda Hellman and Mark Scala discussing the carbon footprint of contemporary exhibition and art preservation practices—all this within a world of art today that is eager to participate in ongoing processes of globalization and rebalance the relation of Global North and South. In more recent years, the idea of decolonizing the arts has assumed a central role in these conversations, and for museums and galleries in the Global North this issue is intimately tied to the question of restitution, of returning formerly stolen objects to their rightful owners. Think of decarbonization and decolonization as two sides of the same coin: they are critical responses to dominant histories of art and art consumption that essentially rested on strategies of extraction. Such thinking generates considerable pushback in the present, though, sometimes playing out one against the other. We can’t return your object, it is argued, because your museums, your storage facilities, your preservation standards can’t guarantee the pristine endurance of the object in question—because your venues don’t value sustainability as much as ours. How do you deal with such arguments, I asked Mark and in particular Amanda, who is an expert in African Art and questions of restitution?
AH:
Decolonization of a museum is, in its most simplest form, a focus on community, and that can happen in a lot of different ways. To have a collection is to be a part of a colonial legacy, even if you don’t have objects that were plundered and stolen. Restitution is the legal transfer of ownership of an object, which I think in some respects is just as important, if not more important, than repatriation, um, which is returning an object to its country of origin. The piece that’s often missing when you’re talking about cases of restitution and repatriation is that it is not necessarily our duty to judge whether or not the country or institution It’s prepared to care for that object the way we think it should be cared for, but it’s really making sure that we find the rightful owner, which is not always a government, which is not always an institution. And in many cases, if not 99.9 percent of the cases, is impossible. So what I think is important in those cases is that we think about who we’re returning it to. And that’s what complicates it more than anything. It’s not an excuse to say that we shouldn’t be committed to that, but I think it is important that we don’t simplify it.
LK:
You might think of this as a separate question. You know, there’s the question of restitution. And there’s a question of the carbon footprint of the current art world. Both of these systems on some level relied on extractivist culture. Extraction of artworks or extraction of materials. How do we, in our contemporary moment reverse or mitigate this kind of extractivist culture on which the art world relies as much as our civilization in general.
AH:
Oh, absolutely. It’s taken us a long time, the global north, to really understand how the transfer of ownership of objects has worked. And it’s highly problematic. And it should be a space in which we’re dedicating a significant amount of resources. That’s easier said than done. But at the core of all of this is that sense of ownership and that entitlement of ownership. If we look at the case of work that’s come out of the African continent, I think in particular, it’s such an abuse of the work, right? Because so much of that work is meant to decay. The art has a life cycle that once you remove it from its context, you’re also stopping its natural progression of its life. That is probably the biggest colonial impact, this change in values that happens when you remove objects from their places of origin.
LK:
So decolonization could mean actually to allow artwork to decay as it was meant to decay.
AH:
Yes, I think that could be a part of it. And I, and again, it’s sort of holding on to this idea that you should preserve it forever rather than letting it go. I am really lucky to have seen so much art and so much art from the past. That’s a real privilege, and I would hate for people to miss out on that privilege, but also we do have to let go a little bit. The history is already flattened, and so much of the nuance has been removed. So, it’s, it is hard and it’s complex and it’s muddied with the way in which humans treat each other and treat things and misunderstand what things are about and what objects are about. I’m very curious to see what kind of opportunities can open up if we’re willing to relinquish that control.
LK:
How does it look from the perspective of a curator, a gardener of the arts, this idea of letting go and allowing art with the possibility that art might actually decay?
MS:
We did an exhibition of Egyptian antiquities from the Cairo Museum. Check went off for, for getting something from a good source. We had Zahi Hawas, the minister of culture, come and give a talk. His passion was returning certain objects to Egypt. And he said, we don’t need everything, but there are certain national treasures that you Western museums ought not to have. You got it illegally or through plunder or through whatever means when we were a British colony. Those we want back. But I think that implicit in that is the recognition that it’s really important for people to see and understand and appreciate Egyptian culture. And so he’s, I think he saw that arts ambassadorial function. We recently did a Chinese show, and we learned that one of the objects had been taken from a tomb. We didn’t know the circumstances, but the question was, was this a grave robber? And we learned that it was a European antiquities dealer, who was responsible for it being removed from the tomb. And so what do you do then? Do you cancel the work of art? Do you ban it, or do you talk about it? Do you talk about how it was acquired? And so it’s a, it’s a really It’s a question that I think we all have to grapple with. For me, the most important thing is to really talk, like, talk about, you know, how this was obtained. Who obtained it? Like, if it’s the Benin Bronzes, you know, the British had a systematic approach where they massacred people in order to steal those. If something is, is completely illegitimately acquired, and if your presentation of it is some way sanctioning that acquisition, then you shouldn’t do it. If it’s recognizing this is an important work of art, these are the circumstances of its history, because its history is as important as its physical presence, that’s doing a public service as well.
