| Summary: | Anthropogenic climate change is a paradigm shifter, an emergent, complex phenomenon that challenges art’s representational strategies. This thesis articulates an art history of climate change through case studies of key artworks and exhibitions from the anticipation of climate change in the 1970s to the full recognition of its impact on the planet in the present decade. These case studies demonstrate that the subject of climate change requires a rapprochement with empirical methods, a critical understanding of the socio-economic issues, and a judicious use of such tropes as the sublime and the monument. Artforms are considered in terms of their capacity to deliver the combination of affect, cognition and criticality required for adequately addressing climate change. Helen and Newton Harrison’s The Lagoon Cycle (1974-84) is examined as a key early project. Lucy Lippard’s curation of fifty-one artists’ projects in Weather Report, Art and Climate Change (2007) is evaluated as a successful but partial response that focused on conceptual and site-specific approaches. Andrea Polli, Natalie Jeremijenko and Frances Whitehead offer different approaches to interdisciplinarity as applied to the urgent matter of climate change. The emergence of the idea of the Anthropocene is tested against the exhibition Among the Machines (2013), which interrogated the ways that human experience is now consistently mediated through technology. The final chapter presents a history of climate change as a subject in Aotearoa/New Zealand that reflects the country’s relatively recent colonization, its bicultural nature, proximity to Antarctica, and its vulnerability to sea level rise.
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