A sustainable art?

One can easily see how this sort of design might affect daily life. But how does it resonate with art making and particularly with the art presented in Beyond Green? At any given moment, artists have access to a relatively limited set of visual languages and conceptual strategies, picking up on or pushing against them. These must be considered along with the broader cultural context-the widespread desire for a more sustainable future-mentioned earlier.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, large numbers of artists began favoring ideas over objects and devising works for sites other than gallery and museum spaces. Growing out of this shift, and in tandem with wider phenomena such as the lingering effects of 1960s countercultural experiments and a growing sense of urgency around environmental problems, some artists began to pursue land art: environmentally based projects informed by conceptual and site-specific modes of art making. Earthworks-one variety of land art-consisted of works sculpted in (and in fact, from) remote or pastoral landscapes and often made no obvious environmental claims.6 Other examples from this period were informed by more explicitly pragmatic and didactic purposes, focusing for instance on the impact of human development on particular ecosystems.7 Since the late 1970s, increasing numbers of environmental projects have dealt not only with such out-of-the-way sites but also with towns and urban centers.8 One common trait of these diverse works-apart from their engagement with environmental material-has been their emphasis on particular places.

Whether or not the artists in Beyond Green directly refer to these predecessors, their work must be considered in relation to and in distinction from them, and one key difference concerns this issue of site specificity. Many of the Beyond Green artists have worked in such modes, which remain a rich part of contemporary practice.9 They also work, however, with a more nomadic sensibility exemplified by the mobile structures, objects, and processes/networks featured in this exhibition. Such works might have a generative connection to a particular spot, but they can mutate and adapt over time and in new places. Additionally, many address the contested spaces of contemporary cities and towns and thus might be seen as extending that strand of environmental work that emphasizes populated places rather than remote ones. Such projects chip away at perceptions that "the environment" is something "out there" and that cities are not as deeply connected to other ecosystems as they are to global trade networks. They reflect the current reality that as far-flung people and places become more entwined, ever-spreading populations and communications networks reduce the number of places that might qualify as "out there." (They also remind us that, for all their flaws, cities have some innate characteristics-for instance, the pooling of resources made possible by density-that can be amplified into sustainable spaces.)

In addition to site-specific and environmentally focused predecessors and parallels, the artists of Beyond Green should also be considered in relation to two aspects of European and American art during the 1990s that have an even more direct relationship to their work: the rise of critical practice and the fertile crossover between art and design.

Critical practice in art can be defined as an ethically based, conceptually grounded approach that addresses the social sphere from a position of critique and does so by embracing process as well as product and involving multiple constituencies, sites of production, and strategies for collaboration. As artist and critic Dan S. Wang writes,

what critical practices share is a fundamental aspiration: to present questions and challenges about the way the world is, the ways we perceive it, and the ways in which we can act in it. These questions or challenges might be presented in general terms or with respect to a particular social detail or situation. This aspiration can be described as inherently critical, because the inescapable implication is that a world with different social arrangements, behaviors, or both is possible.10

Of course there is nothing new about that pull toward relevance, the impulse to grapple with the pressing questions of one's time and even to use creative endeavors as a means to enact social change. That desire recurs again and again in art, but it finds varied manifestations among different generations and situations.11

In the 1990s, new modalities of art making channeled the urge for social engagement into particular forms. As indicated above, collaboration has been an especially important vehicle. The last decade has seen the formation of many successful artists' groups that address social questions not only by working with people outside usual art communities but also by forming collectives and thereby contesting or sidestepping traditional notions of authorship while also pooling resources. Equally important has been the spread of conversational and relational ways of working that derive their meaning in part from interactive processes. The latter have yet to be adequately addressed by historians and critics, but some important attempts have been made: art historian Grant Kester coined the term "dialogical art" for art that takes form not through objects but rather through platforms or processes meant to foster dialogue;12 and critic Nicolas Bourriaud devised the influential term "relational art" to describe works that take on meaning largely through the participatory engagement of the audience. 13 Such modes of working are part of the wider artistic culture (and counterculture) of our moment, and though used by artists with differing aims, they have been particularly strong channels for critical practice, which has in turn been an especially fertile and increasingly visible presence within American and European art since the mid-to-late 1990s.14

During roughly the same period, design and lifestyle emerged as another major area of investigation for European and American artists, who expanded their practices by creating functional works that drew on the visual languages and materials of fashion, architecture, and interior and product design.15 This blurring of boundaries paralleled the general ascendancy of design as a driver of desire within popular culture. Think for instance of the popularity of lifestyle magazines that cut across wide demographics, from Readymade to Wallpaper to Martha Stewart Living, the success of the Scandinavian retailer Ikea, or Target's promotion of itself as a low cost/high style purveyor of "design for all." Critic Hal Foster, among others, has unpacked some of the problematics of the infusion of design into so many aspects of contemporary culture, as we all become targets of increasingly focused niche marketing strategies aimed to infuse the "designed subject" with ever-greater consumer needs.16 Some of the artists investigating design share his concerns or have looked away from consumerist drives and toward emancipatory ways of using design that draw on the utopian ideals of past moments of art/design overlap (the Bauhaus, the Constructivists) or more directly on progressive thinkers outside the art world, such as Buckminster Fuller or Victor Papanek, author of the 1972 classic Design for the Real World. The latter strand of practice has been especially important for Beyond Green.

In many ways the ascendancy of design and the rise of critical practice in art have been distinct developments; many artists exploring design as a site of investigation have no interest in engaging social questions, and many others working in a relational manner have little investment in making objects. The convergence of these two strands can provide rich opportunities for artists to create satisfying visual forms that provide new ways of embodying critical practices. And when this convergence occurs around environmental questions, it resonates strongly with sustainable design's goal of bringing social and aesthetic concerns together with environmental and economic ones.