Abstract

Environmental crises around the world have inspired an outpour of creative response. As the effects of climate change increasingly manifest, environmental art is being politically and pedagogically mobilised for ameliorative strategies. The rubric that instrumentalist, techno-scientific approaches to environmental stress (and attendant social distress) cannot solely provide solutions to this challenge has found increasing acceptance. The concern of this paper, however, is the limited understanding of public art’s capacity that is perpetuated by certain trends in environmental art in which the work is charged with communicative responsibility. Connected to the representational and instructive traditions of public art, this tendency is further informed by the influence of the ‘information-deficit model’ in environmental communication research: a concept that asserts a straightforward connection between information provision, individual awareness and collective action on a concern. The idea that public art can function as a conduit for knowledge, which in turn will inspire new moral positions and behaviours, absents the art work from the process of knowledge-making and the production of conditions that enable new practice. Arguing for a revised approach to the environmental possibilities of public art, this paper will propose that in thinking about environmental transformation as essentially unrepresentable, a different mode of public engagement with the issue is enabled.