Interventions

1a. Natalie Loveless: Art and/in the Anthropocene

2b. Andrew S. Yang: The Aesthetics of Hidden Ecologies

3c. Karin Bolender: R.A.W. Arts of Barnyard Becomings

4d. Leanne Olson: From Repulsion to Care

5e. Christa Donner: Nurture/Future/Sculpture

6f. Scott Smallwood: Thoughts on an Unfinished Composition…

7g. Jessie Beier: Against Frontier Sustainability (or, Breaking Up with The High Frontier)

8h. Natalie Loveless: Aesthetic Attunements

Art and/in the Anthropocene

9The following contribution is the result of a panel, Art and/in the Anthropocene: A Debate on Sustainability and Ecology, co-organized for the Kule Institute for Advanced Study’s Around the World econference in May of 2018.1 The panel invited discussion of two pre-circulated questions:

10Question 1: ‘Sustainability’ has become a catchword du jour. Although it is defined in various ways, it is most often understood as a practice or way of doing things that can be maintained—or sustained—at a certain level indefinitely. For instance, when we talk about ecological sustainability in light of Anthropogenic climate change, we typically still understand it in terms of a battle between nature and human-made interventions (i.e., industry), where ‘we’ (humans) are able to ‘sustain’ nature as we prefer it. That is, we preserve the resources and practices needed for human consumption, whether that means energy consumption or aesthetic consumption. In this way, it might be argued that sustainability is undergirded by the (often) unquestioned imperative for ‘progress’ and ‘growth’, in spite of the growing realization that the planet on which we reside is, indeed, finite. When we talk about sustainability, then, what is it that we hope to sustain? How might we (re) define and (re) imagine sustainability beyond Anthropocentric desires, towards more livable futures for all? And what role might art and performance play in such (re) imaginings?

11Question 2: The term ‘Anthropocene’ has been hotly contested over the past few years, and debate generated under its sign has been crucial to new thinking in the arts and humanities.2 While the current state of ecological affairs requires responses from across the spectrum of human ingenuity, from the development of new technologies and innovation in engineering to far-reaching policy changes, the arts have an important— and often overlooked—part to play. Rather than providing either more information on the Anthropocene or new representations of the Anthropocene, artistic practices can work to shape cultural imaginaries in new ways through care-filled attention to form. In your practice, do you make a distinction between art that is on ecological topics and art that works with an ecological aesthetics (sensorium) or that takes ecological form? If so, how do you make and navigate such distinctions?

12This last question was mine.3 It emerges from my current research, a project tentatively called Sensing the Anthropocene: Aesthetic Attunement in an Age of Urgency. I borrow the title for the project from a short coda to Joanna Zylinska’s The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalype. In it, she writes: ‘the Anthropocene is not to be sensed only, or even primarily, on a visual level: we literally breathe it, day in, day out. The Anthropocene can therefore also be tasted, smelled, walked through, touched, and heard […] We could thus go so far as to say that we already sense the Anthropocene before we can come to terms with it; this is the case even if we ignore or deny it […] Picking up the […] injunction to see and sense better, I want to cast The End of Man as an invitation, issued to those embodied humans who still recognize themselves as such, to look around, take a deep breath, and set out to carve a new path between the familiar and the possible’.4

13Zylinska’s call, while not excluding material actions of protest, intervention, advocacy, policy and political engagement, is, additionally, an invitation to investigate other modes of being in the world, modes of being that work toward carving out new spaces of possibility that impact our local sites of exchange and engagement at the level of relational being within a human and more-than-human world. Responding to this call, the artists gathered together in this forum investigate the interplay of art, ecology and the Anthropocene—a term that carries within itself the very problem that it names: the Anthropos, an anthropocentric worldview that is, at its core, racist, sexist, speciesist and extractivist; that is, one that is fundamentally un-ecological. Together we argue that, while we are in desperate need of technological, economic and social restructuring, we are also in need of serious retraining in how we, as disparate yet interlocking individuals, collectivities and societies, move through, with, as and of, this world. How we breathe it, see it, and sense it. Day in, day out.

