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Between July and October 2010, Lucas Ihlein carried out an environmental audit in the exhibition In the Balance: Art for a Changing World at the MCA in Sydney.
The exhibition engaged with environmental concerns and the thorny territory surrounding “sustainability”. Environmental Audit was commissioned by the MCA and facilitated by curator Glenn Barkley.
This “meta-project” turned attention back onto the exhibition, asking:
If a museum puts on an exhibition about the environment, how much in the way of resources is consumed, how much carbon (etc) emitted in the process? In other words, is it worth it?
With a rather broad scope, Environmental Audit considered the exhibition in the wider context of increasing worldwide consciousness about climate change.
Prior to commencing the project, Lucas Ihlein had no experience of how to carry out an environmental audit. The project took the form of a four month residency and exhibition based at the MCA. A blog was used to track the evolving relationships and discoveries during this period.
A series of offset lithographic prints were produced on the Big Fag Press. The prints were a way of trying to chart, graph and map the complex data which was unearthed during the Audit. These were re-introduced into the exhibition on a regular basis.
More info about Environmental Audit
An exhibition catalogue is available through the MCA.Fenella Kernebone produced a TV segment for Art Nation on ABC about the exhibition, including an interview with Lucas Ihlein about Environmental Audit.
MCA produced a one minute video with Lucas Ihlein speaking about Environmental Audit.
Lucas Ihlein was invited to contribute a short audio resonse to ABC radio national's Venting segment, about Environmental Audit.
Lucas Ihlein was invited to offer a short provocation at Tipping Point Australia's forum in Sydney in November 2010.
Meg Uhlman wrote an article about Environmental Audit for the Greenwash segment of Trouble Magazine October 2010.
Eliot Shields has written an article about In the Balance at the MCA, including commentary on Environmental Audit (October 2010). And here's another one from the same publication by Genevieve Barry.
Environmental Audit was used as a case study in Cara MacLeod's Precious Resources: Environmental Sculpture Resource Kit published by Woollhara Council, Sydney, 2011.
Lucas Ihlein presented at SAMAG's Greening the Arts Part 2 seminar in Sydney in September 2010.
Lucas Ihlein presented at Materiality: The Seventh Australian Print Symposium at the NGA in Canberra about Environmental Audit and Big Fag Press.
Environmental Audit was included in an exhibition entitled Community and Context, curated by Marian Crawford, at MADA Gallery, Monash University, Melbourne, in 2013.
A number of the prints from this series were included in the exhibition "4.543 billion. The matter of matter" at CAPC musée d’art contemporain Bordeaux, 29 June 2017–7 January 2018, curated by Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna of Latitudes, Barcelona. Some photos documenting this exhibition are here.
High resolution scans of the offset lithographic prints produced throughout Environmental Audit are here.
A souvenir artist book from Environmental Audit was produced in 2018 for the Diagrammatic exhibition at Deakin University Art Gallery. See the PDF here.
Alexandra Crosby, Dena Fam, Abby Mellick Lopes, "Transdisciplinarity and the ‘Living Lab Model’: Food Waste Management As a Site for Collaborative Learning", in Transdisciplinary Theory, Practice and Education, 2018.
Suzaan Boettger, Within and Beyond the Art World: Environmentalist Criticism of Visual Art, in 2016, Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, edited by Hubert Zapf.
Liam Dee, "Artistic Freedom: Privilege and New Products", in Against Art and Culture, Palgrave, 2017.
Sébastien Rocher, "The Explosion of Audit in Contemporary Art", (video lecture to the European Court of Auditors), 2021. Environmental Audit is discussed from about 24 minutes onwards.
Vandana Kalra, "Explained: How the art industry is reducing its carbon footprint", The Indian Express, Nov 2, 2021