Published in Die Planung / A Terv ed Katarina Sević et al. (Budapest/Berlin, 2007)

Abstract of a paper given at the Conference on Post-Ecological Studies at TransruralUniversity of Őrség, Velebit and Clare 12-14 March 2048 by Maja and Reuben Fowkes / www.translocal.org

INTRODUCTION

The Transrural University was established in 2027 following recognition of the need to transform higher education from the model inherited from the Twentieth Century, which was created for an industrial society, to one in harmony with the requirements and potentialities of a sustainable ecological society. The change in the university network also reflects a shift in population and cultural production away from urban sites towards rural areas, following the reestablishment of a natural balance between town and country. The Transrural University has a zero-rated carbon footprint, in addition to a fusion of library and practice-based research, students and staff produce their own food and use locally generated renewable energy sources. The institution is decentralised and independent from the national education curricula, while knowledge production is collaborative and circulated freely.

The Conference on Post-Ecological Studies aims to examine the motivations and mechanism for the global social, economic and political transformation of the Green Leap Forward that shook the world between 2008 and 2015. Particular attention at this year’s gathering of local researchers and virtual participants will be paid to the role of artists and cultural theorists in elaborating and making available alternatives to the system of IWC (Integrated World Capitalism) that had seemed so fixed and unchangeable at the beginning of our century, but has already long been a phenomenon of history and academic curiosity. While external forces such as the collapse of the dollar economy and global social breakdown were clearly objective factors in shifting society onto a more sustainable path, the role of art in revolutionising human mentalities in accordance with the fundamental principles of ecology, social justice, grassroots democracy and non-violence, also needs to be addressed.

ABSTRACT

‘I reached the top and had to stop, and that’s what’s a bothering me.’
(King Louis, The Jungle Book)

‘It seems to me essential to organise new micropolitical and microsocial practices, new solidarities, a new gentleness, together with new aesthetic and new analytic practices with regard to the formation of the unconscious. It appears to me that this is the only way to get social and political practices back on their feet, working for humanity and not simply for a permanent reequilibration of the capitalist semiotic Universe.’ (Felix Guattari)

Art history is marked by particular periods which have proved to be highly influential on later artistic and social developments. In the last century, the Avant Garde and Post Avant Garde movements are clear examples, which themselves fed into later innovative practices in contemporary art. One such highly significant period is arguably the early Twenty First Century, at which time so many important works and approaches came into being, which today seem so familiar to art history, but at the time were less widely recognised by a society still enthralled to the consumerist art spectacle and habits of object-based material art production. Today there is a desire to revisit the contemporary art of those pre-revolutionary years, to understand the ecological and cultural context in which they were critically conceived. This research calls for an almost archaeological approach in order to convey the otherness of a society in which the principles of post-authorship were hardly recognised, an age preceding our ecological era with its socially-integrated collaborative model of artistic production in which the notion of singularity has eclipsed earlier binary distinctions between individuality and collectivism. We need to suspend our assumptions in order to understand the role of individual artists in the pre-revolutionary society. This paper will therefore consider several key examples of early Twenty First Century art that in recent decades have shown themselves to have been prescient in their articulation of ecological problems and the elaboration of viable strategies for artistic engagement with sustainability.

At the time, few people suspected that the Pastoralist Congress would become such an important gathering, or that the occupation of shepherd would become one of the most popular in Europe. Fernando Garcia Dory organised the first gathering of Basque shepherds in 2006, as a response to his discovery that the number of traditional shepherds in the Pyrenees had declined in a few decades from more than ten thousand to a mere seven. He organised the Congress to enable them to overcome their personal disputes and combine to revive an age-old human occupation, which is so expressive of the complex symbiotic relationship between humans and animals in a natural state. The following year, he invited shepherds from as far away as the Sahara and Transylvania, to share their respective knowledges and experience of the pastoralist way of life, to seek ways to enable them to survive in an increasingly harsh social climate. The shepherds’ summer schools initiated by Dory became within a decade highly oversubscribed, as people everywhere sought an alternative to the extremes of the European lowland climate, and the chance to spend several months a year in the spiritually enriching presence of goats and sheeps on the mountain ranges of Europe. The Congress itself developed into a forum for the exchange of traditional knowledge of all kinds and skills such as horse-archery and soda bread baking.

