Amy Balkin: (In)visible Matter by International New Media Gallery

Amy Balkin (IN)VISIBLE MATTER

First published online, 8th November 2013, by the International New Media Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition:

Amy Balkin

(IN)VISIBLE MATTER

8th November 2013 – 10th February 2014 inmg.uk Exhibition curated by Edwin Coomasaru. Assisted by Theresa Deichert, Isabella Smith and Tom Snow.

The catalogue front and back cover are from photographic documentation of Amy Balkin’s Public Smog, 2004-present. Courtesy of the artist.

Amy Balkin (IN)VISIBLE MATTER

Edited by Edwin Coomasaru

Contents p.6

Foreword Edwin Coomasaru

p.11

The Law of the Land: An Interview with Amy Balkin T.J. Demos

p.21

Amy Balkin and ‘Art Activism’: A New Approach to Environmental Activism Theresa Deichert

Published Online, 8th November 2013 INTERNATIONAL NEW MEDIA GALLERY 2

Amy Balkin et al., ‘Inuk’, photographic and textual documentation from The People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting, 2012-present. Courtesy of the archive. See sinkingandmelting.org for a full credit list.

Film on PAL DVD Øle Jorgen Hammeken and Bertrand Lozay Uummannaq, Greenland Lat/Long: 70°40′29″N, 52°07′35″W December 2012 GREENLAND COLLECTION 10.12/6025

Amy Balkin et al., ‘Carved Whale Vertebra’, photographic and textual documentation from The People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting, 2012-present. Courtesy of the archive. See sinkingandmelting.org for a full credit list.

Christine Shearer Kivalina, Alaska 67.7189° N, 164.4922° W 2008 Carving of a whale vertebra captured by the community of Kivalina and carved by Kivalina resident Russell Adams Jr. Kivalina is eroding due to insufficient sea ice formation in the fall from warming Arctic temperatures, leaving the coastline vulnerable to erosion from storms. I purchased this whalebone carving from Russell Adams Jr., a Kivalina resident in his 40s whose family has lived in the area for generations. I was in Kivalina to do research on the Native Village of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil et al. lawsuit. But after talking to residents like Russell I realized the full extent and immediacy of the danger they face from climate change — not just the threat of losing their homeland, but their entire culture and way of life. The whalebone for me symbolized this way of life and the thousands-year Arctic culture the people are striving to preserve, which I describe in the book Kivalina: A Climate Change Story (2011). KIVALINA COLLECTION 8.08/6060

Amy Balkin et al., ‘Mixed Sand’, photographic and textual documentation from The People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting, 2012-present. Courtesy of the archive. See sinkingandmelting.org for a full credit list.

Melanie Roumiguière Isla Bastimentos, Bocas del Toro, Panama and Isla Diablos, Comarcha Kuna Yala, Panama 9°25’60” N, 78°28’60” E December 21-28, 2012 PANAMA COLLECTION 12.12/6072, 6074

Foreword

Amy Balkin: (In)visible Matter investigates the politics of perception. The title alludes to atomic matter, often imperceptible to the human eye, which is crucial to Amy Balkin’s practice. Much of her work concerns atmospheric particles: Public Smog (2004-present) explores carbon trading, and Invisible-5 (2006) documents the air pollution along the Interstate 5 route across the US West Coast. By placing a heightened focus on and the effects of molecular material like carbon dioxide, Balkin does not only render them visible matter but also vibrant matter. Vibrant matter is a term used by Jane Bennett, who argues that nonhumans should be considered as having their own agency, impacting on us as much as we influence them.1 Bennet’s writing has responded to Bruno Latour’s suggestion that nonhumans have their own political subjectivity, and his blueprint for a new form of democracy that involves their participation.2 At first this proposal may be seen to conflict with other definitions of politics: the ability to use human language is often considered fundamental to our assessment of who counts as a political being.3 However, such an approach has its limitations: language is not the sole space of politics. Judith Butler argues that ‘by virtue of occupying space’ protesters pose their ‘challenge in corporeal terms, which means that when the body “speaks” politically, it is not only in vocal or written language’.4 Entities such as rocks or earth can be considered comparably. In fact, it is long established that nonhumans, such as fingerprints or a murder weapons, ‘testify’ in a court of law. Methods of evidence gathering characterise Balkin’s A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting (2012-present), a catalogue of objects from parts of the planet witnessing the effects of global warming. While the items collected may seem silent in and of themselves, under scrutiny they reveal narratives of how our world is currently changing. The title of A People’s Archive indicates a shared ownership, and by implication a communal responsibility. It is essential to conceive of the ecological crisis on a planetary scale – although this is not without its difficulties. During the process of Public Smog, a UNESCO official told Balkin that she must gain the consent of every country if she were to submit a World Heritage Site bid for the earth’s atmosphere. The potential problems involved in such a feat draw attention to the poor efforts of many nation states to respond to climate change. In the UK, the current parliamentary coalition had promised to be the ‘greenest government ever’, but has done little to support such a claim.5 An advisor to the Prime Minister blocked proposals for a discussion of global warming at the 2013 G8 meeting.6 This absence is also a point of reference for the exhibition title: such a matter may gain degrees of visibility in the press but remains largely invisible on many government agendas. Balkin addresses this issue by drawing attention to numerous matters of ecological concern. In dealing with the subject of climate change, the present exhibition hopes to involve the viewer in the problem of global warming. It is also important to acknowledge that while the International New Media Gallery may have a smaller carbon footprint than a major blockbuster museum exhibition, it is not completely 6