14In what follows, five of our six original participants, together with the panel organizers, offer responses that, in some cases, reflect what they said in session during the panel, and, in others, have been significantly reworked.5 Each contribution implicitly or explicitly addresses itself to the question of what art can do to unsettle our given relations under the sign of the Anthropocene. Andrew Yang argues for systems thinking in the context of art and ecology; Karin Bolender considers multispecies care practices; Christa Donner makes a plea for intergenerational empathy and collective problem-solving; Leanne Olsen examines our disavowed relations to waste; Scott Smallwood grapples with problems of representing the Anthropocene; Jessie Beier reflects, in a speculative-fictive form, on the folly of attempting to sustain our current ways of living and dying; and I conclude the forum with a reflection on art, ecological form and climate justice ethics. Together, these short essays invite the reader to consider the role of art in creating new conditions for climate justice thinking and action.

The Aesthetics of Hidden Ecologies

15The advantage that art seems to have over writing, law or science is that an artwork is free to take absolutely whatever form suits its function, to unapologetically make a medium the embodiment of its message. Given that freedom, it is incumbent on artists to strive to create work that is ecological in form and not only ‘content’.

16It is in vogue to call all sorts of things ‘an ecology’. Trained as an ecologist, I am critical of the term when it is applied to situations in which the non-human isn’t taken seriously, or when a systems-understanding of relationships aren’t a focus. That said, I think many things—even art itself—could be seen through an ecological lens in virtue of having inputs and outputs that complexly feedback on each other, and from which an integrated system emerges over time. To the extent that art is committed to the circulation of ideas, images and involves the exchange of material and economic resources, the art system is also an ecosystem. The question is just how much those aspects are acknowledged intentionally within artworks themselves. An early example might be Hans Haacke’s work entitled Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 that revealed MoMA’s economic entanglement with urban slum lords in New York City. Haacke’s project one year later, Rhinewater Purification Plant (1972), likewise engaged a kind of systems aesthetic, or, in that particular case, an ecosystems aesthetic around the pollution of rivers.6

17The ecological form that an artwork might take is always going to be partial for the simple fact that showing every aspect, connection or detail of a system is impossible. Because every representation is a model, it is necessarily incomplete, but richly so. The incompletion urges interpretation. An artwork, as a part, can point a viewer’s or participant’s imagination towards what isn’t explicitly shown, but must certainly be there. What are the active connections and important details teeming just out of view? To bring those imagined and very real things closer to the surface—and make one’s participation within them palpable— would seem to be the aspiration of an authentically ecological art.

18In the project Flying Gardens of Maybe (2012–2020),7 I sprout plants from seeds that I’ve recovered from the stomachs of birds that die in collisions with Chicago’s skyscrapers. While that one sentence sums up the project, the work of the art is to make the fuller equation—not only its sum—more perceptible and ponderable. Photographs, text, and diagrammatic wall drawings accompany the seedlings so that the complex eco-logic of connectivities involved can come into view. At minimum, these include: the light pollution and mirrored skyscrapers that scrape the sky of migrating birds; the all-volunteer Chicago Bird Collision Monitors that collect fallen birds throughout the city;8 the Bird Lab at the Field Museum of Natural History where the dead birds are brought to become part of the museum’s archive;9 the museum garbage bin from where I reclaim the seed-rich innards; and the birds themselves, cooperative vehicles by which plants have distributed themselves throughout the landscape for the past 125 million years. The idea is to, in some small way, point to how an ecology of interruptions might be rewoven through the connections of different communities, institutions, and non-human species to each other. Is this an example of authentically ecological art? Possibly yes, likely no, but maybe it is an experiment in that direction.

