Abstract
AbstractIn his last book, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), Marcuse argued that a concern for aesthetics is justified when political change is unlikely. But the relation between aesthetics and politics is oblique: “Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness … of the men and women who could change the world.” (p. 33). Marcuse also linked his critique of capitalism to environmentalism in the early 1970s: “the violation of the Earth is a vital aspect of the counterrevolution.” (Ecology and Revolution, in The New Left and the 1960s, Collected Papers 3, 2005, p. 173). This article revisits Marcuse’s ideas on aesthetics and ecology, and reviews two recent art projects which engage their audiences in ecological issues: The Jetty Project (2014) by Wolfgang Weileder—which used recycled material and community participation to construct a temporary monument within a wider conservation project on the Tyne, N-E England—and Fracking Futures by HeHe (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen)—whic...
Highlights
In December 2015, Alan Sonfist exhibited photographs of himself from the 1970s, climbing naked the trees on a Caribbean island, with bronze sculptures of tree branches, at the Art Basel fair at Miami Beach
Among Sonfist’s other work is Time Landscape (1978), a fenced-off lot on the corner of West Houston Street and La Guardia Place, New York, planted with the tree species which grew on Manhattan before its white colonization
The seemingly original natural growth is the result, not of natural evolution, but of art, a manifestation of a historically specific human-produced culture; and, in general, an art project which intervenes in the processes of what is conveniently called the natural world inevitably raises issues of the relations between people and environment, and the inevitable impossibility of a complete separation of the two spheres
Summary
In December 2015, Alan Sonfist exhibited photographs of himself from the 1970s, climbing naked the trees on a Caribbean island, with bronze sculptures of tree branches, at the Art Basel fair at Miami Beach. I do this not to audit the efficacy of either Marcuse’s arguments or the projects, but to ask in today’s terms whether art may have a potential to contribute to the shift of human attitudes necessary for a sustainable society (which Marcuse saw as political and economic as much as cultural).
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