Sustainability in an Imaginary World
Art and the Question of Agency
Over the past decade, interest in art's agency has ballooned as an increasing number of fields turn to the arts with ever-expanding expectations. Les mer
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Over the past decade, interest in art's agency has ballooned as an increasing number of fields turn to the arts with ever-expanding expectations. Yet just as art is being heralded as a magic bullet of social change, research is beginning to throw cautionary light on such enthusiasm, challenging the linear, prescriptive, instrumental expectations such transdisciplinary interactions often imply. In this, art finds itself at a treacherous crossroads, unable to turn a deaf ear to calls for help from an increasing number of ostensibly non-aesthetic fields, yet in answering such prescriptive urgencies, jeopardizing the very power for which its help was sought in the first place.
This book goes in search of a way forward, proposing a theory of art aiming to preserve the integrity of arts practices within transdisciplinary mandates. This approach is then explored through a series of case studies developed in collaboration with some of Canada's most prominent artists, including internationally renowned nature poet Don McKay; Italian composer and Head of Vancouver New Music, Giorgio Magnanesi; the renowned Electric Company Theatre, led by Kevin Kerr; and finally through a largescale multimedia installation aiming to reimagine the relationship between climate, culture, and human agency.
Sustainability in an Imaginary World will be of great interest to students and scholars of arts-based research fields, sustainability studies, and environmental humanities.
Table of Contents
Section 1: Realigning the art-sustainability relationship
Chapter
1 - An Introduction to Sustainability in an Imaginary World
Section 1 - Realigning the art-sustainability
relationship
Section 2 - Artists of the Floating World
Section 3 - Sustainability in an
Imaginary World
Summary
Chapter 2 - Sustainability as a failure of ontology
What kind of problem is sustainability?
A problem for Modernism or about Modernism?
The Subjects of Sustainability: Information Deficit Models and the Modernist Problem of Personhood
Social
Practice
The objects of sustainability and the rise of complexity
Methodological or Ontological
redress?
A banishing of science?
Or Modernity?
Flattening Ontology
Procedural Sustainability
Flipping the Predicate
Regenerative Sustainability
The joyful climate crisis?
Conclusion
Chapter 3 - Art as the Attention
we Pay
A risky proposition?
Value-add or Trade-off?
Transformative vs.
Co-optive?
Two Cautionary Tales
A descriptive swing and a miss: The Mozart Effect
A prescriptive swing and a miss: Art and science communication
Gauging the risk
Why do we think art has agency and where does this instinct typically lead?
A theory of art for
transdisciplinary work?
Instauration and the nature of construction
Beings capable of worrying
you?
George Steiner and the 'Unmastered Thereness'
Heidegger and the ontological agency
of art
world/earth tensions
Tools vs. Art
Indirect, Mediated, and Frustrating
The agency of the work of art
Conclusion: Art as the quality of attention we pay
Chapter 4 - Does It Need to be Good to be Useful? Art, Aesthetic Merit, and Research Design
In search
of the full promise of artistic agency?
Tackling a 'meta' problem
Aesthetic Priorities
in Transdisciplinary Art Practices
Leavy's resolution
Resistance is fertile?
Aligning descriptive and prescriptive orientations
Misappropriation of Voice?
Aesthetic
priorities and democracy?
Amateurs, and aesthetic priorities vs. aesthetic merit.
Artists?
Double Entrepreneurship as our Homeric moment?
Section 2: Artists of the Floating World
Chapter 5 -Artists of the Floating World: An Art-Sustainability Commissioning Strategy
Background
Modifying Modernism? Artists of the Floating World