Sensuous Resistance: The Legacy of Modernism for Sustainable Art

This text probes some of the legacies of modernism for sustainable art practices, arguing for a re-evaluation of the notion of artistic autonomy as a path of resistance, and was published as part of the Dokumenta 12 magazine project, where the full text can be found.

In 1467 the Madonna del Buonconsiglio miraculously appeared in the town of Genazzano near Rome, descending from a cloud and hovering before an unfinished church wall. Genazzano immediately became a site of pilgrimage and devotion. At the same time, Our Lady of Shkodra, the most venerated icon in Albania, was seen at the height of the Ottoman siege, floating up into the sky, and was followed by two Albanian witnesses all the way to Rome, where they lost sight of it. The holy legend was kept alive from generation to generation and the Madonna was prayed to in Albania’s darkest times of foreign occupation and religious persecution, with hope expressed by the hymn “Madonna of Good Counsel, return to us.”

The rigid divide between autonomous art, for which the highest imaginable function is to have no function, and instrumental art, which is accused of sacrificing artistic freedom for the sake of a political message, is a direct legacy of modernism, and still informs many widely-held assumptions about the nature of artistic engagement. Recent theoretical reassessments of artistic autonomy however, point to a degree of convergence in contemporary art between approaches formerly considered to be binary opposites. Christoph Menke has argued that along with autonomy, art in modernity achieves sovereignty, which enables it to raise claims against rationality. It might therefore be suggested that the autonomy of art guarantees its status as a separate sovereign sphere, with a resultant independence from the rules and conventions of society. It is autonomy that gives art, as well as artists as social actors, the potential to be free and able to offer alternatives to dominant ideological paradigms. So, sustainability of art recognises no contradiction between autonomy and engagement, as long as the formal qualities are fulfilled, as it is precisely the autonomy of art that creates a space for resistance.

The Art of Making Do with Enough

This text originally appeared as a chapter in The New Art, a collection of essays on contemporary art published by Rachmaninoff’s London. Our account of the challenge of sustainability for contemporary art includes criticism of the ‘turbine hall effect’ on contemporary art.

Sustainability presents a far reaching challenge to society and raises important issues for contemporary art. Responding to the broad dilemma of ‘how to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ has implications for artistic practice and brings a reorientation of in our opinion most attuned contemporary art towards sustainability. According to environmental thought, the key problems to be addressed on the path to sustainable living are a capitalist model of growth, consumerism, hierarchies in society, social injustice, and the human impact on the environment and natural world. The transformation of society into a more sustainable one entails putting into practice the principles of ecology, grassroots democracy, social justice and non-violence.

The artistic engagement with sustainability draws on radical critiques of art and society and the dematerialised practices of conceptual art to offer sustainable alternatives for art and life. While in contemporary living we have a greater understanding of sustainability in our everyday choices (or the lack of them), contemporary artists increasingly take on the role of alternative knowledge producer, involved in producing, mediating, and exchanging alternative models and dealing with issues that are marginalised in mainstream culture and politics.

Sustainability in art brings awareness of a wider ecological context around the production and reception of art works. It questions the sacrosanct status of the art object as the highest civilisational value and problematises the belief that artworks are created, and should be preserved, for eternity. Just as in society there is a tendency to stop seeing nature as an endless resource, attuned artists problematise the understanding of art as commodity, and are reluctant to add to the stockpile of art objects, choosing instead to explore alternative means of expression.

 

The Principles of Sustainability in Contemporary Art

This essay appeared in a special issue of Praesens: Central European Contemporary Art Review published to accompany the Symposium on Sustainability and Contemporary Art at CEU Budapest as well as on GreenMuseum, where the full text can be found.

The Land art movement of the 1960s and 70s has often been seen as the origin of today’s environmental art. Land artists famously left the white cube of the gallery to make dramatic interventions in the living landscape. ‘Instead of using a paintbrush to make his art Robert Morris would like to use a bulldozer.’ This statement by Robert Smithson points to the ‘earthmovers’ preoccupation with marking, removing, and rearranging natural materials on a grand scale, arguably treating nature as a giant canvas. Although they were involved in a dispute with Greenbergian modernists, who disapproved of all art that tried to link to the real world, denied the connection of art to a specific historical context, and wished artists to remain within traditional disciplines, it could be argued that their polarised positions represent two sides of the same modernist coin.