19Where does this notion of ecosystems aesthetics leave writing, photography, painting, or collage? Art in these mediums might explore ecological topics, but where within these two-dimensional formats can ‘ecological form’ take substantial shape? As artifacts within an ever more digitally-dominated world, perhaps text and image-based work would seem at special risk of becoming figuratively and literally immaterial—informational, maybe cybernetic, but not ecologic. Even if this were true (and it is not—every medium can engage an ecosystems aesthetic), the digital is material through and through. Our technosocial system invites us to neglect the fact that every PDF, JPG, and webpage owes its existence to the coal, oil, rivers and metal of a physical planet. The effectiveness with which digital media are able to screen-off their fossil-fueled nature or their exploitative manufacture is a testament to extractive capitalism’s skill at evading direct perception. But it is also due to the elusive nature of the pollution that seems to disappear into thin air. If the average American’s Internet usage produces 300 lbs (36 kg) of carbon dioxide a year—about the same as the combustion of 15 gallons (57 liters) of gasoline10—then this essay’s contribution to global greenhouse gas emission appears quite small. But if there is any defining character of the Anthropocene, it is the uncanny and counterintuitive way in which minute increments manifest as large and looming totalities. The nature of global warming is parts-per-million—a marginal fraction distributed and diffuse, however in ways that are not only countable, but also that seriously count.11

20Our habitual obliviousness to how visual culture is powered by the fossil fuel econo-ecology is what Brett Bloom has described as a lack of ‘petro-subjectivity’.12 Maybe these last two paragraphs are small gestures towards trying to activate that subjectivity in ecological form— to recognize this electronic text to be of an ecology and not just a means to communicate about it. How might we construct an aesthetic in the original sense of the word (aisthetikos, Greek—‘of or for perception by the senses’, or ‘perceptible things’) that aids in our perception of the active entanglements of every form within an active system of innumerable others? While aesthetics is often understood in the terms of visuality and art history, my hope is that aesthetics can be reclaimed in relational and naturalcultural ones of ecology; form transformed.13

R.A.W. Arts of Barnyard Becomings

21From the small ass farm where I live with a multispecies family in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, I am excited to share a short video,14 which illustrates certain ways that the Rural Alchemy Workshop (or R.A.W.) practice explores questions arising within this larger conversation. Borrowing Donna Haraway’s guiding question, ‘Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog?’, this barnyard-bound performance practice for the past eighteen years has investigated the question, ‘Who and what do I kiss when I kiss my ass?’—with the caveat that one’s ‘ass’ is never what one thinks it is.15 And of course, the gift of this question resides in the fact that there is no one simple or respectful way to answer it, as such. What matters is the practice of asking it, over and over again, in loving respect, humble wonder, and slow deliberation, and in every way imaginable… and then some.

22Grounded in webs of care, desire, uncertainty, and fraught complexities of intraspecies intimacies, this little video illustrates aspects of the R.A.W. practice I draw from to address important questions posed by this wonderful gathering of thinkers and makers around questions of Art and/in The Anthropocene, beginning with:

23What is it we hope to sustain?

24As I was pondering this question in the context of the discussion, the final passage from Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road came to mind. Actually, the last word, which is ‘mystery’. In case you haven’t read it, or don’t remember it exactly, the passage goes like this:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.16

25The sense of what the earth has lost because of human extractions and overblown hungers is profound and gut-wrenching. But also, in the midst of this stark evocation of loss, I find shimmers of hope in the last line, the last word. Because the mystery, old as it is, is always here. So if I had to narrow my response to the question ‘what do I want my practice and worldly actions to sustain?’ to a word, what I call up is this: mystery.

26We are aware of devastated earthly places, where untold lives are plundered and erased or pushed to the edges of extinction by human activities and effluents. But even in these places, mystery survives, because enmeshed lives are always full of untold stories and unreckoned possibilities.

27Reckoning with the so-called Anthropocene demands humility in a variety of forms. Art provides vital tools for honoring what we cannot know by empirical means, or sometimes grasp at all. Embracing indeterminacy, performance in particular makes vital spaces in which to cultivate humility and various kinds of joyful unknowing and passionate wonder. By the same token, such spaces may actively RESIST dominant and often devastating assumptions of growth and progress. Alongside more overtly political forms of resistance, artful openings allow us to slowly but steadily reimagine becomings within subtle meshes of mystery—maps and mazes, where we wander and invite others to wander with us, following nameless passions and tracing hopes for lively futures, full of mysterious mud and microbes and mammals and untold others.

