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In 1949 with much of the world in ruins, millions dead, and the world still in shock at its own inhumanity the German born sociologist Theodor Adorno wrote that "to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric". This oft-cited quote can be read as an indictment of art and a reflection on the inability of culture to comprehend or add anything of value in the shadow of our own savagery.

It most particularly points at the inadequacy and feebleness of any political art. Any attempt to use art for political ends is like pissing into the wind, and more, an affront to the true struggle of politics itself.

Political art has a bad name, and perhaps quite rightly so. The tired polemics of armchair activism, the feeble anti war, anti business, anti sexism, anti anything posturing of middle class academics, are the substance of too many exhibitions, curatorial statements and journals. There is a self-aggrandisement in this, fueled by the guilt of suburban convention and material comfort. A more recent critic, Boris Groys, in his 2008 book Art Power asserts that there really are only two types of art today, objects for consumption and ideological propaganda. Most art for Groys is simply a product of, and for, an art market, and as such is no different than any other form of commerce. Its aim is profit and the forces that drive it are greed and the pursuit of personal gain. The flip side of this is ideology. Here the ideological is synonymous with the conversion of a socio-political agenda to something naturalised and normalised. It is the way that the dominant social group legitimises itself and its power. The link to the propagandistic is inherently negative, the attempt to limit the scope of knowledge through discursive control.

This doesn’t sound that great! How can an artist, an audience, a critic, anyone, operate in such a barbaric landscape. Why would someone be so simple minded to attempt to make work that would deal with subjects of the environment, the fate of the globe or the future of human kind? The problem is compounded in the sense that the post-modern artist is doomed to work within the existing culture and to utilise its own forms of representation, so that artists must use, reuse and simultaneously critique. Just sounds like more bad news!

To return to Adorno, the holocaust, the final solution of attempted state sponsored genocide is an historical moment. It can be dated, measured, and rendered concrete whilst at the same time being unthinkable. This makes it a subject of historical scrutiny and possible artistic reflection. It would be wrong not to add that Adorno retracted his earlier statement adding "perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream... hence it may have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz”. And there have of course been thousands of works that directly and indirectly bare witness to specific suffering. From Gerhard Richter to Paul Celan or from Hans Haacke to Rachel Whiteread, the artist directed at the very particularity of an event so heinous, is testament to the power, not the impotence of culture. However it is in the singularity of an event, its personal connections and individual relations that this power is often sited. An argument that has been repeatedly made, is that, political art to be successful must be local and personal. Any attempt to speak about perennial suffering or world issues is doomed to inadequacy and generalisation.

To make comparisons between the single greatest horror and human tragedy of the Twentieth century and the world issue of climate change may seem odious. But what I want to force into the open is our fear of talking about or making art about the prospect of global calamity. For many the idea that climate change over the next twenty years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives, mega-famines and droughts is as unthinkable as the final solution. To add just one historical thread amongst so many others, in 2004 the British Observer newspaper published parts of a Pentagon report made to Bush that ended with the most disturbing analysis that within twenty years “disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,” and that ”again, warfare would define human life.” (The idea that an American defence department are preparing for climate wars is hardly consoling.) The point however is that if we are to confront the enormity of the issues that face us they cannot be conceived as being beyond comprehension. In this text I have twice defined things as unthinkable; this is of course rhetorical. The point is that despite all our fear or difficulty conceiving the sheer magnitude of human violence or mass destruction we must make them thinkable so that they can be addressed.

Without wanting to sound crass, one of the most amazing, magical and terrifying aspects of the creative process is that it can go anywhere. We can begin with one word, one point in space, one beat, and this can lead us into a complete unknown. Beyond mimesis or isomorphism, writing, creating form, articulating, can generate fantasy and phantasms, things that are not restricted by reality or exist only in perception. It can be seen as a platitude, but it is no less extraordinary, and in our fabulous imagination is the power to negotiate the unthinkable, project the future, speculate, fantasise and mirror.

In the fifth century the Chinese nature poet T'ao Ch'ien wrote an extraordinary poem called The Peach Blossom Spring. The title is now the standard Chinese word for utopia and a conceptual predicate for Thomas More’s fictional island conceived a thousand years later. It imagines a harmonious world free from war, ordered, happy, beautiful. From Brueghel’s Garden of Earthly Delights through the ideal cites of Pierro della Francesca to the green revolution of Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, our desire to picture the perfect and envisage better worlds recurs through time. But the flip side to the bucolic reverie of T’aos Shangri-la or fantasy heavens on earth are the dystopic realms that also populate the history of art and literature. Swift, Goya, Butler, Ernst, Orwell, Wells, Huxley, Vonnegut, Zamaytin, Gibson, to name just a handful of many, have all held up images of human and divine ruination, pictures of neglect, despotism, waste, destruction and Apocalypse. (It would be wrong not to point out that the dytsopic visions easily outweigh the utopias.) But in these fantastic worlds we find both contextual and conjunctural elements such as political satire and imaginative projections. And it is a testament to human imagination that these projections so often foresee or anticipate real outcome. There is something uncanny about reading Samuel Butler’s predictions of mass hypocrisy in his land of Erewhon or William Gibson’s imagined Internet in Neuromancer.

Aldous Huxley captures a more developed sense of this when he writes “The future is the present projected” and “Our notions of the future have something of that significance which Freud attributes to our dreams. And not our notions of the future only: our notions of the past as well. For if prophecy is an expression of our contemporary fears and wishes, so too, to a very great extent, is history.” It is perhaps here that the power of the fantastic is best revealed. When artists and poets and writers create these worlds or build the fabulous they operate in a time zone that is anticipatory and reflective. A recapitulation fuelled by fantasy projected into the unknown! In 2005 photographer Mary Mattingly presented a work titled Wearable Homes, a series of images of a post-apocalyptic landscape where people carry their their homes on their backs. She makes a similar gesture in her more recent Nomadographies that we are currently showing in our Virtual gallery. In Ilkka Halso’s work recent Restoration of Nature from 2000 trees and rocks are surrounded by scaffolding as if like houses they were being restored. The works of Edgar Martins such as his 2006 The Diminishing Present paint an equally dark future. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's huge installation TH.2058 in the Turbine room of London's Tate Modern is another monumental work that seems hauntingly predictive. Our own current exhibition RETHINK KAKOTOPIA is we believe a developed statement in the same vein.

The question of whether artists should or can work with such notions as an impending deluge or broken nature can perhaps be replaced with one that asks how can any right minded person not be thinking about these things all the time. Far from unthinkable they are too readily thought. And following Huxley’s lead if we are not be doomed by our own history then the need for these speculations and reflections has never been more critical than today. Their poetry is what might keep us from barbarism.

This text was originally prepared for the exhibition catalogue RETHINK presented in Copenhagen in 2009.