When All the Art Is Green: Swiss Institute Takes On Climate Change
The artworks in Spora, a long-term exhibition in Manhattan, are easy to overlook, but they bring an acute awareness to the environment beyond the gallery doors. Art cannot save us. This is the problem with art that seeks to address climate change. Weeks ago, I could feel in my lungs and smell the smoke from fires engulfing Canadian forests thousands of miles away, while walking between galleries on the streets of Lower Manhattan. During this summer that promises to be the hottest on record, the dissonance made me ask the question: How does one look at art when it feels like the world is burning? Spora at the in the East Village is more of an intervention than an exhibition. The shows co-curator, Alison Coplan, described the project as open-ended. New works and artists will join the international group of five artists debuting the project. Taking place in the institutes non-gallery spaces like the stairwells, hallways and roof Spora is slow, provisional and at times easy to overlook. But it does take seriously the climate crisis as a problem. It even succeeds as art. A few visual experiences pull the viewer in like a bee to a flower. Vivian Suters untitled wall mural (2023) of orange spheres on a green-yellow ground glows above the museums roof, visible blocks away, stretching two stories up the side of the taller neighboring building. Inside the museum, the most arresting visual moment comes in a framed Mary Manning photo-collage from 2023, with the lengthy title And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves (for Jenni). It features a large picture of autumnal maple trees and hangs in a stairway beside a series of vertical painted stripes. The stripes, found throughout the building, are the result of an instruction piece by the conceptual artist Helen Mirra, dictating that all repainting and touching-up of the once-white walls must now be done instead with remaindered mixed paint. The work makes visible both the ongoing use of paint as well as the labor of painting by museum workers. It is one of two pieces in the show that update the ethos of maintenance art, which emphasizes work that is essential, hidden and often domestic, developed by , the onetime artist in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation. Looking at Mannings photos beside Mirras lines, I realized that Mannings images, which Ive never thought of as ecological, are in fact documents of a hyperlocal environment. Light through the yellowed leaves of a tree relates to the stained glass windows seen in two smaller images in Mannings assemblage. Set within the tree photo is a snapshot-size print taken inside St. Marks Church as Manning left the memorial for the artist and curator Jenni Crain (to whom the work is dedicated); another similarly sized photo to the left of the tree shows a detail of stained glass taken on the Bowery. Mannings work is explicitly urban but brings an acute awareness to the environment just beyond the gallery doors. The visual seduction of Spora mostly ends with the work of these artists, but the museum itself comes more fully into view as a hive of activity. On the roof, in gleaming chrome, the Finnish artist Jenna Sutela has constructed Vermi-Sibyl (2023), a sculpture-as-compost bin like a gardens oblong, oversized gazing ball with about 1,000 worms in its belly. Powered by an earth battery of organic decomposition, Vermi-Sibyl speaks in a voice adapted from , a character from Jim Hensons 1980s television series Fraggle Rock, and fed regularly with the collected food scraps of the Swiss Institutes workers. Environmental factors like temperature, humidity, and bioelectrical activity from the composting process are programmed to alter the sound it produces. Similarly not much to look at, a glass-fronted refrigerator at the top of a stairway holds transparent bags of mushroom spores and sawdust, materials to be used by the Indigenous artist and ethnobotanist Tuyttanat-Cease Wyss for a yet-to-be-realized sculptural work, called wa lulem ta tsaytens tla stewa kin (The mushrooms are singing), that promises to use biosonic synthesizers and may (or may not) eventually involve a carved elm log. In another context the unfinished quality might seem like a failing. But here it is a glimpse at a still-running experiment, part of a continuing attempt and invitation, with roots that extend deep into the functioning of the Swiss Institute itself, with seeds of future artworks still germinating. In my conversation with Stefanie Hessler, the Swiss Institutes director, she referred to ecological institutional critique, adapting the phrase used to describe conceptual artists of the late 1960s, like , who made the ideologies and power structures of museums the subject of their art. (Hessler organized Spora with Coplan, senior curator and head of programs.) But the question is: Are institutions capable of doing that work themselves? In response, I was given extensive spreadsheets of energy audits going back to 2019, documenting energy consumption, shipping costs and individual airline flights by everyone associated with museum activities, noting whether this travel was first-class or coach, using the to track the institutes carbon footprint. (The Swiss Institute is a founding New York member of the coalition.) The data show a reduction of 44 tCO2e, or metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, from the year 2019 to 2022. Its admirable, to think of an institution taking a deeper look and attempting to quantify its climate impact. And Spora nudges the viewer throughout to look at systems: How museums as buildings exist in the context of cities. How museums are places of work for both artists and museum staff. But what would an accounting look like, that looks at the greater art-world ecology of international art fairs, global mega-galleries, auction houses and art storage facilities? And whos going to convince the billionaire collector class to stop flying their private jets? Through May 10, 2025, Swiss Institute, 38 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, (212) 925-2035; An earlier version of this critics notebook misidentified the location of the Swiss Institute. It is in the East Village, not Greenwich Village. How we handle corrections