The conversation "How do Artists Talk about the Environment" will be taking place in real time, in the very real and magnificent Point Lookout Headland on Minjerribah - North Stradbroke Island - on Saturday June 30, at 12.30pm. The day will begin with a Welcome to Country with Auntie Joan Hendricks. Please go to the Lines in the Sand website for more details.
Meanwhile, it would be great to keep this conversation alive on this blog site!
Tuesday 12 June 2012
Sunday 10 June 2012
How do artists talk about the environment
The question that runs through this conversation is: How do artists talk about the environment? This inquiry arose through a conversation with an environmentalist who was at pains to understand the point of art at all, beyond a decorative function. There is a clear dimension to the purpose of the sciences, likely, I would suggest, because purpose is at the heart of scientific rationalisation and it is therefore assumed that purpose drives all research and endeavour. In an ethos of binary logic, the rejection of purpose reads as purposelessness, so that if art cannot hold up under such scrutiny it is without purpose. In fact I would argue that to enlist in the service of purpose is to be heartily tied up with its opposite and that there are other ways of conceiving and engaging with the world that do not put purpose centre stage. I believe, now, that this is the reason I stumbled to respond to the environmentalist who had struck at the heart of my entire operational method: I live the world through art.
While that claim is rather awkward and not an entirely adequate assessment of things, it does bring together three words that do remarkable things when they come together: Live, world, art. The French philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy speaks about art as the creation of a world, and is one of many contemporary thinkers who question the role of representation, or what representation can be or mean, in language, art and other "meaning making" practices. Why mention representation? Because to talk about something is to represent it. My current interest in the relationship between art and environment is on a non-representational level. Is this even possible? Gestalt psychologists would say that even to look is to begin to make interpretations (which are representations). (This is why James Gibson, writing in the 60s and 70s is an interesting voice to resurface. More later).
Without going too far at this stage I propose that, to the question How do artists talk about the environment? my first response would be to deal with that word "about". In fact, let's just leave it out entirely and suggest a possibility of talking with the environment; a possibility of conversation, so that rather than standing back and analysing, interpreting or otherwise getting a grip on the world, I want to suggest a continuity between world and the beholding subject. Of course there is a long precedent to this notion from the early phenomenologists and more recently thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, but we really don't have to go there - unless we want to (and sometimes we do). But it is one thing to know this theoretically and another to feel it, to really sense this co-extension - the world and I unfolding, emerging together - and then to perform this act of becoming through art.
These are my first thoughts on this question, though they have been developing for a while now. I am intrigued to know how other artists would respond to this trigger. Perhaps we can do away with the question and just throw out some words without any grammar binding them at all: Art, environment, world, talk...HOW?
While that claim is rather awkward and not an entirely adequate assessment of things, it does bring together three words that do remarkable things when they come together: Live, world, art. The French philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy speaks about art as the creation of a world, and is one of many contemporary thinkers who question the role of representation, or what representation can be or mean, in language, art and other "meaning making" practices. Why mention representation? Because to talk about something is to represent it. My current interest in the relationship between art and environment is on a non-representational level. Is this even possible? Gestalt psychologists would say that even to look is to begin to make interpretations (which are representations). (This is why James Gibson, writing in the 60s and 70s is an interesting voice to resurface. More later).
Without going too far at this stage I propose that, to the question How do artists talk about the environment? my first response would be to deal with that word "about". In fact, let's just leave it out entirely and suggest a possibility of talking with the environment; a possibility of conversation, so that rather than standing back and analysing, interpreting or otherwise getting a grip on the world, I want to suggest a continuity between world and the beholding subject. Of course there is a long precedent to this notion from the early phenomenologists and more recently thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, but we really don't have to go there - unless we want to (and sometimes we do). But it is one thing to know this theoretically and another to feel it, to really sense this co-extension - the world and I unfolding, emerging together - and then to perform this act of becoming through art.
These are my first thoughts on this question, though they have been developing for a while now. I am intrigued to know how other artists would respond to this trigger. Perhaps we can do away with the question and just throw out some words without any grammar binding them at all: Art, environment, world, talk...HOW?
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