Joseph del Pesco

An Interview w/ Amy Balkin By Joseph del Pesco
Because Public Smog is a project that involves complicated scientific and economic ideas, perhaps we can start with a general description and build from there. In the website, slide-presentation and subsequent print-on-demand publication it's stated, "Public Smog is a park in the atmosphere that fluxates in location and scale." What might you add to this as an introduction? Public Smog is an ongoing project, made up of multiple attempts to create an atmospheric park. The park functions in familiar ways to many public parks - a place where a natural area is protected from pollution and encroachment through privatization, formulating a public, rather than private space. Attempts to create this park so far have included the purchase and retirement of small amounts of emission credits (which give the purchaser the right to pollute a set amount in a regulated emissions 'market', which when withheld from a market could be said to create a 'cleaner' atmospheric zone), as well as an attempt to have the entire Earth's atmosphere designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Whenever an effort succeeds, the park opens as a corresponding atmospheric domain. The park has opened twice, first in 2004 in the troposphere over California's South Coast Air Quality Management District, through the purchase and withholding of credits for the emission of 24 lbs. of NOx (nitrogen oxides, a smog forming gas created by the burning of fossil fuels, which contributes to smog and acid rain formation). Public Smog is now open in the stratosphere over the European Union through the end of 2007, through the purchase and retirement of emissions credits for 51 tons of CO2 (carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas released when fossil fuels are burned) in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). Beyond the problems of constructing Public Smog through markets or multilateral agreement between states, the project involves considering how to create the park in other ways, including protest, grassroots activity for climate justice, and direct action, among others. These include considering other possible gestures, paths, forms, or models for social and political action against further anthropocentric (human-created) climate change. These strategies involve framing counter-futures in relation to those posited by the vested interests of states and business entities, who wish to control, determine, and dictate the terms on which climate change is and is not addressed. To this end Public Smog is created by any activity that formulates it, and anyone who wants to can Public Smog. Included in the slide presentation and publication are a series of statements which create a constellation of thinking around the Public Smog project. These include both "PUBLIC SMOG IS A SCHEME TO BUY BACK YOUR RIGHTS ON THE OPEN MARKET" and "PUBLIC SMOG MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER." When seen together they suggest a tension in relation to the potential function of the project – between the poetic or aesthetic gesture and a critical and potentially transformational function in support of international emissions policy change through individual (or collective) action. What is the potential vs. actual life of the project? These statements in one way mirror the hyperbolic, contradictory, or false claims of emissions trading boosters, and through the use of language of similar tone, reflect the rhetoric of entities interested in controlling the public mood and dialog around climate change. The statements also reveal tensions and contradictions within the work, between the stated claims of the project, and what it does or doesn't, and can or can't achieve. And some of the tension could also be related to the debatability between the project's self-claims and it's actual social function. The project originated in the the purchase and withholding of NOx offsets within a quietly self-constructing new market, but now potentially includes any activity by anyone that creates Public Smog. The project has changed in that now I consider it as an open-ended set of scenarios and I'm inclined to consider even unrelated activities that advance the same goals as part of Public Smog. The website for Public Smog has a small database record of gestures to create and enhance the park. It's difficult for me to discern where the actual life of the project lies, and I'm hesitant to make any claims. I don't think of the work in terms of the types of binaries you suggest, as there is, in my mind, a lot of slippage around art's social function. I'd like to think it can operate in multiple ways simultaneously. The two parts of the larger Public Smog project: the purchase and retirement of emission credits and subsequently, an attempt to register the atmosphere as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, imply two different forms of agency: that of the individual and that of a multi-national agreement. What lead to the addition of the second phase of the project? And can this project help us carve out a sense of individual agency in relation to larger political frameworks? I wouldn't say that action in markets reflects individual agency, but rather that emissions markets displace agency with the commodity fetishism of 'carbon