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...And the Future is Now (II)


by artists and supporters of this movement

John K. Grande, Michael Vitti, Marion Weber/Danny and Sandra Hobson, Peter Fend

Part (I) Introduction, Debbie Mathew, Jim Cummings, Lillian Cooper, and Shan Wells, Part (III) Tim Collins, Henry Corning, Aviva Rahmani, Laura Audrey, Part (IV) Perceiving Nature by Jim Nollman

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John K. Grande writer and art critic

The Spiritual in Art Linking Nature to it All

We live in a time when all forms - natural or synthetic - are generally not read as a natural flow. Each element in our environment is actually linked to all others. This interconnection between things and inter-relation of elements is as much physical as it is spiritual. We can think of the spiritual as something emphatic and yet not quantifiable. The sense that resources (ourselves included) have limits is essential to our survival both as individuals and as a planet.

Angel wings.
"The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive."
- John Sladek

Screen driven imagery has made us extremely efficient readers of visual and informational data, but the downside to this is we read the tactile, physical world around us in the same way. A hands-off approach to reality tends to work against the individual's understanding of experience.

The objectification of imagery has lead to a simplification of nature, a simplification of human emotions. Walking in the woods is a thoroughly satisfying experience. It liberates our soul from the quantification of emotions, feelings, experiences. Object products tend to train us to read the material world in reverse.

A wooden box is actually a tree cut into linear sections and reassembled. We think of the box as a box with no prior history or context. Change is manifest in the texture and erosion of all things. Experience is superior to the material world that inspired it. The flux and flow of energies that surround us cannot be measured. They cannot be quantified.

Cultural identity is as necessary to humanity as the sun is to nature, for its guides us to identify who we are, where we have come from and where we are going. The impulse to create reflects an implicit desire to improve the world around us. Art can no longer be purely object based. The limits imposed on us by nature are guiding us to establish a new global ethic that involves the mutual respect between all living things. Art draws upon that flow of energies that is part of the process of life, the procreative core of our need to transform, enrich, express. Nature is the Art of which We are a Part.

Art will have a much more pervasive, subtle role. Is it possible that significant art of the future will present an entirely new basis for aesthetic judgement, where near invisibility is considered "high art"? This kind of aesthetic neutrality would be judged not by how it stands apart from, but by how it silently integrates into a given environment. By not being the central feature of a given environment, it would represent an unexpected discovery. It could express a return to the soul and assume a mythic role for art and inspire us to see our place in nature in new and interesting ways. Art, like nature, could be allowed to exist in its own right, without the codification, the labelling and textual translations that render it all so similar, distancing us from natural experience. It could be immediately understood as experience and not simply be ideational translation. An art of the future could present us with a holistic way of envisioning culture ; of embodying a mutualist, co-dependent respect for our ecosystem. Any variety of materials could play an active, equal part in the creative process to that of the artist. This would allow art to renew its place alongside science in developing a future vision. Materialist values and historic notions of progress would have no place within this proto-causal state. Nature is an open and versatile system. The instinctive life forces that truly propel us and the physical energies that are a part of our universal experience are the art of which we are a part. We can and must move beyond the rigid, production oriented and mediatic forms that now threaten the extinction of art, and learn to communicate with and through life's transformative energies.

It is the reintegration of economy into ecology that will prove the major direction of society in the 21st century. The malaise of enforced production-consumption patterns with which we now live must be understood for what they are : an abject form of distraction designed to subject the human spirit to the same sort of exploitation that is occurring to other life forms and all nature on earth. Today's economists could do well to understand this as they subject human beings and our ecosystem to relentless onslaughts of profiteering. None of us will survive this kind of enslavement unless we develop a new sense of responsibility for the immediate world we live in. We can no longer solely express humanity's joys and despairs independent of, and without considering nature.

As our society does move towards a softer, holistic approach to real human needs and abandons a value system based in pure profit and the excess extraction of resources from nature, the artist will be able to change his or her expression to one based on self-reliance and a new appreciation of life on earth. No longer an offshoot of an economic reward system, art can be a celebration of nature. The artist can put something back into nature by direct action. The landscape architect can work with sculptors, as the architect can work with artists to create more organically variable living conditions. Sustainable environments in our cities will relieve the stresses of urban living, encourage us to improve our everyday environments, instead of escaping from them. The future of art will manifest a strengthening of our relationship with nature. We can rediscover a basic curiosity as to who we are, why we are alive, and where we stand in relation to the universe. Perhaps, with the aid of art, we will begin to realize that though other forms of life on this planet respect our place, we have often denied them theirs.

A new emphasis on the immediate environment and culture, de-centralized and focussed on the specific needs of each bio-region, that realizes the limits to resources on the basis of scale, not sensibility, could be exactly what the many regions of the world need to regenerate. It will encourage a greater resourcefulness, a sense of cultural permanence in us all. In the words of an old Lakota song: "Take courage, the earth is all that lasts." The endless movement of materials and goods, so costly in terms of resources, like the endless movement of art to international venues, is a transitional phenomenon, an ephemeral response to unreal demands and expectations. This will no longer be the function of culture in the future. More likely, artists and citizens of the world will seek to be responsible for where they live and they will express these concerns in intuitive ways. It will depend on each individual's commitment to identify less with external, material results -- the product -- and more with integral, lasting values. A resouling of art and society based in real communication -- the process -- is taking place.

A Case for Animal Literacy.
"Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress."
- Charles Darwin, Life and Letters.

Values that call for a reintegration of economy into ecology will be marketable in the future. The "big sell" commoditization of all facets of our lives, art included, is based in the objectification of nature. It empties us of any real emotions and it makes us feel valueless. It also causes moral crises that are simply not necessary. Materialist values can no longer be supported by a responsible, survival-based economy. Nature is an open and versatile system.

