Making Matters...But So Also Sustainability (Part 3)

Here's the final instalment of my three-part recount of the symposium Making Matters: Sustainability and Craft Practices held at the Tom Thomson Art Gallery January 19, 2003.

Eric Nay is currently the Associate Dean of Liberal Studies and Faculty of Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design. His area of interest and expertise is environmental sustainability as it relates to design and architecture. The title of his talk, Sustainable Art and Design: Viewing Craft as Cultural Resistance made a similar opening claim to that of Arlene Gehring's, namely that craft is "inherently sustainable." And, it is as such that craft represents "a significant step in correcting a battery of wrongs." "Craft," continued Nay,

provides a form of active resistance to the erosion of history and culture, the global homogenization of culture and the reliance on petroleum-based by-products (plastics) to provide for all of our worldly needs.

Any of you who read my previous post know the two (and I thought somewhat obvious) problems I raised about establishing any necessary link between craft and sustainability: First, craft materials and practices are not inherently environment-neutral; many are, in fact negative in their toxicity. So, I'm not sure how the case for inherent sustainability can be made. Secondly, if we are going to say that all craft is necessarily sustainable are we willing (or, really, even able) to conceptually exclude any practice that employ techniques or materials that are demonstratively unsustainable? My guess is "no;" to say "yes" would simply result in a glaring "cut the nose to spite the face" event.

Ok, now I'll stop chopping at my old block and get on with the content of Nay's talk, which was as entertaining as it was expansive. Nay provided some wonderfully vivid examples throughout his lecture on how craft addresses the sustainability issue, and his train of thought was a much more stable commute than perhaps my re-hashed criticism suggests.

Nay began his lecture with several reminders of bald-faced cold comfort. First, sustainable practices and ways of life are no longer simply avenues of moral or self-congratulatory choice; they are increasingly government-legislated and legally-enforced initiatives, and this because, of course, they are fast becoming practices of brute necessity. This does not mean that the freemarket drive to make sustainability a sexy lifestyle choice will abate anytime soon. Moreover, he pointed out that several results of becoming more sustainable are not really very sexy at all: increased initial energy and capital costs, for example, which could contribute to the destruction of certain things we value in our material culture along the way.

To the next question of what sustainability has to do with art, craft and design Nay answers: artists and craft practitioners, along with their institutional networks, have a practical messaging role to play in the world. We mustn't simply call out our warnings like a voice in the wilderness; rather, the art and craft legions need to start helping to "visualize how sustainability may be realized...and to broadcast this to the larger population to force the massive paradigm shift that will be required to re-visualize our relationship" to the planet.

Unfortunately, according to Nay, such an imperative is a foreign idea to too many artists, craftspeople and cultural workers in general. Nay lays blame for this ellipsis at the feet of modernist art history and aesthetics. Modernism displaced an older craftsmanship and technique-based criteria of judgement with a formalist one privileging "the visual over other sensory responses." While the influence of formalism in the artworld began to dwindle in the 1970s, it was replaced with a paradigm that ultimately fell even farther from upholding the sort of handmade and de-mechanized craftsmanship Nay links to sustainable practice: "the 1980s and 90s saw art completely degrade and become a quantifiable commodity like pork bellies and coffee futures." Moreover, it was at this very point that many craftspeople themselves began adopting the language and criterion of formalism, thereby setting craft on the dismal course to becoming, to borrow from Marx, the farce on art's tragedy.

It is only now, faced with an irresistible need to make the near future a sustainable one that craft, at its "anthropological root" (a phrase I introduced in the previous post), suddenly emerges as the only viable way forward, not only for art and craft practices, but for society's production needs as a whole. In Nay's view, what is important is not just that craft brings us closer to understanding environmental sustainability by its insistence that one work directly with the earth itself; it is rather that in working with the earth in the way craft demands, at its anthropological root, we are able to shift art and craft theory away from both formalism, on the one hand, and ego-driven artstar entrepreneurialism on the other. Craft, at its essence, "opens up a re-engagement with history and a reintroduction to a material palette provided by nature." Moreover, Nay noted that by encouraging craft through exhibition programming,

We preserve what is precious and restore it by remaking it in a harmonious and sympathetic way that has integrity and practicality, and therefore truth and beauty. We embrace decay and entropy and re-invent materials as they take on new and different lives.

Nay mentioned Mark Jaroszewicz as an example of a maker that is critical, "thoughtful, exploratory, yet completely historically rooted work." Jaroszewicz is a ceramicist who retrieves and uses clay extracted from the earth in the wake of various construction projects in Toronto and around Ontario. As Nay described,

The clay being dredged and disposed of to make room for massive skyscraper footings was useful for ceramics and like local food had an innate connection with the climate, the materiality and the physical quality of the region. Every region has its own unique soil and its own clay that has certain properties that are valuable for those who know what they are looking for, like Mark.

Nay made the mention of Jaroszewicz's practice his concluding point because it embodies, for him, a form of "cultural resistance." Unlike our dominant and (questionably) postindustrial consumer culture, it acknowledges the role the natural world plays in conditioning what we use to make things - or, better yet, the sort of stuff we ought to make things with should we wish a sustainable future. Jaroszewicz uses craft to expose audiences to the traces of a particular region, often their particular region of dwelling, and as such reconnects them to always already present link between the earth, the hand and art.