the impediment
On the home page, I wanted to welcome visitors and highlight a core insight that launched this whole articulture initiative. It’s the notion that:
Our contemporary (“Western”, industrial, settler-colonial) idea of “art” is rooted in the illusion of separation which may itself be an impediment to a more holistic, integrative, “regenerative” culture. In short, the idea that something is art reflects a mindset that has led us to climate catastrophe.
It’s a bit like focusing on individual trees and ignoring the forest and watershed.
First, a little context. During my near-decade working on greenmuseum•org (2000-2008), I wore the sparkly hat of an environmental and eco-art cheerleader. With my colleagues, I tried to share the best examples I could find from what was then, an emerging field (since the 1960s) that was just beginning to take off. I spoke, wrote, organized, and connected people and ideas from around the world. I did everything I could to raise awareness of what was happening in the generative frothy mix of art and ecology to help inspire the creation of new work. It all felt important, even urgent. Eventually, I found that the self-inflicted promoter hat no longer fit. Viewed through the burning lens of climate disruption and its many implications on human and non-human survival, I began to doubt the effectiveness of what I was doing, how I was living, and to deeply question the destructive behaviors, institutions, and systems that sustain and enable contemporary life. Was any of this art actually helping shift the ways people lived and understood the world?
It was a crisis for me personally, and as an evangelist facing a crisis of faith, I dove in hard, questioning everything. I was convinced that art and ecology were a natural mix for humans seeking to thrive for any length of time. What I didn’t understand clearly enough, was why. The “arts” were part of how humans, even our cousins the Neanderthals, made sense of, celebrated, and engaged with the world and each other. Our ancestors and anyone today with intact indigenous practices and experience living within their ecological means, understand life much more holistically.
A case could be made to say that integrated cultural systems have been evolutionarily selected for. Globally over millennia, there have been an enormous diversity of experiments and creative ways of incorporating beauty and metaphor into daily life. The ones that worked best in concert with practical survival policies and beneficial infrastructure likely carried on. If it didn’t help people survive and thrive, then it must have made life that much harder. The dominant “modern” understanding of what we call art emphasizes separation into disciplines, objects, movements, and even segregated physical spaces outside of a more ecologically integrated life. In just a couple hundred years, the industrial growth society has taken the entire planet to the edge of disaster, tearing things apart, conceptually and physically.
The egocentric, consumption and separation-oriented worldview contrasts with more collective, systemic, and integrated ways of mediating our connection to the Earth. Ecocide/genocide, climate disruption, and disconnection from seeing ourselves as part of the planet are the results. Non-Western industrial cultures (and it’s a huge generalization) often have creative elements everywhere, are more widely participative, and frequently experience what we think of as the “arts” integrated into how people live and manage their relationships with the worlds within and around them. These creative expressions are profoundly interconnected and support people’s capacity to live wherever they are.
At greenmuseum•org, we sought out and received numerous inquiries from environmental artists (we used this as an umbrella term that covers eco-art, bio-art, land art, and art in nature) wanting us to feature their work. We had limited capacity and resources so we were in constant dialogue internally and with others, about what we felt should be highlighted. While the format of submissions changed over time (at first, we requested slides marked up with key details written along the plastic borders, before moving to all digital CDs), each artwork had its artist name, title, date, materials, and a little blurb to go with specific projects. We would sort, edit, and format these for presentation online - tasks any curator or arts professional was doing for their own venues or publications at that time around the world. What I found, as I’m sure many curators and jurors do, was that most projects were far more interesting in their descriptions and in photos than in actuality (whenever I had the opportunity to actually visit some of them). The dominant art distribution model seemed to emphasize documentation and descriptions over the actual “impact” on the ground and in the oceans and atmosphere over time. From my perspective, few of these projects aged well and became abandoned debris in remote areas or eventual landfill locally.
Some artists were very organized and relentlessly promoted their work while others did not. The artworks themselves, varied in quality, interest, or other criteria, but rarely were they long-term embedded parts of people’s lives, to be embraced and modified and sung to over generations. Most were designed for exhibition in galleries, public spaces, or in some cases, temporary remote locations with spectacular backdrops and briefly-engaged human and non-human collaborators. Too many projects felt, to my increasingly dissatisfied self, like performative ecological stunts, brief photo ops arranged to make an attractive splash, fill a slot in a resume, and then on to the next one. If an artist did something that had scaling potential, it was often as if (due to the nature of being designated as “art”) they were staking out that particular creative territory, approach, or subject matter. Artists tend to seek and are rewarded for novelty and originality. Great ideas can soon become disconnected and atomized through this process. Artists who do what their colleagues have done elsewhere are frequently criticized as being derivative, or not giving credit enough to the long chain of predecessors working in similar ways, or perhaps uninformed. Funders, critics, and gatekeepers want novelty, too, so there is selection pressure to make more new shiny highlights that fit some sense of what “art” in a contemporary sense should be. In general, addressing climate change by supporting the viability of a low-footprint lifestyle is not one of them. Like the classic conservation preference for funding charismatic megafauna, deep systemic multigenerational bio-cultural complexity is much harder to support, wrap our heads around or write grants for. In the meantime, catastrophic climate change continues to metastasize around us.
Ecological artists, particularly the growing number now perched precariously in universities, often wrestle with the “silos” of academia and the challenges of collaborating with scientists, resource managers, local human residents, and even wildlife. This interdisciplinary and collaborative focus is characteristic of the field and evidence (to me at least) of a heartfelt desire for a culture of interconnection and increasing embeddedness. This interest, however, does not frequently translate into the long-term capacity to live within our ecological means, or even to help those who might want to, given the chance. A career in the arts (or almost anything in today’s world) seems separate from how we live our daily lives or the practical challenges of how our descendants might possibly adapt to a rapidly changing climate. The climate speaks in temperature, weather, and airborne molecules, not exhibition histories.
