Anne Douglas’ response to my review of “Thinking with the Harrisons”.

In an email exchange responding to my review of her and Chris’ book, Anne Douglas contacted me about the point I’d made about artists today and the “material question”. She writes that:

“this very point was raised by a PhD student from Berlin/Bauhaus Weimar. Her work is excellent on sea level rise and she was very clear that there would be no way she could function in the way the Harrisons had and asked whether that undermined her potential as an artist working on ecological issues. My response at the time was that she was an artist and needed to focus on working within whatever constraints life posed as excellence frequently emerges out of very severe constraints”.

She also notes that when Newton Harrison “addressed Masters students at ECA in Edinburgh, he began by saying that their challenges to be artists in the current world would be much, much greater than his own…” adding that: “then there is Hannah Arendt, ‘We are born unasked into the world” and have no control over the circumstances of our birth. Thereafter we have some and therefore need to invest in thinking for ourselves”. 

She goes on to say taht while her points don’t directly address my thoughts about the economics of the art world and how eco-art practices “can/will be supported when so much of institutional life, not least education in art schools, is fractured. It would make an important book around the kind of judgements artists need to make in how to become recognised…”.

I very much hope someone out there is busy preparing to research and write just such a book, not from the usual “critical Left” position within the art world, but with a clear understanding of the radical shift of mentality needed. One that moves us beyond the myopia imposted by a disciplinary-based education system to a view of life in which creativity is seen as intrinsic to all worthwhile human activity – Joseph Beuys’ notion that “everyone is an artist”. One in which everyone’s practices are understood as located within an ensemble of skills and orientations rather than in specialisms all-too-often linked to exclusive notions of authority and power.