On Ecological Forms

28I am immensely grateful to all of the artists, critics, curators and others who have cultivated practical spaces that allow artists to fully embody, explore and live messily inside the frames of our deepest questions, quandaries, and passions. Guided by these practices and theories, I can both creatively and critically dwell inside of what Natalie Loveless frames as an ecology of care in the R.A.W. barnyard.17 In the logic of art practice that formally embraces complex interconnection and care in order to do purposeful and responsible imagining within specific naturecultures, it’s all ecological. I most admire situated but wildly expansive art practices that resonate with Deborah Bird Rose’s observation that ecologies may not just be more complex than we think they are, they may be more complex than we CAN think.18

29I would call the R.A.W. an ecological art practice, not because it considers multispecies matters but rather because, more than anything else, it questions the wisdom and value of making certain distinctions between forms of life, versus the value of sustained attention to interdependencies. Creative practices seek and often find new ways of thinking and perceiving. What is most exciting to me is when we find unforeseen modes of becoming right in our own backyards, entangled bodies and beloved muzzle tongues.

From Repulsion to Care

30I met thirty-something Shoe in midsummer. It appeared after a layer was scraped back off the Clover Bar ‘Landfull’ in Edmonton.19 Deemed in its end phase of life as pre-determined by discard culture,20 it was told: your span has ended, please retire to the pile. Yet, just look at Shoe! It’s quite intact—not wasted away at all, barely decayed—though it is missing its pair.

31By pausing, by shifting the gaze, I alter the process. What was the physical process of discarding Shoe? A quick flick of the wrist and into the can/luggage compartment that took Shoe to the Edmonton Waste Airport and onward to its final destination?21

32But: freeze frame. Still image; a scenario where we can ultimately ‘sustain’ time. Here’s a photo:

33Now Shoe has emerged again, via the industrial combines, to be found through a lens. By creating a photo of Shoe, I immortalize the sight of Shoe. This is not a familiar sight of Shoe, nor is the site readily accessible. By making Shoe a four-foot art piece, I ask for an expansion in visual memory. I ask to set aside a slot in our minds for decay. With Shoe soon to be in a gallery, I wonder, will there be any empathy for Shoe?

34I recently completed a year-long artist residency at the Edmonton Waste Management Centre, a program funded by the Edmonton Arts Council. Embedded in the operations of waste managing and processing, I became more and more comfortable with discards, becoming visually familiar with the materials and working up to an embrace of decay.

35As James K. Rowe asserts in his essay, ‘Is a fear of death at the heart of capitalism?’,22 to combat and interrogate the fear of death (or time), we must first acknowledge the fear, observing where it arises and how it permeates. Knowing this, we can familiarize. We can learn, we can say Hello to the land that holds these materials. Through acknowledgement, we learn which land holds these materials, reflecting on the proximity of that land to the city and power structures that created the materials.

36Let’s take a closer look at other skins of consumption.

37Is waste the visual reminder of what we pay to hide?

38Stacked in a pyramid, an undeniably hierarchical formation, are the leftover carcasses of corporate slogans. Viewing corporate advertising as a muddled slew for a year has been a refreshing experience. Cleansing, even. By documenting materials in these formations—as decaying slogans or word puzzles—I introduce an additional view of consumption:

Nurture/Future/Sculpture

39The language of sustainability is used to describe a sensibility of shared ecological values, inspiring new tools to mitigate the harm that humans inflict upon our own planet. These days you can find an endless supply of ‘green’ products that are both innovative and familiar, allowing consumers to pursue a comfortable lifestyle while reassuring them they’re doing something nice for the world. This approach is premised on the idea that humans are the ones in charge here, that we are an inherently aggressive and invasive species tamed through the possessions we choose to buy. Of course, we are more vulnerable than we like to believe, and none of this is especially ‘sustainable’ in the long run. My own working definition of sustainability requires an investment in relationships built among the complex network of organisms that live in and around us. It is a messy, slow process of inquiry, failure, and mutual respect. When considering how humans can live in balance with the ecosystems we so heavily rely on, what role can artistic practice play?

40If we are to find a way forward, we will need to do so with creativity, and with care. When I say ‘care’ here, I mean carefully, but also with respect to those who care for others, whose knowledge and labor have always been devalued by capitalist culture. Giving care greatly expands our capacity for improvisation and creative problem-solving, both critical resources in this time of rapid change. Creative caregivers can play many roles in reimagining and redefining sustainability. Some of us are already doing and living this in interesting ways, both public and private.

