Page 176 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

13 THE ANAMORPHIC POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE 169

Hidden Figures invokes the Tate’s release of the minutes of meetings from
its ethics committee in the wake of numerous freedom of information
requests. Black rectangles blocked out multiple sections of the released
documents. Hidden Figures reproduced an enormous black square within
the museum, placing the fact of redaction, hiding, and censorship at its
center. As Liberate Tate explains, the redactions reveal a divide, a split
between the ostensible public interest of the Tate and the private interest it
seeks to protect.
Occupying this split via its demonstration of the museum’s incorpora-
tion into BP’s ecocidal infrastructure, Liberate Tate disrupts the flow of
institutional power. Rather than fueling BP’s efforts at reputation man-
agement, it makes the museum into a site of counterpower.
The Natural History Museum, the new project of the art, activist, and
theory collective Not An Alternative (of which I am a member), similarly
adopts an anamorphic politics. The Natural History Museum repurposes
the generic form of the natural history museum as a set of institutionalized
expectations, meanings, and practices that embody and transmit collective
power. It puts display on display, transferring our attention to the infras-
tructures supporting what and how we see. The Natural History Museum’s
gaze is avowedly partisan, a political approach to climate change in the
context of a museum culture that revels in its authoritative neutrality.
Activating natural history museums’ claim to serve the common, The
Natural History Museum divides the sector from within: anyone tasked
with science communication has to take a stand. Do they stand with col-
lectivity and the common or with oligarchs, private property, and fossil
fuels? Cultural institutions such as science and natural history museums
come to appear in their role in climate change as sites of greenwashing and
of emergent counterpower.
Operating as a pop-up people’s museum, The Natural History Museum’s
exhibits and tours provide a counter-narrative that combats the influence oil
and gas industry on science education. The Natural History Museum also
serves as a platform for political organizing, the ostensibly neutral zone of
the museum turned into a base camp against the fossil fuel sector. It moves
beyond participatory art’s creation of experiences and valuation of partici-
pation for its own sake to the building of divisive political power. In March
2014, The National History Museum released an open letter to museums of
science and natural history signed by dozens of the world’s top scientists,
including several Nobel laureates. The letter urged museums to cut all ties
with the fossil fuel industry and with funders of climate obfuscation. After its