CHICAGO — Burnt books have no place in a library, nor microplastics in the stomachs of fish. But they are there, and here I am: Chicago’s CLI-Fi Librarywhich houses a shelf of bio-charred eco-literature, a ton of books made from recycled plastic, snippets of classic climate fiction, and more.
Chicago’s CLI-Fi Library is not actually a library but an art exhibit, housed in the elegant paneled gallery of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, an interdisciplinary institute at the University of Chicago, housed in a neo-Gothic mansion and better than most for bring together scientists, researchers and artists to work collaboratively on complex human problems. The exhibition, curated by in-house curator Dieter Roelstraete, features a handful of local artists – Geissler & Sann, Jenny Kendler, Dan Peterman and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle – who have each developed a unique way of dealing with the existential threat of anthropogenic climate change. There are no common movements here except environmental grief as expressed through artistic creation.
Indeed, the artists included represent truly diverse approaches to what one might call the aesthetics of disaster. The term has been used by scholars at least since 2005, primarily to name the practice of photographing death and disaster, and it was the title of a round table on the occasion of the exhibition. Extending the term’s application beyond journalistic documentation – or, indeed, increasing artistic possibilities for dealing with disaster – is increasingly urgent. Artists have to do it and museums have to show it, and with the smallest possible carbon footprint. Terrestrial observatory, a sprawling 2021 exhibition curated by Giovanni Aloi and Andrew S. Yang, set local precedent by showcasing more than 30 artists, designers, and scientists critically dealing with ecology. from Roelstraete Everyone talks about the weatherwhich will open its doors at the Fondazione Prada in Venice in May, promises to do the same internationally.
At Cli-Fi Library, the artist dealing most explicitly with the aesthetics of disaster is surely Jenny Kendler. Artist-in-Residence for the National Resource Defense Council since 2014, Kendler has been making drawings, sculptures, and performances about interspecies coexistence, ecological issues, and native plant life for two decades. Stylistically, the work has ranged from quirky and playful to bold and beautiful; more recently it has appeared elegiac. “Underground Library” and “Whale Bells”, presented here, resemble an invitation to collective mourning. The bells, crafted with Andrew Bearnot, are a continuous series of shadowed black glass domes, hand-blown to evoke whales surfacing vertically to survey their surroundings, a behavior known as spying. Inside, dangling clappers made from the fossilized ear bones of an ancient cetacean related to modern humpback whales, a species that eventually recovered from being hunted to near extinction to be at again threatened by ship strikes, entanglement of fishing gear and excessive noise. In a sunlit window well at the Neubauer, eight of the 30 bells made to date hang silently from a black rope, like so many wrapped mourners, waiting to sound the death knell.
For whom will the bells ring? Well, a musical performance for an event dubbed “Quartet for the End Times” is scheduled for Earth Day. In addition, there are these cremated books, representing four decades of climate change writing, from technical manuals to bestsellers. Kendler launched the “Underground Library” in 2017, so called because each set of books, after being burned in a low-oxygen process that produces a very stable form of carbon, is buried underground, thereby sequestering the carbon and benefiting the surrounding soil and plants. Between cremation and burial, they are displayed, here on a lovely blond wood mantelpiece made readily available by the emerald ash borer, an invasive species responsible for a 46% decline in the population of ash trees in the region. The volumes themselves are terrifyingly beautiful: matte and flaky, distorted and shimmering, in all shades of black and all manner of faux. A few title fragments can be deciphered (Economic consequences of a warmer planet, Love in the Age of Extinction) but otherwise the texts – thousands of pages of pleas to save the planet by some of the world’s greatest science writers – have been rendered as silent as their messages falling on deaf ears.
Dan Peterman also stored the Cli-Fi Library with books and shelves. A ton of books, to be precise, plus an outdoor installation of shelves, flooring and benches equivalent to the average annual plastic consumption of 57 people. Everything is made from planks of post-consumer recycled plastic, even the “books”, which, like proper books, provide information about their content – namely the plastic – and can be “read” in terms of texture and color. A longtime member of Chicago’s artist-activist community and developer of Blackstone Bicycle Works, the Experimental Station, and many other neighborhood infrastructures to critically and creatively address urban waste and needs, Peterman has worked for decades with a variety of recycled materials: for Handout 14, it exhibits thousands of copper and iron ingots cast from industrial waste and salvage. But its go-to, because it’s the go-to of the world, is plastic. He’s used it to build everything from low-key sculptures to two of downtown Chicago’s most functional public works of art: an outdoor dance floor and a 100-foot-long picnic table. If some of this sounds pragmatic and user-friendly, it is, but none of it has the guilt-busting effect so common in eco-friendly consumer goods. Peterman’s works never forget that they are the product of material excess and environmental neglect.
For all the excesses of Kendler and Peterman’s projects – tons of literature, tons of plastic, millions of years – their exterior forms are relentlessly minimalist and compact. Maximalism doesn’t sit well with environmentalism. The contributions of Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann to Library are no exception. A couple working collaboratively since 1996 and more recently as members of the Anthropocene Task Force, a decade-long initiative of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, they are presenting two works from the suite “Comment la fin du monde (pour les autres)? The “others” in question are the horseshoe crabs, survivors of five mass extinctions in the last 475 million years and today severely endangered by human exploitation, portrayed in an impeccably clinical photographic diptych, tilted helplessly to one side. The “others” are also everyone and everything, represented in bound copies of a score, available to roam the gallery couch or attend the Earth Day performance event. The score allows a lively and humiliating reading. The first part is the past: a timeline of deep history through the Cambrian period, the Holocene, modernity and the great acceleration, with pointed notes to the artists of a cohort of earth scientists, debating points the finest of major disasters and developments that have shaped the world so far. The second part is the future: brief synopses of 47 climate fiction books, arranged chronologically according to the time period in which they are set. As a genre, cli-fi has been around for about a decade, although novels dealing with environmental change have been around for much longer, mostly understood as science fiction. But as their stories approach reality, the sci-fi category has become creepy.
All the best books, cli-fi and sci-fi included, have clever footnotes that point to incompletely told alternate stories, and so does Chicago’s CLI-Fi Library. Here they come in the form of a bewildering little canvas by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, normally a creator of sleek sociopolitical renderings of icebergs, modernist houses, bombs and clouds. What is the connection with this half-red, half-black and white paint image of a young Dustin Hoffman captured in front of the Greenwich Village townhouse accidentally destroyed by the Weather Underground on March 6, 1970? Depends on the footnote, though initial readings suggest alternate stories ranging from the little red book from Chairman Mao to Hoffman’s then recent turn The graduationin which a well-meaning friend of his character’s parents said, “One word…plastics…there’s a bright future in plastics.”
Plastics, they’re forever, man.
Chicago’s CLI-Fi Library continues at Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society (5701 South Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) through June 11. The exhibition was curated by Dieter Roelstraete.
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