A more fruitful ground for searching for the origins of today’s sustainable art is in the innovative practices of the conceptual artists of the same period. Their radical questioning of the art system, alternative strategies for making and presenting work, engagement with social and political realities, ethics, and encouragement of independent thought, are all important legacies for contemporary art. Furthermore, dematerialisation, through the disavowal of the art object and shift towards process-based practices, performances, actions, as well as ephemeral works that were created not to last, was an invaluable inheritance for later sustainable art, as of course was the desire of conceptual artists to provoke on the level of idea or concept. Regarding the interplay of art and nature, a highly resonant image from the late 1960s was the art student Goran Trbuljak’s gesture of throwing empty picture frames into the boundless sea.

Art and Ecology: Unified or Fragmentary?

This review of the RSA’s first symposium on Ecology and Artistic Practice was published on Green Museum and provided a rare critical take on what would turn out to be a significant development in the spread of ecological concerns to mainstream contemporary art. What follows is a short extract, please follow the link below for the full version with illustrations.

The theoretical basis and ‘keynote paper’ to the symposium was provided by Gary Genosko, Research Chair in Technoculture Studies at Lakehead University, Canada, who spoke about Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies. His paper ranged from the distinction between inter- and trans-disciplinarity to Guattari’s notion of ecosophy, and the need to extend our understanding of ecology from the ‘environmental’ to include the ‘mental’ and ‘social’ worlds. A new subjectivity that could challenge the dominance of consumerism would he predicted be ‘marbled by eco-consciousness’ rather than a representing a ‘single-issue’ eco-logic or one that followed the ‘paper trail’ of the ‘techno-scientific elites.’

Questions and comments from the floor revealed some concern about the lack of urgency and relevance to ecological activism of Guattari’s ecosophy. A lively discussion broke out contrasting the ‘unified vision’ of deep ecology theorist Arne Naess and the ‘fragmented’ approach represented by Guattari. The speaker reiterated his view that ‘fundamental change in how we think’ is only possible through the emergence of ‘dissident subjectivities that become ecologically expressive.’ Simplistic and ‘single-issue’ theories, along with all attempts at a ‘technocratic solution’ to environmental problems are counter-productive, while long-term ecological solutions are to be found in the ‘paradigm of creativity.’

Art and Ecology: Unified or Fragmentary?

Nature in Contemporary Art

This essay was written for the exhibition Unframed Landscapes and deals with the position of nature in contemporary art. In addition to appearing in the exhibition catalogue, it has been republished in GreenMuseum and NeMe. The following is a short extract, and the whole text can be accessed using the link below.

The rise of environmentalism, feminism, and post-modernist critical theory together has significantly changed our understanding of nature, and consequently artistic practice. Ecology has challenged the anthropocentrism of a culture based on the objectification and exploitation of nature. When talking about environmental artists Newton and Helen Harrison, eco-feminist Carolyn Merchant has praised the way ‘they think of the world as a giant conversation, in which everyone is involved, not only people, but trees and rocks and landscapes and rivers.’

Feminism in general, and ecofeminism in particular, have brought a new understanding of how gender has shaped the ways in which we see the environment. This has involved drawing attention to the ubiquitous binary coupling of women with nature and men with culture. Landscape art is deconstructed as mastery over nature that is evident in the rules of perspective and the stress on viewpoints for representing nature. Eco-feminists aspire to move beyond dualistic thinking and to establish relationships based not on hierarchy and domination, but on caring, respect, and awareness of interconnection.

Post-modernist theory demonstrates how our relations to the non-human world are always historically-mediated and constructed. For post-modernists, landscape is a set of contingent visual and verbal conventions, rather than something natural and given.In the words of Simon Schama, ”it is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape.”
Nature in Contemporary Art