green. The technology that enables this show to exist – from the hardware used by the INMG team and visitors, to the server that hosts its data – contribute to ecological pollution and damage.7 While this should be recognised, we also believe it is vital that this exhibition, and others like it, exist in order to contribute to an ongoing debate about the future of our planet. I would like to thank TJ Demos and Theresa Deichert for contributing to the catalogue. Demos’ interview with Balkin addresses her approach towards and interventions in legal frameworks. Demos also discusses the importance of the commons, as a method of contesting neoliberal privatisation, for Balkin’s practice. Reflecting on the issue of public ownership, Deichert’s essay considers the activist potential of pieces like Public Smog. Deichert argues that Balkin blurs the boundaries between art and activism, making it impossible to reduce her practice to one or the other. My thanks go to Amy Balkin for being generous with her time and a pleasure to work with. I would also like to thank Tom Snow, Isabella Smith and Deichert for their support with the exhibition and public programme. I also owe my greatest thanks to Snow for his assistance editing the catalogue.

Edwin Coomasaru, Director International New Media Gallery

Notes 1

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (London: Duke University Press, 2010), p.24-28. 2 Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Catherine Porter trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p.69. 3 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, Steven Corcoran trans. (London: Continuum, 2012, First published 2010), p.37. 4 Judith Butler, ‘Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street’, EIPCP (Published 09/11, Accessed 3/4/13, eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en). 5 Leo Hickman, ‘Can the government still be the 'greenest ever' after the reshuffle?’, The Guardian (Published 5/9/12, Accessed 18/9/13, gu.com/p/3a7z8). 6 Ed King, ‘Key Cameron adviser blocks climate change from G8 agenda’, The Guardian (Published 26/3/13, Accessed 18/9/13, gu.com/p/3eyj3). 7 For example, see Stephan Schmidt, ‘The dark side of cloud computing: soaring carbon emissions’, The Guardian (Published 30/4/10, Accessed 5/10/13, gu.com/p/2gy3p).

Amy Balkin, still from slideshow documentation of Public Smog, 2004-present, 21 minutes and 28 seconds. Courtesy of the artist. See publicsmog.org for a full credit list.

The Law of the Land: An Interview with Amy Balkin T.J. Demos

T.J. Demos: In the face of governmental immobility in addressing climate change, one might argue that experimental jurisprudence offers new, if as yet unrealised, possibilities for intervening positively in the way human governance systems define, use, and protect the environment. I’m thinking of the recent development of ‘wild law’ or earth jurisprudence,1 the ‘Rights of Mother Earth’ (as established recently in the constitutions and legal systems of Bolivia and Ecuador), and the growing number of lawsuits against corporations by indigenous communities (such as the Inupiat of Kivalina, Alaska who tried — ultimately unsuccessfully — to sue ExxonMobil in a United States district court in 2008). But for artists to engage such legal subjects is distinctly challenging, owing to the discursive, bureaucratic, and anti-visual nature of law. How do you think of your artwork — which is amongst the most direct in addressing the conjunction of law, land, and environment — as confronting that difficulty? Amy Balkin: While there is a significant history of discursive, bureaucratic, and antivisual artwork, legal subjects (as you suggest) can be challenging for artists – especially for those working without a background in jurisprudence and its history, codes, forms, processes, its specialist knowledge related to ethics, norms, and time, or its fraught relationship to justice and role in legitimising the nation state. While the law does meet the visual and performative in the public trial, visual evidence and legal transcripts, codes, and other documents are also visual by-products of closed or occluded processes. Making existing legal processes, documents and the machinations they represent more public has been one response in my work, such as in an audio tour containing stories of legal struggles to close toxic waste dumps sited in poor, politically weak communities along a public freeway corridor in California, but hidden from view (Invisible-5, 2006); through participatory public reading of publicly available but difficult-to-parse documents (Reading the IPCC Report, 2009), or in the collection of materials contributed by people living in places that may disappear owing to the combined political, geographic, and economic impacts of climate change, and their organisation into an archive that is also a collection of community-gathered evidence and a public record (A People's Archive of Sinking and Melting, 2012-present). In the course of developing these projects, for me formative readings have included China Miéville's Marxist analysis of international law, Between Equal Rights (2005), Luke Cole and Sheila Foster's From the Ground Up (2001), and Larry Lohmann's writing on emissions trading, including Carbon Trading (2006), which contains a concise history of its financial mechanisms and neoliberal origins. In 2009, drawing from these writings, I gave a talk on what shape political resistance in the difficult-to-inhabit space of the atmosphere might look like.2 TJD: Why take up the law in your work, especially when – as you point out, quoting China Miéville, ‘[t]he attempt to replace war and inequality with law is not merely utopian but is precisely self-defeating. A world structured around international law