neutrality' schemes. The first activity reflects the agency of corporations within markets, and the second reflects the agency of states - and whether agency is an appropriate term is a question. I would say the implicated agents of these first two actvities are corporations and states. Both phrase agency inside closed frameworks, where people, as consumers or citizens, can act in circumscribed roles through granular activities in markets - ie purchasing light bulbs, low-flow toilets, or offsets - or through voting, petition, or letter-writing. If these pathways are insufficient and/or false, then that raises a number of questions about how, where, and when we should act. How can a global public (or an environmental movement) act independently, swiftly and in the appropriate scale of response needed to address climate change? When and how do we self-authorize? So Public Smog has become a way for me to examine alternative avenues for individual and collective action, and so the project has to address other political and social routes to change, through activities like protest or direct action. The second phase of the project reflects what I see as the desire for people to be able to act to ameliorate climate change globally. Where are the social structures to support this? I suspect that many people consider, even cynically, that the United Nations is the closest entity to this that exists. So it seemed worthwhile to explore how a protective aegis of an entity like the UN might be utilized to consider how to protect the atmosphere. Unesco's World Heritage Site program, as it was set up to preserve "the world's superb natural and scenic areas and historic sites for the present and the future of the entire world citizenry," seemed like the structure within the UN where protection of the atmosphere could be addressed. But there are sets of new questions that immediately follow out of that, once you begin examining the procedural process of nominating a site for the World Heritage List. For example, what constitutes a site? Who can nominate a site (can people nominate a site as individuals, or only as representatives of states). What type of protection would World Heritage status actually afford the atmosphere (symbolic v. actual protection)? And another set of questions arise, about the value of the United Nations as a representative body. Who does it actually represent? Does it have the enforcement capability to protect a huge, vulnerable, global system like the atmosphere? If we assume that the pathways for "consumers or citizens" are in fact insufficient (if not false) and encapsulated (limited by the logic of the system), and that Public Smog and other projects like it are an attempt to externalize, in relation to the frameworks of corporations and states, an approach toward change... doesn't the domain of art risk being a tolerated exception, rather than a space for the active determination and contestation of larger societal formulations? The domain of art risks not only being a tolerated exception, but an active site for recuperation of political activity. Like a 'public park' within a totalized system of property, the domain of art could be argued to act as a built-in pressure valve that displaces political action from real recuperation to self-limited, and so tolerated, symbolized recuperation instead. But socially engaged work doesn't exist in a vacuum, and is presented in a social and political context. And the domain of art has always been a vital place for the creation of critical counter-narratives in the context of political engagement. Protest music is a clear argument for the role and value of art in the context of social struggle. Howard Zinn speaks also speaks well to the value of contestation by art and artists in his talk 'Artists in a Time of War', from October, 2001. Whether in relation to Marcel Duchamp's 50 cc of Paris Air, or Michael Asher's Column of Air, there are material precedents for Public Smog's air-park. Can you talk about how you think of the project in formal terms, and how it's been visualized for gallery presentations? Like "This is the Public Domain" [one of Balkin's previous projects] where the work is the land and the social relations around it, (and perhaps in contrast to 50 cc of Paris Air or Column of Air), representing Public Smog in a gallery is not about capturing, framing, or recreating some aspect of the atmosphere - or atmospheric phenomena - within the gallery. In the past, I've considered the gallery an appropriate place to show documentation of the processes involved in creating Public Smog, and a meeting point for activities that might create it. When the project was shown at Peer Trust, the gallery was a meeting place for a 'climate-futuring' breakfast before the November 4th London climate march. The project's process was also documented and shown as a projected Powerpoint-style video about Public Smog processes so far - two emissions trades, and research into making the atmosphere a UNESCO World Heritage Site. When I present slideshow documentation of Public Smog in a gallery, the documentation is updated to reflect the project's current status, including whether the park is currently open or not, and if open, where. The gallery activities or visualizations are not fixed, but change as the project changes and the park continues to grow.