Making Art in the Anthropocene: Artistic Citizenship for a Future Worth Living

This is a brief excerpt from my MFA summary project, Making Art in the Anthropocene: Artistic Citizenship for a Future Worth Living, completed June 2019. This paper connects artistic citizenship and “sensorial empathy” (Abram, 1996, p. 69) with living and making art in this particular era of the Anthropocene.

For the past few summers, the Pacific Northwest has been plagued with wildfires. The sky appeared hazy at first, like fog rolled in from the sea. But it was not fog at all—it was wildfire smoke. Ash fell from the sky, gathering thick on any flat surface. The air was still and heavy—hard to breathe, like a weight pressed on the chest. The sky was orange, and we stayed inside, miserable, for weeks. People, animals, plants, and trees in the path of fire lost life and home. Summer used to be a glorious time in the Pacific Northwest. Is this the new normal? Welcome to the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene is a term often used to name the current geological epoch, a period where humans are the primary force in geologic, atmospheric, and environmental change. It is an era of climate change, mass extinction, and rampant ecological devastation. It is not hyperbole to consider that we humans may face extinction by our own hand. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report on biodiversity calls for immediate “transformative change” (Nature’s, 2019). IPBES chair Sir Robert Watson explains, “By transformative change, we mean a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values” (Nature’s, 2019). 

I feel profound grief at the loss of life on Earth and keep a wary eye to the immense challenges ahead. This savage destruction of environment and culture is embedded in the process of colonization and capitalism, where dominant monocultures devour the diversity of life and value extraction, wealth, and economic growth above all else. Our planet is on the edge of ecological collapse as a result of human behavior. Human behavior is rooted in cultural ways of knowing. We must intervene to create new systems and other ways of living. We cannot change if we cannot envision where we are and what we are changing to, and art is exceptionally positioned to address this visioning process.

Climate change has primarily been addressed through science for the last 30 years. We have access to so much data and knowledge, but this approach has not captured the national imagination in the U.S. nor inspired much forward-thinking action. Data alone is also not effective at disrupting dominant power structures and economic systems which promote the status quo. We need interpreters, agitators, free-thinkers, creators. We need to feel with our bodies. We need artists.

There are two important concepts that inform and shape my work: artistic citizenship (Elliott et al, 2016) and “sensorial empathy” (Abram, 1996, p. 69). In Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility and Ethical Praxis, authors David Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Wayne Bowman examine arts practice through a lens of citizenship and assert that the arts are a social phenomenon and that there is a “social/ethical responsibility. . . at the heart of a responsible artistic practice” (2016, p. 2). Human thriving is embedded in their concept of citizenship, and ethics, in this case, asks: What is it good to be given our current circumstances? (Elliott et al, 2016). 

In The Spell of the Sensuous, author and philosopher David Abram suggests that any real change in environmental ethics (and a resulting change in human behavior) will not come from logic or legislation but from the perceptual dimension, by rejuvenating our “carnal, sensorial empathy with the living land that sustains us” (1996, p. 69). By actively engaging our senses, we may, through our bodies, perceive the world around us as alive and understand that we are deeply interconnected to all life.

Art can address the Anthropocene in ways that science alone never can. Data is abstract. We don’t feel it in our bodies. Few people can grasp the enormity and severity of climate change and ecological destruction. We need to experience it through our senses and feel it in our bodies. The Anthropocene must be visceral. Through sensory perception and art, we engage with Anthropocene issues from bodily and emotional perspectives, which are powerful forms of understanding. One of art’s strengths is in revealing connections. Art involves critical reflection to make sense of the world and our experience in it. Art is messy, experimental, and free to roam. With a new-found sensory awareness, can we then develop empathy with the land, the sky, the wind, the sea, and the non-humans we live in relationship with? Will we see the world as animate?

So, ethically, what kind of artist is it good to be in the Anthropocene, our current circumstance? Through a lens of artistic citizenship, I assert that in our current time of global ecological crisis, artists have an ethical responsibility to work for the common good—which, in this case, I define as a healthy planet habitable to all life, not just a few select humans. As artists engaged in praxis, a process of critical, reflective action, how we approach this is up to each of us individually. There are many avenues to take and many injustices to right.

