The arts as social activity of critical engagement toward inclusive environmentalism

by Se Jong Cho

I believe art is one of the few remaining areas of social activity where the attitude of critical engagement may still be encouraged—all the more reason for art to engage with those issues that are critical. (Victor Burgin, 1977)

As an environmental scientist and artist, I’ve become interested in exploring how different forms of art with explicit or implicit environmental themes can help to address increasingly dire environmental problems. Natural and social scientists investigate environmental and social processes and offer practical wisdom for solving various challenges. However, the task of rethinking and reconstructing the human relationship with the natural world requires the humanities, where the cultural shift in human-nature relations can be explored and imagined.¹ The humanities, including the arts, provide a framework for understanding and contending with complex social problems and moral issues, and for discovering tools for imagining our future through human experiences.² In this essay, I examine the arts as a social activity to foster critical engagement toward inclusive environmentalism—a multidisciplinary social movement to foster more reciprocal continuity between nature and humans.

Social order relies on the interpretation of the world that informs, justifies, and motivates a particular distribution and structure of power in a society.³ During the Renaissance and through the 19^th century in Europe, those in the highest ranks of power held exclusive control over political ideas in the arts. For example, in the political artistic tradition of the Venetian Renaissance, works of art were used to justify social hierarchy and conquests of foreign territories. The ruling class reinforced civic pride and legitimized their new empire through a deliberate curation of political ideas and motifs in the arts and architecture that surrounded their citizens.⁴ More recently, propaganda arts have been used in the deliberate control of information and manipulation of public opinion over the course of the 20^th century. Examples include political indoctrination by the despotic regimes of Stalin and the Nazis, but more broadly, the use of the arts by advertising and public relations campaigns shares an essential commonality as social and commercial forms of persuasion.⁵

While the arts have been used to reinforce particular social orders throughout history, it is also the arts that have provided the tools to upend them. The Dada movement emerged in the time of moral and social reckoning in post-World War I Europe. Dadaist art blurred the boundary between aesthetic perspectives and social revolution, and demanded changes in moral order and social structure by challenging the role of the arts and artists as a social agent.⁶ Though the Dadaist movement may have failed to bring on real, comprehensive social changes, it revolutionized the arts. With its anti-art stance, Dadaists sought to destroy art with the deliberate negation of art (e.g., Duchamp rejected painting as unnecessary for the arts and adopted readymades), and brought down the barrier between the arts and everyday space, opening up possibilities for the arts to the broader segment of society and shaping the way we interact with the arts today.⁷

The arts also hold up a mirror to our society and cultural life. Surrealists branched out of the Dada movement from the cracks of its internal conflicts over various competing social ideals, and formed the Surrealist Research Bureau to coordinate scientific investigations of mind and social behavior.⁸ The Bureau was short-lived and the Surrealists’ revolution never happened, but they presented a category of aesthetic experience that permeated and reflected the chaotic and hostile post-war European society. Surrealists, by embracing the dichotomy between chance and determinism and the inherent uncertainty of the world through a particular aesthetic lens that incited absurdist humor and poignant ardor, helped people to make sense of the world and to discover magic in life even in the wreckage of war and violence.⁹

But can the arts be more than just a reflection of our times for good or ill? Can the arts provide tools to address complex social problems and moral issues? Tony Morrison stated that “all good art is political”.¹⁰ More recently, Theaster Gates posited that “Art and protests are forms of political thought” and that “[t]here has to be a belief that artistic power lives amongst all people”.¹¹ Another example of the arts as a social movement can be found in the Ipgim (입김) movement of the 2000s in South Korea. A Korean word meaning breath or influence, Ipgim challenged the patriarchal culture and the authoritative social order of systematically oppressing women. The movement celebrated the positive values of femininity through public display of multi-media art forms. The Ipgim movement spread globally and paved the way for art and cultural activism that takes place in the public sphere, outside of the institutional art world or exhibition halls.¹² The movement made feminism accessible and mainstream by building social empathy, and provided “a framework with which to analyze social concerns and develop policies that reflect the lived experience of people”.¹³

These words and movements inspired me to seek a path toward an inclusive environmentalism that is informed not only by ecology, economics, policy, management and technical perspectives, but also by the arts to consider social structure, grounded in both objective and subjective realities that guide our sense of right and wrong.¹⁴ Environmental issues are often perceived differently based on different senses of reality, which have contributed to disagreements over the strategies and goals of environmentalism.¹⁵ Like other social issues, addressing environmental issues requires the task of rethinking ethics and making moral sense out of the ambiguity emerging from multiple perspectives and senses of reality. And what better ways are there to embrace ambiguity and plurality than through the arts? Where science reaches the limits of clear and distinct articulation of environmental problems and the prescription of solutions, art takes over to discover expressions that directly touch people's emotional center. As Victor Burgin declares, art is a social activity that can bring together and engage with different individual senses of critical environmental issues and articulate ethical implications as a prerequisite to establishing more inclusive environmentalism.¹⁶ For this reason, I began seeking ways to collaborate with multidisciplinary scientists and artists to examine environmental issues through a broader perspective and to interrogate human relationships with the environment, both natural and constructed. Inclusive environmentalism—as a support structure—can be established to create a new kind of environmental narrative, one that blends scientific perspectives with aesthetic expressions, that increases awareness of environmental and social issues through community engagement and artistic production, and that imagines and catalyzes a more reciprocal relationship with nature.

Acknowledgements

I would like to share my appreciation for my collaborators and sponsors in the investigation of Environmental Public Art (EPArt) and its social effects through the development of a conceptual model: Lisa Chandler, Lekelia D. Jenkins, Alison Adams, Nicole M. Ardoin, Bianca Lopez, Christopher R. Field, Kristian Brevik, Roger Peet, Todd Lookingbill, Alia Dietsch, and the National Science Foundation through the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), University of Maryland. This essay was informed through the many discussions that I had with these collaborators through the investigation of EPArt.

I also would like to thank Jonna McKone and Elana DeBold, the co-founding members of Pellis::Terra, an environmental art and science collective formed with a generous contribution from Grit Fund 2022. The collective aims to develop interactive exhibitions and publications that explore the ways in which art can create a new language and consciousness through the expression and engagement of multiple timescales (human, cultural, and geological) and spatial scales (individual, community, and landscape) of environmental issues.

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Se Jong Cho makes art to explore the extents of her imagination and to broaden her creative domain. She began painting while pursuing her PhD in Environmental Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where she worked with a team of multidisciplinary scientists and local stakeholders to sustainably manage natural resources. Her training as a scientist taught her to be observant and think critically, and she has cultivated a brand of imagination and creative expression that combine multidisciplinary perspectives in the arts and the sciences. She has exhibited in a number of solo and group shows in Baltimore, D.C., Miami, and New York. Her work has been covered in BmoreArt Print Journal, Baltimore Museum of Art Stories, and Baltimore Style Magazine. She has given lectures and presentations on art and science at Maryland Institute College of Art, Northwestern University, City College of New York, University of Baltimore County, and Johns Hopkins University.

Se Jong Cho expands on the journey of discovering painting and developing a hybrid practice at the nexus of art and science in a Research Highlight published on the SESYNC website.

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