After our class where we viewed and discussed artistic works by both Olafur Eliasson (“Ice Watch”) and Michael Wang (“Carbon Copies”) I wanted to elaborate on my feelings in reaction to seeing Eliasson and Wang’s work after reflecting for a while.
Eliasson’s work elicited positive emotions towards the arctic like concern and wonder. It spurred inspiration for action. I thought, “Hmm, what can I do to help?”.
Wang’s work felt important in terms of transparency. However, it only brought up negative emotions and no feeling of being “spurred to action”. It gave me the feeling of a call-out post (anger) and brought up the same energy as “pointing fingers”. Instead of making me think about impact and solutions, it made me question the other artists and brought back the feeling of futility in individual action.
Taking this a little further. It reminded me of the BLM protests when riots began to occur at night. People began to decry the protests with the riots, saying all of it should stop. I’m against senseless violence, but when I asked people who claimed to be pro-equality, but anti-violence “okay, but what do you think people should do instead of this to fight for their rights?”– They would provide no alternatives, they wouldn’t even try to think of an alternative, they just doubled down and said, “riots bad”. Inaction is not a solution. Inaction is not a solution for equality and it’s not a solution for the environment.
Wang is right to call out how sometimes in the process of doing good, we do some harm. However, JUST pointing it out elicits negative feelings towards those trying, not action towards the problem they’re on the same side of…
