Once artists enter the realm of action, it is difficult to characterize their projects differently from those of other actors such as landscape designers or even architects. In a recent exhibition, Groundswell, at the Museum of Modern Art, a group of exemplary landscape designs were presented. What differentiates them from the previously described environmental projects is that they dealt primarily with postindustrial urban landscapes.15 The museum's architecture and design department organized the exhibition, thus preserving the conventional distinction between the practical and the discursive arts. What MoMA's departmental division fails to acknowledge, however, is that the discursive has spilled over into the practical and the practical has become more discursive. The landscape projects have as much to do with art discourse as artists' action projects do with design. The prevailing division between art and design practice is one of the biggest obstacles to holistically envisioning a new sustainable culture and remains a challenge not only for museums, but also for artists and practitioners.

Let us return for a moment to Hildegard Kurt's intention to discover an "aesthetics of sustainability" and her claim that in order for art to function as a cognitive medium, it must be "seen, felt, thought and conceived differently." Although we recognize that culture consists of multiple discursive modes that complement each other's ability to describe, explain, or even represent experience, defining the boundaries of those modes has become increasingly difficult. By separating art too rigidly from complementary practices that engage the same issues and situations, one runs the risk of maintaining a misleading cultural hierarchy in which art projects are understood to carry a heavier discursive load than more pragmatic designs. Thinking this way, however, often minimizes the discursive power in a practical design project.

Artists who call attention to social or environmental problems sometimes garner more notice and public interest than the people who are engaged directly with such problems. For a recent exhibition of his work at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, artist Dan Peterman was invited to build three shed structures-a bicycle repair shop, a marketplace/classroom kiosk, and a garden shed-using standard waste containers. Two were relocated to a local park during the exhibition and adapted for a variety of cultrual uses. However, the kiosks received more public attention and occupied more discursive space as art than as design. Had such kiosks been placed in the park directly, they might have merited a mention in the newspaper but not gained the cultural capital they accrued as works of art. By presenting his kiosks in an art exhibition, Peterman performed a service in that he called the need for such structures to public attention, and one could well argue that he used the cultural capital of art's discursive power to call attention to a social need.

Nonetheless, the hierarchy between art, architecture, design, and planning remains a paradox within the culture of sustainability, where the principal criterion of value is to bring into being sustainable projects and environments. The social space for the demonstration of such projects is still coded unsustainably according to discursive hierarchies that privilege some practices over others. This would be less of a problem if the formal manifestations of each practice were sufficiently distinct, but as these formal distinctions break down, we need to open up the discourse about projects to create greater continuity between them.

What gets lost when a cultural hierarchy of practices prevails is the wider knowledge of projects that do not fit easily into an art-world or museum framework. I think here of the many productive ideas that resulted from research at Nancy Jack Todd's and John Todd's New Alchemy Institute, particularly their "living machines" that have been successfully used for water treatment and other purposes but also their ecological designs for urban spaces-hydroponic factories, back lot bioshelters, and bus stop aquaculture designs.16 These are equivalent to work that some artists have carried out, but they have not been linked to related projects in the art world.