Les Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen

David Cross seeks to make sense of his collection of postcards of jet aircraft and the contradictory relationship he has with them

David Cross is an artist and Reader in Art at the University of the Arts, London (UAL). From 1991—2014 Cross collaborated with Matthew Cornford as Cornford & Cross, exhibiting in the UK at the Camden Arts Centre, ICA, Photographers’ Gallery, and South London Gallery. In Europe, they exhibited in Athens, Bologna, Bruges, Rome, and Stockholm; in the USA in New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. To reduce conflict between his internationalism and environmentalism, Cross stopped using jet travel in 2005. In 2012, following the Artist Placement Group, he designated his job at UAL as an artist placement, proposing that UAL divest from fossil fuels and switch to an ethical bank. Since 2019 he has advocated that UAL integrates decarbonization with decolonization as a start towards climate justice.

Les Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen (2018)

Airline postcards in conservation sleeves
4700 mm x 2100 mm

The civilian passenger jet has a paradoxical relationship with both freedom and power, as it facilitates international cultural exchange, while being dependent on the military-industrial complex which underpins the exclusionary systems controlling the movement of people across borders.

My own position offers a high degree of freedom, and the potential to use excessive material power. As a white, English male, I have surely benefitted from the colonialist, patriarchal legacy of the British Empire. As a consumer, my choices are vastly multiplied and their effects are amplified by fossil fuels, which not only destroy the climate, but also trigger military aggression. And as an artist and academic, I am a doubly privileged global citizen, with the freedom, which has almost become an imperative, to travel internationally. All these advantages sit in tension with my ecological and humanitarian idealism.

I renounced jet travel in 2005, when I could no longer reconcile my internationalism with my environmentalism, or more accurately, my international career ambitions with my awareness of the injustices of climate breakdown, and the increasingly destructive pursuit of fossil fuels as their energy yield falls to zero.

As a consolation, I began collecting postcards of jet aircraft, and became interested in how the photographs’ similarities subsume the different journeys undertaken, while the aircrafts’ superficial differences conceal systemic similarities. Searching for an ordering principle through which to make sense of the collection, I explored perspective as “the rationalisation of sight”. I arranged the cards according to their camera position relative to the subject: the lower the camera position, the higher the card is placed; the further to the left the camera position, the further to the right the card is placed. Like a flattened celestial globe, an inverse map of the skies in which the spatial order confirms the abstract worldview of the viewer, the result is internally coherent, but obsolete, detached from the dynamic complexity of the world.

The title, Les Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen (“The Rights of Man and of the Citizen”) refers to the declaration published during the French Revolution in 1789, which held civil rights to be valid for everyone, at all times and in every place. Yet although based on universal ideals, the rights did not initially extend to the abolition of slavery or equality for women. Today, recognising the interconnected nature of existence, and the ecocidal consequences of the imagined split between people and the biosphere, it would be fair to ask whether there should be any limit to the revolutionary conception of inalienable rights.

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