Consumer Materialism / Bio Materialsim
I sometimes envy the ease with which Medieval painters and sculptors laid claim to the public’s attention. The only time people in this era encountered images (instead of tangible things) was during Sunday visits to church!
In an era characterized by a relentless barrage of depictions, two-dimensional renderings and sculpted representations are possibly the least optimal forms of artistic communication today. These conventional art genres and mediums are being trounced by imagery emblazoned on surfaces everywhere - commercial products, printed materials, storefronts, T-shirts, overlays on our computer screens, the walls surrounding baseball fields…...A supersaturated public is not inclined to seek additional visual experiences.
Thus, every day contemporary artists face the problems that male cicadas confront just once every 17 years – how to make their presence known within the cacophonous din created by frenetic competition.
Many eco artists regain the impact that art enjoyed in Medieval times by offering today’s audiences experiences that are as rare to us as rendered images were 800 years ago. They are greatly expanding the inventory of art strategies to provide the opportunity for sensual and visceral encounters with the vast catalog of actual materials that abound on Earth.
These artists seem to acknowledging the inadequacy of statistics, abstractions, representations, theories, symbols, and metaphors. They are reclaiming tactility, smell, sound, texture, weight, etc. – experiences that have been appropriated by industrial manufacture and simulated by electronic technologies.
Jane Bennett, the renowned political theorist, shares this view. She makes a compelling case for the need to reconnect with ‘vibrant matter’ in order to awaken ‘enchantment’ with the wonders of the physical environment and stimulate ‘prudence’, the basis of environmental reforms.
Green Hermeticism reinforces this materialist thrust. It offers a compassionate and holistic alternative to modern science and religion. Hermeticists assert that both have betrayed us because they prevent us from accessing nature from within – as participants, not outsiders. Thus hermetic interactions are intimate, emotional, even erotic – not dualistic, fragmented, and alienating.
I invented the word ‘muckro’ before I became acquainted with Bennett and Green Hermeticism to balance the eagerness for experiences that are remote from sensual interactions. Contemporary culture’s obsession with ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ scales of engagement has come to define of progress. Meanwhile, interactions that are accessible to the human body had no word in all the English language. Thus, I proposed to slip ‘muckro’ in between ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ to enable people to conceptualize and assign value to the items available within human-scaled experiences – plants, animals, trees, dirt, fields, woods……
Materialism is commonly associated with the belief that material goods are abundant, cheap, and replaceable. This attitude is the bane of environmentalist reforms. Now, this ‘consumerist materialism’ is being challenged by ‘eco materialism’ – the practice of attending, with diligence, to all materials: soil, microbes, plants, metals, plastics, nuclear waste …….