Art and Sustainability

Abstract

Over the past four decades, approaches to persistent and complex sustainability challenges have relied on solutions developed through scientific problem analysis and subsequent decision-making. Recently, this assumption has been exposed to various criticisms pointing out flaws and a lack of success. Art occupies a different intellectual, creative, and social space that can allow for surprising and promising perspectives and outcomes, offering innovative approaches to address sustainability problems. Since the 1990s, there has been a surge in interest among artists, curators, and theorists in collaborative art practice. Engaging directly with specific audiences and with pressing issues, the artists produce works that range in their intent from encouraging reflection, conversation, and learning to developing concrete solutions. This chapter focuses on the confluence of our heightened sustainability challenges with an increasing willingness among artists to address them and socially engaged practice as a particularly conducive art form. We focus on visual art and artists, although the most successful projects span disciplines and engage constituencies to challenge existing assumptions and propose new models.

The role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist.

(Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 2002, p. 13)

Artists cannot change the world…alone. But when they make a concerted effort, they collaborate with life itself, working with and between other disciplines and audiences, and given the chance to be seriously considered outside the rather narrow world of art, they can offer visual jolts and subtle nudges to conventional knowledge.

(Lippard, Weather Report, 2007, p. 6)

A more functional relationship between art and the everyday is urgently needed, through which artists can act as interlocutors…intervening in the debate itself and mediating new forms of acting and living.

(Teddy Cruz in Thompson, Living as Form, 2012, p. 58)