41As an artist, I move between the imaginative space of the studio and more social, hands-on engagement. I use painting and drawing to propose speculative systems, often borrowing models from other organisms to investigate what we can learn from them, and how we might co-evolve. While drawing tends to be a solitary activity, I approach it as a collaboration with many ‘future foremothers’, working across time and space to shape a new domain. These foremothers are writers, artists, and activists, some well-known and some less so. They include the Buddhist environmentalist Joanna Macy, who facilitates conversations with beings two hundred years in the future, the writer Marge Piercy, whose work proposes a holistic restructuring of society after environmental and economic collapse, and my daughter, Stella, who has radically altered my relationship with the natural world and with time itself. I translate what I learn from these foremothers not only into drawings but also toward workshops, interview-based projects, and guided visualizations that aim to activate intergenerational empathy and collective problem-solving.

42This process extends to my work as a parent, and as a college educator working with themes of care and sensory experience in my classes. Raising a child and institutional teaching are not activities that we typically consider ‘art’, partly because they’re so personal and intimate in scale—but I recognize them as part of the larger creative practice of modeling systems I hope to see in the world. Caring for the next generation has changed my relationship with the past and the future, compelling me to speculate beyond my own lifespan and to consider my role more carefully. If I involve my daughter in the process of growing and composting things, it makes these processes visible, accessible and integrates them into her larger world view. I consider this a sort of ecological form, one which may—or may not— be disseminated further, holding the potential to grow and evolve as others pass it along.

43Most recently I’ve been taking my interest in social sculpture23 and nature-based adventure playgrounds into some practical, hands-on work with my community. We’ve been working to create situations where—even in the middle of an intensely urban place like Chicago— future generations can develop an ongoing relationship with nature. When young people explore the natural world on their own terms, they develop new skills and create potent sensory memories. They become more mindful members of the local ecosystem. If we’re lucky, some of these children may become future stewards of the environment. This broader ecological form feeds back into my more speculative, studio-based practice, and vice versa. As artists and scholars, as parents, as people, we play a critical role in transmitting information from the past and the possible future to the next generations, who will help shape what is to come.

Thoughts on an Unfinished Composition…

44As I consider the provocations offered—about climate change, sustainability, what it is we are sustaining and why it matters—I am in the midst of working on a new artwork that addresses these very questions by working sonically with data on climate change. The data I work with includes temperature changes over time, per country or per region; humidity changes; the frequency of catastrophic storms; deforestation and the loss of our planet’s lungs; the loss of ice in Greenland, the Arctic, Antarctica; our glacier inventory… and on the list goes.

45When my partner and I first immigrated to Canada, one of the first things we did was visit the Athabasca glacier in Jasper National Park, nestled in the Rocky Mountains that follow the Alberta-British Columbia border. As we began our walk from the parking lot to the edge of the glacier, we noticed along the way a series of small signs—monuments really—with a simple year printed on each. We realized that these signs marked the edge of the glacier in that year, showing how far the glacier has receded over time. Upon realizing this, Jen and I each entered into a state of mourning, stepping away from each other to contemplate the glacier, hiding our silent tears from each other and the other people there. I recalled that I had come this way before when I was only three years old, with my parents, as part of a long road trip to Alaska. I don’t remember much about this trip, of course. But I thought about this as I searched for the sign that was closest to the year 1972.

46With these memories front and center, I asked myself: should my new work be about glacier loss? Should it be Canada-specific? Should I insert myself into it—by engaging with aspects that are personally meaningful to me? I want people to feel these changes, to feel the loss, the disappearance and the continuing slide…

***

47I grew up in the mountains of Colorado, and mountains have always been very special to me. I’m not a religious person, but I think of mountains as living things, as spirits. To my young eyes, they were the edges of my world, always snow-covered, even in the hottest of summers. Travelling through flat places like Kansas or the panhandle of Texas was a bizarre experience to my young brain, as the world seemed to go on forever. It was almost dizzying.

48Recently, when I was visiting my parents in Colorado, I found (in the garage) my grandmother’s dinner bell. It’s about thirty-five cm tall, and has a beautiful floral pattern etched into its bronze body. I picked it up and rang it. The sound of that bell startled me. I was immediately transported to my grandparents’ home in Stephenville, Texas, circa 1981 or so.