Cultural and social change takes a long time—time we don’t have. If art is to have any impact in changing our values, artists will have to take a sharp look at how they participate in existing systems and in the commodification of art. Artists in the Anthropocene need to move beyond the limiting ideal of the individual genius artist and art as a capitalist venture to embrace collective, participatory art that is civically engaged. We need the idea of citizenship to take hold in artist communities and for artists to move beyond identifying problems to actively working for solutions. Interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary work is necessary. Silos should be torched with glee.

Through active engagement of the senses and through artistic citizenship, artists are uniquely positioned to stimulate the transformative changes in paradigms, goals, and values so desperately needed in our current times. Artists should be integrated into a systems or holistic approach to supporting the continuation of life on Earth and truly working for a future worth living.

October 2020 Addendum:

Nearly two years after I wrote the above, I came across this passage in The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with Edward Said and David Barsamian. Edward Said comments on why he thinks culture is so important: “It provides a visionary alternative, a distinction between the this-worldness and the blockage that one sees so much in the world of the everyday…and the possibility of dreaming a different dream…What one must train oneself is to think the alternative, and not to think the accepted and the status quo or to believe that the present is frozen” (2010, p. 105-106).

The world desperately needs visionary alternatives.

Citations:

Abram, D. (1996). The Spell of the sensuous. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Elliott, D., Silverman, M., & Bowman, W. (2016). Artistic citizenship: Artistry, social responsibility, and ethical praxis. Oxford Scholarship Online. Doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199393749.001.0001 

Nature’s dangerous decline ‘unprecedented’; Species extinction rates ‘accelerating’. (2019). In Intergovernmental science-policy platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Retrieved on May 7, 2019, from https://www.ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment

Said, E. & Barsamian, D. (2010). The Pen and the sword: Conversations with Edward Said and David Barsamian. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Power, Leverage, Will

Text from a speech at Seattle University, 2018.

We live in an age of planetary civil war. We inhabit a deeply damaged landscape and exhibit a fractured psyche to match. We’ve broken a covenant with life. We wage war on the planet itself and on each other.

We must renew the covenant. But how? The word covenant stems from a Latin verb meaning to come together. Within the problem, we find the solution. We must come together in connectivity, interdependence, and solidarity if we are to choose life.

I turn to the words of John Berger for inspiration. He wrote, “The fact that the world’s tyrants are ex-territorial explains the extent of their overseeing power. Yet it also indicates a coming weakness. They operate in cyberspace and they lodge in guarded condominiums. They have no knowledge of the surrounding earth. Furthermore, they dismiss such knowledge as superficial, not profound. Only extracted resources count. They cannot listen to the earth. On the ground they are blind. In the local, they are lost. Effective acts of sustained resistance will be embedded in the local, near and far.”

The problem contains the solution. Local action circumvents global power by being rooted in place. We seize their weakness as our leverage point. We have freedom to move on the ground, and, therefore, we must know our community intimately. We must live rooted in the health of the land. Nature, culture, and health are interdependent. We will not have healthy communities in an unhealthy ecosystem. Art plays a vital role in revealing these connections, in imagining new ways of life, and inspiring us to act.

Five years ago, I began an experiment to unite art, ecology, and gift giving. I call it hypha, inspired by underground fungal networks. A network’s strength lies in decentralization and sharing. With hypha, I collaborate with friends to propagate plants, make art, and give it all away to strangers. A gift inspires reciprocity; it’s an offering that grows in abundance only if it is kept in motion. I consider knowledge a gift to be shared.

For example, the Pacific Northwest shares many natural gifts with us; this place abounds with medicinal plants. If I share a plant and my knowledge of its use and propagation with you, while adding art that celebrates this plant’s specialness, I believe that you will care for this plant and share it further. With each gift, hypha plants a seed of empowerment to explore and protect our local ecosystem while connecting you to others doing the same.

This may seem a small thing, but the implications and possibilities are profound. In a few short years, I have given thousands of plants to hundreds of people while talking about art, gifts, and sharing knowledge. All around Seattle, I’ve met committed, passionate people working to support their communities. Networked together, we can work collectively to confront and circumvent global power structures that destroy our communities for corporate profit.

