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POSTMODERN
AESTHETICS AND ENVIRONMENTALISM
This is a short version of a paper delivered
at the conference Culture, Environment and Eco-Politics at the University
of Northampton, June 17th 2006. An extended version will be published
as a forthcoming book chapter.
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INTRODUCTION
The terms aesthetics and environmentalism allude to discursive terrains
as extensive as the polar ice sheets which melt at an unprecedented
rate. I do not attempt to define postmodern aesthetics but take
environmentalism as a hinge which links the arts to a need for a
transformative social idea, or imaginary. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse's
idea that a prerequisite of social transformation is the emergence
of a new consciousness, I ask how culture may contribute to its
evolution. This follows Marcuse's interest in environmental issues
(1972), and recognises the activist aspect of environmentalism (as
opposed to a reformism seeking environmental protection within liberal
society). I ask if there is an equivalent practice in art to that
of environmentalism; and if it counters the distancing effect of
claims for art's autonomy in Modernist aesthetics. If so, an aspect
of postmodern aesthetics is the negotiation of a tension between
distancing and engagement.
CULTURE AND POSTMODERNITY
Raymond Williams gives a history of the word culture in Keywords
(1976). He traces its origin to a verb for cultivation, notes its
transposition by the metaphor of cultivating a mind to a noun for
that which articulates the taste of an elite, or art, and its use
to denote a way of life - from Johann Gottfried von Herder's Ideas
on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784-91; see Herder,
1969: 179-224) and counter a model of universal history. Culture
now means the arts, and this ethnographic idea. Yet, since Kant,
culture as the arts has had an association with universal benefit,
for which the foil is utility, or the everyday life - culture as
a set of practices indicating the values of a social group. The
divergent meanings of culture merge in the work of what has been
termed the artist as ethnographer (Foster, 1996). Artists, from
the 1960s, engaged in participant observation, worked in community
settings, intervened in public issues, and rejected the Modernist
privileging of the art object. For some, the art object is replaced
by process-based tactics, called by art historian Grant Kester dialogic
art (Kester, 2004). In dialectics, the articulation of a way of
life is active: individuals and groups are conditioned by the conditions
in which they live and intervene to change rather than reproduce
those conditions which in turn re-produce their culture. This aligns
with a sense of hope for a better world which runs through Marxism
and the optimism of international Modernism. The outcomes of the
inter- and post-war professional consensus that a new society can
be produced through design did not deliver it, and include the tower-blocks
of urban peripheries. But this failure redirects attention less
to the utopian content of the dream than to the assumptions on which
the intervention was based, and to a tension between the dream and
an implicit desire to maintain the status of professionals as its
producers.
Parallel to this was an idea that artists had a privileged voice
as licensed outcasts able to plumb psychic depths unavailable to
ordinary citizens (Kuspit, 1993). This is ruptured by Joseph Beuys'
remark that everyone is an artist - which I take to mean that everyone
in a society has a capacity to imagine the alternative worlds of
possibility. Something may be understood from this of the difference
between environmental protection and environmentalism as transformative
awareness. I return to these ideas later. First, I turn to Catherine
Belsey's definition of culture in Poststructuralism: a Very
Short Introduction:
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Culture
constitutes the vocabulary within which we do what we do;
it specifies the meanings we set out to inhabit and repudiate,
the values we make efforts to live by or protest against,
and the protest is also cultural. Culture resides ... in the
representations of the world exchanged, negotiated and ...
contested in a society. (Belsey, 2002: 7). |
These representations are historically specific. As Belsey observes,
the protest is cultural as well as its target.
A similar view of landscape is offered by Rolf Peter Sieferle in
the catalogue of an exhibition, Natural Reality (1999).
