Curated by Sean Roy Parker

A Future Without Growth

"It's difficult to overstate the need for artists to imaginatively lead the way towards degrowth...Detoxifying the artist's studio will not happen overnight. What would happen if all the factories making these art materials closed down tomorrow? Then what would artists use to express themselves or make meaning? This selection of artworks destabilise archaic perspectives of the function of art." Sean Roy Parker

Featuring work by: Clare Barber, Naty Lopez-Holguin, Jenny Mellings, Anna Chrystal, Bobb Budd, Caroline Dear, Victoria Malcolm, Julian Claxton, James Winnett, Laura Lulika

Introduction by Sean Roy Parker

Through the chaotic lens of the ongoing global polycrisis, it's clear art is simultaneously more useless and more necessary than ever, argues critic and theorist Boris Groys in his e-flux essay 'Art and Activism'. On one hand, the image-obsessed industry continues to use art to generate huge upward transfers of wealth and in a market devoid of ethics at extravagant fossil-fuelled fairs and biennials around the world. Meanwhile, anti-imperial activists and local mutual aid movements practise creative messaging and radical public expression using whatever materials they can find to generate emotional, financial and political support for intersectional justice.

As Just Stop Oil hang up their hi-viz, after highlighting the urgency for public discourse around the climate crisis by, among many other protests, throwing soup at Van Gogh, it's difficult to overstate the need for artists to imaginatively lead the way towards degrowth. Anthropologist Jason Hickel describes the concept of degrowth as, "a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being." I tend to think about it as doing less, slower, together, with intention.

Artists are inexplicably compelled to live in line with their ethics, to furiously dream for a fair future despite current crushing realities. Their delusion is often a thinly-veiled road map out of this mess. Those at the vanguard of decolonial, interpersonal and ecological thinking - who are able to deeply feel and hold and communicate multiple contradictory perspectives - are constantly giving clues not in what they do but in how they do it.

New visual languages around the found object in sculpture that challenged received understanding of what constitutes an art material have been around for a century at least, typified by Readymades, Arte Povera and Pop Art. Fortunately, the homogeny and monotony of mass-production and commercialisation has in the last twenty years given way to less cynical methodologies. Long-winded experimentation with biomaterials, futile low-tech and no-tech solutions, systems thinking around waste and sincere representational crafts. Each illustrates how artists are taking responsibility for their decisions, creating challenging frameworks and wrestling with existentialist questions. Octavia Butler comforts us with the reminder, "All that you Change / Changes you."

Detoxifying the artist's studio will not happen overnight. The bisulphites, benzenes, phthalates and cadmium seep into our skin and can be easily inhaled from the atmosphere. They stick to canvases and wood, flow out of the studio down sinks, flake off onto our clothes. They have long been baked into the most basic and unsuspecting materials, the irony being that so many artists depict nature with tools that have never known soil. Forever, chemicals.

What would happen if all the factories making these art materials closed down tomorrow? Then what would artists use to express themselves or make meaning? How would they reorganise the overwhelming abundance of things in their world to make sense? Could these methodologies become legible in the context of constant flux?

This selection of artworks destabilise archaic perspectives of the function of art. They are reaching into the future, bringing back clues as to how to move forwards: with wit, connection, inquisition, acceptance, thrift and a deep acceptance of the temporary. The artists hone in on their own critical understandings of expanded lifecycles through heritage crafts, post-consumer waste, marginal reportage, right when we need them the most.

Read more about these artists in the Artists Gallery and connect with your fellow members in the Axis Community. A bibliography is available in the Community Curated Spotlight and by request.