In the future, artists may have to leave their works unsigned so that we can appreciate them for their own merits and envision their integral place within a specific environment. Embodying a principle of near-invisibility, art could acquire new meanings. This process would demystify the myths surrounding the material meaning of art which, in this century, have threatened the integral process of creativity and retarded the natural process of exploration and discovery which the creative process implies. This challenge will require as much strength and resistance on the part of the artist as has ever been known in the world's recorded history. An active acceptance of an equal, not superior, relation, to other species and elements in our ecosystem is essential.

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Michael Vitti

Similar to Jackie Kennedy's 1960's fashion statements that spawned a contemporary fashion frenzy, our current officials espouse a contrary effect on nature, environment and perceptions of nature. Nature as art may become more precious and rarer as the current climate to exploit resources rather than preserve natural habitats remains in vogue. The experience of environment in art or as art will continue to distance itself from the audience experience, removing itself from our day to day experience until the last environmental features have been recorded & preserved in museums. Greed, war and energy are distractions from a greater sense of order.

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Marion Weber, Danny and Sandra Hobson
Arts and Healing Network

The future of environmental art is one of leadership. Artists possess the ability to look at the troubles of our time from another perspective and bring deep creativity to problem solving. It is time for artists to come out of the studio and bring their creativity into the larger world. Where we have the four elements of community, creativity, environment and healing coming together - that is where hope lies.

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Peter Fend, Ocean Earth view art

Periodically in human evolution, art returns to its original role: of assuring a sustainable relation between humans and all the other animals and plants. The artist, painting for unrecorded millenia on stone walls or floors, helped make sure of success in the hunt. Also, with other drawings or sculptures, success in procreation. In both cases, the tribe was led to a better communion with animal forces, with animal magic.

Nowadays, the human tribe, evermore global, is out of synch with the other animals and plants. Nowadays, it becomes evermore difficult to achieve success in the hunt. There's success with procreation, one might say, but there's ever-diminishing likelihood of success in the hunt. Or the gathering or the fishing or any other co-existence with our fellow species.

In pre-historic times, failure to succeed in the hunt would lead to replacement of the artist. It could even lead to death of the artist, in the belief that the artist practiced bad animal magic.

The environmental art movement and eco-art constitute slim, weak efforts to bring art back to its original function. Part of the weakness comes from being categorized as a subsection of art. Part, also, comes from being denied the powers accorded to art in vigorous societies: namely, the power of organizing technology.

That power nowadays reposes largely in the Pentagon. In a healthy society, artists would be directing those technological advances which are now controlled by the Pentagon and its associates. The artists would show ways of controlling and organizing territory -- the essence of regional planning, and the function of the military -- instead of, as now, the adherents of old-fashioned ways.

To be successful, what is now called the environmental art movement, or is now called eco-art, should gain the power and socio-territorial power now enjoyed by the occupants of the Pentagon. It should satellite survey, site plan, territorially-control and resource-engineer the planet with the same strength, but very different consequences, as do the cohorts today of Donald Rumsfeld.

Pollen, muck, scum, and trash echoes in a creek.
"The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet."
- William Gibson

With this restoration of power and function in global society, what is now called environmental art would assert the original nature-mimetic functions of art, extending from drawing through high-tech painting and sculpture on up to architecture, or territorial organization, as What Art Does. By architecture is meant not buildings, alone, but what Leon Battista Alberti presciribed: that arrangement of technology for a city, for a habitat, which assures clean air, clean water, circulatory space and --yes-- defense. This function was exercised by Da Vinci, by French landscape and military architects Vauban and Le Notre, by the onetime artist-kings of Ceylon. This function can be attained again. For the sake of the planet, it must be attained again."

To re-establish the function of artists on the planet, to reverse Global Warming and end Global Terror, focus now on four tasks:

(1) Replace fossil fuels with renewable sources of hydrocarbon or hydrogen fuel. Start in islands, like Jamaica, Iceland or Ireland, where biomass is available, where the market can be easily saturated, and where regional identity is strong. Use paradigms from Beuys' Fat Corner, Edelson's whale cycles and process art.

(2) Taking a cue from "Water: A Natural History", reverse desertification wherever wild animal habitats, starting with underground animals, can be restored. For the Middle East, promote parallels of effort -- based on a US State Department program -- between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of California, and between an enlarged Dead Sea Basin (a possible Palestine) and the Great Basin (with its several subsections). Thus, completely replace the policies now being essayed by the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Powell regime.

(3) Following through on the 1978 arrangement for earth art projects to be built by the Iranian military, for recovery of savannah where now there is desert, and on the 1985 request by Algerian diplomats for a similar earth art collaboration with the military in the Sahara, project a US military policy throughout the arid world of pan-territorial water cycle restoration. Thus, after a 25 year hiatus, we might realize what Willoughby Sharp calls "the triumph of American art."

(4) Following through on the second amendment, giving civilians the right to bear arms, artist-citizens take up the weapon of satellite surveillance of the planet, for mass-media markets, ecological restoration and depletion-taxation purposes. Make use of what is now monopolized by the professional military, so that people can see for themselves what is going on,and what is to be done. The mirror replaces the master.. A completely different posture of the United States towards the rest of the world ensues, in line with the probes of artists in the past thirty years.

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...And the Future is Now (I)"
(Introduction, Debbie Mathew, Jim Cummings, Lillian Cooper, Shan Wells)

...Part (II)"
(John K. Grande, Michael Vitti, Marion Weber/Danny and Sandra Hobson, Peter Fend)

...Part (III)"
(Tim Collins, Henry Corning, Aviva Rahmani, Laura Audrey)

...Part (IV)"
(Perceiving Nature by Jim Nollman)

So what do you think? Join the ongoing discussion in the Forum...

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