Unless we can recreate a vibrant culture of interconnection, we risk becoming disconnected from the web of life (extinction).
The endless pressure to “make a living” leaves too many of us still dancing to the destructive beats of a worldview that promises fulfillment at the expense of contextual healing and reciprocity. What if more creativity were directed towards reducing our dependence on these destructive lifeways? As someone who enjoys aesthetics and creative challenges, my mind falls into cultural patterns. I believe that to maintain a paradigm or mindset, we need to surround ourselves with constant reminders of that fractal pattern. That’s where articulture (or even just culture) comes in. It helps reinforce and shape a particular worldview (consider religion, modernism, etc.). If I was a lawyer or politician perhaps I might use those tools to shape things. As it is given my background, this is where I feel I can contribute.
Part 2, came when I considered parallels to ecological thinking. What impact does what we call “art” have ecologically or even atmospherically, since that seems to be a dominant driver of climate? Most current human activity (art included) is pretty destructive and harmful to the environment. Perhaps it’s all a direct result of fossil fuel exploitation and the intrinsic need to ignore the psychological, ecological, and social costs of industrial capitalism. Just look at the toxic waste we generate as a species or as individuals, not to mention the CO2 we spew. In some rare cases, such as a habitat sculpture or water purifying landscape, it can benefit other beings and watersheds directly, or at least be somewhat neutral in terms of impact on the nonhuman stakeholders - such as worms and watersheds. It gets complicated very quickly when we shift to other more familiar forms of art. If a photograph (or any other thing with a toxic technological and material footprint- ok computer!) changes people’s understanding of the world and then inspires real action around climate change then, cool, perhaps it’s helpful overall.
Inspiration-wise, convincing Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos to give their fortunes to young female activists such as Greta Thunberg, Nemonte Nequimo, and Malala Yousafzai to redistribute is potentially even more impactful, so perhaps we should focus on capturing the precious attention of billionaires? The right project experienced by the right person with “influence” could help change laws and thereby impact many more watersheds than the artful erosion control system woven from green willow branches by a handful of volunteers that less than a hundred people will ever notice. It gets back to Donella Meadows. Where to intervene in a system?
I can’t make those types of decisions or evaluations for other people. The instinct to pay even more attention to billionaires feels off to me, although I can see the point. It’s hard enough to evaluate priorities in my own life and family. I try to think of the worms and watersheds when I make decisions and reflect on the implications of my ecological, material, and energetic footprints as best as I can. I’m not much interested in politics or being a celebrity so my leverage is limited. We each have something to contribute and hope it’s enough. (This is how NASA climate change scientist Peter Kalmus tried to address his personal life impacts, for example.)
The intrinsic joy, passion, and beauty of whatever we might call art will not always directly translate into lower CO2 emissions but can spur us on. It’s a slippery slope to evaluate these often subtle things. What’s the impact of a moment of transcendence? Too many variables, subjective personal criteria, unknowns, or indirect relationships. Still, I maintain it’s worth trying to speak to and honor our nonhuman relatives in ways they might understand: biodiversity, habitat, clean water, fertile soil, and less atmospheric carbon. Adding layers of metaphor, beauty, and deliciousness to this makes it all that much better. If it’s collaborative and multi-disciplinary and wildly participative and integrated into our lives and supporting the influence and messaging of other cultural elements, even better. Experienced and developed over time as a system, perhaps most effective.
In a paper co-written by indigenous scholars and elders entitled “The determinants of planetary health: an Indigenous consensus perspective”, the authors emphasize the importance of an interconnected worldview:
“Mother Earth is dependent on the human capacity to understand interconnectedness as a basic and fundamental reality. Universal interconnectedness is a transformational relational process of understanding that can stimulate psychological integration and a sense of responsibility to the larger world. An awakened sense of interdependence between people and planet can be achieved through a gradual process of awareness and action that depends on the inherent human potential for relationality—we are all in and of Nature. Human beings must adopt an all-inclusive consideration for Mother Earth as our relative in all spheres of influence….” [emphasis mine]
Creative practices that help us maintain and cultivate a sense of interconnectedness, are therefore vital to our health and the well-being of the Earth. I would argue that it’s not just about the content of these artworks (everything from performance, music, storytelling, painting, food to tattoos, etc.) but about how they are made, decay, function, and interact and acknowledge each other. How they fit together (and particularly if they are deliberately designed to do so) matters. A systemic or holistic approach to culture with its powerful capacity to highlight and reveal interconnections in active support of low-carbon lifeways, infrastructure, and community building seems like the most time-proven and effective way forward. So what’s holding us back?
To accomplish a more holistic and integrated cultural shift would require a massive restructuring of our perceptions of quality and meaning, new creative forms of expression, collaborative support systems, patronage, distribution, and standards of aesthetics, quality, and standards for evaluating success. This is why I see the industrial concept of “art” as an impediment. Like modernity in general, it’s a window for perceiving reality that reinforces the blinders to interconnection even as it occasionally seeks to transcend them. What if we shift the focus to supporting low-footprint lifeways infused with metaphor and creativity that work like systems rather than as a collection of parts? I can still be thrilled now and then by excellence and talent even if it’s “unique”, plastic-wrapped, and destructive, but it’s not where my heart goes. I know we can do better. I want to think more like a planet or a watershed, or my ancient ancestors when it comes to this if I can. This site aims to explore this wider cultural forest (not the trees) as if our survival depends on it.