He accepts that the landscapes produced in industrial societies
differ from those of earlier societies but argues that the earlier
landscape was framed by human activity, as depicted in European
landscape painting: "meadows kept free of shrubbery, or woods
used in the forestry sense, artificial fish ponds, pruned trees
or flocks minded by shepherds ... villages and towns, farms, castles
and mills." (Sieferle, 1999: 149). Hence a "schematic
confrontation of natural and cultural landscape ... [is] subjected
to a critique essentially aimed at questioning the natural character
of the traditional landscape to be protected (ibid). This raises
issues for conservation, and draws attention to the disintegration
of concepts such as authenticity - the real which lies behind the
surface, the genuine under the skin of what is produced - or, it
might be argued by extension, autonomy.
Predictability is similarly outmoded by complexity theory - complex
systems have many elements which interact in non-linear ways. Paul
Cilliers gives the example of verbal language as "...constantly
transformed by the way in which it is used "so that the frequent
use of a word ...can cause that term either to limit its semantic
field ... or to expand it. The use of the term thus shifts the meaning
of the term itself." (Cilliers, 1998: 124). A claim for aesthetic
autonomy makes no sense, then, understood historically as following
from an idea of autonomous action.
In European drama, the proscenium stage is setting for characters
acting as if possessing coherent identities, acting out futures
as if of their own devising or free choice (Belsey, 1985). This
fractures in Brecht's alienation and Beckett's absurdity (Adorno,
1997: 25-33), just as autonomy fractures now in a postmodern world
of contingency. But is this the case in art which draws attention
to environmental questions? To what extent is the artist's voice
still privileged, or the art work seen as bringing aesthetic value
to what is at root a political problem?
CULTURE + ENVIRONMENT
I do not have space to offer a history of environmental art but
will outline a few of its forms to draw parallels between these,
attitudes to environmental issues, and the knowledges implicit in
them. Kester looks back to land art in the 1970s, and cites more
recent projects in which artists sought practical ways to enter
discourses of culture and nature. Kester summarises:
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While
some artists ... viewed the land as a larger canvas, of interest
primarily for its cultural and historical associations or
for the formal properties of scale and material opened up
by the natural environment, others began to approach the natural
world as a complex gestalt of biological, political, economic
and cultural forces. (Grant Kester, catalogue for Groundworks,
2005, p. 21). |
Looking specifically at art which responds implicitly to the natural
world, or explicitly to environmental agendas, I suggest the following
categories: firstly, art which represents the natural world; secondly,
art which enters a discourse of the natural world and its apprehension;
thirdly, cultural production which tests methods of environmental
salvage or contributes to sustainable forms of living; and fourthly,
dialogic inter-action at the cusp of art and activism.
An example of representation is a sculpture of three life forms
selected from a list of endangered species, carved in Kilkenny limestone
for European Year of the Environment (1987) by Peter Randall-Page.
Seen on Dartmoor, at more than a metre across in each case, they
have a monumental quality in contrast to their vulnerability - things
easily trodden underfoot. Like the figures of workers depicted in
Realist painting, they are lent the status of that which it is appropriate
to depict - rather as early ethnography granted the status of being
appropriate to academic study to non-white cultures. The work's
aspiration is undermined, however, by its history: commissioned
for a site outside a new supermarket on a greenfield site in Basingstoke
it masked the environmental damage of the development; then, surrounded
by rubber mats, the sculptures became play-forms for children, at
which point the artist sought - I do not know with what success
- a new buyer for the work.
An example of discursive art is Kate Salway's series of composed
photographs of natural history specimens, with reference to the
cabinets of curiosity (Wunderkammer) in which things were
kept for study and amusement, leading to the categorisation of species,
and display of collections of once-living creatures - insects, butterflies,
fish, shells - in cabinets and frames. The attitude which analyses,
divides, and categorises these life forms is that which denies them
life, literally when the specimen is killed to be re-presented in
a frame. Salway's point is that this is a destructive form of apprehension
likely to lead to further denigrations of non-human species. Again,
a parallel with early ethnography occurs, as bringing material into
the respectability of academic study while depriving it of intrinsic
validity as well as vitality.
An example of art as salvage is Mel Chin's Revival Field,
in which plants naturally take up toxins such as cadmium from polluted
land. Chin aimed to pilot this organic technology of waste management,
at the Pig's Eye landfill site in St Paul-Minneapolis in 1989-91,
and later at sites in the Netherlands and Germany, so that it can
be freely taken up by others; and saw the work as a symbolic representation
of an affluent society's repression of its excess wastefulness.
