C O 2 * [art + sustainability]: Finding sustainability in the work of Duchamp, Picasso and Georges Braque

(Pablo Picasso. Installation in the artist's studio at 242, boulevard Raspail. Paris, December 9, 1912, or later. Gelatin silver print. 3 3/8 x 4 ½ in. (8.6 x 11.5 cm). Private collection. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)

"Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives"

(Joseph Beuys)

by Sueli Ferreira Lima Fortin (5u3l!)

There is now clear scientific evidence that humanity is living unsustainably, and that an unprecedented collective effort is needed to return human use of natural resources to within sustainable limits (1, 2).

In this context, never has the role of the arts been so needed. Because this crisis has also been and continues to be nurtured and produced by past and current cultural practices and ideologies, artists, immersed in a world of cultural practices, are ideally situated to locate and develop responses, (3) and help humanity to end the current unsustainable situation.

An "unsustainable situation" occurs when natural capital (the sum total of nature's resources) is used up faster than it can be replenished. Our current global situation is that, since the 1970s, humanity has been in ecological overshoot with annual demand on resources exceeding what Earth can regenerate each year.

It now takes the Earth one year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year. This means that humanity is now using the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. Moderate UN scenarios suggest that if current population and consumption trends continue, by the 2030s, we will need the equivalent of two Earths to support us. And of course, we only have one. Turning resources into waste faster than waste can be turned back into resources puts us in global ecological overshoot, depleting the very resources on which life depends on to exist.

We maintain this overshoot by liquidating the Earth’s resources, and replacing them with waste which is contaminating the planet's soil, air and water.

Overshoot is a vastly underestimated threat to human well-being and the health of the planet, and one that is not adequately addressed. "The solution to pollution is dilution", is a dictum which summarizes a traditional approach to pollution management whereby sufficiently diluted pollution is not harmful. But it assumes that the dilutant is in virtually unlimited supply for the application or that resulting dilutions are acceptable in all cases.

Such simple treatment for environmental pollution on a wider scale might have had greater merit in earlier centuries when physical survival was often the highest imperative, human population and densities were lower, technologies were simpler and their byproducts more benign. But these are often no longer the case. Pollution is no longer "dilutable": it is accumulating and taking the place of healthy habitats, including human habitats.

The more someone is exposed to environmental pollution, the more likely it is that health complications will emerge. Health issues can include neurological issues, reduced fertility, damage to the immune system, respiratory issues, developmental issues, and cancer. Thus, theoretically, the long-term result of environmental degradation is the inability to sustain life on Earth. Such degradation on a global scale could imply extinction for living beings.

In light of the ever increasing need for addressing environmental degradation, all of us are being called to live sustainably (4). This means that we must use nature's resources at a rate at which they can be replenished naturally. A response to this environmental degradation is the creation of art that carries sustainability at its core. By practicing sustainability, artists have the immense power to instigate cultural changes favoring sustainable life style.

While tackling the issue of ever growing environmental pollution, artists may include within the artistic process, for example, practices of pollution prevention and waste minimization such as recycling, reusing (re-purposing, up-cycling), reducing, mitigating, and preventing the production of waste.

(Pablo Picasso. Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912)

Recycling is not new concept to the visual arts. It has been used before, and, intriguingly, at a time in which that old belief that “"The solution to pollution is dilution" was irrefutable. Recycling is part of the arts world since the early part of the 20th Century, when cubist artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963) created collages from newsprint, packaging and other found materials (Synthetic Cubism). Picasso's and Braque's collages integrated real substances such as wallpaper, sand, straight pins, ordinary string, brand labels, packaging, musical scores, and newspaper with the artist's drawn or painted versions of the same or similar objects.

The combination of elements broke with traditional two-dimensional art practices, not only in terms of incorporating such humble materials but also because these materials referred to modern life in the streets, in the studios and in the cafés. This interplay of real-world items mirrors the integration of contemporary street imagery in his friends' avant-garde poetry, or what Guillaume Apollinaire called la nouveauté poésie (novelty poetry) - an early form of Pop Art.

Today, collage is recognized as a genuine expressive art form and celebrated because of the materials used and not in spite of them.

(Georges Braque. Fruitdish and Glass, 1912)

Reusing, re-purposing, and up-cycling quotidian objects as an art form are also well known practices to artists. The introduction of Ready-mades by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1960) contemplated the visual arts with self analysis, and simultaneously reflected the world context of the time: the generalized insanity surrounding the WWI which was being satirized with enormous creativity by the members, including Duchamp, of the short lived, but nonetheless highly important Dada movement.

Ready-mades were everyday objects which Duchamp chose and presented as art work. In 1913 (or 1910), Duchamp installed a Bicycle Wheel in his studio. However, the idea of Ready-mades did not fully develop until 1915. The idea was to question the very notion of Art, and the adoration of art, which Duchamp found "unnecessary".

"My idea was to choose an object that wouldn't attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see", said Duchamp in interview at the BBC in 1966.

(Marcel Duchamp. Bicycle Wheel, 1915 (copy of lost original from 1913)

The Ready-made reflects the dynamic nature of art and the idea that the creative process that goes into a work of art is the most important thing - the work itself can be made of anything and can take any form, and in this way, it changed the art world forever.

A man of great humor and wit, Duchamp loved nothing more than jokes, puns and challenging others to think beyond conventional wisdom. Perhaps Duchamp's greatest contribution, though, is that he almost single handedly shifted the focus of art away from the strictly visual and onto the mental. Duchamp's enormous impact on Contemporary Art cannot be overstated.

Every movement using everyday objects to startle onlookers (Surrealism, for example), to allude to, bash or even cast a poetic light on consumer society (Pop Art and New Realism, for instance), or to reconcile art and everyday life (as Fluxus) can thank Duchamp for showing the way, overstepping established academic conventions. After Duchamp, the constraints of traditional media vanished and artistic potentialities have been stretched to absolutely any object, altered or not.

(Marcel Duchamp. With Hidden Noise, 1916)

But 20th century art can thank Duchamp for more than kick-starting a revolution in the materials arena: he also drew the spotlight on aesthetics’ more complex questions, whence Conceptual Art ultimately derived in the 1970s. No modern-day artist has probed the concept of art, asking “when is there art” and exactly what is “enough to produce art” more frankly than Duchamp did. He was an “intellectual” artist, in the tradition of Leonardo da Vinci, and opened the door to questions that Joseph Kosuth later probed.

Today, we still own Duchamp our most sincere gratitude for his nonconforming spirit which has brought him to introduce the Read-mades, and has pushed artists and audiences to overcome barriers to major and needed paradigm shifts to reach evolution. Perhaps, this same nonconforming spirit is the essential ingredient that will help artists and audiences to find ways to reach sustainability when it is mostly needed: now!