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Catalyst: reimagining sustainability with and through fine art
How might we begin to explore the concept of the " sustainable city " in a world often characterized as dynamic, fluid, and contested? Debates about the sustainable city are too often dominated by a technological discourse conducted among professional experts, but this technocratic framing is open to challenge. For some critics, sustainability is a meaningless notion, yet for others its semantic pliability opens up discursive spaces through which to explore interconnections across time, space, and scale. Thus, while enacting sustainability in policy and practice is an arduous task, we can productively ask how cultural imaginations might be stirred and shaken to make sustainability accessible to a wider public who might join the conversation. What role, we ask, can and should the arts play in wider debates about sustainability in the city today? We explore a coproduced artwork in the northeast of England in order to explain how practice-led research methods were put into dialogue with the social sciences to activate new perspectives on the politics, aesthetics, and practices of sustainability. The case is presented to argue that creative material experimentations can be used as an active research inquiry through which ideas can be tested without knowing predefined means or ends. The case shows how such creativity acts as a catalyst to engage a heterogeneous mix of actors in the redefinition of urban spaces, juxtaposing past and present, with the ephemeral and the (seemingly) durable. INTRODUCTION We need, in short, to examine the way in which new materialities influence the cultural constructions we place on the environment (Redclift 2005:225).
Art and Environmentalist Practice
Column in _Capitalism, Nature, Socialism_ Those at the art/science/environment juncture face head-on the challenge of our century, attempting daily to be artists, activists, dialecticians, and scientific practitioners simultaneously. Their fellow travelers are already on board: art critics, robot designers, amateur scientists, professional hackers, and post-disciplinary anarchists. The voices of red-green political ecologists belong in this engagement. The issues raised at this productive nexus call out for a reading that is simultaneously historical and red, ecological and feminist, critical and resistant, dialectical and materialist.
Environmental Art Chromatics and the New Plastic Sublime
2018
Over time, environmental artists began to concern themselves with the ‘unnatural’—namely, biodiversity in manmade urban spaces, documenting human interventions in local ecosystems, climate change impacts on human infrastructure, and histories of pollution and waste disposal. This intersection between plastics and contemporary environmental art plays out not only on the material itself, but the very color of the material.
Sustainability: The Journal of Record, 2013
In this essay Andrea Olsen discusses the dialogue between the goals of sustainability practices and the skills of art making. She draws on examples from her daily walks on the Monterey Peninsula in California and 30 years of teaching dance and environmental studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. As visiting scholar at the Monterey Institute of International Studies spring semester 2013, Olsen reflects on the edge between all that we know from our heritage and studies and all there is to discover moment by moment-the dynamic ecotone of art and science. She considers that the creative process of art making gives students the confidence to visualize an idea and make it real-whether that's installing a complex public sculpture or saving an old-growth forest. Artistic discipline provides students with a practiced form and skills for expression so they avoid depression, aggression, and repression-the burnout and health issues that accompany challenging projects. Overall, Olsen concludes, the arts help you feel-sustaining a conservation ethic through responsiveness to both form and flow.
The Poetics of Green Esthetics: Situating Green Criticism in the Postmodern Condition
Phenomenology + Pedagogy
ofAlberta i have always had the desire to rewrite evolutionary theory. i once suggested this to a colleague and was laughed at; but i think this is what fundamentally drives me; it defines my lack. The whole problematic surrounding "man" and the questioning of those discourses that have emerged to identify "him," which form the postmodernist background, intrigues me. This feeds a darkness, "out there," which can never be grasped. Imbedded in that darkness are issues of gender, cultural imperialism and identity. Since i have always had difficulty identifying mysel/ this seems to be a life theme; the darkness haunts me. i have troubles with borders. No one particular country can i call my own. i live at a point, Edmonton, both a location and a direction. i don't feel particularly comfortable in education, with its continued drive towards defining "discipline" and redefining 'punish ment" as "reward," but neither do i feel welcomed in fine arts, with its selfiseru ing drive for "fame" and its consciousness stuck in the "studio." Where do i belong? Where does anyone belong in this electronic age of ecological crisis? Where then is my site/cite/sight? When i write, it seems all "disciplines" swim together. An anthropological discourse, which "grounds" the essay in this issue of Phenomenolo' + Pedago' has been written. Perhaps one day it will find a home and will be made public? Until then, remain a nobody.
