Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene
Julie Reiss (Ed.)
by Paul Ardenne (University of Amiens, France)
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I am honored to offer a review of 'Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene', edited by Julie Reiss. This outstanding collection of essays focuses on the role of art (primarily visual) in response to environmental awareness and audience engagement in the context of the Anthropocene. The volume’s essays range from scholarly theory and reflection on the role of arts during a time of dramatic anthropogenic climate change and ecological/species decline to thoughts and reflections on specific exhibits, installations, projects and collaborations, community and pedagogical examples, and activist art projects. Reiss’ Introduction notes the increasing need for art and the humanities to creatively connect with audiences in rethinking/reimaging their place in the other-than-human world in order to forge new stories of change and possibly even hope.
While differing in style and purpose, each essay is excellently written and cogent to a wide array of readers.
Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene is an essential book in the catalogue of environmental humanities scholarship by contextualizing the possibilities for environmentally engaged visual arts.
Prof. David Taylor
Stony Brook University
Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene” will be an invaluable resource for artists and art teachers who are trying to figure out how art can make a difference in a time of climate change. Its authors present a wide range of perspectives. They take on, among other questions: how can art directly act on environmental problems? What practical effects can art have on specific audiences? What standards can be created to evaluate the relative effectiveness of various approaches? This book is an important addition to the growing literature on our increasingly fraught situation and injects a note of hope and agency into a vital debate.
Eleanor Heartney, Contributing Editor, Art in America
Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene contributes to the growing literature on artistic responses to global climate change and its consequences. Designed to include multiple perspectives, it contains essays by thirteen art historians, art critics, curators, artists and educators, and offers different frameworks for talking about visual representation and the current environmental crisis. The anthology models a range of methodological approaches drawn from different disciplines, and contributes to an understanding of how artists and those writing about art construct narratives around the environment. The book is illustrated with examples of art by nearly thirty different contemporary artists.
Introduction
Julie Reiss
Chapter 1 The Anthropocene sublime: Justin Guariglia’s artwork
Eva Horn
Chapter 2 Art, theory, and the Anthropocene
Martha Schwendener
Chapter 3 Art as destruction: an inquiry into creation
David Haley
Chapter 4 Imaginative engagements: critical reflections on visual arts and climate change
Julie Doyle
Chapter 5 Ecological art—origins, reality, becoming
Paul Ardenne
Translated by Charles Penwarden
Chapter 6 Charting urgency and agency
Jennifer McGregor
Chapter 7 Terra incognita: exhibiting ice in the Anthropocene
Julie Reiss
Chapter 8 Ethical grounds: the aesthetic actions of soil
María Patricia Tinajero
Chapter 9 After nature and culture: plastiglomerate in the age of capital
Weiyi Chang
Chapter 10 Curating digital decay: machines will watch us die
Patrizia Costantin
Chapter 11 A Poem - A Leaf
Alice Momm
Chapter 12 Blued Trees as Policy: art, law, science and the Anthropocene
Aviva Rahmani
Chapter 13 Students being transformed into trees: inverted anthropomorphization in order to enhance connectedness to natural environments and plants
Margaretha Häggström
Notes on the contributors
Index
Julie Reiss directs Modern and Contemporary Art and the Market, an accredited MA program at Christie’s Education, New York. She received her PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center of CUNY. A pioneering scholar in the field of installation art, she is the author of From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (MIT Press, 1999), as well as numerous essays and reviews. She has spoken on panels relating to art and the environment including “Shifting Domains: Artists Respond to the Threatened Ecological Commons,” (Rauschenberg Project Space, Marfa Dialogues, 2013), “Landscape and the Anthropocene,” (College Art Association, 2016), and chaired several related panels including “Mapping, Extracting and Remaking: Contemporary Art and the Environment” (Christie’s Education, 2015), and “Art and Sustainability in the Anthropocene” (Council for European Studies, Univ. of Glasgow, 2017).
Anthropocene, Capitolocene, Environmental Ethics
Subjects
AnthropologyArt
History
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