While some artists sought the elements of sustainable life in the old knowledge of the rural cultures that had been carelessly trampled by the bulldozer of modernisation, others were engaged with the possibilities of new technologies. The technocratic ecologists of their day promised a solution to ecological crisis without a radical change in social or economic systems. Although during the Green Leap Forward (2008-15), the purely technocratic solutions proposed by the Corporations and their client caste of Parliamentarians were rejected in favour of the approach of ‘making do with enough’ - backed by a new understanding of quality of life that went beyond the old measure of monetary use value – some of the idealistic technological proposals put forward by artists, such as Tomas Saraceno, proved to be visionary and realisable. The artist’s exploration of the potential of new materials designed for space travel, such as Aerogel, to make floating cells that could stay suspended in the air without using fuel energy proved to be of use in new forms of intercontinental post-aviatic transport. His discussion of the advantages of a world without passports echoes debates that led to the abolition of international travel restrictions based on outdated concepts of national citizenship in the early 2020s in favour of a world citizenship.

In considering the development of ecological aesthetics, the new potentialities of art as a factor of mental ecology drew on the overcoming of the separation between art and the external world that was cogently proposed by Theodor Adorno as early as 1970. His argument that there is no contradiction between aesthetic autonomy and a socially critical role for contemporary art was developed during the next half century by theorists who were able to bring out the potential of art through its autonomy to offer alternatives and take up critical positions with regard to the dominant rationalities of social and economic systems. The autonomy of alternative social actors, as it turned out, was nurtured by rather than in contradiction with the autonomy of art. These developments were clearly related to the wholesale reassessment of the legacy of Kantian aesthetic principles during the Green Leap Forward (2008-2015) and the rediscovery of pre-Kantian aesthetic theories that pointed to the importance of Sensuous Knowledge pertaining to both art works and the experience of sublime nature, as a way of understanding complex phenomena in their intuitive whole, rather than in a piecemeal scientificist manner.

It is probably that few people today remember that the idea of Peninsula Europe was originally an art project dating from the early years of this century. So successful was this contemporary art work in galvanising scientists, politicians, and environmental activists, that the original initiative of Helen and Newton Harrison was lost from sight. Their project Peninsula Europe sought to reframe our understanding of Europe, which was to be no longer seen in terms of the old national state boundaries, but instead to follow the ecologically more meaningful division of the continent in terms of watersheds. Their proposal was to begin reversing the ecological disaster of modern Europe by restoring a natural balance to the mountainous regions of the continent – which they termed a peninsula, because it is surrounded by water on three sides and to emphasis the different scale in which the problems of Europe should be conceived – on the basis that an improved environment in the higher areas would pass on benefits to the lowlands further downstream. They also developed the methodology of ‘conversational drift’, which was seen as a way to combine the approaches of different specialists and ordinary people in solving the complex problems engendered by modern society’s relationship with the natural world. Their work was used in later years as a counterweight to the demands of eco-communalists that social and ecological action should be conceived for and carried out primarily at a local level, within face-to-face communities. The Harrisons showed the importance of taking on the bigger picture and imagining whole continents as ecosystems, with the inherent optimism that a solution can be found for big problems by bringing about interconnected and complex solutions.

The reassessment of the art of the early Twenty First Century offers both a guide to later trends in ecologically sensitive art production that are compatible with wider notions of sustainability, while contributing to the achievement of an ecologically viable and just society on both a global and local level, as well as a corrective to the sometimes overly dogmatic approach taken during the Green Leap Forward. The most appealing art works of late pre-ecological society succeeded in combining an ecological relevant approach through the formal aspects of their production and the aspiration to keep faith with the tradition of artistic independence from social control and political agendas that was as much an inheritance of the earlier Avant Garde and Post Avant Garde as the desire and belief in the potential of art to change society for the better.