cannot but be one of imperialist violence. The chaotic and bloody world around us is the rule of law’.3 How do you see your work intervening in such a rule of law? AB: States use the law as a tool to undermine the possibility of a future within ‘global limits’, naturalising and institutionalising the environment as property. As such, law, backed by the potential for military force, forecloses other, equitable, sustainable, and just relationships. In that my work is increasingly concerned with the intersection of politics and future scenarios for climate change, it was unavoidable to look at the law and how it constructs both present and future, particularly related to new enclosures and commodification of still-shared commons, the framing of and legal arguments for new kinds of borderisation and other frameworks for structural state violence that are being put into place in response to global warming, and in the politics of counter demands for environmental and climate justice in the face of the construction of these unjust futures and their terrible implications. TJD: And more specifically, you work with the law in the United States... AB: In the United States, the environmental justice movement and environmental justice law, together arising out of the American civil rights movement, have been a powerful instrument for low-income and non-white communities faced with unequal health burdens produced by structural racism involved with the location of polluting projects. In this regard, my work is informed by and is particularly indebted to the work of Luke Cole and Brent Newall of The Center on Race, Poverty & The Environment, who have both served as attorneys for the Kivalina City and Tribal Council in the case you mention (Kivalina v. ExxonMobil Corporation, et al.), using a strategy based on a federal common law claim of public nuisance.4 We interviewed Luke Cole about his representation of the Padres Hacia una Vida Mejor in Buttonwillow but I didn't discuss his work in Kivalina at the time (the audio transcript of the Kivalina appeals from the US 9th Circuit Court archives is available online).5 So I have been more directly influenced by proximity to environmental justice advocacy legal work than in the work of framing the rights of nature, not that they are exclusive. TJD: I recently participated in a conference hosted by the Contingent Movements collective at the Venice Biennale’s Maldives Pavilion,6 and Davor Vidas, a specialist in international law at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Norway, also spoke, giving a presentation about the need to organise international law around human rights rather than territory when addressing the threat of climate change. When I asked him how recent developments in Ecuador and Bolivia regarding the institution of the rights of nature are affecting shifts in international law, he responded flatly that they aren’t affecting any shifts, because such developments have been ‘ineffective’. This was quite depressing. Do you think the artistic realm can provide an arena of creativity and experimental thinking that can get us beyond the blockage of such legal realism, and can it have an effect more broadly? Or do you find environmental justice in the context of the US more open to bringing about political transformation, and more open to cultural or artistic collaboration, than rights-of-nature discourse? AB: I'm not surprised to hear Davor Vidas' position on the lack of momentum of the rights of nature, but do think there is potential for environmental justice in the US, and by extension the global climate justice movement to bring about political 12

transformation, particularly based on its origin in the Civil Rights Movement, and its networked, community-based, grassroots, united-front organising strategies and given the success of those struggles. TJD: With Public Smog (2004-present), you’ve attempted to add Earth’s atmosphere to the list of protected areas on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. In your contribution to dOCUMENTA (13), 2012, you assembled some 50,000 signed postcards and sent them to Germany’s Minister of the Environment, Peter Altmaier, requesting that Germany lead a coalition process to get the Earth’s atmosphere on the UNESCO list on an emergency basis, as only a state can do this. In November 2012, a further 40,000 postcards were shipped. Germany declined the request. What is the current status of your campaign, and what are your future plans in regards to this goal? AB: I first approached Germany to lead a process as a way to consider the potential and limits of soft power of an exhibition like dOCUMENTA. The invitation to Germany was made with the support and assistance of Dr. Birgitta Ringbeck, who wrote Management Plans for World Heritage Sites (2008), Prof. Dr. Hartmut Vogtmann, the first vice-president of the German League for Nature and Environment, whose publications include Transboundary Water Resource (2005), and Prof. Dr. Gerd Weiss, president of Germany's Hessian State Office for Historical Monuments. After the rejection of this first proposal in 2010 by then-current Minister of the Environment Norbert Röttgen, I invited any and all UNESCO States Parties to lead a coalition process. There were 13 responses in total to the mailing of 186 letters, sent in six languages, including one reply of interest from Dr. Ana Maui Taufe'ulungaki, the Minister of Education, Women Affairs, and Culture for the Kingdom of Tonga/Puleʻanga Fakatuʻi ʻo Tonga, based on her position on Tongan values as framed within her 2009 talk ‘Safeguarding Of Intangible Cultural Heritage’.7 Taufeʻulungaki’s reply stated interest from Tonga, but acknowledged the lack of a budget and administrative support to lead a coalition effort or begin the process. This was followed by a request to dOCUMENTA's audience to petition their governments from within the exhibition to lead an emergency nomination process. Roughly 90,000 audience members signed and mailed postcards, sent in two batches to the new Minister of the Environment, Peter Altmaier, in September and November 2012, who declined the request.8 I'm presently interested in inviting responses to the letter, but haven't done that yet. The current status of the attempt to inscribe earth's atmosphere is that it still awaits a State Party to lead a coalition effort or begin an emergency nomination process, but the project may turn in other directions. That said, the work done by 90,000 people who took the time to sign and mail a postcard is also unfinished. TJD: What would such responses be? And how is the postcard project unfinished? AB: A response would involve inviting interpretations of the letter from individuals positioned to critique the declined request in relation to Germany's on-going political activities in climate negotiations, and other political, historical, and cultural readings. The postcard project is unfinished in that its demand has not been met. TJD: What of Bolivia or Ecuador as potential State Partners?

