Realising potentials for arts-based sustainability science (original) (raw)

Toward a Theory of the Arts and Sustainability

Journal of Management for Global Sustainability, 2017

To make real progress on what can only be classified as environmental emergencies, we need a wide base of public consensus for action given that public motivation and involvement is a prerequisite for policymakers to implement what our scientists urge us to do. In this light, crucial thresholds of public motivation and involvement can be created by reaching into the hearts of individuals, an area of competitive advantage for the arts. Efforts to enhance understanding in this arena, however, must incorporate sufficient complexity given highly complex and interrelated challenges in sustainability. This article thus presents a theoretical framework for the arts and sustainability based on the variables of artistic complexity and public engagement. The arts, when allowed sufficient scope and freedom, can assist society in marshalling and galvanizing people across the globe to take essential steps toward a sustainable planet.

Artistic activism promotes three major forms of sustainability transformation

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 2022

The far-reaching use of artworks (e.g. paintings, music, films) in environmental activism fosters cognitive processes and behavioural changes. At the margins of the environmental sustainability literature, the rising importance of environmental artivism is apparent with the surge of creativity after the conditions of isolation that started in 2020. There is an overall gap in literature on how different environmental claims and transformative initiatives are voiced and promoted through artistic media. This paper fills this gap by unfolding the foci, purposes and repertoire of artivists pursuing environmental sustainability. The synthesis of literature is conducted through lexicometry and illustrated with selected references. Artivism is a growing constituent of environmental activism, articulated around three major topics. The first one is the education of audiences through performative expressions of today's global environmental crises, especially climate change. The second one involves ecocritical reflections of environmental controversies and conflicts towards creative emancipatory practices. The third one positions art practice as an avenue for environmental improvement across different sectors (e.g. water, mining, urban) with involvement of citizens, governments, and corporate actors. The paper informs readers about the state and prospects of environmental artivism for expressing, communicating, and engaging with transformative politics.

Towards ecological sustainability: observations on the role of the arts

S a P I En S Surveys and Perspectives Integrating Environment and Society, 2014

This paper describes how the arts shape environmental behaviour of individuals and society and is a synthesis arising from a program of previous publication. The literature suggests that the arts may have a role in shaping environmental behaviour but it is not clear how or in what circumstances this might occur. Hence we set out to describe ways in which the arts shape environmental behaviour at the individual level and, through the accumulated actions of individuals, at the societal level. Through this examination we aim to explain the role of the arts in moving society towards ecological sustainability. Our research drew on interviews with 96 key informants working in the arts and in the natural resource management sectors, combined with a mix of empirical, experimental and post hoc studies of eight community-based art and environment events. On the basis of this research, a model was developed to describe how the arts can shape environmental behaviour. Three pathways are proposed: communicating information in an engaging form; creating empathy towards the natural environment; and embedding the arts in ecologically sustainable development.

Why the Sustainability Movement Needs Art to Survive

This paper discusses sustainability theory, and the underdevelopment of the "social/culture leg" of the sustainability tripod. This talk reviews the history of the sustainability movement beginning with the Bruntland Comission, and discusses the importance of environmental change that is rooted in the social sphere.

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).

Sustainability and Art Making

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.

Sustaining Sustainability: The Pedagogical Drift of Art Research and Practice

Studies in Art Education, 2012

In this article, the philosophical theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are juxtaposed with the research and practice of environmental artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison in order to explore and examine correspondences between their respective ways of thinking and performing sustainability. The complex and contradictory alliances and movements of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic assemblage, body without organs, and schizo-analysis are compared with the dynamic plurality of conversational drift, an altruistic process of environmental discourse that the Harrisons’ perform in and through their work in collaboration with leading experts in the sciences, ecology, the arts, public policy, and their most important interlocutor, the earth and its biologically diverse characteristics.

Thoughts on future directions: Art and culture in transformations toward greater sustainability

Creative Responses to Sustainability | Portugal Green Guide, 2019

The Guide identifies 16 most significant cultural organisations contributing to social and environmental change in Portugal. In addition to the Directory, the guide also features 2 essays: one on Regenerating Sustainability Through Community-Led Initiatives by Gil Penha-Lopes and Tom Henfrey; the other by Nancy Duxbury, Thoughts on Future Directions: Art and Culture in Transformations Toward Greater Sustainability, looking at future directions in the area of sustainability and the arts. The essays provide a contextual background to the practical approach of the Directory as they set the framework of where Portugal stands in the global debate on the role of arts and culture in promoting sustainability. Download guide and map of arts organisations here: https://culture360.asef.org/magazine/creative-responses-sustainability-green-guide-portugal-launched/