FUSION NOW! Art and the Politics of Energy

FUSION NOW! Art and the Politics of Energy. An essay by JJ Charlesworth

FUSION NOW! is an exhibition that takes as its starting point the revolutionary science of nuclear fusion, a science that has the potential to provide society with a source of energy that is abundant, indefinitely available and clean. FUSION NOW! is also an exhibition about art’s relationship to the political world of the present. Starting from the science of nuclear fusion, FUSION NOW! asks how science becomes politics, and how politics becomes art.

There are many political issues that could be the subject for an art exhibition today; the war in Iraq, or the global experience of mass migration, or the supposed clash of cultures between the West and East, or the rise of China as a new global power. Or it could be the environment and climate change. FUSION NOW! begins with the science of nuclear fusion to argue that energy has become a political issue. It does so because the controversy over energy goes to the core of how we understand the nature of modern society, of how we might understand what progress is, and how abundance or scarcity are defining forces in our existence. And in different, often contradictory ways, art has always related to these questions. Energy might seem a purely scientific question, but the themes it touches on – the meaning of creativity and work, of aesthetic experience and its relation to pleasure and abundance, and our relationship to human history and to the future – forms the basis for art’s drive to make sense of things.

So FUSION NOW! asks what art and society might look like if we thought positively about a world based on more energy, not less, and a reality oriented towards unlimited potential rather than pessimistic restraint; it explores how art might make sense of an aspect of reality which, while fundamental to our existence, is in many ways impossible to represent. And in parallel to the exhibition, this publication presents texts by writers who follow through the manifold questions that lead from pure science to the contemporary politics of energy: Professor Mike Dunne, the scientist leading the new European HiPER fusion reactor project, makes the case for the imminent viability of fusion-based power – the ‘holy grail’ in the quest for abundant, clean energy. Technology analysts Joe Kaplinsky and James Woudhuysen examine whether alternative energy sources really are the alternatives they are made out to be; and political writer James Heartfield presents ‘The Cornucopian Manifesto’, an account of how abundance and scarcity have always been defining questions in human history.

Energy is political. At a time when we are told that our excessive use of fossil fuels threatens the environment itself, environmentalism advocates that there is no solution other than to cut back and reduce our production and consumption of energy. From the oil that is refined to power cars, ships and air flight, to the gas and coal which heats our homes, lights our cities and drives our industry, it is our production and use of energy that leads to the catchall problem of carbon emissions.

Over the last two centuries, humanity has built its development on fossil fuels, and it is clear that society cannot indefinitely rely on that source. So it is true that, even without the concerns over carbon emissions, our use of fossil fuels must give way to a new stage of energy use. We should be exploring the possibilities now, but there is a conspiracy of silence around these questions. We are only told that we should reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and switch to renewable energy. But is this the only option?

Whatever position we take on the science of global warming, or about the possible consequences of climate change, the way in which contemporary society identifies carbon emissions as a problem touches on the founding basis of every material social development of the last 150 years. Because, while human society had developed and advanced for centuries before, it had always done so on the basis of what we today would recognise as ‘renewable energy’ – wind in the sails of ships and of windmills, in the biological energy of animals, or as fuels found in the burning of trees and of organic oils – all sources of energy closely tied to the immediate environment that produced them. But with the advent of the development of fossil fuels as a source of energy, many of the social advances we now take for granted were made possible.

By contrast, the approach to energy embedded in environmentalism’s reliance on renewable energy becomes an implicit demand that we regress from a more advanced level of energy production to a more primitive one. If seventeenth-century Europe was built on the windmill, the watermill and the sailing ship, the best that new technology can hope for is to make the extraction of ‘renewable’ energy more efficient. Beyond direct environmental sources, contemporary environmentalism makes a case for carbon-neutral biofuels, a turn which also finds parallels in the energy base of society before the industrial revolution. But both renewable energy and biofuels suffer from the same shortcomings. Compared to fossil fuels, they are hopelessly low-intensity sources, requiring extensive inputs for proportionally little return. As Kaplinsky and Woudhuysen argue, to expand renewable energy to match even current energy use would require a technical transformation of the global environment on a scale the consequences of which would be unacceptable to today’s environmentalists.

