Inspiration Over Function in Eco-art

Warning: this article is going to start with a vaguely pretentious reference to the Core. But I promise this reference is relevant and will be brief and painless.

At the beginning of this semester, I had to read Plato’s Republic. In Book X of that oh-so-important treatise, Plato discusses the merits of the arts, particularly of poets and poetry. While this is a fairly long and drawn-out discussion, it’s easy to summarize: Plato thinks art is largely useless, and he sees poetry that describes anything other than exemplary heroes as dangerous and even subversive. He would rather censor art and mandate that it only portray good and brave people in order to make it a functional thing—a public service announcement meant to teach people the proper way to behave. As my CC teacher said, Plato’s pre-modern PSAs are not art. To subjugate art into function is to neuter it, to make it a tool rather than an inspired and personal expression of imagination and creativity.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but before I began writing this column, there was some common ground between my views of art and those of Plato. I somewhat naïvely approached this assignment—to write a bi-weekly column about art that deals with the environment—thinking I would find some sort of magical artistic mechanism that would make people care about the planet, recycle, and get rid of their gas-guzzling SUVs. I believed I would find art that would not necessarily teach people how to behave properly and responsibly toward our earth, but instantly make them want to behave properly.

In the course of researching for and writing this column, though, I learned that this utilitarian dream for art is unrealistic. This is best illustrated by an event I covered about urban design that has minimal impact on the environment. At that event, the urban designers were incredibly reluctant to compromise with real-life limitations imposed by government or economic practicalities. As a self-proclaimed pragmatist, I could not understand why the designers were so inflexible. Although I still believe that the designers at that event were—for lack of a better phrase—excessively whiny, now I think I understand their opinions. Designers are artists, and while they create things that are functional, to ask them to compromise too much of their creativity is potentially to do what Plato does to art—to rid a creation of any meaning or intrigue beyond its most basic use. To insist that art’s primary and only goal be practicality is to transform it into something mundane and no longer artistic.

So after claiming that art is not a directly functional tool, why do I continue to study and write about it? If art that deals with the environment is not instructive, then what is the point of it? The point is to make us think and to color and contribute to the debate over environmental issues—like wildlife preservation or global warming. Each exhibit I go to, whether it features Chinese landscape painting or boats built from scrap materials, forces viewers to consider and evaluate their view of the earth and their relationships to it. While the art rarely presents any sort of explicit political opinion, it still adds to and stimulates discourse about the environment—discourse that in turn can fuel pragmatic action. This semester, I learned that art is not practical, but rather inspirational.

Diana Greenwald is a sophomore at Columbia College majoring in art history. EarthWorks of Art runs alternate Fridays.