Department of Random Insight

Dawn February 11, 2023

I have always thought transparency is a good thing and that it's impossible to be truly generous without openness. The opposite of generosity is withholding. Withholding in personal relationships is cruel sport. In relationship to the rest of nature, it is just profoundly short-sighted, even, stupid. This is our present challenge: environmentalists are being outgunned and outspent and outpowered by people who have no problem being transparent. Corporations, miners, hegemonies are very clear. They are transparent and open about greed and ruthlessness.  They just leave out the part about generosity. That is a big problem. That doesn't mean resistance is futile, but it IS a challenge at scale.

I haven't written a blog post for some time. Ever since my book, Divining Chaos, came out last summer, most of my time has been taken up with interviews and articles about my thinking: wonderful but not my main focus as an artist. What was left of my attention after what went to marketing my book for the past nine months, long enough to birth a baby, went to developing my formal ideas about and seeking support for my experimental opera based on the 2018 mock trial for The Blued Trees Symphony, Blued Opera.

Thinking underlies my entire practice. And recently, that has meant thinking about the relationship between withholding and ecocide and why it is so difficult to prosecute and hold perpetrators responsible.

This post will be a rambling disquisition on what I've been thinking about since my book launch. The baby I birthed was the first segment of my opera-in-progress. I'm not going to share that yet, although a trailer is now available for curators. The segment is based on an exchange in the mock trial between one of the lawyers and the art critic Ben Davis, the expert witness, who defines the legal standing for the work on the basis of where it stands in a contemporary conversation about what is important to the culture now about land ownership. What I'm writing about instead now, is the thinking behind the opera and even beyond the opera, what I think about people who allow ecocide to continue apace and eschew generosity.

My ideal future world would be open, transparent, and generous to all creatures. This will be a post about withholding that generosity, but first some background. Trigger warning: I will make many didactic, opinionated, and judgmental statements and leaps between assertions.

Informally, I have said that my book was about the relationship between ecofeminism and physics. Both are about change. Ecofeminism is ultimately about generosity between genders and nature. Physics is about relationships between dynamics. Both are about effecting change. Considering responsibility for ecocide brings up the question of why change, and specifically generosity, is so difficult. I'm not the first one to think about this relationship between a philosophy (ecofeminism) and science . It is perhaps no accident that the ecofeminist Vandana Shiva's career began as a physicist.

Some people are surprised by how often moral, psychological, even political and philosophical questions come up in artmaking. But there is a long list of contemporary artists who straddle art and philosophy, many of whom are Feminists as well as conceptualists, such as Adrian Piper. And then there's the whole tumultuous circle around the legendary philosopher Herbert Marcuse, when he was at the University of California at San Diego, which included Martha Rosler and myself. I think I am more of a theorist, especially about ecoart, than a philosopher. But I found the boundaries between theory and philosophy especially blurred this year for me, as I contemplated the implications of how ecocide continues to pillage the world we know.

I recently began a section of a grant I was writing to develop the Blued Opera with the sentence, "I want 3 years of strategic guidance towards the next judicial victory." The victory I want, is over ecocide.  I think art can do that. One reason that is because I think art is the ultimate act of generosity.  I think the aesthetic premises of the Blued Trees project are that art could drive home that point about generosity.

When I began the Blued Trees project in 2015, I was sure I had a tiger by the tail that would take me to the Supreme Court in six years, if I just held on tight enough. I thought that justice. like art was a discourse about negotiating change. Then came Trump. Trump is the ultimate avatar for withholding, specifically, withholding the voice of marginalized peoples, let alone nature. He and his acolytes threw ice water on the kind of legal activism that might have impeded ecocide. Instead, they unleashed untrammeled cruelty on the world.

In my book, I quoted a sociologist I once heard in the eighties say and never forgot, "if you don't feel your own pain, it's amazing how much pain you can cause." So what is the pain that allows ecocide? I have answered this many times, in my book, in other writings and talks. Empathy is the pain others would rather bury: empathy for the Other as well as for oneself.

Since the 2016 election, the whole world has been turned on its head and I have been flummoxed by a number of those turns, like, why has shameless cruelty and withholding, epitomized by the former president of the United States, become so normalized? Sure, there was a time when people were shamed unfairly, like women for being sexual or anyone for the color of their skin. But utter and overtly gratuitous cruelty ? Really? A cult of don't look up at how the world is coming to an end? Really. I thought we had made more progress. I think denying reality is a form of withholding and the consequences are cruel and horrific. If they are so horrific, why are they now so normalized? Even sadder, where, in many circles, are those qualities conflated with Christianity?

Recently, I've been thinking about patterns of withholding in personal relationships, the microcosm of all of the above. In intimate relationships, withholding can take many forms. It can be emotional coldness or simply denying facts even after they have been verified. Denial of psychological pain is another form of withholding. Often denial sits under anger & fear. I have no doubt, for example, that climate and election deniers are terrified of simple facts about contemporary precarity in the world: white supremacist hold onto power is contested because their mission is based on protecting a very shaky mandate: that only a small group is entitled to generosity.

This has something I decided I want to think about more deeply in my work going forward: what pain have I denied? Not to be masochistic, but to consider what enables the generosity that needs to partner with transparency: faith, the faith required to shoulder truth, or just plain reality including routine disappointments in life and the Other.

Maybe withholding hope is just another form of denying faith? Does that mean faith is the answer to all pain, whether spiritual or material? Is that why people turn to religion in the most narrow sense? Over global warming and impunity for ecocide for example, do they require having faith in some arc of history and biology, let alone the Other? I have no answers. Theologians and philosophers argue over distinctions between hope and faith. My conclusions about the theological speculations are that some believe that hope is about specific expectations, whereas faith is a belief that whatever the outcome may be, it will include a generous vision for all concerned.

For about a year, I have argued against those who cling to hope, specifically, a yearning for a return to some sentimental past illusion of normalcy. I think yearning is a very closed idea. Now I speculate about whether hope needs to be separated from faith? I think faith is more conditional and open to possibilities. But maybe that's all hope is: faith. Every morning I capture a photograph of the dawn. I have faith that there will always be another dawn and every time I capture a new dawn, I know I have captured a measure of hope realized.

But I think I am in the faith contingent. I believe ecocide is evil and resistance to ecocide is an obligation. If art is a form of resistance, and ethics drives art, then I will fling myself at fate to realize a vision I have about what art can be as an act of faith. I will withhold nothing when the time comes to launch my opera.

And what exactly will I NOT withhold? Perhaps just the light and color I see in every dawn, how it always embodies hope and faith.

Until then, I'll just carry on capturing daily dawns, as an act of faith that there will always be reality-based hope for another daily dawn. I hope to see my hope for a judicial victory realized. Meanwhile, I will continue developing my opera and embracing my faith that art has a significant role to play in resistance to ecocide, whether I see immediate results or not, whether my efforts bring us closer to holding entities accountable for ecocide in a court of law or not.