In another way, the studio-house by Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy
Till in north London using straw-bales, rubble from the site, and
other low-cost and low-energy materials, pilots a material response
to sustainability and challenges the conventional split of professional
and domestic spaces. As well as these elements of visual culture
are the many experiments in alternative ways of living, in eco-villages
and permaculture settlements around the world.
An example of interventionism is the work of PLATFORM in London,
as in guided walks through London's financial district to draw attention
to its intertwined histories of colonialism and capital accumulation.
PLATFORM invites individuals from contrasting backgrounds to these
events, which may last up to ten hours. They see intimate encounters
of this kind as more likely than appeals to a mass public to shift
the consciousness of those participating - though they have used
tactics including the distribution of spoof newspapers to London
commuters to, as they put it, insert ideas in the social bloodstream.
Jane Trowell, a core member of PLATFORM, and Chin use the term viral
to describe their art. Perhaps art gives a critical distance; or
offers a position outside the arena of conventional - representational
- politics. The context is a breakdown of such politics as people
react to environmental policy with a cynicism nearing that which
met leaflets advising them to hide under the kitchen table in the
event of nuclear war, and its replacement by the formation of new
coalitions and single-issue campaigning. Nikos Papastergiadis sums
up:
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In
face of urgent responses to either ecological needs or the
growing force of global corporatism, neither socialism nor
liberalism is seen as offering solid foundations for critical
responses. ... In the absence of a formal expression of political
alternatives there is an increase in the number of informal
movements which have clustered around the critical issues
of social justice, cultural identity and ecological defence.
(Papastergiadis, 2006: 21). |
ENVIRONMENT + CULTURE
Climate change now attracts media attention. Beside spectacular
disasters such as the hurricane which destroyed New Orleans in 2005
are persistent signs of disruption of the planet's ecologies produced
by a rapid increase in carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions.
It is accepted that this is the case but not that it requires a
radical revision of the lifestyle and values of an affluent society.
Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, writes,
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...
if the scientists are right, we're living through the biggest
thing that's happened since human civilization emerged. One
species, ours, has by itself in the course of a couple of
generations managed to powerfully raise the temperature of
an entire planet ... . But oddly, though we know about it,
we don't know about it ... it isn't part of our culture. Where
are the books? The poems? The plays? (Bill McKibben, Open
Democracy website: 'Can You Imagine? A Warming World Needs
Art' 22nd April, 2005. |
Yet there are books, such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring,
and Arundati Roy's Power Politics (2001). But McKibben's
possibly rhetorical question hides an assumption that it is down
to individuals to deal with the looming environmental crisis. It
is the case that trans-governmental initiatives such as Kyoto are
ineffective and that national policy has limited scope in a period
of global de-regulation; it is also the case that global industries
view the planet as an extractive resource to be processed into profit
at any cost - while green consumption grows through organic vegetable
box schemes, low-energy light bulbs are commonplace, and to recycle
at least some domestic waste is now the norm. But if dealing with
climate change is out-sourced to customers and citizens, this ignores
the alliance of power and wealth at trans-national and global levels
which is able to carry on as usual - so that oil companies use new,
sustainable technologies as fig leafs for extraction. I do not give
up on regulation, but if there is to be a revision of the structural
basis of the affluent society this requires a shift of consciousness
on the part of individuals within a complex set of overlapping publics.
There seem parallels between efforts to raise environmental awareness
and the modes of cultural production outlined in the previous section.
Both can be read in terms of the kinds of knowledge produced, drawing
on Andrew Jamison's rehearsal of Bronislaw Szerszynski's four pieties,
as Szerszynski puts it, within environmentalism (Jamison, 2001:
149-151). These are: a monastic piety of counter-cultural modes
of dwelling; a sectarian piety of activism; a churchly piety of
campaigning organisations; and a folk piety of green consumerism.
