Sustaining Sustainability: The Pedagogical Drift of Art Research and Practice.

The Logic of Bamboo 1... unlike the trees, bushes, and shrubs, the few shoots of bamboo along the back fence began to multiply... and, at first, we were enamored by the vitality of its soaring elegance. . . and when the fleshy stems of its invasive roots began to proliferate and crawl below the earth's skin, it became clear that some form of intervention was necessary... and in an attempt to contain and control its territory within the overall design of our yard, I chopped down all that shot up outside of its original placement. . . and what I deterritorialized in one area, quickly rete rrito ria lized in another, again and again...... and so, bamboo won't stop, it won't stay in one place, the more I hack away at it, and the more I uproot its rhizomatic tangle, the more sustained its audacious improvisations, and the more persistent and viral its intensive curriculum... and by extending its limitless, nomadic reach under the fence, it's now mapping the neighbor's yard... and as the knotted spread of its machinic roots assemble and re-assemble, expand and re-expand, its lean and sinewy canes rocket here, there, and everywhere among our trees, bushes, and shrubs... and up through the cracks of our sidewalk and driveway... and drifting into our garage... and its unpredictable movements stirring my nervous system... and igniting the synapses of my brain... and affecting memory and cultural history... and irreducibly emerging onto these pages... and... and...... and while the concept of sustainability has acquired a myriad of nodal constructions and reified understandings since the rise of the Environmental Movement in the mid to late 20th Century, in this article, I focus on the research, practice, and pedagogy of art, namely its irreducible and interminable logic in sustaining sustainability through exploration, experimentation, and improvisation. My purpose in advocating for such systemic mutability is because the topic of sustainability in art classrooms is, more often than not, addressed from the mindset of human-centered, discipline-specific self-expressions; the making of an isolated self through making isolated art objects, art projects, and art activities, which in doing so operate within closed and truncated systems of production and representation that take hold of the body and the body politic in ways that are consistent with the forces of academic, institutional, and corporate power. In characterizing power's manufacture of the body's desire for immediate gratification, performance theorist Stephen Bottoms (2007) writes that, "on the macro-scale, our short-termist obsession with rapid returns is cultivating longer-term chaos in the earth's climate" (p. 9).Art critic Suzi Gablik (1993) has suggested that such systems of power "socialize us to pursue our own ends, to dominate and prevail, even at the expense of others and the earth... survival is equated with dominance and power to control the environment" (p. 81). In comparison, an irreducible sustainability suggests anthropologist Gregory Bateson's (1972) ecological conception of Mind, which is consistent with larger biological systems, and where "the very meaning of 'survival' becomes different when we stop talking about the survival of something bounded by the skin and start to think of the survival of the system of ideas in circuit" (p. 461). Contrary to socially and historically determined conceptions of artistic self-expression, Bateson's aesthetics of ecological survival calls for a muddling of and circuitous participation in and among reified, hierarchical systems of production. This immanent process of critique accommodates discursive complexity and contradiction, and new ways of thinking about habitat change and sustainability. Like Bateson, art critic Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) contends that art functions as a social interstice, an unbounded space of relational aesthetics where the "inter-human" play of history is "being forever re-enacted, in relation to its function. …