Analyzing political movements, Jonathan Smucker wrote, “[To demand] something from the powerful- [to make] them do something- requires a political force behind it. We have to take responsibility to construct such a force. Otherwise we are just shouting at the wind. Our problem is one of power, leverage, and will.”

I take these words to heart and contemplate each problem. Power, Leverage, Will.

Through art we search for knowledge. Art inspires people to feel and to act; art cultivates our will. Local action is our leverage point. Locally, our actions have the greatest potential for success. Individually, we have little power against global systems. Collective action provides a stronger and more effective strategy for change.

I believe art and collective, local action provide meaningful, strategic resistance to global power. I also believe we can move beyond resistance to repair our broken communities and renew our covenant with life. To do this, we must ask what, “what can we offer and how can we show up for one another?” I ask you to gather your gifts and share them with others. We need each and every one of you.

The One Day Cob House

On May 9, 2014, a group of roughly 60 people gathered in Reno, Nevada, to build a cob house in one day. To our knowledge it hadn't been done before. Barnraisings, yes, but a cob cabin? Cob is known and often celebrated as a slow process. It's labor intensive, and speed varies with materials used and limiting factors such as the weather. Taking one's time is enjoyable and meditative, providing space for thoughtfulness and creativity. But not this time! This was a speed community building project, drawing enthusiastic participants from around the country.

The weekend was hosted by Be the Change Project in Reno and led by builders from House Alive and Be the Change, the latter being an inspiring group of people living off the grid on an urban homestead, devoted to living an ethical life based on principles of nonviolence, service, sharing, unjobbing, unschooling, and gifting. They are a hub for the redistribution of food, used goods, and anything they can remove from the urban waste stream. I've had the good fortune to visit the homestead twice and have been blown away each time by the swirl of activity that surrounds their space and the level of community sharing that occurs on any given day. These wonderful people are great reminders that our time is our own and it is also our greatest gift, to be savoured and shared with others.

Below is a video of the event made by Kim Doyel and following that a slideshow of some photos we shot during that memorable weekend.

Video of Reno One Day Cob Build by Kim Doyel

A Gift

“A gift is a thing we do not get by our own efforts. We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will. It is bestowed upon us. A gift that cannot be given away ceases to be a gift. The spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation.”
        ~ Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

A central theme of Hypha is the gift. To my mind, art, knowledge, and the abundance of nature are gifts. Our capitalist society, however, is predicated on scarcity and profit. Have we lost track of the generous spirit of gift giving when our culture views everything solely through a lens of economic gain?

There are other ways of living, to be sure. I've drawn inspiration from the reverence of First Fruit ceremonies. Historically, cultures all over the world celebrated the first harvests of corn, berries, salmon, deer, and bear, among others, with a ceremony of sharing the harvest among the people of the tribe and making an offering back to the earth, often in the form of gifts to the gods or a shaman, or alternatively, in the form of saving plant seeds or returning bones to the sea. Some Pacific Northwest tribes return the first salmon bones to the sea so the fish can return home and begin the cycle again, ensuring future abundant harvests. The salmon is seen as a gift, with part of it eaten and part given back to the earth.

Lewis Hyde comments in The Gift, “the myth declares that the objects of the ritual will remain plentiful because they are treated as gifts... The first salmon ceremony establishes a gift relationship with nature, a formal give and take that acknowledges our participation in, and dependence upon, natural increase. And where we have established such a relationship we tend to respond to nature as a part of ourselves, not as a stranger or alien available for exploitation. Gift exchange brings with it, therefore, a built-in check upon the destruction of its objects; with it we will not destroy nature's renewable wealth except where we also consciously destroy ourselves.”

Hypha is my response to our culture's desecration of the earth. I assert that plants and knowledge should be received and given as gifts and that art and storytelling can be employed as pathways to reconnect and repair our relationship with the earth. We are not separate from nature. We are unconsciously destroying ourselves as we plunder the earth for financial profit.

What happens if we reintroduce the concept of the gift, an offering that grows in abundance only if it is kept in motion? (I realize fully there are societies that still retain this way of thinking, so I am speaking of the dominant culture here.) Hypha is an offering to the land and community that sustains me; it's a love song to Seattle.

I'd love nothing more than to stimulate a conversation in my urban environment, my adopted home and a place I dearly love, about reverence, gratitude, and other ways of living.

 Future posts will examine these ideas further.