The monastic piety is characteristic of counter-cultural groups
who develop alternative ways of living, often in collective and
collaborative modes. It is principled rather than purposive in that
it enacts a value system rather than seeking to promote a shift
in policy in structures external to the piety such as the state.
Cases include eco-village living and permaculture sites. A parallel
in cultural production is the tendency to group and collaborative
practice characteristic of politicised artists' groups today, and
what Kester (2004) calls dialogic art. The sectarian piety is that
of direct action, again involving groups and coalitions but aimed
at impacting policy - but I would say at interrupting the maintenance
of a social order serving capital. I disagree with Szerszynski's
view that direct action is purposive rather than principled, but
when he writes that, "the 'community of saints' in one of the
small direct action groups such as the Dongas or Earth First! is
experienced by each of its members in the form of face-to-face affectual
relationship" (Szerszynski, 1997: 45), he states a crucial
point about activism - that it takes place among those present.
The churchly piety, next, is purposive, seeking to change the policies
of governments and behaviour of commercial interests through pressure
groups and campaigns enabling members of a mass public to participate
at arm's length in radical causes. Greenpeace is a radical example,
and the Worldwide Fund for Nature a liberal one. To join such a
campaign is to enjoy a passive identity of dissent. When art is
used to meet the imaginative deficit of scientific data on climate
change, as in the Cape Farewell project - in which artists
and writers accompanied scientists to the Arctic ice, producing
work for a subsequent exhibition on climate change at the Natural
History Museum, London, and for a programme, Climate Change:
Cultural Change in Newcastle-Gateshead in June, 2006 - it is
aligned with. The folk piety is principled in offering participants,
equally within mainstream society, a sense of belonging to another
or incipient society based on green values. Organic vegetable box
schemes are a key case here, I suggest, when the emotive value of
the box is not only based on the material contents but also grounded
in a feeling of belonging to an invisible but present network. Other
areas cited by Jamison include waste recycling and energy conservation.
A parallel in art is work representing the natural world.
CONSCIOUSNESS
When Marcuse spoke at the Dialectics of Liberation Congress in London
in July, 1967, he alluded to society as a work of art: a trope for
a libidinal society, and the end of a discrete category of art as
aesthetic production, along the lines proposed coincidentally by
Beuys. It is a millenarian vision, which permeates the present.
The transformation is in the act of being present. The means are
the end, always unfinished. This leads me to think that a critical
environmental cultural practice would operate in a potentially creative
or destructive tension between the limits of cultural work (as use
of language) and the liberation of presence (in its extreme beyond
language), and be non-teleological. But words do not stop ice melting.
Marcuse is aware of the difficulty but has no answer. He responds
to a question from the floor after his lecture, 'The End of Utopia'
at the Free University, Berlin (1970: 62-82),
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You
have identified what is unfortunately the greatest difficulty
... for new, revolutionary needs to develop, the mechanisms
that reproduce the old needs must be abolished. In order for
the mechanisms to be abolished, there must first be a need
to abolish them. That is the circle in which we are placed,
and I do not know how to get out of it. (Marcuse, 1970: 80). |
Marcuse falls back in later writing on the role of an intelligentsia,
which is parallel to an idea that art makes up the imaginative
deficit of science, or offers utopian glimpses. Neither are false,
but neither are revolutionary either. Both can be accommodated
to the strategies of containment of liberal reform, and do not
threaten the more violent strategies of neo-liberalism - they
may indeed make social organisation as a whole more acceptable
by adding notes of concern for the natural world as embellishment.
In recent collaborative art practices, the tension between art
and everyday life is exposed. Kester writes of projects in which
he sees,
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an
understanding that the issues of representation and material
production that so preoccupied previous generations of artists
have given way to engagement with modes of exchange, collective
action, and what Nicolas Bourriaud calls 'the sphere of interhuman
relations'. (Kester, 2005: 31, citing Bourriaud, 2002: 28) |
Kester
adds that these practices do not transcend previous practices
but indicate a widening of art's field. This appears a further
expansion of the field expanded in the 1970s to include art earthworks
(Krauss, 1983). But while the previous expansion was a modification
between adjacent cultural fields such as architecture and landscape,
it appears now, in its environmentalist forms, as a site between
activism, environmental debate, environmental science and ecology,
and single-issue politics. Rather than read these as boundaries
I see them as triangulation points for intersecting axis-lines.
