Search

Reimagining Art and the Ecovillage develops an expanded understanding of art and the way it functions in the ecovillage within the broader context of the environmental, sustainability movement. Although art plays a vital role, there is little extant research in this field, a shortcoming that this thesis addresses. My overarching question asks whether the ecovillage can be reimagined as a work of art, not in terms of what a work of art is but, drawing on the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, what is enabled by an expanded conception of art. I use a qualitative mixed method design to generate data from semi-structured interviews, art workshops, photography, observation, reflection, and journaling. These are gathered from three Australian ecovillages, Aldinga Arts Ecovillage in South Australia, Billen Cliffs in New South Wales and Crystal Waters in Queensland. The methodological challenge for this project is how to bring together the apparent disparate paradigms of social science research, which inevitably generates static representations, and the open-ended performativity of the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. The thesis begins from the position that Deleuze’s work encourages creative solutions to this problem, offering a dynamic approach to reading the data. Chapters Two, Three and Four examine the ways in which art embeds itself in the social structures, physical spaces and the subjectivities of the ecovillage dwellers. I argue that these structures, spaces and subjectivities work together to produce all of life as a form of art. Chapter Five undertakes a critique of excessive consumption as it links with capitalism, showing how the ecovillage movement stands apart from capitalist tendencies in the way that it engages with art. Finally, in Chapter Six, I explore artworks that I co-produced with the ecovillage dwellers to arrive at the conclusion that while there is always a role for a trained artist to exist in any community, conceiving of and thus reimagining the ecovillage as art, means that the transformative potential of art is available to all as a life practice.

The convergence of art and culture within Australian cultural policy disguises conflicting and preferred meanings ascribed to key terms such as ‘culture’ and ‘community’. Arguments for funding the arts tend to support programs that express a universalising script of a commonly shared Australian national identity. This study has recorded and analysed interviews with six arts/cultural policy managers and eleven creative practitioners to assess the impact of Australian cultural policy. The study concludes that Australian cultural policy discourse is prone to ambiguous and preferred meanings that legitimate public funding for art and cultural programs. The thesis argues that current cultural policy aims to grow the economy with a creative industries strategy while the community cultural development model is designed to build social capital. The two approaches are not always consistent in their aims and outcomes. The Australia Council’s community arts programs are founded on cultural democratic ideals, advocating ordinary people’s right to engage in creative expressions of Australian identity. A founding principle for funding the community arts is intended to promote cultural pluralism. However this approach has contributed to the prevailing view that the sector privileges the cultural fringes at the expense of the wider Australian community. The thesis tracks how funding for the community arts has devolved to local government to voluntarily plan and manage community cultural development even as state and federal governments continue to assert influence in local and regional arts and cultural programming. There is also the expectation that local government must demonstrate expanded understanding of culture as an integration of social ideals and economic objectives. The research method deployed by the thesis encourages participants to tell their stories. Consequently, storytelling emerges as a critical creative method and practice that can disrupt and renew idealised images of Australian cultural identity. The thesis concludes that there is a general consensus based on the interview data that culture does not need to be mandated by government. As local government continues to rely on key individuals to identify and realise local arts and cultural aspirations, these tend to support idealised expressions of a shared cultural heritage. The consequences are a general resistance to difference in art and cultural practices.