Eco-Visionaries: Confronting a Planet in a State of Emergency review – speculative and oblique

There are appropriate responses to climate emergency: anger, seriousness, the determination to do something about it. Also, the recognition of the scale and complexity of the challenges it presents, of the dangers of unintended consequences, of the shortage of easy answers. You could imagine the material for powerful displays on the theme: the streets of Matera in southern Italy turned into whitewater rapids, Piazza San Marco as a lake, incinerated koalas, any amount of terrifying imagery of storm, drought, rising ocean and scorching Earth. Or a piece as impactful as the melting iceberg that Olafur Eliasson brought to the side of the Thames, in his Ice Watch London.

I’m not convinced that the responses and images offered by the Royal Academy in its Eco-Visionaries exhibition, which claims to be “confronting a planet in a state of emergency”, rise to the occasion. Here, a number of artists and architects present installations and exhibits that react somehow or other to the question of climate, which is fine, but the overall tone is speculative and oblique. In a situation that requires the rolling up of sleeves, Eco-Visionaries offers the stroking of chins, fingers placed against temples, the furrowing of brows, the escape of a slow hmmm from pursed lips. That dread term “virtue signalling”, so often used to dismiss integrity and commitment, is apposite here.

Thus, we have A Film, Reclaimed, a 2015 piece by Ana Vaz and Tristan Bera, in which clips from movies – for example, a steamship hauled through the jungle in Fitzcarraldo, a scene of whale slaughter, the face of Frankenstein’s monster – are mixed into a cocktail of unsettling imagery. Statements, in French and English, are spoken and written on the screen. Among them is a call for “a return to the true polis: polysemy”.

I mean, I’m all for polysemy. I love polysemy. I even have some idea what the word means. But the exhibition’s concern with niche concepts doesn’t sit well with the urgency of its subject. Vaz and Bera, to be fair, can be more punchy – “Our economic system is a war against nature”, for example. Such words, though, presented with only the artful fiction of the film clips as supporting evidence, can end up sounding glib and sententious.

Elsewhere, you can see the invisible pollutants in Madrid rendered as coloured clouds. There is The Breast Milk of the Volcano, a work by Unknown Fields about the astonishing Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, a vast white salt flat that is part of the lithium triangle, the area containing more than half the world’s known supply of an element extremely useful in long-lasting and high-performing batteries. The film draws attention to the mythic importance of the area to its indigenous people. It points out the environmental cost of clean-seeming electrical energy.

One of the more effective pieces is the final one in the exhibition, Rimini Protokoll’s 2017 installation win > < win. Here, you sit in a small auditorium, wearing headphones, watching a reflective screen that you slowly discover to be a jellyfish tank, beyond which you slowly discover other people, in an identical auditorium, having the same experience as your own, but on a different cycle of time.

You’re encouraged to reflect on the fact that jellyfish have existed for hundreds of millions of years and could continue for hundreds more, especially as they are currently benefiting from global warming. Homo sapiens, whose survival is so much more demanding of resources, would be lucky to last a fraction of that time. It is another work that, while clever and engaging, is more likely to provoke mild reflection than a call to arms.

Both exhibits and captions resort to what might be called the Radio 4 “we”. (Or, to be honest, the Observer or the Guardian “we”: we – ha! – are all at it.) In this formulation, the pronoun shuttles between describing the whole of humanity (“we are facing an ecological emergency”) and the beneficiaries of a developed economy who might get to see or contribute to an exhibition such as this, as in “our economic system”. This “we” arrogates self-importance to those who use it.

It also blurs the difference between what climate crisis means to different people in different parts of the world, the conflicting facts that poorer regions suffer most, and that the slowing of growth thought necessary to avert disaster is likely to hit them hardest. It is this kind of tough problem that gets overlooked by some of the airy statements in the Eco-Visionaries exhibition.

It is not that the perception of emergency should blow away all nuance or makes all other aspects of human life and culture redundant (otherwise, how would most of us justify our existence?). But there is a dissonance between the Academy’s claim to be “confronting” the issue and the curator-speak it also uses – for example about “innovative approaches that reframe our relationship with nature”. This is not so much rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic as interrogating the weave of their fabric and reframing their frames.

The strongest pieces in Eco-Visionaries bring about a shift in your soul: Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s The Substitute is a heart-rending animation of the almost extinct northern white rhino, roaming in the confines of an abstract white box, disappearing into and reappearing from a pixelated version of itself. I’m grateful, too, to Unknown Fields, for the insight they provide into the lithium triangle.

However, some of the work on show risks becoming the contemporary equivalent of moralistic and religiose art of the past, of depictions of extravagantly wailing Madonnas or of caricatures of virtue and vice. Into this category comes HeHe’s Domestic Catastrophe No. 3: La Planète Laboratoire, which greets you on entry. Here, a globe, suspended in an aquarium, becomes enveloped in dye. Which, in a way that seems a touch trite, represents pollution.

The exhibition includes Dolphin Embassy, a proposal by the architecture and design collective Ant Farm for a solar-powered floating structure that would further social relations between species. It is as appealing and gently provocative as anything in the show, but it was conceived in 1974 and never put into practice. Should it not be possible, 45 years on, to do more than nudge awareness and promote whimsical hypothesis?

• Eco-Visionaries is at the Royal Academy, London, until 23 February 2020