AB: From 2010-2012, when I first began inviting nations to lead the coalition effort, I thought perhaps Bolivia or Ecuador might respond positively, given their legal establishment of the Rights of Mother Earth, but neither did. I sent a follow-up letter to Bolivia acknowledging the enactment of la Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra and with a further request, but did not receive a response (I'm not sure it ever reached the representative who would be in a position to respond). TJD: You’re right to point out that there’s an important history of conceptual aesthetics of administration and of law, and I’m curious about your work’s relation to those precedents, especially to art in the environmental domain — such as Agnes Denes’ Tree Mountain (1992-96) or Wheat Field (1982), and Robert Smithson’s projects working with abandoned mines and airport landscapes. While your art is sometimes compared to these past models, your approach seems quite different to me. It’s not about the positive remediation of damaged land, for instance, but a negative critique of its compensatory logic and ultimate impossibility or ecological inadequacy. AB: Public Smog, actually, is both: a counter model that contains a negative critique and the possibility of positive remediation. TJD: Can there be positive remediation when the atmosphere is global, so that to protect it in one place — e.g. ‘South California’s South Coast for Quality Management District, covering all or parts of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernadino Counties’, as your project defines it — is necessarily incomplete, even impossible when it comes to an environmental region in flux? AB: The atmosphere is a complex dynamic system, it’s true, but there can be positive remediation. Two very different examples are the 1979 Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution, and the successful activism in 1999 by a coalition of residents and farm workers from Westley, California, who fought to have an enormous toxic smoke plume from a tire fire extinguished rather than allowed to burn out. And while fraught both in origins and at present, the World Heritage model strongly supports local and regional approaches for protection of varied types of ‘cultural landscapes’ of ‘outstanding universal value’ including ‘ongoing ecological and biological processes’. Benjamin Morris, for example, has written hypothetically about protecting local atmospheric processes, specifically Scotland's haar (coastal fog), through World Heritage in the context of climate change.9 TJD: Also, I don’t think of your work so much as a private or individual-led artistic gesture, as with past eco-art models, but rather part of an investigation into reconceptualising and realising a new mode of the commons, as well as pointing out the challenges of that goal. AB: That's right. TJD: Also, it’s not directed toward a specific local geography (like a strip mine or an enclosed lot), but concerns spaces of global geography without boundaries (like the Earth’s atmosphere).

AB: Yes, this is true, which is one of the reasons that Rodolphe Imhool of Switzerland suggested to me that inscribing earth's atmosphere on the World Heritage List would undermine the ‘forest by forest’ World Heritage approach, which is about specific and local relationships. That said, the atmosphere is simultaneously global, transnational, specific and local, and embodied. TJD: And your work isn’t focused on intervening in the physical condition of geography, but rather on the terrain of international law and institutions that govern land and environment, and that financialise nature. AB: Actually, it's focused on intervening in both, as much as law and institutions are spatial and site-specific, such as the relationship of the physical and spatial qualities of the oceans to the development of maritime and international law. I see an interesting link here between Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ 1969 ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art’, for instance, and the precautionary principal, as established recently in environmental and climate justice. My work is also frequently situated and concerned with scale, wastelands, and tourism, which are common subjects of land art. TJD: Perhaps, then, it’s important to stress your connection to those past models, ones that you also reinvent within the conditions of contemporary climate change and the current legal structures and financial mechanisms employed for addressing it, with links to the international climate justice movement and environmental law. Can you talk about the reception of your Public Smog billboards in Douala, Cameroon in 2009, which proposes a different context for this work, one in Sub-Saharan Africa, and how it compares to the reception of your work in the US and Europe? AB: I didn't travel to Cameroon at any point during the period for reasons unrelated to the project. So my understanding of the reception is limited by that distance, and largely based on reading what was written in the local press. The work was sometimes used as an entry point for journalists to discuss climate change and the politics and structural impacts of emissions trading on Africa. That said, the news response was more politically complex than that, including a call for NGOs to purchase the maximum amount of Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) possible to protect the South's future development, but also read as political satire containing a critique of emissions markets and a call for the commons. This is similar to the mixed readings that some of my work has received in the US and Europe, although that varies widely by project. TJD: With your project A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting, you’ve invited people to contribute to a growing assembly of objects that testify to a changing ecology. You’ve described it in various ways: as a ‘time capsule’ for a near future when hundreds of millions of people are likely to be displaced; as a ‘public display of evidence’ for a present when grave mistakes are being made; a ‘proxy for political consciousness’; and a ‘sort of commons, a global network of the shared experience of environmental destruction’.10 I’m curious about the simultaneity of the melancholy aestheticisation of our own destruction, on the one hand, and the activist call to political action, on the other, that are both present to varying degrees in the project. Do you see these extremes as related, and if so, how?

AB: Perhaps the simultaneity is a response to the doubling of temporal perspectives I'm attempting to engage and asking of participants to consider: to think forward in time and look back. The request for contributions asks a potential participant to reflect upon their own social, political, and geographic situation within current climate politics, assuming incomplete knowledge and information asymmetry. This requires the demands of foresight and for some the willingness to consider personal loss– whether actively experienced, imagined, or predicted, of place, status, culture, and cherished, familiar, or survivable conditions. The varied descriptions also describe my intentions in initiating the archive to potential contributors and reflect my own unanswered questions as to how to read materials of potential aftermaths. They are also responses on the unstable status of the object within preservation. For what scenario and which future people are things preserved? TJD: A continuous concern of yours is the investigation of ways of creating a space of the commons, as in Public Smog, A People’s Archive, and This is the Public Domain (2003-present), which goes against the generalised trend toward the privatisation of space that is a key logic of neoliberalism.11 Do you see your attempts as correlating with recent movements to occupy public (or private) space for radical anti-capitalist purpose, as with Occupy Wall Street? Are there differences as well? And how does this impulse relate to the artistic context in which you also operate, which is similarly conflicted by the forces of privatisation and radical attempts to reconstruct a relation to inclusive public experience? AB: Yes, I support and have affinity in my work for movements that seek to reconstitute or articulate commons that have been lost or are in the process of being destroyed. This is the Public Domain and Public Smog, as projects rather than movements, are subject to the same range of critiques as other works that act to support, engage with, or enact politics, and share similar limits and risks of instrumentalisation. TJD: You’ve spoken of artwork as providing a ‘pre-figurative space’, creating a demand that can be satisfied only later in time, as Walter Benjamin defined one of the foremost tasks of art. This seems to be a key to your work, which relates back to past utopian models of avant-garde practice, even though your work never seems escapist or detached from present political concerns, as past artistic models sometimes do. Is there a utopian element in your work? AB: I do see some of my work as connected to the social satire in utopian writing. This is the Public Domain could be seen as most directly connected to past utopian models, although it is a real space, politically complex and troubled. Such is generally the case with claimed or attempted spaces of exteriority, and enmeshed with property regimes in Kern County, California, including the Alta Wind Energy Center. TJD: Would you argue that artists have an ethical or political responsibility to address the environmental crisis? AB: Climate change is a disorienting dilemma; a situation that pressures all others...

