Interrogations: Art, art education and environmental sustainability

How can art educators begin to inhabit questions of environmental sustainability, accepting to be ethically normative but avoiding becoming dogmatic? This article investigates three interconnected approaches to sustainable art education with the aim of building a platform from where to explore ‘environmental sustainability’ without losing the epistemological and ideological complexities that have been developed within the contemporary research field. The first section, Art, presents two contemporary art projects and discusses their possible contributions to environmental sustainability. The second section, Art Education, introduces four currents in contemporary art education: critical art education, post-structuralist strategies, visual culture pedagogy and community-oriented visual interventions, and ‘interrogates’them about environmental sustainability. Keywords from the interrogations are used as ‘cornerstones’ to create an epistemological ‘platform’. In the third section, Environmental Sustainability, the insights and keywords from the previous sections are used to exemplify how moments of environmental sustainability could be introduced in art education.