This week an artist came to speak to the senior class who made work a lot like mine, out of accumulations of waste products: paper, plastic, tires, ceramics. Mostly used newspaper, which I also am working with.

I thought his work was beautiful. Knowing his materials so intimately, I felt deeply moved by the slides of his work.  The sculptures were simple and elegant in a way I have not managed, have not even really attempted.   I am trying to make art about being overwhelmed by ecological crisis.  The installation I am spending the year on, my senior project, is messy and multi-faceted. I am hoping that this approach will convey my panic to the viewer, and that it will also help me feel less scared about the world I am living in.  In contrast to my work, the visiting artist’s seemed almost sparse, but his slides evoked exactly the reaction from me that I dream people will have in response to my work.

However, he was an asshole. His artist talk was painful; he was rude to the students and self-righteous. He fell in to all of the pitfalls of talking about ecological art that I am working hard to avoid. He sited half-relevant statistics about consumption and included images of dumps and parking lots meant to illustrate how appalled he was by today's world. To his credit, in my eyes, he did not claim that his art was a solution to ecological problems, he acknowledged his complicity in waste.  However, this pissed most people in the room off. By using his artist's talk as a platform to discuss ecological issues outside of his work, he primed his audience to look at him as 'part of the solution'. When inconsistencies between his work and talk became apparent, most notably that he also makes work out of store-bought materials and sometimes cuts down small trees to use in sculptures, people got angry. They saw him as a hypocrite. He responded dismissively and defensively, which made it much worse. I cringed, knowing that his terrible handling of the subject matter we share could well predispose my peers to see all ecologically oriented artwork more cynically, and to be more judgmental of my work. 

Since his lecture, though, I've had a couple of really interesting exchanges about what was wrong with the talk. Our shared frustration leads us to talk about his content, and I end up sharing a lot of my opinions about consumption, waste, and my art's engagement with these issues.  This result is exciting.

This artist talk crystallized some thoughts I’ve been having about art as education.  I understand art as basically a teaching tool, a way by which individuals learn about the world by making things, and a way in which any number of skill sets can be synthesized to creative ends.  I have designed my art work this year to teach me about consumption patterns and my complicity in them, because this is something I want to know with the intimacy that art makes me understand things. Talking about my work is the main opportunity I have to share this learning, and so it makes sense to think of it as an act of teaching.   I try think I am being a good teacher by letting people have their own experience of my work and by offering up a lot of information about my thinking when asked.  By pissing us all off, the artist inspired us all to dwell on his talk a lot more than we would have if he were pleasant, and so maybe his artists talk was effective, even though I left hating him.

Mostly, I think of confrontational teaching as counterproductive and fundamentally bad, but some of the anti-racist workshops I've attended in the past few years have made me rethink this. These workshops ask me to confront the ways in which I unjustly benefit from being a white person in America.  I leave feeling terrible. I respect the facilitator a whole lot but am definitely scared of him, because his work calls me on all my bullshit..  It would be wrong for me to leave happily motivated, though, because the delusional over-empowerment of liberal white folks like me is part of the problem.  Thus it is honest for the leader of an anti-racist workshop to make me leave feeling powerless, guilty, confused. The aggressive pedagogy evokes an appropriately difficult emotional response.

I think ecological self-reflection should also make people feel bad, because it is a just sadness  (In fact sometimes I feel kind of weird about the fact that I am making art about ecological crisis, because I derive so much joy from the process of making, and so am kind of deriving joy from crisis?)  However, I don't think anyone talking about ecology, especially not in an arts context, has the right to preach, because what human can claim the moral high ground? We are all suffering from and contributing to planet trash soup. I am trying to find a way to talk about my art work and life choices non-judgmentally, non-condescendingly as a way to compassionately increase other’s thinking about ecological crisis.   I think I'm getting good and gauging the appropriate tone, but it’s definitely been a struggle for me. This visiting artist did not do this.  Instead, he set himself up as outside of his work and the problems it deals with, provoking an oppositional response that called for conversation, much more so than my work does.  I sometimes think that my work must be the only way to approach my subject matter, but of course its not, and of course I am not doing it perfectly, either.  I am one attempt. 

By Rachel Schragis