0.0 What is environmental art?
Before we can answer this (if we can) the question must be divided into two questions: 1.0 What is art? 2.0 What is environment?
1.0 What is art? –
art is a language, a means of communication.
1.1 What is communication? –
Communication is an ethical listening and saying in communion with the other. Communication is how life survives.
1.2 What does art communicate? –
art is language that interrogates language. When languages stagnate – when survival is threatened – art communicates the threat in a way that offers a solution.
1.3 How does language stagnate and how does this threaten survival? –
A language stagnates when that which is written or spoken in the language becomes merely an ordering of things; at which point each iteration becomes an order as such, and not a means of communication – where none are actually listening or saying, and evolution ceases. Communication is an ethical transaction in which each one must justify its saying in this moment and in the presence of a listening other. A language stagnates when all writing and all saying has been reduced to an ʻIt is Written!ʼ or an ʻIt is Said!ʼ. (This could be thought of as a kind of fascism of the word.)
1.4 But where and how is such a catastrophe occurring? –
It is happening right here in the lines of this text. Each of these words is the ideal object in which a rich variety of awkwardness is compressed. Each could be interrogated back into its roots, and beyond, into the very structure of things – by which I mean that we could stop here and now, in this moment, and listen in depth to what each word is actually saying. But to do such a thing would itself be counter-productive to the kind of ʻideal survivalʼ that this flow of words permits.
1.5 So whatʼs the problem? –
If art is for the re-creation of language – a necessary and continual balancing of human languages, between the ordering of ideal objects as ʻknowledgeʼ, and unknowable awkwardness of other things, then art is a fundamental human right and responsibility. Art is the constant and ethical search for a paradigm of ʻawkward survivalʼ; but the problem is that over the last millennium, art itself has become the ideal object. The art of linguistic re-creation has been subsumed by the text it once sought to interrogate… art has been commodified, as Art!
1.6 But surely thatʼs just a fact of life? –
In recent centuries, in Western cultures, art has been taken out of the hands of people and is nowadays re-presented to them as The Art Experience! – in which the knowing re-creation of language has been ceded to someone ʻcreativeʼ called ʻAn Artist!ʼ But in this move towards the power of an ʻideal survivalʼ, I have lost touch with the awkwardness of the Other – which would (if I could only understand it) make me what I am.
Because the art of re-creating language with the Other has become objectified, the ethical search for an ʻawkward survivalʼ paradigm has all but ceased for the people of the West. That the ʻideal survivalʼ paradigm of Western cultures came to dominate the ethical instinct for ʻawkward survivalʼ of Indigenous cultures in the 17th -19th centuries, was a ʻplace of no returnʼ for the West.
For these Indigenous cultures, things of the environment were and still are ethical symbols, imbued with the very awkwardness of the Other. But to the ʻknowingʼ Western mind, spirit was and still is invested in the image of an ideal, ‘all-knowing’ self – man as God, the creator of all things. And it is only now, in the aftermath of destructive colonisation, that we see the extent to which that fallacy has led us towards ecological calamity and war. Those languages which once enabled us to survive are no longer appropriate for our survival.
1.7 What can environmental artists do to improve our chances of survival?
What environmental artists can do, is try to help us solve the problem of this stagnant ʻideal survivalʼ paradigm. Letʼs face it, all artists are actually environmental artists, we all respond to the contexts in which we find ourselves. Whatʼs required of artists and gallery directors/curators is that they have the will to move out of the so called ʻArt Worldʼ, and help the rest of us discover our paradigm of ʻawkward survivalʼ.
1.8 How can we do this? By looking towards that which causes the logic of ideals the most distress, which is the utmost awkwardness of quantum entanglement.
2.0 What is environment? –
Environment is what we mean when we are surrounded by other things.
2.1 What is a thing? –
A thing is an undefined environment of an environment. A thing is an undefined object.
2.2 But what are things, actually? –
Things are not different from each other in time and space like comprehended objects are; rather things are environments of understanding that under-stand each other. That ‘state of understanding’ is the singularity.
2.3 What is quantum entanglement and what has it got to do with all of this? – “Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon whereby a pair of particles are generated in such a way that the individual quantum states of each are indefinite until measured, and the act of measuring one determines the result of measuring the other, even when at a [great] distance from each other.”
If we think of the pair of particles as two real objects apparently ʻseparated by a vast distance of spaceʼ, then the fact that measuring the condition of one instantly determines the condition of the other is indeed very awkward for our ʻideal survivalʼ paradigm – destructively paradoxical in fact. But if we think of the pair of particles and the person doing the measuring as actually being a singular thing – an environment of singularity – a constituent of the singularity of infinitely overlapping environments, then the awkwardness is gone and the quantum paradox resolved.
2.4 This seems to suggest that space is not real? –
On the contrary, space and time – and every ideal object in space and time – are real. Itʼs just that reality is not the actual state of things.
2.5 What is the actual state of things? – In comprehending, we simplify and condense infinitely complex (but singular) environments of understanding into the different ideal objects that we see around us. This comprehending is the be-coming of reality; and itʼs not until a fundamental paradox arises in reality, that our way of comprehending is thrown into question. The Quantum paradoxes seem to imply that reality is merely our condition of the actual state – the singularity of understanding.
2.6 How can people/environmental artists make use of these things? –
We and every other thing around us are actually environments of understanding. We under-stand each other as the infinite flux of things. Each thing as a constituent of all things – in other words we are one. What this means is that we constitute, and are constituted by, every other environmental thing in the universe. We are the universe – we donʼt just simply live in it. We are this planet Earth – we donʼt just simply live on it. We are the others that surround us – we donʼt just simply live beside them. Moment by moment, you under-stand me and I under-stand you. We are entangled environments of understanding. It is every human being’s right and responsibility to re-create our languages, so that we can speak more slowly, thoughtfully, symbolically with the things around us.
3.0 What is environmantal art? Environmental art – cognitive re-creation with the environment.