Kester writes that the gap between them is "a relationship
in which the quotidian is held in an unresolved suspension with
the aesthetic." (Kester, 2005: 31). Perhaps the exit from
Marcuse's difficulty is glimpsed in a similarly unresolved suspension
between the desired utopia and the everyday life in which, for
Henri Lefebvre, moments of presence occur spontaneously (Shields,
1999: 58-64). Hence, the new does not require production because
it is already here, but requires only recognition (Miles, 2004:
70-92).
To conclude, if the prerequisite for an effective response to
the looming disaster of climate change is a new consciousness,
and end to environmental and social injustice, exploitation, and
destructiveness, how is this to emerge? Through art which represents
environments and environmental issues, or which discursively deals
with the values and underlying assumptions of attitudes to the
environment, or which pilots technologies for salvage and sustainability.
or which verges on activism as a transformational act? All have
limits and I have brought myself to the edge of saying that art
is a decoration of discomfort. Yet it is possible that critical
interventions in culture, as the vocabulary within which we act,
are acts in which the values of an alternative world are expressed
and shaped. This suggests an aesthetic, departing from the autonomy
of Modernism, from the disinterested judgement of Kant as well,
of interested and critical but not judgemental interventions in
discourses and realities; in which the creative imagination remains
in an always unresolved and active tension with everyday life.
Marcuse writes, "Liberation in nature is the recovery of
the life-enhancing forces in nature, the sensuous aesthetic qualities
which are foreign to a life wasted in unending competitive performances"
(Marcuse, 1972: 60). He saw this as integral to liberation in
human consciousness (through which we see nature and frame it
as idea).
REFERENCES
Belsey, C. (1985) The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference
in Renaissance Drama, London, Routledge
Belsey, C. (2002) Poststructuralism: a very short introduction,
Oxford, Oxford University Press
Benjamin, W (1998) Understanding Brecht, London, Verso
Bloch, E. (1986) The Principle of Hope, Cambridge (MA),
MIT
Bourriaud, N. (2002) Relational Aesthetics, Dijon, Les
presses du réel
Cilliers, P. (1998) Complexity & postmodernism: understanding
complex systems, London, Routledge
Foster, H. (1996) The Return of the Real, Cambridge (MA),
MIT
Jamison, A. (2001) The making of Green Knowledge: Environmental
Politics and Cultural Transformation, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press
Kester, G. (2004) Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication
in Modern Art, Berkeley (CA), University of California Press
Kester, G. (2005) ed. Groundworks, exhibition catalogue,
Pittsburgh (PA), Carnegie Mellon University
Krauss, R. (1983) 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field', in Foster,
H. ed. (1983) The Anti-Aesthetic: essays on postmodern culture,
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Kuspit, D. (1993) The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press
McKibben, B. (2005) 'Can You Imagine? A Warming World Needs Art',
Open Democracy website, 22nd April
Marcuse, H. (1969) An Essay on Liberation, Harmondsworth,
Penguin
Marcuse, H. (1970) Five Lectures, Harmondsworth, Penguin
Marcuse, H. (1972) Counter-Revolution and Revolt, Boston
(MA), Beacon Press
Miles, M. (2004) Urban Avant-Gardes: art, architecture and
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Roy, A. (2001) Power Politics, Cambridge (MA), South End
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Shields, R. (1999) Lefebvre, Love & Struggle, London,
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Sieferle, R. P. (1999) 'The Transformation of Landscape', catalogue
essay, Natural Reality, ed. Strelow, H., Stuttgart, Daco-Verlag,
pp. 148-159
Szerszynski, B. (1997) 'The Varieties of Ecological Piety', Worldviews
1, pp.37-45
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