AH:
It is the responsibility of the institution to understand what happened to their objects, whether they own them or they’re just displaying them for a minute or three months or four months. But I think that, that it’s not always about displaying the work and having a, a label, right? That, that the real work has to be done to make sure that the rightful owner has that piece. In some cases, especially if you’re working with a lending institution, that’s a pretty major claim to say, I’m sorry, we’re not going to show your work.
LK:
So it’s really hard and difficult and challenging to have discussions about how to proceed with decolonization. It’s equally hard to have discussions about how museums, how galleries, how the art world should navigate the world in time of climate change with the kind of carbon footprint that we’re seeing. Turns out that both of these are related. Both questions are grounded in a system of extraction, extraction of natural resources, extraction of art. And we don’t quite know how to move on from here. Is the hardest challenge to see these connected with each other or is it an opportunity?
AH:
We’re never going to understand any of these major issues in isolation. We can only understand it more deeply when we see their connections. This is true with all of the biggest man made issues from environmental destruction and displacement to political corruption. These things are all connected and it’s that connection that I think is worth discussing at the moment. It makes me think of the work of Fabrice Monteiro, who’s a Beninese Belgian artist. He has become quite well known in the last decade through his Prophecy series, which is a photography series with a Senegalese designer, Dulcie, where they recycle trash. Dulcie’s known for being able to sew anything, and he creates these couture gowns out of fishing net and plastic bags and VHS tape. And for me, what is so powerful about that work is the way in which it makes visible the fact that we don’t see, certainly in the United States, we don’t see our trash, we don’t see our waste. And so when you see this, you know, big VHS bowl monster sitting on top of a giant pile of e-waste of. computers and keyboards, it’s pretty shocking, especially when you start to think about the way in which you’re connected to that, that your phone carrier tells you every two years that you are eligible for an upgrade. And as soon as you start connecting that to what’s happening in, say, the DRC—the Democratic Republic of the Congo–, Right where they’re mining cobalt and artists like Steve Bandoma are creating works of art that show the hypocrisy of the destruction of natural resources with the rise of corruption within the government. There’s nothing that I can add to the conversation about corruption in the DRC. But as soon as I’m implicated in that cycle of my new phone needs. And then when I turn in my phone, it actually ends up in a big pile in Senegal, where the chemicals are leaching into the water, we are implicated.
LK:
Mark, what kind of art, what kind of artists do you look at when you look for something that helps you navigate this emergency of climate, but also the emergency of extractivist art?
MS:
Well, we are complicit. Every time we open our laptop, we’re complicit. Your initial question was, are these two things, decolonization and, uh, managing your carbon footprint, are these intertwined? I think in certain instances they can be. Each requires a certain measure of responsibility on the part of the museum.
I’m always interested in artists who are thinking about both those things, but as you say, we’re part of it. We’re in the middle of it. How do we do the work on both sides of it? What does our whole institution do? about this. What conversations do we have in our exhibitions committee? What is the content of this work? How does this conform with our ideals about promoting art that is about decolonization? How do we measure that in terms of the current footprint? We’re better at the first, we’re better at the conversation about decolonization than about climate. And that’s something a lot of museums need to think more about.
LK:
Lots of open questions, but that’s the beauty, that’s also the privilege of art to ask questions. Even if sometimes good answers are not quite in our reach. You both do great jobs in your institutions to make sure that those questions are being asked. And we really want to thank you for this, this great conversation.
Mark Scala
Thank you for the conversation. It’s been fun. Yeah. Very, very thought provoking. I’ve been in this line of work for a very long time. We didn’t used to think about these things, but now if you don’t, then you’re not doing your job. You’re not a responsible steward of everything that you’re involved with.
LK:
And you have to make uncomfortable choices.
AH:
Absolutely.
LK:
The arts, as we argue throughout this podcast, offer great places to explore alternate models of being in and interacting with a world haunted by ever-more climate emergencies. Art can entangle us with what is not us and in doing so it can probe modes of planetary life that are less about extraction and more about co-making, co-evolution, kinship. But next time you visit your local art museum, travel to an international art fair, or for that matter watch a video art piece online—try this: ask what it took to get you and the art there. Ask about the extractivist practices—material or symbolic—that enable the presence of a particular object. Ask about the carbon emissions that were necessary to bring a performance, an installation, or even a conceptual intervention into being in front of your eyes. And ask why it often continues to be difficult, if not impossible, to find good and detailed answers.
We can’t do without carbon dioxide in the air, but we also can’t do with too much of it. Does the same hold for art as well? For how we make, preserve, and consume it in times of climate change? How we trade and exhibit art? Or even how we write and talk about it, as critics, scholars, audience members and yes even as podcasters?