T.J. Demos is a critic and Reader in the Department of Art History, University College London. He recently guest edited a special issue of Third Text (No. 120, 2013) on the subject of ‘Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology’, and is currently at work on a book on the subject for Sternberg Press.

Notes 1

See Cormac Cullinan, Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 2011); and Peter Burdon ed., Exploring Wild Law: The Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence (Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press, 2011). 2 See Amy Balkin, ‘Free Seas, Free Skies’, Disclosures (Published 2009, Accessed 14/10/2013, disclosuresproject.wordpress.com/disclosures-iv/amy-balkin). 3 China Miéville, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (Leiden: Brill, 2005), p.319; cited in Balkin (2009). 4 The defendants included: ExxonMobil, BP, BP America, BP Products, Chevron Corporation, Chevron USA, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell, Shell Oil, Peabody Energy, AES Corporation, American Electric Power Company, American Electric Power Services Corporation, DTE Energy Company, Duke Energy, Dynegy Holdings, Edison International, MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company, Mirant Corporation, NRG Energy, Pinnacle West Capital Corporation, Reliant Energy, Southern Company, and Xcel Energy. See: ‘Climate Justice in Kivalina: Fighting climate change on the frontlines’, Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment (Published 2013, Accessed 16/10/2013, crpe-ej.org/crpe/index.php/campaigns/climate-justice/kivalina-ak); and ‘Native Village of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil’, Bloomberg BNA (Published 21/9/2012, Accessed 10/10/2013, op.bna.com/env.nsf/id/maln-8ycsny/$File/bob%27s%20story.pdf). 5 See: ‘Our Founders’, Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment (Published n.d., Accessed 2/10/2013, crpe-ej.org/crpe/index.php/about-us/who-we-are/our-founders). 6 See: ‘Contingent Movements Symposium’, Maldives Pavilion 55th, Venice Biennale (Published 27/9/2013, Accessed 29/9/2013, maldivespavilion.com/blog/contingent-movements-symposium). 7 See: 'Ana Taufe'ulungaki, ‘Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage’, Ministry of Information & Communications, Tonga (Published 30/3/2011, Accessed 20/9/2013, mic.gov.to/ministrydepartment/14govt-ministries/moet/2318-dr-hon-ana-taufeulungaki-safeguarding-of-intangible-cultural-heritage). 8 For Altmaier’s response, see: tomorrowmorning.net/Brief%20Bundesministerium%20f.%20Umwelt%20Naturschutz%20etc.%2016.1 1.2012%20(2).pdf. 9 See Benjamin Morris, ‘Air Today, Gone Tomorrow: The Haar of Scotland and Local Atmosphere as Heritage Sites’, International Journal of Intangible Heritage, Vol. 8 (2013). Also see Lucia Allais' work on the early origins of UNESCO World Heritage as a quasi-colonial construct initiated at the 1931 Athens Conference by the League of Nations, one of the earliest intergovernmental organizations. 10 See Dana Kopel, ‘What Will Have Been: Interviews on A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting’, Tomorrow Morning (Published 2013, Accessed 11/10/2013, tomorrowmorning.net/texts/What%20Will%20Have%20Been_Interviews%20on%20A%20Peoples% 20Archive%20of%20Sinking%20and%20Melting_Dana%20Kopel.pdf). 11 On the relation of Balkin’s work to the financialisation of nature, see T.J. Demos, ‘The Post-Natural Condition: Art After Nature’, Artforum (April 2012), pp.191-197.

Amy Balkin, Kim Stringfellow, Tim Halbur, Pond: Art, Activism and Ideas, and Greenaction, CD cover for Invisible-5, 2006, audio recordings, 2 hours, 18 minutes and 9 seconds. Courtesy of the artists. See invisible5.org for a full credit list.

Amy Balkin, Kim Stringfellow, Tim Halbur, Pond: Art, Activism and Ideas, and Greenaction, visual documentation for Invisible-5, 2006, audio recordings, 2 hours, 18 minutes and 9 seconds. Courtesy of the artists. See invisible5.org for a full credit list.

Amy Balkin and â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Art Activismâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;: A New Approach to Environmental Activism Theresa Deichert

In 2004 the Environmental Grantmakers Association released a report that testified the death of environmentalism as viable social movement.1 However, instead of a radical dismissal, art historian and activist Yates McKee identified a need to understand environmentalism within an expanded aesthetic politics, concerning ‘questions of seeing and framing, interpretation and meaning, desire and affect, imagination and identification’.2 Advancing from this perspective, McKee argues for a ‘significant new role for visual culture and related artistic practices in displaying the current ends of environmentalism or in rearticulating the ‘environment’ as a site of nongovernmental politics’.3 In this context, the work of San Francisco-based artist Amy Balkin can be considered to be representative of a new visual culture of environmentalism that refuses to distinguish between the social, environmental and political, and instead reinforces their inseparability. Through a process-based interdisciplinary approach to her work, Balkin operates within a conscious ecology, defined by Gyorgy Kepes as imagining and pre-experiencing alternative futures.4 Balkin deals with subjects such as race-based inequality, where low-income communities are placed in environmentally hazardous areas, as well as environmental justice and global warming caused by pollution and contamination. She explores legal loopholes, the ambivalence of the (American) legal system, and the questioning the so-called democratic use of space or common territory. At the same time her work often critiques current systems while contributing to conversations centred on utopian possibilities. The boundaries between art and activism are therefore distorted, making it impossible to reduce her activity to an unhelpful dichotomy between one and the other. In the following essay, Balkin’s This is the Public Domain (2003–present), Public Smog (2004–present) and Invisible-5 (2006) will be looked at more closely in terms of their role in the field of the joint aesthetic politics of ‘art activism’. Focusing on the strong legal implications and challenges with which these projects are concerned, I will focus on what the merging of art and activism means for Balkin’s methods and concepts, as well as how she deals with situations that are novel within the context of art, such as the confrontation with (environmental) law and the judicial system.

