Guest Blog by Deanna Pindell: Ecoart Strategies for Engaging with the More-than-Human Lifeworld
Introduction by Aviva Rahmani
Ecoartist Deanna Pindell is an activist and teacher who has immersed herself in Indigenous studies, is active with WEAD, SANZ, is a contributor to “Ecoart in Action” and the ecoart list serv. I asked her to write a guest blog on one of her areas of research expertise which deeply interests me: how and why artists express our relationships with other species. Please consider contributing to how her ideas can be part of a greater educational outreach.
Article by Deanna Pindell
Not even four centuries of the Cartesian split have passed, and look where we are: Westerners seem to have forgotten how to exist. I don’t mean that hyperbolically; we’ve created our very own existential crisis. We refer to that crisis as Progress. Quantum physicist and queer feminism scholar Karen Barad has developed a theory of quantum intra-activity which describes an unending co-creation of existence by all sentient beings. Barad’s theory applies without regard to whether we choose ecstasy or ecocide. Her thinking provokes the question: can we re-engage in communicative, companionable co-existence with the more-than-human lifeworld?
Many ecoartists have charted multiple pathways for reciprocity across ecosystems, with the intention of decentering patriarchal, colonial, and ultimately anthropocentric worldviews. Collectively, ecoartists have used aesthetic strategies to examine ideas about knowledge systems, power, rights of nature, and our place in the larger lifeworld. For Westerners, the study and assimilation of strategies, values, and worldviews of contemporary Indigenous people is clearly essential and central to the question of whether humans can continue to exist on this planet.
A transformative aesthetics of ecology has emerged. Long-held epistemologies and ontologies are being challenged (goodbye, Descartes) by ecoartists, and are being expanded through deep, communicative listening to the intelligence of the more-than-human realms. Reiko Goto-Collins, an ecoartist, collaborates with Darkness, a cob horse. She uses practice-based field methodology to document Darkness’s daily explorations. Goto-Collins explains, "What we have learned is that Darkness communicates through reciprocal, embodied sign relationships that include his body and mind, and ours, in a shared environment." Ecoartist Hope Sandrow frames her living arrangements with Gallus gallus domesticus, the agriculturally-domesticated chicken, as a laboratory; she writes, "The idea that chickens are markers of the Anthropocene within the transformation of the biosphere has guided the ongoing transformation of my backyard into a living record of the impact of climate change and restoration." For these two artists, the transformative praxis of deep empathy begins with centering the viewpoint of the Other. In my own work, I am most challenged and thus most transformed through my efforts to develop empathetic relationships with trees. Artists around the globe are developing this ecological aesthetic through their relationships with critters from slime molds to giant sequoias (see artists Heather Barnett and Elizabeth Demaray)
As we dismantle the anthropocentric systems of division and hierarchies of privilege across species, we can begin to be transformed by the aesthetic elegance of an ecosystem that works, by which all lifeforms continually, intra-actively, co-create each next moment in the system. This aesthetic goes beyond any notions of modern or postmodern, sculpture or painting, beauty or the sublime or embodied identity. This is the aesthetic by which Aviva Rahmani's Blued Trees collected-and-ongoing body of work can be understood, along with many other ecoart projects that investigate large complex systems.
I am personally committed to this notion of an ecological aesthetic. It allows us to discover ways to heal, transform, and transcend our anthropocentric misbehavior, and recognize it as art. If Barad's theory of quantum entanglement and intra-active life-world-making holds, it's time for artists to expand our role in co-creating the living universe; physics tells us that even though our touch might be as light as a butterfly's wing, the impact could be instantaneous.
Note: Reiko Goto-Collins, Deanna Pindell’s, and Hope Sandrow’s work are included in the forthcoming anthology, “Ecoart in Action”.