49The bell hung on the wall separating the living room from the kitchen, and I recall annoying everyone by ringing it loudly before dinner. Even though it has been over thirty years since I’ve been in my grandparents’ home, I remember every room: the feel of the carpet on my feet, the tile of the kitchen floor, the smell of the garage where my cousin’s skateboard hung on the wall, the homemade ladder my grandpa made, the strange feeling of moist Texas dirt in my hands as I made mud pies in the backyard.

50On and on the memories flood in, all because of this bell.

51I made recordings then and there, and now they sit on my computer, playing through my studio speakers back in Edmonton, as I contemplate climate change and my family. My grandparents’ Texas oil money that helped put me through college. The mysterious pump jacks in their gentle up and down motions as far as the eye can see on the infinitely flat expanse of the panhandle of Texas as we drive from Colorado. Linda Ronstadt and John Denver on 8-tracks.

52‘Are we there yet?’ I keep asking my dad.

***

53I’m not a scientist, and as I pour over the climate change data I’ve gathered for this new work, I can’t understand much of what I’m seeing. I have to rely on people who can. What I do have are my senses. Other animals have different senses, different ways of measuring and knowing. If only we could harness the knowledge of our non-human companions. The octopus with its many tentacles. The birds and forest creatures who can predict a storm. The hummingbird who can somehow find its way across the world. The cat who somehow knows when a human is about to die.

54What is it we want to sustain? To the best of our ability, and with the understanding that there are many layers of time and space in our universe that we will never be able to contemplate, the human project must be to sustain maximal joy, and minimal suffering. We need to own our planet, to be good stewards of it as a precious creation, whether given to us by gods, or spontaneously generated by some mysterious process. We must work with our non-human counterparts to make our time joyous, and for as many of us as possible. What else is there?

55Time marches forward. Bells mark time and events. Data drifts, as the conditions they outline become unmoored and they float away into an unknowable future. As we drift, and try to understand the data and each other, perhaps we can turn the tide.

Against Frontier Sustainability (or, Breaking Up with The High Frontier)

56Dearest [redacted],

57I finally received the promotional pamphlets you sent. The illustrations look great. The High Frontier (THF) is lucky to have such a formidable artist on the team. And only a few parts of your letter were redacted this time—here’s hoping my words also get back to you without too many interferences.

58The pamphlets arrived at just the right time too. Just last week, the annual EOD24 was declared (arriving even earlier this year) and, as has been the case the last three years, rations have now been imposed on every citizen. Meanwhile, state officials have, again, extended unlimited access to [redacted]. People are frustrated, but also too exhausted to do anything about it.

59And so, as you can imagine, looking at your gorgeous illustrations of life on THF has made me consider, once again, taking the leap to join you up there. You were right: the brochure really does sell it! I know the orbital real estate model has really taken off (so to speak), but the marketing team at THF, armed with amazing artists such as yourself, really leads the way in terms of selling a rather stellar (!) vision of sustainability. ‘Love the Earth? Leave it!’25 —genius slogan. The section titled ‘Project Human 2.0’26 is also really compelling: the pitch that THF has been able to develop a ‘safe operating space’ for human preservation and perpetuation through sustainable energy (i.e., those solar power satellites that provide ‘unlimited clean energy’ enabling infinite growth and higher productivity for industry and agriculture) is really powerful. (Although I can’t help but wonder, how powerful? Like, how are things actually working up there? You mentioned last time that there were problems with [redacted] and [redacted]—any new updates there?)