This is the Public Domain Balkin began This is the Public Domain with the intention of creating a permanent international commons, an area of land shared and open to use by anyone in the world.5 In 2003, in an auction on eBay the artist acquired 2.64 acres of land in the Mojave Desert located north of Los Angeles, and has been involved in exploring legal strategies that will eventually allow her to hand over the land to the public ever since.6 However, finding a loophole in the Californian legal system has proven to be extremely difficult. Requiring the land to be neither a private nor an eminent domain (of which the latter can be seized by the government ‘in the name of the people’ at any time), Balkin’s project involves diverse research strategies into the legal conditions of territories. These include turning the land into a ‘public land trust’ or a ‘bearer share corporation’, establishing a limited common property regime or a share system through a ‘general public domain license’.7 To further investigate her work as an intricate legal activity that operates in the field of activism it is important to consider the project’s predecessors in the 21

Californian counterculture communes of the 60s and 70s, such as musician Lou Gottlieb’s commune Morningstar Ranch (1966-1969) and the Hog Farm’s Earth People’s Park (1970–1994). Having been in correspondence with a lawyer involved in the Morningstar Ranch court case, these alternative living spaces are exemplary for Balkin in their ambitions to abolish exclusive ownership of land and their creation of a public commons through ‘returning land to ‘Mother Earth’ itself’; inevitably resulting in legal and political confrontation.8 In public property projects, such as Public Domain, law can be identified as the entity that prevented the structuring of the inhabited space as a commons. In the context of defining the commons, Gottlieb saw the Morningstar Ranch and its surroundings as ‘land access to which is denied no one,’ a space whose ‘territorial imperative’ is removed and thus beneficial to the reduction of human conflict.9 With this definition and his (failed) attempt one year later to transfer the land’s ownership directly to God, Gottlieb was creating a form of ‘outlaw territory’: a space identified by Felicity Scott as literally existing beyond the law.10 Such spaces, by trying to set themselves apart from the law, ultimately come into conflict with it. In the context of the political and social constructions of property and shared commons, as well as the role of parks, preserves and reserves in this field the legal barriers that Balkin came across in her work are not surprising. The U.S. legal system is structured so that a piece of land has to remain within a chain of control mechanisms and ownership has to be traceable by the government in order to subject the landowner to responsibility for its use.11 Therefore, the land could neither be made into a land trust requiring a board of directors, thus still implying an ownership, nor become a limited property regime, as this would involve an uncontrollable common pool of sharers. Balkin stresses the importance of the eventual handover of the land to the public as crucial for the completion and success of her project; stating that otherwise it would merely make ‘a conceptual statement about land use’, without immediate practical application.12 However, the artist’s struggle to find an adequate way of surmounting the legal barriers preventing the establishment of Public Domain continues. On top of the legal struggles, the land’s geographic location is highly problematic. Landlocked on three sides by a wind farm and on the fourth by a strip of private properties, the land lies within an extreme dry and windy area, and is both inaccessible and uninhabitable in its current state. This physical framework continues to influence the land’s condition. Intending to expand, representatives of the wind farm wrote to Balkin in summer 2012 seeking a ‘wind lease’ on the land, to generate income through the use of wind turbines for energy production. Balkin corresponded with a lawyer to make a counter-proposal. This would have allowed a wind lease if the company purchased another tract of land for the project and would have also included the acquisition of all mineral rights that are necessary for the eventual complete handover. However, these negotiations have been suspended.13 Public Domain raises more questions than it provides answers – questions not only about the democratic limitations of the American property law, but also about the sharing of finite resources. What Public Domain would really look like and how it could be operated once the land is handed over remains undefined. Furthermore, Matthew D. Rana states that Balkin’s work points out who is ultimately granted a voice to participate in politics and thus, who is able to shape policy.14 While Balkin’s work on some level is a utopian challenge to the legal system, it also imagines a model of politics that gives voice to the voiceless and an ‘unyielding expression of 22