Beyond Canvas: Environmental Artists as Agents of Change
The human impact on the environment continues to grow. Throughout time artists have taken to exposing these devastations. Environmental art emerged in the 1960s when numerous artists started trailblazing the way for art intertwined with the earth, showcasing either the planet's destruction or its glory. Soon after, others began figuring out ways to turn waste into beauty or created art that physically tried to heal our world. This research paper will introduce the leading artists for each category and show how these essential artists have helped prevent climate change and continue to bring awareness to such a critical development.
This seminar explores recent and contemporary art, primarily from within the United States, that critically engages landscape, ecology, and other environment-related sciences and politics. As such, it is conceived as an intersecting history of art and history of “the environment” in recent decades. We will investigate the extent to which visual artists, as important cultural producers, have addressed and responded to pressing environmental issues, including pollution, climate change, urban sprawl, biodiversity, ecological restoration, biotechnology, waste management, public health, alternative energies, and sustainable design. Rather than claiming to offer a comprehensive survey of environment- related aesthetic practices, the seminar is structured in thematic clusters and treats art as a communication device for studying the environment.
Artistic Practices and Ecoaesthetics in Post-sustainable Worlds
An introduction to sustainability and aesthetics: The arts and design for the environment, 2015
The concept of sustainability, its discourse and societal application has been subject to pointed critique, including claims that the term has become an empty rhetorical vessel, is liable to greenwashing or that critical reflection is required on the political and philosophical underpinnings of sustainability and sustainable development (Holden 2010; Phillips 2007). Part of the critical framing around an aesthetics of sustainability has already been explored by artists and thinkers such as Maja and Reuben Fowkes (2012) and Sacha Kagan (2011). Sustainability’s broad nature mirrors the complexity of environmentalism and allows for many different aesthetic approaches. It asks of us to decrease our consumption and also to take a transdisciplinary perspective (Kagan, 2010). However a significant trend in twenty-first century relations with the natural world has been a ‘darkening’ in the tone of debate and mobilisation of apocalyptic metaphors. Climate denial by some in society is mirrored by an underlying zeitgeist of despair and guilt in areas of the environmental movement (Anderson, 2010). I have argued elsewhere that this has left us open to ‘zombie environmentalism’ (Phillips, 2012b). Is it possible to stir from this apparent stalemate to a state of flourishing, by moving on from disaster? Morton (2012) argues for a re-examination of sadness and Soper (2008) reconfigures austerity into alternative hedonism. TJ Demos (2013) discusses the significance of a political ecology to artists working towards new formulations of eco-aesthetics. A key strategy for arts practice is to relinquish “the privileged position of its autonomous and exceptionalist positioning” at the same time as maintaining a ‘countervisuality’, or ability to see things and see them differently (Mizroeff, 2013). In my own work I see eco-aesthetics as a broad set of tendencies that will take us into new futures. Elsewhere I have outlined eight sensibilities in artworks that are more adaptive at dealing with uncertainty and imperfection, risk and opportunity (Phillips, 2012a). Working through Lauren Berlant’s ideas of cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011) as a way of escaping this sense of environmental procrastination, I’ve been considering how an artwork can both embody and encourage resilience in an unruly world, something that is still positive at the same time as it ‘stays with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2013). In a recent project about Little Penguins in Sydney I’ve been grappling with applying some sense of anticipatory readiness or “a cultivated, patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces” (Bennett, 2010, p. xiv). Through this practice-based example, this paper invites an aesthetics of action in the face of the inevitable uncertainties inherent in an ecological worldview.