60It is very tempting though; the thought of taking a long bath gives me goosebumps while memories of fresh herbs make my mouth water. Not to mention the job opportunities—the Representational Innovator (RI) position you mentioned in your last letter does seem to fit with my skills. After reading the material, and especially after taking in all of those persuasive illustrations, I was this close to heading to the local Expansionist Agency to sign up for work duty abroad. (BTW: The recruiters are still doing weekly visits, touting all of the opportunities ‘up there’ by comparing it to the bleak reality of living ‘down here’.) But, like I’ve expressed to you before, I am finding it harder and harder to get behind the project. I can’t help but think about how the accumulation of things up there, is also the accumulation of extinction (or worse, the aggregation of antagonisms, oppression and suffering) down here.27 Just yesterday, for instance, [redacted]. Despite the ongoing protests from people refusing the options given, [redacted]. I could hardly believe it. But, unfortunately, such examples are now the norm. It seems that the promise of mining asteroid and lunar materials has been swiftly replaced by ‘alternative’ extraction projects down here, which have [redacted], leaving the rest of us behind. As this year’s EOD makes clear, THF’s ‘sustainable’ endeavours have not only carried forward the same old risks, including [redacted], but have also introduced radically new risks that are still, even as we are experiencing them, difficult to fathom.

61As I contemplated the material you sent, I couldn’t help but be reminded of all of those long, and often heated, debates we used to have about these things. Remember that time when things almost came to blows after our argument about the very tenability of this thing we call sustainability? It was right after THF made its official public launch and you finally told us about your position as Visual Communication Manager. At the time, it was hard for me to articulate my discomfort with the situation, but now I know it was because all of these pitches for a ‘sustainable’ human empire, no matter how artfully presented, could only ever be made possible via the continuation of our exploitative, extractive, and expansionist legacies. Not to mention, [redacted]. While THF is pitched (and sold) as a seemingly endless frontier movement, which, through sustainability rhetoric, has been able to ‘solve’ the apparently threatened plenitude of (human) Life as we know it, it has also perpetuated an untenable vision of human supremacy that has now occluded the very possibility of challenging human rule from our range of vision. It is simply taken for granted that any sense of sustainability will forever be founded on the conservation and triumph of a particular expression of human being, and thus all of our future imaginaries now operate through an unquestioned dedication to the industry of a particular form of human preservation.

62That was the night where we began to part ways, I think. It was also the night that things crystallized for me, when I realized that perhaps there is no ‘human enterprise’ worth defending on a suffering planet, that perhaps there is no such a thing as a ‘safe operating space’ for humans to persevere after all. While I didn’t have all the words back then, I do remember asking you: what is it, exactly, that we are aiming to sustain? And so, while I’m glad we have reconnected, I need to tell you that my answer remains the same. While I am sometimes envious of your ability to keep living a life of convenience and pleasure, of more importance to me now is working through collective ways of avoiding a political imagination captive to an either/or organization of reality: either collapse or sustain. Or, put another way, rather than focusing on actions that promise to sustain and extend the present (in all of its ecocidal glory) into the future, I have begun to question whether this present, with all of its desires and interests, is perhaps not worthy of sustaining.28

Aesthetic Attunements

63We are living in a time of climate catastrophe, ecological genocide and, now, pandemic. Species are dying at unprecedented rates; hurricanes, tornadoes, fires and floods occur with increasing intensity; the economy is crashing, and most are (at the time of writing) isolating in place— to one degree or another. This is a time during which we—those who labour in the fields of art practice, criticism, history and theory—may legitimately, and in new ways, be asking ourselves ‘Why Art?’ The responses gathered together in this forum, implicitly or explicitly, work to shift the terms of this question from ‘why art?’ to ‘which art?’ Or, from what ‘art’ (as a category of expressive, interventionist or critical cultural attention) can do in general, to which forms of artistic practice reattune and recoordinate us and how. In this way, they grapple with the distinction raised at the beginning of this forum, that of ‘ecological form’.

64Often, when I begin to talk about art that is formed ecologically I am asked whether I mean art with an activist or pedagogical approach to the environment and the human’s place within it, or whether the distinction ‘ecological form’ refers to something like a work of art’s carbon footprint or some other measure of ecological impact. My response is generally this: while I think that it is important—even crucial—that we pay attention to carbon use and environmental impact at the level of the conception, production and circulation of artwork, and that artwork that raises awareness about climate catastrophe is urgently needed at this historical juncture, both of these ways of thinking about ecological form, while necessary, are not, to my mind, sufficient. Not sufficient for art, and not sufficient for life.