equality among subjects, the incessant demand to ‘count me in’’.15 Public Domain reflects Balkin’s personal interest in the utopian ideals of Gottlieb’s counterculture commune, while its aesthetic workings seem to reflect the nongovernmental visual media proposals identified by McKee. The project unites art and activism by proposing and imagining an alternative future while at the same time laying bare the deficits of the law. Thus, Balkin’s work insists on the abolition of a division between art and activism. Public Smog In 2006 the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change noted the considerable scientific evidence for the inevitable threat of global warming and urged an immediate global response. With the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as CO2e (CO2 equivalent), currently rising at 2 parts per million (ppm), pre-industrial levels could be doubled as early as 2035. The current level is 430 ppm CO2e. To stabilise the concentration between 450 and 550 ppm CO2e, emission levels have to be reduced drastically to 80% below the current level each year.16 In this context, the Stern report states the requirement for three elements of policy – firstly the commodification of polluting chemicals through pricing, tax implementation, trading or regulation, secondly the policy support of innovation and development of low-carbon technologies and thirdly individual education about accurate responses to climate change and energy efficiency.17 Based on the success of an earlier cap and trade system, the American Acid Rain Program and the Clean Air Act of 1990, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol supported this and other environmental policy tools for providing environmental accountability without preventing economic growth.18 However, the outcome of the 2012 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which was called ‘a failure of epic proportions’ by Greenpeace International Director Kumi Naidoo, shows that the focus on business strategies to cope with global warming is not the cure-it-all solution global leaders would like it to be.19 Balkin’s Public Smog is a park of clean, unpolluted air in the atmosphere that varies in size and location. The project explores, like Public Domain, a common space created and structured through political, financial and legal activities. However, Public Smog’s physical qualities are distinctively different, making it more utopian and challenging to both American and international law and the structuring of an international commons. Public Smog was initiated when Balkin intervened in the emissions trading scheme. She created the first ‘lower park’ of clean air in the troposphere through purchasing credits for the right to emit 24 lbs of nitrogen oxide within the South Coast Air Quality Management District and subsequently withholding them; thus reducing potential pollution from the market. A second ‘upper park’ located in the stratosphere above the EU opened from November 2006 to December 2007 through Balkin’s acquisition and withholding of CO2 offsets in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. In the manner of environmental activism, Balkin’s efforts within the trading scheme are small-scale interventions that the artist uses to expose the weaknesses of international agencies and their legal structures. Additionally, Public Smog embodies Balkin’s comprehensive attempt to add the earth’s atmosphere to the UNESCO World Heritage List. This undertaking is extremely ambitious because of 23

the atmosphere’s unique characteristic of being a global commons belonging to every nation. To ultimately expand the ‘clean-air park’ into the whole atmosphere and register it as World Heritage, every state party would have to agree. This requirement, up to now, proves to be unachievable. The letters Balkin sent out to 186 different nation states mostly received either no answer or a letter of decline. Even the recent petition consisting of 90,000 postcards signed by dOCUMENTA (13) visitors in 2012 and subsequently sent to German minister of the environment Peter Altmeier, received a negative response.20 Illustrative of the complexity of the issue are the transcripts of Balkin’s phone calls to UNESCO officials. These conversations, featured in the slideshow documentation for Public Smog, are largely consistent of ‘hms’ and ‘rights’. Being imperceptible to the human eye, Public Smog is made visible and tangible through a vast amount of bureaucratic paper work created by the activities outlined above. These documents, like those of Public Domain, are telling of the project’s collision with legal structures of the trading emissions system and the UNESCO World Heritage List. They lay bare problems in these systems that otherwise would remain hidden. While Balkin’s parks are a positive intervention, they also expose the non-selective participation to add or subtract from the resource ‘atmosphere’. This is made possible through the emissions scheme opening the way to corruptions of this market. In her 2010 lecture ‘Free Seas, Free Skies’, Balkin outlined the status of law in the atmosphere as a place of on-going contestation for legal, economic and political control. An example for this includes the Trail Smelter Arbitration case in which air pollution drifted from Canada into the US, forcing courts to rule internationally against trans-boundary environmental harm. This court case exposed how the atmosphere is truly a commons whose boundaries are unstable and easily dissolved. Furthermore, Balkin points towards the contradiction between the properties of the atmosphere as an international commons – perceived as limitless and empty but subject to international law, state power and commodification – as well as the on-going failure to bind all nation states to a universal legal agreement to protect it.21

Invisible-5 Above I have explored Public Domain and Public Smog as legal activities concerning environmentalist issues and the structuring of a commons, representative of a new visual language employed by the figure of artist as activist that McKee identified. Balkin herself is unsure how to exactly define these projects and sees them as inhabiting an ‘in-between place’, that changes depending on one’s frame of reference and political concerns.22 This is telling of the projects’ resistance to classification as solely art or activism. By contrast, Balkin more confidently defines Invisible-5 as ‘a form of advocacy journalism in support of the environmental justice movement’.23 Balkin completed Invisible-5 as part of a including the artists Tim Halbur and Kim Stringfellow, as well as the non-profit organisations, Greenaction and Pond: Art, Activism and Ideas, that promote environmental justice. Invisible-5 is primarily an audio tour in the style of a museum’s exhibition audio guide. Based on the route of the Interstate 5 (I-5) that connects San Francisco and LA, it consists of 23 tracks that are congruent with 23 stops. The piece was designed to be listened to when driving along this critical pathway of the Californian West 24

