We are living in a time when our culture is becoming more socially responsible and active. Creative fields, including fashion, architecture, and visual arts are leading the way in conversations around sustainability, the environment, and social consciousness. In art, sustainability has led to the development of pioneering works that use innovative materials and media to convey powerful messages about climate change, political policy, and social injustice. So, what does “sustainability” mean? What is Sustainable art? This article engages with questions like these and more while looking at examples of work by Sustainability artists.
What Does Sustainability Mean?
Ideas about sustainability vary across literature and over time, making it difficult to pin down a precise definition. In our era, known as the Anthropocene, sustainability can be broadly understood as a societal goal that strives for the healthy co-living of humans and other species on planet Earth. The Anthropocene era, derived from anthropo, the Greek word for “man”, refers to a geological unit of time, wherein the human impact on the earth has started to show devastating consequences, such as climate change, natural imbalances, and the extinction of multiple plants and animal species. The social shift towards living more sustainably aims to reduce the negative effect that humans have on the planet in the hopes of safely living on the earth with other species in more healthy ecosystems for many generations to come.
What Is Sustainability in Art?
Sustainable art can be defined in a variety of ways, as can most aspects of the art world. Some artists are primarily concerned with expressing environmental issues, while others use environmentally friendly materials and studio practices in their work.
Additionally, Sustainable art isn’t just limited to visual arts; it’s also prevalent in architecture and fashion, among others. By employing circular economies and closed-loop fashion, designers and manufacturers are finding ways to use less water in the manufacturing process, use more eco-friendly color dyes, and extend the life cycle of clothing. Musicians, writers, performers, and filmmakers are also showing increasingly more interest in engaging with issues of sustainability and the environment in their work.
A Short History of Sustainable Art
Even though the term ‘Sustainable art’ is relatively new, qualities of sustainability have been practiced by many creatives from many cultures long before a term was invented for it. African art, for example, has a long history of art and culture that is made with natural materials that are respectful of nature, from functional and sculptural works of clay and wood that get passed on through generations, to creative expression through body painting, fashion, and weaving practices, to briefly name a few. Another example is the culture of upcycling, seen also in African art, but perhaps most notably in Japanese culture. Kintsugi, for example, is the practice of celebrating imperfection and avoiding waste by repairing broken ceramics and pottery with traces of gold. Upcycling remains a dominant Sustainable art form used by many fine and contemporary artists today. The following subtitles briefly discuss the development of sustainability in art into the different types of Sustainable art that are practiced today.
Landscape Paintings
The Western art world’s shift to sustainability started with the 19th-century Romantic artists’ resistance to industrialization and shift of focus to nature in their paintings. While these artists had not yet considered sustainability in terms of materials, they introduced a shift in thinking at the time that honored and glorified the natural world in their work.
Land Art
Artists have since, especially from the 1950s onwards, started to develop their thinking so that nature is no longer simply the subject of paintings, but becomes the actual material they used to create work. It is also around this time that scientists’ concerns about global warming started to grow. The first warnings of climate change in the mid-20th century had only gotten more urgent into the 21st century. The world is becoming increasingly aware of the importance of the climate crisis, which has prompted several artists to work with themes related to sustainability in their art. Sustainability is a central theme through which artists are highlighting these issues in their work and they are making a real impact on social awareness through their work.
Many artists began challenging the traditional gallery model in the 1970s by creating work that is site-specific and uses the earth and environment as mediums. These works were called Land Art, Earth art, or Earthworks.
Conceptual Art
Conceptual art, also called information and idea art, emerged around the same time that Land art did. In Conceptual art, the idea behind the artwork is the most important aspect of the work and it is even more significant than the end product. Similar to Land art, Conceptual art is also often site-specific, though it does not necessarily use earth as material. Conceptual artists could, however, use any material of their choosing, given that the material adds to the idea or meaning of the work.
There can thus be many similarities between Conceptual art and Land art, and some Land art can be considered as being conceptual. To distinguish between the two, one can see Land art can be seen as an artist interacting within a specific natural landscape, the end product is the most important and is predominantly sculptural and site-specific. While Conceptual art can take similar shapes to Installation art and Land art, the idea is always central and the most important in the work. For this reason, many Sustainability art projects and installations can fall under the category of conceptual art as it is the idea of, for example, the climate crisis, social change, or sustainability that is the most important aspect of the work.
Written by Myra Postolache