The same, I think, can be said for most of the people I know or have recently met who live in L.A.: There is very little sanguinity about what\u2019s happening here, climate-wise, among Angelenos, regardless of where they work or come from.<\/p>\n
So maybe I should have expected that an exhibit of recent work by L.A. artists would be similarly, logically, oriented toward these same (largely home-grown) anxieties around our place in a world increasingly shaped by the developing climate crisis.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, it struck me how many of the artists centered the interface between the built and \u201cnatural\u201d environments at the Hammer Museum\u2019s biennial \u201cMade in L.A.\u201d exhibition when I visited last weekend.<\/p>\n
Many of the artists seemed to be grappling with how we situate ourselves in a climate-changed world.<\/p>\n
From Alake Shilling\u2019s uncanny cartoon bears driving buggies and mowing down weeping, humanoid sunflowers to Kelly Wall\u2019s installation of glass swatches painted the color of toxic L.A. sunsets displayed, for tourist consumption, on an erstwhile pharmacy rack, the exhibition communicates Los Angeles as a place of largely unresolved conflict between human beings and whatever we define as \u201cnature.\u201d <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Part of Kelly Wall\u2019s installation, \u201cSomething to Write Home About.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Elijah Wolfson \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
I thought that as a climate journalist, I might just be primed to see such things, but Essence Harden, who co-curated the biennial, noted that \u201cconcerns around the environment are historical, they\u2019re rooted. They\u2019re not ahistorical. They don\u2019t come from nothing or nowhere. I think art produced in Los Angeles has a relationship to the site specificity and the dynamic of architecture and history which grounds it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harden said that she and her co-curator, Paulina Pobocha, didn\u2019t seek out artists grappling with climate specifically for the seventh edition of Made in L.A. But after scouring dozens of local galleries, they found that climate and environmental anxieties permeated the scene.<\/p>\n
Much of this Anthropocene-angst is \u201crooted in a sort of longer history of capital,\u201d Harden said. Indeed, as a relative outsider, I have always sort of felt that L.A. wears its supposed climate excellence a little too loudly on its sleeves \u2014 or maybe, on its postcards and souvenir T-shirts. The iconic palm trees, for example, are transplants, forced to live in neighborhoods that don\u2019t want them.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe idyllic palm trees sight line of Los Angeles comes from these neighborhoods that were historically Black and Japanese and Latinx,\u201d Harden said. \u201cThey are rooted in these places that people who are buying the product of Los Angeles don\u2019t want to go.\u201d <\/p>\n
There are no palm trees in the Hammer biennial. At least, none that I remember. What there are instead are painted cinder blocks and hunks of glass, graffiti and rutted acrylic paint, twisted tubes of neon and roughly formed clay. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Anthropocene Landscape 3 by Carl Cheng<\/p>\n
(Hammer Museum)<\/p>\n
It was refreshing to see a show that grappled with the environment but was not didactic. Describing her curatorial process, Harden said she is mostly attracted to \u201cpeople who are more ethereal and capture dreams and sensation.\u201d If they also happen to be engaging with climate change, all the better.<\/p>\n
More recent news and ideas on climate and culture<\/p>\n
Writing for The Guardian<\/a>, Beth Mead \u2014 a star forward on England\u2018s national soccer team for nearly a decade, with the all-time most assists in the history of the Women\u2019s Super League \u2014 shared how climate change has changed the game she loves over the last decade. For professionals on her level, yes, but more importantly, for the many kids around the world who are now less likely to be able to regularly play what she calls \u201cthe world\u2019s most accessible sport\u201d thanks to extreme heat, droughts and flooding.<\/p>\n A \u201cmilk apocalypse\u201d is coming for your burrata, reports Motoko Rich for the New York Times<\/a>. Cheesemakers and dairy farmers in Italy, which produces and exports some of the most popular cheeses in the world, report a declining supply of milk, thanks to rising temperatures.<\/p>\n And if you wanted to pair your favorite Oregon pinot with that cheese \u2026 well, better do it now. The Willamette Valley has long had a nearly perfect climate for growing pinot noir \u2014 to the point where \u201cOregon wine\u201d is often shorthand for the varietal. But as Branden Andersen reports for the local outlet Newsberg<\/a>, thanks to changes in temperature and humidity, the region may need to rethink what\u2019s been practically a vineyard monoculture.<\/p>\n In Bel\u00e9m, Brazil, COP30 is coming to a close. I\u2019ve always been drawn to the art and performance at past COPs, and was glad to see some examples from this year\u2019s climate conference<\/a>. But what was even more interesting to me was Spanish artist Josep Pi\u00f1ol\u2019s performance piece<\/a>, in which he was commissioned to produce a large-scale sculpture in Bel\u00e9m and then canceled, saving what he said would have been the emissions equivalent of 57,765 metric tons of carbon dioxide.<\/p>\n The past week in broader climate news<\/p>\n Melody Gutierrez has been in Bel\u00e9m reporting on COP30 for The Times, and this week, she wrote about an image that has come to represent the socio-economics of this year\u2019s events<\/a>: two gigantic diesel-powered cruise ships, used as temporary housing for the global elite that comprise much of the COP delegations, docked at the mouth of the Amazon River, whose rainforests and people have felt much of the brunt of fossil fuel-driven climate change.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the California Air Resources Board is expected to vote today on new measures to address methane leaks and underground fires at landfills which \u2014 unsurprisingly \u2014 are more likely to impact poorer Californians. As my colleague Tony Briscoe reports, landfills are a climate change and environmental health menace<\/a>, and updates to the rules governing California\u2019s are long overdue.<\/p>\n Earlier this week, a U.S. appeals court put a hold on a California law<\/a> set to go into effect in January that would require any company that makes more than $500 million annually and does business in the state to report, every two years, the financial impact of climate change. <\/p>\n Finally, there was a lot of talk this week about how the build-out of data centers is driving up energy costs<\/a> across the U.S. I found this Pew Research article<\/a> to be a useful one-sheet to get a feel for what we know to be real when it comes to AI\u2019s impact on the energy sector, what is hyperbole and what we still don\u2019t fully understand.<\/p>\n This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox<\/a>. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before I moved to L.A., I\u2019d spent pretty much my entire professional life working for New York-based publications.…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":392812,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[35564,1582,276,33025,186636,49747,78112,3438,26769,1854,2961,20010,224,5337,9105,186635,186638,186637,41663],"class_list":{"0":"post-392811","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-big-oil","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-climate-crisis","12":"tag-climate-progress","13":"tag-critic","14":"tag-electric-bill","15":"tag-environmentalist","16":"tag-gas","17":"tag-gavin-newsom","18":"tag-la","19":"tag-lawmaker","20":"tag-los-angeles","21":"tag-losangeles","22":"tag-month","23":"tag-oil-drilling","24":"tag-oil-industry-whispering","25":"tag-rooftop-solar-industry","26":"tag-state-official"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115583465345957454","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}