Articulating a Critical Voice: Artists Who "Rattle the Cage" about the Environment

Among the most pressing concerns of many contemporary artists is the deteriorating environment. Indeed artists are often active participants in attempts to improve the environmental behavior of society. This interest clearly grows out of a strong strand of interest in the natural environment by artists extending through history to the present day. In his examination of an evolving vision of the Australian environment, Ken Johnson posed the question, how do we know what is causing [environmental] problems? He suggested that the arts have a special role in doing this, and he provided the examples of Russell Drysdale's paintings of drought and rabbit ravished landscapes in Australia in the 1940s as well as poetry by A. D. Hope. In the modern era, socially critical artists who examine the environment include artists as varied as performance artist Benny Zable, singer and storyteller Lisa Yeates, dancers of Bangarra Dance Theatre, writer and poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal, and visual artists Lin Onus and Tamsin Salehian. A major 2010 retrospective exhibition at the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art highlighted the range of artistic responses to the gathering environmental crisis. But how do artists who produce socially critical work see their work and its effects on society? To shed light on this question, I interviewed artists in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia whose work is socially critical and often investigates environmental deterioration. The focus in this chapter is thus the beliefs of such artists themselves.