Useful art. Artistic practices in the face of the climate crisis

Abstract

The aim of this article is to signal possible directions in thinking about how contemporary art practices and writing of art theory and history respond to the challenges of the climate crisis. Following the thinking of humanities scholars working on the climate crisis and the Anthropocene, we claim that both the theory and practice of art in the “Age of Humans” requires unlearning modern, anthropocentric habits of thought that are partly responsible for human-induced planetary change and the passivity and marasm of homo sapiens in the face of danger. We believe that thinking and writing about art, aware of the climate crisis and the Anthropocene, needs to constantly search for a new theoretical background and should stay as close as possible to the artistic practices growing out of reflections on these issues. We refer to Stephen Wright’s theory of use-oriented art and community creative actions, which are carried out on the borderline of art, activism and science, as a guide on how to realise the postulates of unlearning. As an example of this kind of artistic practice, we analyse the activities of the “Krzak” Cooperative and the Zakole Wawerskie collective. This text is an attempt to outline how we can think and write about art as a reaction to the climate crisis in the spirit of what Ewa Domanska calls an apotropaic text.