A Sustainable Artist Looks Like..........

 Reflections 34 35 on Art and Sustainability
by Victor Margolin

http://www.sdscrolls.org/museums/beyond-green/reflections-art-sustainability-index.html

Beuys was instrumental in creating the current difficulties that surround the problem of "ecological aesthetics." He was strategically brilliant in trading on his recognition as a gallery artist to gain attention for his action projects such as 7000 Oaks and the polemics of his lecture tours. Ultimately all these activities have been drawn into an art discourse, but they don't fit comfortably. To deal with new forms of human expression and action, critics and curators are continually trying to stuff them into institutional boxes where they don't fit. Old categories need to collapse before we can begin to create a different dialogue on aesthetics in a sustainable culture.

We will need a new aesthetic to embrace the three categories of object, participation, and action without privileging the conventional formal characteristics of objects. In this aesthetic, the distinctions between art, design, and architecture will blur as critics discover new relations between the value of form and the value of use. Hildegard Kurt was correct when she criticized the art world for viewing sustainability in terms of environmental subjects instead of as a larger cultural challenge. The culture that Kurt identified within the wider sustainability discourse remains an issue and needs to be overcome. This will lead to new forms of solidarity within the culture of sustainability.

Imagination is an artist's greatest asset. It can produce bold visions of what a sustainable future might be like. People can be moved and aroused by powerful environments, innovative designs, and practical demonstrations of active engagement. With open minds and a willingness to collaborate, those who seek a place in the culture of sustainability must move forward. The problem of "ecological aesthetics" will solve itself.

The Principles of Sustainability in Contemporary Art
by Maja and Reuben Fowkes



The artistic engagement with sustainability entails an understanding of ecological equality, a shift from the anthropocentric model to include the non-human world in our moral universe, a renewed sense of social responsibility, as well as a concern for grassroots democracy, and draws on radical critiques of art and society and the dematerialised practices of conceptual art to offer sustainable alternatives in art and life.
http://greenmuseum.org/generic_content.php?ct_id=265

In general we prefer to talk about the sustainability of art,
rather than Sustainable Art with capital letters, as our
primary interest is in the implications of a broad notion
of sustainability for the whole of contemporary art,
rather than just a niche area, such as is associated with
the term Environmental Art. Artists that consider the
ethical aspects of their formal decisions, such as what are
the implications of the use of animals in art or of people
in community art projects, are in that sense giving
precedence to ethics, rather than aesthetics.

Satish Kumar's article entitled ‘Art for Earth’s Sake’.

In our times of eco-spiritual crisis, Satish Kumar proposes a shift from unsustainable mass consumerism to mass production of life-sustaining art

The dominant thinking in Western society is that of separation: the separation of mind from matter, science from spirituality, art from daily life. From the Renaissance onwards, artists worked as individuals, in their studios, in isolation from other artisans, separating themselves from their fellow craftsmen and women.  They practised art as a way of self-expression.  Their art produced mostly items of luxury and status.  Thus art became disconnected from the natural world, from living communities and from life itself. There art stayed, for centuries, something apart – to be practised only by those with special talent, to be purchased only by those with great wealth and seen mostly within the four walls of churches, museums and art galleries. For the past 500 years, art has become an item of consumption; a commodity to be bought and sold: no longer a way of life, practised by everyone as an everyday activity.

The Art of sustainability – Should Artists be Driving Political and Ethical Thinking?

Are music and sustainability related? If so, maybe musicians and artists should be using art to drive political and ethical thinking. Or is it really anything to do with them at all? Giles Crosse tunes up.

http://www.ourfutureplanet.org/news/457

Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions. Rather than asking whether art and sustainability are suitable partners, if we think about things in terms of the 'art of sustainability’, the approach becomes rather different.
From this perspective, sustainability itself can be seen as an art form, an organic, growing process that stands on the shoulders of others and develops throughout time, as individuals and societies contribute to the cultivation of knowledge that might actually create something positive.
So the ‘art of sustainability’ might be about learning better how to interact with the planet, how to live responsible and happier lives, and how to derive some measure of peace and contentment from minimising the rape of resources and achieving a much more holistic balance.