Apocalypse later

Cornelia Parker's work has always drawn on a sense of disaster. In her new film, she talks to Noam Chomsky about how art might save the planet

Just over two years ago, I attended a weekend seminar at Oxford University about the environment. It was a consciousness-raising event where scientists invited artists to engage with their cause. They felt they had been shouting in the dark for a long time, trying to get politicians to act. So they asked the 50 or so artists and writers who attended, people such as Philip Pullman and Ian McEwan, to use their creativity to explore the emotional dimension of climate change. I left the event sobered: as the mother of a six-year-old, the implications of what I had learned seemed huge.

Afterwards, I found myself reading voraciously, soaking up books not normally on my agenda in an attempt to understand how we had got to this point. I read books on American foreign policy, on "resource wars" and our obsessive drive for oil. I found myself reading Noam Chomsky. Cutting through the noisy fug and disinformation of Bush's America, Chomsky's voice emerged as a beacon of clarity.

When I was asked, soon after, to contribute a new work for the Eighth Sharjah biennial in the United Arab Emirates, the biennial's theme of "art, ecology and the politics of change" seemed like an impossible contradiction - here was an oil-rich country with a profligate consumer society. I felt ambivalent about participating: what role can art play when faced with melting ice caps and political inertia? I am not a propagandist; my work has often had a political dimension, but hopefully one that is not didactic and is open to interpretation. But in this instance, I decided to take the theme of the exhibition head on, and attempt to make a polemical piece.

I wasn't sure the issue of climate change was even on Chomsky's radar, but I sent him a letter: "I am an artist living in London writing to ask you a favour. I was wondering whether it would be at all possible for me to visit you at MIT [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] in order to record a video conversation based on your thoughts about the unfolding environmental disaster now threatening our world. I have read with great interest and trepidation your observations on the probability of nuclear annihilation (apocalypse soon), and would greatly value a chance to discuss in more detail the threat of this other, slower, but equally devastating apocalypse. I would be very grateful to have your consideration on how we have come to this critical point in history. Why the powers of the world are so slow in acting to try to prevent this catastrophe and why the American government appears to be in denial about it."

I didn't expect him to say yes, but I was given an audience of 45 minutes, which turned into an hour. I felt I was struggling to fathom the most complex issues, but Chomsky spoke so clearly and compellingly, answering my questions with real insight.

In the resulting film, Chomskian Abstract, I have taken out my questions but left in the pauses where Chomsky listens, a silent space where people can ask their own questions. The piece is related to my series Abstracts, forensic forays into the minutiae of iconic thinkers: for example, Marks Made By Freud Subconsciously, a photograph of the creases made by Sigmund Freud on his leather seat; and Einstein's Abstracts, images of the scientist's equations on a blackboard, seen through a microscope.

I had worried that an interview with Chomsky might be dry, but in the end it turned out to be emotive and compelling. I also realised that I was drawing on a sense of apocalypse - death and resurrection - that was always there in my previous work. I have, in my time, steam-rollered objects (Thirty Pieces of Silver, 1989), blown them up (Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991), and submerged them in my bath (Drowned Monuments, 1984).


There are other things art can do. It can imagine the unimaginable. I have just read my first novel in more than two years, Cormac McCarthy's bleak but redemptive The Road, in which the author imagines what the end of the world might look and feel like (McCarthy regularly talks to scientists). Artists can bear witness. We are free radicals in a way that scientists can never be. Humanity may be on the brink of disaster, but this could be an exciting, creative period, with everyone - philosophers, artists, politicians, bus drivers - doing everything they can to avert it. My Chomsky piece is me putting my head above the parapet.

· Cornelia Parker is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, until March 30. Details: 020-7522 7888. Poison and Antidote: A Day of Debate, inspired by Parker's film Chomskian Abstract and set up in association with Friends of the Earth, is on March 29. Details: poisonandantidote.co.uk