This is an artefact of a book. Produced by IACCCA, the International Association of Corporate Collections of Contemporary Art (who knew?), a coming-together of curators from companies whose artworks adorn the walls of their members’ offices: the bankers, lawyers, utilities providers, and intermodal logisticians (you’re right, I have no idea what that means), but mainly bankers.

I think I feel OK about large, corporate art collections, but I definitely have to think about it. I certainly feel better when they collaborate to create a book like this, which may be why they do it. It’s prefaced by three thoughtful, and thought-provoking, essays, most notably the first by the book’s curator, Heidi Ballet (it’s from this essay that I draw the unattributed quotes below).

This note is not intended to do the book justice, but rather to reflect on a thought it provoked. It’s well worth reading the essays in full and wandering among the collections in its pages. If your banker hasn’t already given you a copy, it’s available to download for free from IACCCA.

And, of course, this thought wasn’t really ‘provoked’ by this book, that’s not how thoughts work, rather it was recalled, elaborated and fleshed out, much as it had been through reading Hyperobjects a few weeks ago, much as I’m certain it will be through what I read next.

Mindsets.

There are a number of mindsets which must come together to create the situation in which we find ourselves. In Ballet’s essay, Bruno Latour contends that “no one would have invented “individuals” capable of an egotism radical enough, continuous enough, coherent enough to “owe nothing to each other” and to consider all others as “strangers” and all forms of life as “resources”.”

These mindsets seem to me to include the ancient, imperial hypothesis that might-is-right and its more modern, colonising extension that far-flung reaches of empire might be reduced to wasteland to fatten the centre (seemingly without it suffering irreparable moral collapse). To these, came the enlightenment additions that (our) ideas are of universal application and as such should be exported by whatever means necessary, and the insidious ability of the enlightenment sciences to entrench pre-existing delusions; as they did in ‘scientific racism’ and in the alienation from nature as a subject of the ‘natural sciences’. But only once this machine of self-superiority was scaled to inhuman levels by industrialisation, could it manufacture that egotism radical enough to consider all forms of life as resources.

And only then could the planet-scale exploitation of lands, minds, waters, cultures, and bodies in pursuit of an endless, boundless ‘growth’ be envisaged. Or not envisaged in fact, at least not by any single mind. This system of growth has the features of a hyperobject, it’s massively distributed in time and space, it’s unimaginably vast, and all we can experience are its local manifestations as they rupture through into our individual lives.

This endless, boundless growth is the idea which became the cancer of a planet.

Nature, Landscape & Environment.

In terms of ecology, that radical egotism manifests in our conceptions of nature, landscape and the environment. In each case, we place them as objects to our subject, we exclude ourselves from them, and in so doing we secure our idea of who ‘we’ are and of what (really) matters.

Nature is a thing out there. It’s a thing we might choose to spend time ‘in’ but it’s something from which we can equally choose to withdraw. And so we should, Nature is dangerous, it’s wild, it’s dark and teeming, it’s uncivilised, it’s what we transcend and leave behind. And now Nature is dangerous in new ways too. “We are still in danger of being a victim of nature’s mercilessness, only now feelings of guilt and shame override the original, ambiguous sensation of the Romantic Sublime.” The Natural Sciences have made Nature into “a wonderful but scientific object”, displacing any sense of an interconnectedness, or a wholeness in which we humans might be functionally indistinguishable from the teeming mass of life. In turns Nature comes to mean ‘not us’ and therefore ‘not as important as us’ and eventually ‘a resource for us to use’.

Landscape is a concept which links ecology and art. Landscape takes the world and renders it as a view, and us as the viewer; it makes an object of everything. It also normalises what we see. My landscape is one of gently rolling hills, a patchwork of subtlety different greens and yellows, all separated by hectic hedgerows, and punctuated by single, noble, mighty trees. My landscape is a normal and normative rendition of Englishness, this is what an English landscape should be. But, of course, it’s a construction, a deceit, it’s greenwashing by a particular phase of modern agriculture. It’s a landscape painted to persuade me of a truth, or which I choose to use to persuade myself of a truth.

Environment “is not innocent” either. Ballet cites Michel Serres in pointing out that “assuming we are the centre of a system… that flawlessly turns around us” is a narcissistic conceit.

In choosing to be visitors to Nature, in creating an idealised Landscape, in imagining an Environment within which we are centred as sovereign subjects, is to construct an idea of us as omnipotent, to define and push away the other, and to construct our selves. And these are appropriately, the three sections into which this book is curated: “Dreaming of Omnipotence”, “Relationship to the Other” and “Constructed Selves”. It takes each as a separate but interconnected process. In truth, they are one. The scaffold we construct to shore up our own sense of self is at once the barricade against the other, and its gallows.

So, what of art?

If this exploitation in pursuit of growth is too vast to be envisaged, if it’s massively distributed in time and space, that doesn’t mean it can’t be chased and glimpsed and shown. Probably not in any single work of art, but maybe in a collection. Or in a collection of collections. That’s the curatorial thesis here; that in these collections we may be able to discern “the underlying dynamics that played a role in today’s climate crisis”. And that thesis is compelling.

Perhaps these collections do speak to enough of the local manifestations, as they rupture through into our individual lives, to start to build a sense of a whole. Perhaps they can make visible the “slow violence”, perhaps they reconstruct what Timothy Morton envisages as a slow motion nuclear explosion, this thing that’s happening everywhere and all at once, but imperceptibly slowly… until it’s neither slow, nor imperceptible. Perhaps that’s the role of art in general.

And in particular, individual artists and specific pieces have a different role to play, art is “a vector of change”. To TJ Demos, art “can offer opportunities unavailable elsewhere for thinking, being and becoming otherwise”. To Selina Nwulu, it lets us “speak of the crisis without using the trappings of climate change language [and to] create new paths of comprehension, so that we may all be better informed and called to act”. And to Rebecca Solnit (as quoted by Nwulu) art can be “an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings”.

Those openings are vital. Hope is the channel through which change flows. And only if art can show us how to think, be and become otherwise, might we actually do it. This is the unique role of artists, and they too are vital. As Amitav Ghosh has it, “the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats”.

So, more power to the artists who chase, and glimpse, and show, and also to their patrons, collectors, and curators. We need to be led to new ways to see the world, new ways to imagine ourselves in it, and new forms of togetherness we can embrace.

This need feels urgent (and may yet become a manifesto).