Wrapping up

Ok, back again with what should be my final posts.

To dig back a bit, let's go back into the issue of terminology.

To get back to Tom's and Taylor's posts: "sustainable" is still my term of choice, imperfect as it is. Tom, I completely agree that labels like "environmental" and "eco" are fraught with problems. They sound dated. One of the biggest reasons is that they suggest a practice that's only focused on "the environment" as if that could be detached from these broader interlinked issues. Of course, even "sustainable" has that connotation for some folks. Last month, at a workshop on urbanism and sustainability sponsored by the Dutch magazine Volume, I talked with an architect who felt that "sustainable" has become narrowly synonymous with "helps abate climate change": defined in a narrow way that leaves out all considerations of social justice. That echoes Taylor's comments. If you're both right, we need to either find a new word or reclaim "sustainable" so it's not yet another tool of greenwashing or the kind of shallow, feel-good faddism you mentioned, Tom. So, if we do need new and better terms to help focus our thinking or talk about it to wider audiences ... well, we still have work to do.

But still for now I'll stick with "sustainable art". The others Tom mentioned — "Landscape-based or "place-based" — seem to be related, overlapping terms. Some, but not all, sustainable art deals with specific places; some, but not all, place-based work deals with sustainability. It sounds like we both think that this zone of overlap is an especially fertile area of investigation for artists right now. For now maybe that level of description is enough, without getting too hung up on finding the perfect words.

I also wanted to respond to Tom's question about artists I'd include in "Beyond Green 2". First off, I wouldn't frame a project quite that way. To dream a little... I'd rather do something that might be grounded in an exhibition but would have a different kind of long-term impact, perhaps by fostering truly critical, generative conversations among cultural leaders so we can deal more effectively with sustainability in relation to everyday practice within all manner of art institutions, or by creating structures that support the work of artists who are committed to serious—and seriously playful—work around sustainability (in that broad sense). Even the exhibition portion itself might take an unusual form. In Beyond Green, I consciously cut out site-specific projects since those could only be brought into the exhibition in the form of documentation. I could imagine another kind of show where site-specific work could instead be the focus---a dispersed exhibition that would link new and ongoing projects all around the world. (This would be a counterpoint not only to museum shows like Beyond Green, but also to the biennial model of commissioning new projects for a short burst of energy around one city.) Maybe you have something happen within a museum, or perhaps everything's simply linked through through a website, publication, programs. Design 99's work in Detroit would fit here, or Superflex's onoing biogas project, but I also want to get to know artists who haven't yet been part of the discussions here in Europe and North America. I want to learn more about what's going on in Asia, and Taylor's already pointing to the relevance of some of the work in Brazil.

And of course there's a whole other conversation we could have about art that touches on questions of sustainability but does so purely through representation rather than through hybrid or activist practices. For instance, in the Smart's current show, my colleague Wu Hung examines four Chinese artists' nuanced responses to to the Three Gorges Dam. The artists speak in different ways to the complexities of the dam's impact, and two of them do so through very traditional forms of representation—ink painting and realist oil painting—and they're incredibly powerful, moving works.

Taylor, you asked about Dan Peterman. I've known Dan longer than any other artist in the exhibition; he was part of my first show at the Smart Museum, back in 2000. (The exhibiiton, Ecologies, included new installations by Dan, Mark Dion, and Peter Fend.) Dan's piece for that show was the first to explore the Universal Lab, a defunct amateur laboratory that is the source of most of the materials contained within the travel pods in Beyond Green. I won't go into the Lab here—I'll bring a catalogue when I come to Portland—but it's proven to be an incredibly generative set of materials and issues for Dan, and the travel pods are one of the most succinct objects to come out of the wonderfully sprawling larger project. (We have a set in the Smart's collection and visitors love them.) Dan's been a very important friend and colleague. We've worked together on several projects but he's also inspiring because he's built a practice that is simultaneously extremely localized and globally networked, that moves nimbly through a lot of different kinds of aesthetic and social infrastructures. Check out the Experimental Station (www.experimentalstation.org). Dan is one of the founders of this place, which is run through the creative work of a whole community of people. This goes back to our conversation about place...

But I should get back to other work. There's so much that we could talk about; there are a number of issues that we've started and stopped along the way, questions that I didn't get to, more things that I would like to know from all of you. I would have liked to have gotten into a more extended back and forth with everyone. Maybe we can can together while I'm in Portland, to discuss some of these questions in person? That w0uld be fun if we could manage it...

Thanks everyone, and I look forward to seeing you in Portland!
Stephanie


PS: Tom, re Heartland: here's a link to our partners in organizing the exhibition, the Van Abbemuseum, where they've set up a blog covering our research process so far. I need to get some new (and old) information up there... http://heartland.vanabbe.nl/. I'd love to talk more about that project and hear more about how it links up with the Portland scene, but let's save that for another time.