Contributed text

David Haley (MIRIAD, Manchester, UK) : ‘Questions from the future’...

Republished from Everything will be fine - Alles wird gut, catalogue of the Art Program of the ESA Arts Conference, Lüneburg, 2007.

  witness the dance
  creation and destruction
  confluence of life

While I was sleeping, the time changed. The tense changed too. We are there, now.

The new paradigm is here, now – ‘eco-culture’ . Welcome to the future and the liberation of ecological art. No longer do artists have to be prophets of doom, thinking the unthinkable, trying to change attitudes and making a stand against society. The tide turned. Artists and scientists, teachers and politicians, commercialists and industrialists need to learn how to make the new world work – the new way of life – ‘ecopoiesis’.

There was a time, before the effects of global warming became evident, when people lived in denial of what was taking place. Brave artists and scientists worked to create understanding in the pre-paradigmatic state of Postmodernism, the antithesis of a culture that could be traced back to the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, the Renaissance and even Ancient Greece.

There was no way that art would change the world, but the world has since changed art. Now, as our relationship with the world has shifted, we are forced to embody a new order, an eco-culture and ecology has become the capacity for convergent knowledge - a dynamic synthesis of art and science, nature and culture. Earlier notions of an overriding theory of ecology presupposed ecology to be a science. However, ecology, like Gaia, is not a science, but an art – ‘rt’. Science could only ever gain data about Gaia and ecology. Art is the understanding. It must be said, however, that seldom did art in Western Culture come anywhere near this understanding.

The problem was that linear forms like progress and development were used as moral values by societies unwilling to recognise the complex, non-linear world – we needed different concepts to embrace the uncertainties of quantum theory and climate change. Much art, even eco-art became trapped in the paradox of radical gestures performed in reactionary contexts. In more than forty years, little had changed. Indeed, Wittgenstein would have appreciated playing-out the endgame of life in acts of art while science measured the effects. It was like applying quantum theory to Newtonian physics – they didn’t fit – the later assured certainty, while the former demonstrated uncertainty. Uncertainty has never been a problem in daily life. Uncertainty became a problem when people couldn’t let go of their ‘classic’ mindsets and binary opposites.

In previous writings I have called for society’s need to become an ‘eco-centric culture’. Global events are possibly forcing this paradigm shift upon us, if we are to learn anything from what Slaughter calls the ‘tsunamis of change’. But eco-centricity is not just a matter of political, ideological, corporate and civic preferences, it’s a way of understanding and working with our ‘embodied ecology’. So, restoration of the habitats of others becomes the realisation of our complete connectedness – one specie’s extreme environment becomes a sustaining habitat for another, given time.

Or as Richard Slaughter writes in Futures Beyond Dystopia:‘As we contemplate the dilemmas of the twenty-first century, it is clear that a viable future for humankind cannot be based on industrial era assumptions, models and values. We should not therefore uncritically carry over existing cultural commitments from one era to the next. Rather, we need to let go of some earlier commitments and consciously take up others. We need grounded visions, designs if you will, of a world that has experienced a recovery of vision, meaning and purpose; one that has moved beyond the disastrous conceits of industrialism – particularly the obsession with material growth, the subjugation of nature and the marginalization of non-Western cultures’ .

So, what does the new art look like? How does it sound? What senses does it engage? What questions does it evoke? Or, is it the same old art trying to survive the new world? Has eco-art found its place and time, only to become the mainstream? If this is the norm for the new world, what is the avant-garde? Is there a need for fashion and novelty? Does art sill need to join-up with science and other disciplines? Was eco-art, as Wittgenstein might have put it, a way to let the fly out of the bottle? How did suburbia become the aesthetic driver of global economies? And can life continue to support suburbia in a climate changed world?

  Plankton bathing in the sun
  River finding its way home
  Time is of the essence

— David Haley 2007/02/10 10:32