Coast. As an ‘Intermodal Corridor of Economic Significance’, the I-5 crosses a toxic landscape contaminated by ‘pesticide drifts, hazardous waste dumping and incineration, groundwater contamination, oil extraction and large scale dairying’.24 The work consists of field recordings, interviews with residents and activists of the affected areas and communities, as well as music and archival audio such as radio recordings. Invisible-5 is about recognising not only the pollution but also the consequent suffering of the people affected by it, who mostly belong to black or Hispanic minorities. This is evident in the audio track concerning Buttonwillow, a lowincome, high poverty, predominantly Spanish-speaking farmworker community and home to California’s second largest Class 1 toxic waste site. The audio track consists of the voice of Luke Cole from the Centre on Race, Poverty and the Environment, describing the struggles of the approximately 1,300 inhabitants of the town to achieve a closure of the dump, highlighting the language barriers that rendered legal procedures and court cases unfair and almost impossible to win. After 12 years the bleak outcome of the community effort was that only one of their appeals against the dumping of radioactive waste was approved. As of 2005, when the interview was conducted, Buttonwillow is facing an extension of the toxic waste dump.25 Invisible-5 records stories of activists and communities contesting the dominance of oil and chemical corporations. Defining environmental justice as a democratic practice of accountability, equitable treatment and self-determination, Invisible-5 lays bare the injustice that these communities endure through being subjected to unacceptable environmental risks.26 As such, the environmental crimes that Invisible-5 records can be termed as ecocides: ‘extensive damage to, destruction of or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, … to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been or will be severely diminished’.27 The project aims to expose and challenge the persistent laws that make possible such crimes, appealing to the widest audience by making the audio tracks and additional information easily accessible online. This collaborative work actively operates within the environmental justice movement, but also into the expanded registers of information and education. Its structure is comparable to activist campaigns that are geared towards educating the general public about offences against the environment. As Emily Scott has pointed out in her article on Invisible-5, the data that was collected has been used well beyond the field of art in multi-disciplinary areas such as geography, architecture, environmental justice, and urban planning.28 Balkin hopes that the unedited interview recordings from which Invisible-5 was extracted will be conserved for the future into an existing oral history archive such as that of UC Berkeley.29 With the rise of global emissions by 48% since the first Earth Summit in 1992, the need for a strong environmentalist lobby is more pressing than ever. This demands new approaches within environmentalism to raise awareness and foster change. Balkin’s work can be considered as exemplary of McKee’s demand for a new aesthetic political visual culture and artistic practice that attends to the environmentalist cause. Although Balkin’s commons so far have been unsuccessful in fulfilling their ultimate aims, she has achieved raising awareness through the medium of art. Balkin demonstrates that aesthetics and activism must combine to 25

produce significant outcomes in the urgent campaign to protect our environment. In her practice Balkin confronts the American legal system and uses petitions, lectures and websites to educate the public. Although her works include metaphorical and theoretical elements, they are not limited to a conceptual proposal. Balkin does not shy away from effecting social, political and legal change. Through employing creative aesthetic to innovate activist methods, Balkin attends to the new visual culture while simultaneously opening pathways to a new stronger environmentalist movement.

Theresa Deichert is a curator at the International New Media Gallery. She recently graduated from University College London's History of Art MA, where she specialised in contemporary art.

Notes 1

Yates McKee, ‘Art and the Ends of Environmentalism: From Biosphere to the Right to Survival’, in Michel Feher eds., Nongovernmental Politics (New York: Zone Books, 2007), pp.539-83 , p.541. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Gyorgy Kepes, Arts of the Environment (Henley: Aidan Ellis , 1972), p.12. 5 Amy Balkin, ‘Welcome’, This is the Public Domain (Published n.d., Accessed 30/11/2012, thisisthepublicdomain.org). 6 Kyle Knobel, ‘RECORD/PLAY 000’, kyleknobel.com (Published 2010, First published 2003, Accessed 2/12/2012, tomorrowmorning.net/texts/REC-PLAY000_2010_PROOFV3.pdf), p.17. 7 Balkin (n.d.). Other strategies include limited common property regime, bending copyright law, tribal sovereignty or public dedication. 8 Amy Balkin, in conversation with the author (9/12/2012). 9 Sarah Lewison, ‘time in de-tension: Some Northern California Experiments in Open Land’, in Cathy Crane and Nicholas Muellner eds., (1968): Episodes of Culture in Contest (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), pp.31-50, p.31. 10 Felicity D. Scott, ‘Woodstockholm’, in Meg McLagan and YatesMcKee eds., Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism (New York: Zone Books, 2012), pp.397-428, p.414. 11 Knobel, p.18. 12 Ibid, p.19. 13 Balkin (9/12/2012). 14 Matthew David Rana, ‘Social Work: Politics, Police and the Law in Art, Part 1’, Art Practical, 1:6 (Published 14/1/2010, Accessed 4/12/2012, artpractical.com/feature/in_the_eyes_and_ears_of_the_law_on_giving_voice_to_the_voiceless). 15 Rana. 16 Nicholas Stern, ‘Stern Review Executive Summary’, HM Treasury (Published 2006, Accessed 2/12/2012, hm-treasury.gov.uk/sternreview_summary.htm). 17 Ibid. 18 United Nations, ‘The Mechanisms under the Kyoto Protocol: Emissions Trading, the Clean Development Mechanism and Joint Implementation’, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (Published 2012, Accessed 11/12/2012, unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/mechanisms/items/1673.php). 19 Jonathan Watts and Liz Ford, ‘Rio+20 Earth Summit: campaigners decry final document’, The Guardian (Published 23/6/2012, Accessed 15/12/2012, gu.com/p/38gnb). 20 Balkin (9/12/2012). 21 Amy Balkin, ‘Free Seas, Free Skies’, Disclosures (Published 2009, Accessed 24/11/2012, disclosuresproject.wordpress.com/disclosures-iv/amy-balkin). 22 Balkin (9/12/2012). 23 Ibid.

Emily Eliza Scott, ‘Field Effects: Invisible-5's Illumination of Peripheral Geographies’, Art Journal, 69:4 (Winter 2010), pp. 38-47, p.39. 25 Amy Balkin, ‘Stop: Buttonwillow’, invisible5 (published 2006, Accessed 2/12/2012, invisible5.org). 26 Amy Balkin, ‘Invisible-5 Audio Project’, invisible5 (Published 2006, Accessed 2/12/2012, invisible5.org). 27 Polly Higgins, Louise Kulbicki, and Zoe Lujic, Eradicating Ecocide (Published 2012, Accessed 18/12/2012, eradicatingecocide.com). 28 Scott, p.45. 29 Balkin (9/12/2012).

INTERNATIONAL NEW MEDIA GALLERY