THE SUSTAINABILITY OF RENEWABLE ANXIETY From domestic comedy-drama to cheap horror to the Sublime, the art that scares us is the art we often yearn for. It’s a coping mechanism, like a bad dream. We learn from the fear. We’ll manage. It was fun, mostly. It’s vigilance too—never forget the danger that can actually strike, like disastrous climate change, already well underway in the worst-case real-world scenarios of scientific prediction and a tsunami of apocalyptic movies, games and sci-fi-ish novels. But our imaginings can also lock into ultimately evasive and fatalistic clichés. Anxiety is invaluable but exploitable. How can we sustainably manage our concerns—crank up the fear voltage, invent new horrors or seek out alternative visions and possible solutions?
These are the kinds of questions asked by Lyndon Blue and Francis Russell on seeing exhibitions about art and ecology at PICA in Perth and apocalypse at Success arts space in Fremantle. Hugh Davies reviews Screen Ecologies, an Australian book we’d love to read about the variety of screen-based artist responses to climate change in our Asia-Pacific region—art that’s actually close to home. Often we feel left out of the action—when did our own government last engage us directly in sustainable environmental programs in the everyday? Anxiety is perpetually renewable but only sustainable when rooted in an evolving, nuanced exchange between research, fact and fine imaginings.
Keith and Virginia
DEGREES OF GREEN ART RADICALISM Lyndon Blue writes that works in PICA’s Radical Ecologies by Pony Express, Peter and Molly, Katie West, Matt Aitken and Rebecca Orchard variously throw into relief the meaning of ‘radical.’
SLOW TRAUMAS OR APOCALYPSES OF CHOICE? Reflecting on curator Laetitia Wilson’s Inanition: A Speculation on The End of Times, Francis Russell seeks works that go beyond “the conventional moralism of eco-crisis” to the likes of “the more progressive tropes of science fiction.”
BIFEM 2016: MARATHON Bec Scully sees in Peter de Jager’s open responsiveness to Xenakis’ unbelievably demanding scores for piano and harpsichord vindication of the composer’s “deep sense of cultural and social responsibility in his art.”
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