Ecology and the aesthetics of imperfect balance

Abstract

This issue can be read in the context of recent critical writing about sustainability. The work of Tony Fry (2009) has been critical in expanding the understanding of sustainability away from purely technological solutions to more expansive ontological approaches. These look to forms of production, including craft, which reflect a more caring relation to materials. This is the critical difference. Caring is not the same as conserving. A useful complement to Fry’s approach can be found in Allan Stoekl's Bataille’s Peak (2007), which argues that certain energy saving measures can be more a sign of the problem than a solution. Stoekl draws on George Bataille’s thinking about the ‘problem’ of excess production. According to Bataille, traditional societies gathered the surplus resources produced during the year, which they expended in calendar rituals such as festivals or sacrifices. Under capitalism, excess is channelled back into financial systems and is so re-invested in production. This enables economies to grow, year by year, and thus also expands the amount of energy required to sustain this system. For Stoekl, energy-saving is simply an extension of this deferment. Rather than curb excess, its purpose is to enable the system to keep growing. So how can sustainability be more than reducing resource use? This issue of craft + design enquiry reflects an ontological approach that attempts to consider the ways of being that frame our relation to materials. Broader critiques consider factors such as private property, capitalism, consumerism and society of spectacle as promoting the short-term exploitation that leads to longer-term environmental disasters. While this ontological approach to sustainability is new, it resonates with the birth of modern craft, more than one hundred years ago. As noted in this volume by Peter Hughes and Mary Loveday-Edwards, the Arts and Craft movement positioned the handmade construction of beautiful objects as a moral counterpoint to the looming dominance of the machine in Victorian society. Today, climate change has served to raise parallel concerns about consumerism as an unsustainable basis on which to maintain societies. In positioning craft as an alternative to the rapid turnover of fashion and technology, it maintains its role as a counterpoint to dominant trends in modernity. Hughes extends the line of the Arts & Crafts Movement to the contemporary concept of ‘emotionally durable design’. Loveday- Edwards reads the work of contemporary English craft practitioners as a link between the Victorian craft movement and contemporary phenomena such as Transition Towns. Interestingly, she remarks on the changing emphasis on craft, now understood as process rather than product. Mathew Kiem connects this argument to contemporary sources, including Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Manzini and Fry. His paper takes the form of a call to craft practitioners to respond to the need for sustainability. Kiem considers the object not as an art work in itself but as a thing embedded in the world. Rod Bamford argues a similar logic, with reference to particular initiatives such as the craft response to ‘peak clay’ in Japan. The focus is not on the object itself, but its role in shaping the lives around it. This point resonates with current projects, such as the Dharpa Djama workshop set up in Gunyangara East Arnhem Land where the Gumatj clan has collaborated with furniture designer-maker Damien Wright to develop a process of using the timber left over from mining operations to make useful objects for the communities. While creating value out of waste is significant in itself, it also promises to strengthen community by facilitating self-reliance, creating employment opportunities, exchanging skill and culture.