Page 175 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

168 J. DEAN

but on a different scale, activists focusing on pipeline and oil and gas
storage projects target the fossil fuel industry as the infrastructure of cli-
mate change, the central component of global warming’s means of
reproduction. But instead of being examples of the politics of locality
dominant in recent decades, infrastructure struggles pursue an anamorphic
politics. They don’t try to address the whole of the causes and effects of
global warming. They approach it from the side of its infrastructural sup-
ports. The recent victory of the campaign against the Keystone Pipeline, as
well as of the anti-fracking campaign in New York State, demonstrate ways
that an anamorphic politics is helping dismantle the power of the oil and
gas industry and produce a counterpower infrastructure.
The new movement to liberate museums and cultural institutions from
the fossil fuel sector supplies a third set of examples, modeling a politics
that breaks decisively with the melancholic catastrophism enjoyed by the
anthropocenic Left. As the demonstrations at the Louvre accompanying
the end of the Paris COP made clear, artists and activists have shifted their
energy away from the promotion of general awareness and participation to
concentrate instead on institutions as arrangements of power that might be
redeployed against the oil and gas industry. Pushing for a fossil-free culture,
an array of groups have aligned in a fight against the sector that supplies
capitalism with its energy. They demonstrate how the battle over the
political arrangement of a warming planet is in part a cultural battle, a
struggle over who and what determines our imagining of our future and
the future of our imagining.
In this vein, Liberate Tate works to free art from oil by pushing the Tate
to drop the sponsorship of British Petroleum. For the past five years, the
group has performed art interventions in Tate buildings as well as other UK
arts institutions that support (and are supported by) BP. Actions include
unauthorized performances such as Birthmark, from late November 2015.
Liberate Tate activists occupied the 1840s gallery at the Tate Britain,
tattooing each other with the number of CO 2 emissions in parts per million
corresponding to the day they were born. Hidden Figures, from 2014,
featured dozens of performers standing along the sides of a
hundred-square-meter black cloth which they held chest high, raising and
lowering in arches and waves. Taking place in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall,
the performance pointed to Malevich’s Black Square, part of an exhibit that
opened the same summer that carbon concentrations exceeded four hun-
dred parts per million, a fact parallel to and omitted from the exhibit, much
like BP’s—and by implication the Tate’s—involvement in the climate crisis.