65By all means: recycle. Walk or take public transport instead of driving. Buy an electric car and get solar roof panels. Boycott institutions in bed with the fossil fuel industry. But as anyone who has started to research any one of these individual actions in any depth can attest to: before long we are down the rabbit hole of impossibility, unsure whether the energy used by the recycling plant or to produce the electric car fuel cell, in the final analysis, is actually ecologically sound or whether it simply defers or distracts from the problem by offering a short term and ultimately short sighted solution. This is not to say: don’t research and make the best choices possible at any given moment, as needed. It is to say: don’t mistake such actions as carrying any guarantee. We simply do not know and cannot know what it will take to pull ourselves back from the brink of climate collapse. When it comes to the impacts of climate change, it is not if, but when. And that when (and where and for whom) ongoingly exceeds our predictive capacities.

66What the future holds we cannot guess, nor do we want to; but what we can and must do is move forward, one conference, conversation and artistic project at a time, looking to support multimodal ways of working in and with the arts and humanities, attuned to human and more-than-human social justice. As Beier, my co-organizer for the panel on which this forum is based, evocatively argues, we must resist the complacency of a technophilic guarantee: the seduction of thinking that the aim is to maintain economic growth within the logics of late-stage capitalism; the idea that the problem is simply what we are using (‘dirty’ as opposed to ‘clean’ energy) rather than, additionally, how we are using it. While it matters that we pay attention to our carbon footprints, and think about what it means for a scholar or artist to have used about half a ton of CO2 equivalent or more to fly from point A to point B to give a talk, or to consider the relative merits of the 55 or so tons expended for one of the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch sculptures,29 we must do so non-innocently. Tallying sustainability impacts and working to offset them without any attempt at degrowth is a mode of accounting that remains inside of the very system that got us into this mess in the first place.

67Within the productivist and technophilic structures of our current economic system and worldview, art is understood as a cultural additive rather than a core value. The contributors to this forum challenge this perspective. “How might the world be shaped and organized differently?” is a question that matters urgently, and it is a question that art—particularly art attuned to social and ecological justice—asks. We need not only political, technological, and economic reorganization to help us move beyond our toxic ways of doing life under petro-colonial-capitalism, but social and cultural shifts—shifts at the level of daily orientations and local practices. Art, as a practice of aesthetic micropolitical re-attunement, encourages resilience and imaginative worlding, not by offering more facts but by finding ways, through aesthetic encounters and events, to persuade us to care, and to care differently. And while a creative, speculative, and multispecies model of care is far from the only thing needed in the context of climate justice and action, it is perhaps the most urgent.

68We live in a world in which care practices are deeply undervalued, and, even when they are valued, too-often life is structured in such a way that there is (or seems to be) no time to really inhabit care as an ethics of being in-and-with-and-as the world. Care of things—attunement to things—that make no sense within a capitalist, consumption-driven, world view. We know the climate is changing. We know that the devastating effects that surround us will have consequences beyond our ken. More headlines and graphs aren’t shifting—at a scale that matters— how we do human and more-than-human social and material life.

69Given this, I stake my lot with art that works at the micro-political level of the here and now—art with both an aesthetic and an activist impulse. One of the quotes that I’ve been working with in this context is the following, by the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway: ‘What is needed is action and thinking that does not fit within dominant capitalist cultures [… rather, we need] on the ground collectives capable of new practices of imagination, resistance, revolt, repair, and mourning and living and dying well’.30 In developing such practices, she tells us a ‘common livable world must be composed, bit by bit, or not at all’.31

70This is key.

71To take this quotation seriously is to argue for the need for new (artistic, pedagogical, institutional) strategies, strategies that force us to develop our artistic and academic research differently, responsively. Art that remakes relations. Work that asks us to render each other capacious and capable in our knowledge making-and-sharing practices; that asks us to negotiate the production of more livable and more just worlds, attentively, slowly… bit by bit.

72In our given world, we romanticize the heroes. But real change doesn’t happen at the level of the heroic, it happens at the level of the micro-political. It happens in the crevices. Yes, grand acts matter. They gather attention. They mobilize affect. They shift paradigms. But it is at the level of our everyday micro choices about how we move through the world that lasting change happens. Our temporal and material attunements form us. They shape us. And these shapes matter. To my mind, what art can contribute to the project of nurturing affective resilience and more-than-human social justice is this: local, situated, and care-filled attention to how form makes worlds.