This is part of a series of articles for the upcoming exhibition, The Greatest Emergency at the Circulo de Bellas Artes of Madrid. The exhibition is based on Santiago Zabala’s book, Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency. In this exhibition, ten contemporary artists rescue us into our greatest emergencies, that is, those we do not confront as we should. Each article in the series will contextualize these artists’ practices and explore how they are linked to Zabala’s aesthetic theory and the exhibition’s themes. The third article in this series highlights the work of American artist Diane Burko.
The Amazon rainforest is the world’s largest rainforest, making up half of the planet’s remaining tropical forests. It is often referred to as the “lungs of the planet” because it sucks up the global emissions of carbon dioxide from commodities like cars, ferries, and power stations, to name just a few. Without this “carbon sink,” the world’s ability to lock up carbon will be reduced, compounding the effects of global warming. According to data from the Brazilian government and Imazon, an NGO that independently tracks forest destruction, deforestation was distinctly higher under former President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro’s administration than during Brazil’s two previous presidencies (Dilma Rousseff, 2011-2016 and Michel Temer, 2016-2018). Despite the current government efforts, the Amazon rainforest is on fire. Real-time satellite monitoring shows that in 2024, more than 10,000 wildfires have ripped across 11,000 square kilometers of the Amazon across multiple countries. Never have so many fires burned so much of the forest this early in the year. Scientists worry this is pushing the region closer and closer to a tipping point, where widespread degradation and repeated burning of the forest will become unstoppable.
These fires in the Amazon, together with other climate change consequences, are a paradigmatic example that our greatest emergencies are those we ignore despite scientist’s alarming warnings and unquestionable evidence. Why are we unable to adequately confront this global emergency, as the constant failure of United Nations Climate summits demonstrates? Our inability to confront this problem properly is not simply political – given the petrostates’ lobbies and pressures – but also emotional, as truth is not always enough to bring change. Just as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden’s revelations were not sufficient to bring to justice military abuse or illegal surveillance programs, neither are climate scientist James Hansen and investigative journalist Naomi Klein’s findings sufficient for these climate summits to reach agreements. As we can see, truth is not exclusively a matter of knowledge and information but also involves senses and feelings, without which truth is useless. In this condition, art becomes vital to acknowledge that our greatest emergencies are the ones we do not confront properly: the return of authoritarian leaders, increasing gender violence, and climate change, among others.
Diane Burko’s oeuvre is meant to convey great emergencies through paintings that address the environmental damage caused by global warming. While continuing to engage the traditions of landscape painting, her abstract and large-scale images are layered with visual and scientific information about the urgent challenge posed to the planet, manifested in glacial melting, coral reef bleaching, and raging forest fires in the Amazon. This is why she collaborates with geological research centers whose documentation and data she includes in her paintings. For example, Tad Pfeffer, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado, supplied her with photographs documenting precipitous glacier melt, which Burko transferred to her paintings. The difference between these photographs and her paintings is not one of kind but instead of degree, intensity, and depth. Photographs by respected scientists such as Pfeffer can be truthful but rarely as powerful as Burko’s paintings. But why is this difference significant? Why are the latter more powerful?
Although Pfeffer’s photographs, as he explains in the catalog Endangered: From Glaciers to Reefs, are technically more informative because they reveal “the precise information sought,” Burko’s paintings include something that has been lost from his scientific images. Her artwork, he continues, “reconnects these scientific images to their aesthetic roots, grounding them, once again, in the mystery of the image, which contains so much beyond the quantitative.” However, if the “mystery of the image” contains so much more than its scientific information, it’s not due to the aesthetic roots or how it is perceived but because it grounds a different reality.
The problem with 20th-century aesthetics, which focused primarily on what constituted the subjective experience of a work of beauty, is how framed it was within certain socio-political paradigms. After Kant and Nietzsche, the “aesthetic roots” of these scientific images – and of all images, for that matter – have more to do with what is being disclosed in the work than whether it’s objective, beautiful, or even art. If a work of art, as Martin Heidegger pointed out, is not an implement outfitted with some aesthetic quality but rather what reveals and grounds a different reality, then Burko’s paintings are also freeing, saving, and rescuing us from those paradigms that Pfeffer refers to as “technically more informative.” Although these socio-political paradigms are responsible for concealing our greatest emergencies, those global emergencies we ignore, we can still view them through the “mystery of the image” Burko’s paintings provide.
When Burko integrates Pfeffer or other scientist’s scientific information in her paintings, she is not trying to rescue us from great emergencies, but instead into them, bringing us closer to these great emergencies that concern our environment. This is particularly evident in the paintings of the Amazon forest fires she will present in The Greatest Emergency exhibition this fall at the Circulo de Bellas Artes of Madrid. The different colors and shapes that constitute each earth render visible these scientific findings that too often cannot convey an emergency that literarily concerns our future. As with other works by Burko, these paintings were inspired by a trip she took in the Brazilian Amazon in 2023 with the LABverde “Speculative Ecologies” team, where she was able to experience first-hand the rising temperatures and fires mentioned above. As we approach her painting, we are rescued into these temperatures and fires through colors and forms that recall the earth, Brazil, and the rainforest.
All photos courtesy of the artist.
Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is the author of many books, including Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (Columbia University Press, 2017), and Signs from the Future. A Philosophy of Warnings (forthcoming in 2025). His opinion articles have appeared in The New York Times, E-Flux, and The Los Angeles Review of Books among other international media outlets.