In the Soup: Art/Health and Climate Change
I have bronchitis. Again. Third time in the last six months. I don't think of myself as a sick person, but I am now seeing this status reflected on the faces of my friends, family, and sweetheart.
They ask, "How long I've had this cough? Have I seen a doctor? Am I on antibiotics? Have I been drinking my juice?" I appreciate them caring.
I have taken to calling it "the consumption," and when I'm asked to do a small but annoying task around the house, I lay back and fain weakness to my partner. She rolls her eyes and does whatever the task is herself. She has made me chicken soup for the week or weak, depending on how you look at it.
Andy Warhol, Campbell's Tomato Bisque, 1962
My dear friend and co-curator of the "Changing Climate, Changing Practice" exhibit reminds me that this is not new for me. She gently teases me with the reminder that I have had lung issues since I was a child. I grew up in a part of California that still has one of the highest rates for asthma and lung cancer.
It's a small community, and like many of the small agricultural parts of the state, it only gets talked about when there are national conversations about the social or political impacts of the West Coast and its attitude toward a changing climate. But it does function as a microcosm to interconnected issues that are foodways, health, colonialism, and, of course, a changing planet. The environmental crises we are more known for are related to water. Artists like Kristin Diekman have highlighted the impact of what happens when our water runs dry.
I grew up in Steinbeck's California; I like to call it Calabama. My social upbringing can make me feel like my peers who grew up in the Midwest or South. We also have similar health and wealth outcomes, meaning we're more likely to be poor and sick. The gift for living in an 'affordable' agricultural region that feeds the nation. I remember when cows broke out on the playground at school and have memories of running under the fumes of the crop-duster as it 'snowed' mid-spring.
Climate activists are making these connections, and we have seen growing interventions. Most spectacularly, with the series of soups thrown on art, most recently with the Mona Lisa. There have been 38 widely reported demonstrations. With activists saying, "What is more important? Art or the right to healthy and sustainable food? Your agricultural system is sick. Our farmers are dying at work."
We can quickly see the connection between our health, the health of the planet, and our daily practices. There is increased scrutiny and visibility around how the art world and aesthetic practices can be highlighted. I keep thinking about consumption, art practices, and the consumption of art. "The imperative is to break through superficial understandings of emergency that limit our purview to near-future impacts, and instead comprehend present conflicts in light of long entangled social and ecological formations. In fact, many experimental aesthetic practices, operating at the nexus of environmental studies and social justice activism, are doing just that" (T. J. Demos, 2021).
This can be addressed from the personal to the institutional level. Further, it can combine practices and knowledge bases that help to bridge the gap between understanding and practice. For example, the collaboration to rethink how natural history museums display a contemporary understanding of the climate crisis.
Or being overt as an artist scientist, like Catherine Sarah Young.
Catherine Sarah Young, found specimens, The People’s Cabinet of Curiosities, 2018.
Whether this shift comes about because of individual practices as artists and consumers or because we as a collective work to included arts in future climate policy, like the Green New Deal, "The American public needs new stories that challenge dominant Hollywood narratives about the climate crisis devolving into a Hobbesian war of all against all. We need visions of human empathy and solidarity in the face of ecological chaos. We need hope for a damaged people and planet," writes Ashley Dawson. Much like any healing process, while the soup will help, we may also need to take our antibiotics.
Further Reading:
Ashley Dawson, “The New Deal Funded the Arts. The Green New Deal Should, Too.” December 5, 2019.
T.J. Demos, “Extinction Rebellions” Afterimage, 2021.
AC Panella is a writer, curator, and tenured communications professor whose research sits at the intersections of trans/gender, museum, and communication studies.