“Every poster in this exhibition is a failure…” It had to be done: organize a retrospective devoted to a long series of fiascos. In New York, the Poster House, a small museum dedicated to posters, had the good idea of presenting a selection of environmental warning posters. “We tried to warn you”, is aptly titled the exhibition, the inauguration of which took place on the day when torrential rains flooded New York.
The whole thing spans fifty years, from 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, to 2020. If some today are tempted to blame the communication of environmentalists, the thirty posters on display have the merit of reminding us that , almost everywhere in the world, people have tried to alert us in all tones without real reactions, from the enchanted celebration of the Earth in the hippie style of the 1970s to the apocalyptic representations of what awaits us.
Whether the communication was dramatic, poetic or sarcastic, no message created the decisive awareness hoped for. “All the environmental problems shown on these posters have remained the same or gotten worse,” recognize the organizers of the exhibition. Among the posters from around fifteen countries, a poster signed Folon from the support committee for Brice Lalonde’s candidacy for the 1981 presidential election.
Messages left unheeded
We could classify the posters by theme – the gas mask appeared in 1970, the polar bear in 2003 –, by types of concern – an acid rain warning poster is signed by the Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Messages that should have moved us remained a dead letter. And others were moved when they shouldn’t have been.
Among them, a poster adapted from a TV commercial showing an Indian advancing on his canoe in the great American spaces soiled by pollution, a zoom on his face revealing a tear falling. The associations representing the native populations did not appreciate this campaign, and not only because the Indian was played by an Italian actor. Those fighting for the environment accused the spot of shifting the problem of responsibility from manufacturers to citizens who would do well not to leave their waste lying around…
The failure, says Tim Medland, curator of the exhibition, is perhaps to have believed that it was necessary to draw attention to these crises and to address people by asking them to mobilize in their own way. ladder, “while the only thing that works is the laws”. Recent campaigns more directly target corporate responsibility. Among them, a Volkswagen ad parody. “We’re sorry to have been fooled”, can we read on the poster, in reference to “dieselgate” and the company’s fraud on polluting emissions.
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