Actions that can motivate a sense of the immeasurability of life, and generate a sense of place. Above all actions can lead to exchanges between people of all ages, diverse backgrounds. If freedom ever truly exists (it is, of course, a concept invented by humans and not by the animals, or by nature) it could potentially be a force that emerges when we recognize the liberation that accompanies identifying with the other. The other is social, and never truly defined. Freedom is not a myth, but a force that encourages social and cultural invention as part of a greater global community. Actions need not be quantified. They “work” when we do not conceive of them, or measure them, and that is part of the magic of the unmonitored invented action.
Sustainability is a word. Let it be a word, and let us act to sustain through our actions. What we sustain depends on what we want to sustain. Commodification involves applying a consciousness to apparent or invented needs, not on the part of each individual but in the interests of more abstract, innocuous entities we will never see or know. Actions that encourage us to see beauty, to feel life that are outside the systems of consumption, often seem to be at odds with the system we live in, which is sending us confused and sometimes overwhelming messages as to what we should or would need. Largely these needs are manufactured, and involve less of the human, more of the projected invented and unattainable. All of this has something to do with the animal spirits that are behind economy, and these spirits are quirky, mercurial yet they do involve that element that connects us tour primordial ancestors, for whom economy was a less constructed, more fluid part of the ecology of life. We were never truly great conservationists, as is witnessed by the collapse of so many civilizations in the past, but adaptability and that ingenious inventive quality are part of what make the human species quite special. Let’s go with that, when and if we can!
Each of us can find points of meaning in time, and each of these can add a human value to these points in time. Our actions can generate further actions. All this inside the sphere of nature. Art in a post industrial era has multiform layers of meaning, and the expressions often reflect fashions as to how, with what materials, and even what subjects and scale an artwork can be. The digitalization of technology has led to an atomization of the social identity. While we strive to find a new social culture, we are increasingly detached from the actual problems in society, and have the ability to avoid much of what we should as members of that society, deal with and try to assist with. A shock doctrine applies to the art world where simply stunning your public with scale, with whatever they do not feel, enables the artist to control the audience, artist relation. A mutual exchange is preferable, and respects the artist and a community alienated from its own resources.
Statement overrides integration into nature. Nature is the source of our sustenance. Somehow I am brought back to that age old axiom that an understanding of the limits to materials can bring about an understanding of transcendence and that which surpasses those self same materials. In a digital culture, materials are not mediated, nor indeed part of the mindset, but in the age old physical planet earth we do live on, and which supplies us with food and shelter, it is this desegregation of society from nature that will bring the positive change. Decentralization of resources, a fluid and multi-faceted food and energy system will decrease dependence on the vulnerable, centralized systems that we have worked with the the age of oil, a history at best that is transitional, where humans believed they could be self-created gods.
By manipulating nature through art we have treated it not as an equal partner, the fundamental facet of any economy, and a true source for expression but instead as something to be framed.
Artists have a choice as to how they wish to interpret their lived experience which includes all time from birth to death, not just significant, edited time or what Platonists would call the conscious facet of experience. An art of the future needn’t follow precedents from the art of industrial and post-industrial society. It could find its new impetus from a new relation to nature where material is seen as a part of a living ecosystem. Bio-mimicry, and eco-design encourage the change we need, but all this in the scale of life, not just to repeat the past’s economies out of scale with life, while re-labelling them green. We can redesign it all with a basic respect for self and other, within the scale of the life we are a part of. The dominance of machines over humanity and over nature has created human-made landscapes and environments whose scale is staggering, and is still more pervasive than when we were born.
Art can guide our society towards a regenerative view of life, and bring us closer to the instinctive life force and physical energies that are part of our universal experience. The artist can direct their energies towards a re-souling of art, where integral values are based on real communication, between self and environment, between humanity and the ecosystem will raise the spirits. Let’s invest in new systems of transport, in new systems of food production that are bio-regional and less oil dependent. Let’s invest our energies in a way of living that involves wisdom, and a certain joy in the sharing of experience!
Nature should be allowed to exist in its own unnamed context.
Simultaneously occupying real space and being a creation, art can integrate almost invisibly into a given environment. It may seem almost secret, camouflaged, an anathema to our current obsessive approach to artistic production. At any moment in time there are thousands of exhibitions taking place in the world. How can an artist construct a meaningful identity if it is seen exclusively in terms of individualist achievement in an economic marketplace?
Recognition in these terms is now virtually meaningless. Values of reintegration of economy into ecology will become more marketable in the future. The current “big sell” commoditization of all facets of our lives which empties us of any true feeling and causes value crises, loss of identity in the name of materialism can no longer be supported by a responsible, survival economy. Art of the future could represent a modest reintegration of man’s spirit into nature. By not being the central feature of a given environment such an art would be an unexpected discovery. It could express a return to the soul. Nature is an open system. The world’s life forms – ourselves included – will not survive, nor will our ecosystem if we do not base our collective culture on integration into nature’s open system.