Leopold Museum Exhibit Responds To Climate Change Protests

In November 2022, Letzte Generation activists rocked the world with their oil spill on Gustav Klimt’s Death and Life at the Leopold Museum in Vienna. The incident occurred on Leopold day, a public holiday in the region. In London, similarly radical acts have been treated as criminal offenses, but in Austria, activist Florian Wagner had a rare conversation with museum director Hans-Peter Wipplinger to address whether the seemingly opposing parties agreed.

Then on March 22, 2023, the Leopold Museum launched A Few Degrees More (Will Turn the World into an Uncomfortable Place) in partnership with Climate Change Centre Austria (CCCA) “to send a signal to society” so its viewers can “join this movement.”

The title is a pun. For the first week of the show, it went without a title. The artworks were inexplicably tilted slightly off-center, just by a few degrees, in a dramatically jarring visual. The pun is about 1.5 degrees Celsius (34.7 degrees Fahrenheit), the potentially damaging increase in global temperature. Like the optics, the results could be drastic.

The Leopold’s exhibition press release notes that this 1.5 degrees may seem “too abstract as a figure,” so this is a way to bring it to the fore. The impact on bodies of water and even cities is demonstrated with landscape and coastal scenes by 15 of the museums most important artists, including Tina Blau, Gustave Courbet, Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser and Egon Schiele.

Almost more powerful is the fact that the 15 works are included as a “curated intervention” in a concurrent exhibition: Vienna 1900: Birth of Modernism, on view since March 2019. The permanence of works in the museum’s official collection being radically altered in this way speaks to the dire consequences on the world we take for granted.

The idea was conceived by Austrian creative agency Wien Nord (Vienna North) Serviceplan, so that the tilted paintings could say what a poster or advert could not without so much as a word. Instead, art and its “cultural assets” are turned into “climate ambassadors.”

One of the key message points of the show is prevalent in the literature for considerably more extreme groups Letzte Generation and Just Stop Oil in the UK: Artists are activists and radicals in their own lifetimes. Certainly, Vienna, with its troubled history of Nazism and complicated art repatriation, is acutely aware of the significance of divergent thought. Now at the apex of a climate crisis, the sensitivity of the showcase addresses this sensitively and inclusively.

“Museums fulfill per se a sustainable role in society by conserving cultural heritage for future generations and by teaching about it,” Wipplinger’s statement reads. “They regard themselves as spaces of inspiration and reflection about our being and thus have the potential to positively impact our future actions by making societal phenomena more visible. In that sense, we declare ourselves in solidarity with the goals of the climate movement.”

“I’m very happy that the museum found a way to contribute to raising more awareness,” Wagner of Letzte Generation wrote via text message, adding delicately, “I wonder if our protest was a trigger for that.”

His organization collaborated in a show that closed last month called #NOCLIMARTCHANGE at the far lesser-known Tiroler Landesmuseen in Innsbruck, Austria.

Yet CCCA’s head of office Claudia Michl still pressed for further action.

“…A simple transfer of knowledge is not causing a satisfactory degree of actions being taken,” her statement said. “Collaborations with artists or art institutions can build bridges because they offer more poignant and more provocative forms and possibilities of engagement with audiences.”

If nothing else, the museum offers a space for reflection on imminent solutions.

The showcase will be on view until June 26th. Climate change tours are held on Sundays at 2pm.

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