But the green agenda refuses to think of big solutions to problems standing in the way of human progress. Green repugnance to rolling out further conventional (carbon-neutral) fission nuclear capacity, for example, exposes a pessimistic prejudice towards expansive solutions. Green antagonism to new nuclear power is not so much an attempt to dismiss the particular shortcomings of any one technology, but is more profoundly a moral rejection of expansive solutions to the challenges facing human society, based on the notion that any form of human expansion is by definition a noxious incursion on the purity of an otherwise pristine planet. It reflects a culture in which we are uncomfortable with using energy – uncomfortable with our own energy use and uncomfortable with any idea of abundance. More fundamentally, it is an anxiety regarding our relationship to our own energies, a view of human productive activity as a negative force for harm and destruction. James Heartfield argues that, paradoxically, green antipathy to human expansion chimes with a wider political fear about abundance within contemporary capitalism itself. Scarcity, Heartfield suggests, has always formed the basis of social power. Yet capitalism has unwittingly replaced scarcity with abundance, undermining its power over social relations, and the green message of restraint and reduction offers capitalism a new moral justification for restraint and austerity.

Renewable energy, however extensively deployed, can only ever yield as much energy as the Sun inputs. The paradigmatic difference between pre- and post-industrial revolution society, in terms of energy, is the difference between energy captured in the here-and-now (wind and water), in contrast to the release of energy stored up over millions of years in the form of fossil fuel; energy condensed, accreted, compressed and stored on a time-scale that stretches far beyond the timeframe of human history. It is this input, a release of stored energy (which is not ‘contemporaneous’ to the inputs of the present ecosphere) and the developing human ability to harness it through technology, which underpins the productive and social advances of the last two centuries.

If the earlier world of renewable energy has been left far behind through the development of the last two centuries, it is one which many contemporary environmentalists would wish us to return to. It means that we need to think through what might transcend the current paradigm of energy, not regress to an earlier one. The greatest potential is in the development of fusion power. As Professor Dunne argues, fusion technology is fast approaching the point where a net energy-producing reaction will be realised. It is a matter of years, he says, not decades.

If fusion power can be seen as both scientific fact and a political and cultural metaphor for abundance, art might also connect with this, even if it need not declare this explicitly. The artists in FUSION NOW! move in and out of the various points where energy touches on questions of science, history, industry, aesthetics and subjectivity.

It is present as a sort of symbolic creative core in Roger Hiorns’s super-bright light source; the late John Latham’s sculptures manifest the artist’s lifelong philosophical concern with relating art to questions of cosmological totality; in the paintings of Andrew Rucklidge, energy appears as an aesthetic force where painting refracts human technology and architecture, while John Russell and Mark Titchner’s computer-generated images and animations each explore how artworks can articulate questions of visual and subjective excess.

Elsewhere, the legacies and potentials of Utopian Modernism are addressed: Sam Basu’s sculpture delves into a paradoxical future-history where work and industry are returned to a sort of neo-primitive collective ritual and Alasdair Duncan’s banner makes a graphic celebration of the combination of human science and aspiration. Energy’s contemporary political dimensions – the way wealth, work and social division operate – are addressed in Liam Gillick’s computer animation, which takes as its subject early experiments in the democratization of industrial work in the 1970s. And in directly polemical vein, the artist’s group Freee makes a declaration about the terms of a real ‘ecological politics’, while WITH and Laura Oldfield Ford present satirical and poetic responses to how contemporary culture reproduces the orthodoxies and contradictions of green pessimism.

Art is inherently political regardless of whether it addresses any one particular event or situation. Eventually, contemporary art often takes a position on the generally important questions about human experience and society; the individual and social forms of desire, the potential of human subjectivity, and how we choose to act in our present. If FUSION NOW! asks a political question then, it is whether art and artists cannot fail to take sides in a politics that is only now becoming clear: a politics where lines are drawn between those who want austerity against those who want plenty, between those who counsel restraint and those who would explore potentials; between those who wish for less, and those who want more; More light, more power, more people. And more art.