MixedMedia

Today I’m headed to Ithaca, New York to give a talk, run a workshop and in other ways participate in Earth Day celebrations that take place there each year through the Center for Environmental Sustainability (CES) which will sponsor,”GREENING THE ARTS.”  They’ve asked me to be part of an informal panel on Friday morning exploring the questions, “What IS ‘green’ art” and “Why is it important”?

Other panelists will hopefully include Liesel Fenner, Coordinator of Americans for the Arts’ Pubic Art Network; Sam Bowers, founder/director of greenmuseum.org; 2 local Ithaca artists who have curated ‘green’ art shows; and the director of Cornell University’s art museum. After the panel session, folks will be invited to form lunch groups to come up with their own definitions – and then to return for an afternoon Open Space aimed at generating action plans both for local next steps and for the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. We’ll also do a Peace Tiles workshop that Saturday.

This should be really cool. There’s only one glitch, which is that I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly “green” artist, neither in outlook nor technique. Put differently, this is not the standpoint from which I approach my artwork, although I can see many intersections. Which is why I’m excited: the connections to sustainability, development, and important frameworks like the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Now these I can get excited about.

So what is “green art” from my perspective? What I think is that this “discipline” of “green” art is two things:

• One is a movement that puts “greenness” as an artistic value – which is to say the pursuit of “techniques” of “greenness”, which is new and kind of boring to me personally. That said, its got to be enormously important to our understanding of art and the world around. An analogy would be Joseph Albers’ color studies. I simply don’t have the patience and acuitivity of mind to pursue that stand to the level Joseph was able to – which contributed enormously to the arts, grounded as it was in science. Furthermore, the intersection of art and technology can be enormously dynamic, creating new “green products” for popular consumption that help to mitigate our collective negative impacts on the environment.

• Two is an approach (“narratives” and a collection of “archetypes”) that ground the artist, artwork and society in a ‘holistic’ understanding of humans, the environment, and unseen forces (maybe math; maybe spirits) in an interdependent web of “life.” In other words, it seems to me that “green art” in this sense is less concerned with technique than with certain cultural stories and signs, which perhaps can be best represented through particular medium – stone, wood, etc “worked” to varying degrees. As I write, I am reminded of the the young Thomas Merton’s study of nature in poetry – specifically that of Gerard Manley Hopkins – and thus human kinds relation to god as it can be found in and through nature.

That said, there must be thousands of artistic traditions that are perfectly “green” by today’s new standards and yet never viewed themselves in such as way. Quite the contrary, the artist would have been working with the materials and tools best available to him/her, though in retrospect one might find a particular satisfaction in qualifying the art as “green” for some reason…

Hm, am I making any sense?

Furthermore, I wouldn’t expect green art to be any more ‘backwards-looking’ or anti-science than I would other fields where ‘greenness’ is being used as a value – architecture, design, engineering, etc. In fact, contrary to what writers like Strout seem to describe, “green” comes with much heavier scientific connotation for me than, say, the somewhat backward craning romantic historicism of early predecessors, say, a William Morris or the later work of “new age” artists. While some artists may reject anything but naturally occurring materials out of hand, I have a suspicion that the label “green art” is large enough to be seen more as a spectrum than a collection of binary opposites.

Two perhaps clumsy continuums by way of illustration:

John Ruskin <—-> Walter Gropius

Andy Goldsworthy <—-> James Turell

What I think Peace Tiles can contribute to the larger conversation are at least two discussions:

• How Peace Tiles, as an educational tool, can raise awareness about important development issues related to the environment, for example urbanization and stewardship
• How in practice Peace Tiles embraces – but is not grounded in or limited to – re-use of materials and renewable resource consumption.

Anyway, because I know so little about the emerging discipline of “green art”  and yet feel deeply attached to international development, I expect to learn alot, make new friends, and have a great time in Ithaca, home of one of the country’s most successful land grant universities (and happens to have terrific programs in planning, architecture, international development, sociology, and landscape design, and fine arts – all of which interest me greatly).

More soon…