1st Edition

The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change

Edited By T. J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, Subhankar Banerjee Copyright 2021
    492 Pages 23 Color & 84 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    492 Pages 23 Color & 84 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    492 Pages 23 Color & 84 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    International in scope, this volume brings together leading and emerging voices working at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, activism, and climate change, and addresses key questions, such as: why and how do art and visual culture, and their ethics and values, matter with regard to a world increasingly shaped by climate breakdown?

    Foregrounding a decolonial and climate-justice-based approach, this book joins efforts within the environmental humanities in seeking to widen considerations of climate change as it intersects with social, political, and cultural realms. It simultaneously expands the nascent branches of ecocritical art history and visual culture, and builds toward the advancement of a robust and critical interdisciplinarity appropriate to the complex entanglements of climate change.

    This book will be of special interest to scholars and practitioners of contemporary art and visual culture, environmental studies, cultural geography, and political ecology.

    Part I Extractivism

    1 Extracting the Cost: Re-membering the Discarded in African Landscapes

    Virginia MacKenny and Lesley Green

    2 In the Frontiers of Amazonia: A Brief Political Archaeology of Global Climate Emergency

    Paulo Tavares

    3 From Tuíra to the Amazon Fires: The Imagery and Imaginary of Extractivism in Brazil

    Rodrigo Guimarães Nunes and Alyne Costa

    4 Describing the Indescribable: Art and the Climate Crisis

    Lucy R. Lippard

    5 Art of the Interregnum in Canada’s Chemical Valley

    Jessica Mulvogue

    6 Road to Injustice: Ecological Impunity and Resistance in West Papua

    Nabil Ahmed and Esther Cann

    Part II Climate Violence

    7 Into the Heart of the Occupied Forest

    Macarena Gómez-Barris

    8 The Coming War and the Impossible Art: Zapatista Creativity in a Context of Environmental Destruction and Internal Warfare

    Alessandro Zagato and Natalia Arcos

    9 View from the Terracene

    Sara Mameni

    10 Waste You Can’t Deny: A Slow Trans-aesthetic in The Blue Barrel Grove

    Sintia Issa

    11 The Perpetual Present, Past, and Future: Slow Violence and Chinese Frameworks of In/Visibility and Time in Zhao Liang’s Behemoth

    Connie Zheng

    12 Remembering the Land: Art, Direct Action, and the Denial of Extractive Realities on Bougainville

    Amber Hickey

    13 Multispecies Cinema in Wretched Waters: The Slow Violence of the Rio Doce Disaster

    Isabelle Carbonell

    Part III Sensing Climates

    14 Staying with the Troubling, Performing in the Impasse

    Sarah Kanouse

    15 A Conversation between Three Ecosexuals

    Bo Zheng with Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle

    16 Climate Justice, Satire, and Hothouse Earth

    Julie Sze

    17 Indigenous Media: Dialogic Resistance to Climate Disruption

    Salma Monani, Renata Ryan Burchfield, Danika Medak-Saltzman, and William Lempert

    18 At Memory's Edge: Climate Trauma in the Arctic through Film

    Lisa E. Bloom

    19 The Breathing Land: On Questions of Climate Change and Settler Colonialism

    Heather Davis

    Part IV In/Visibilities

    20 Sensing Particulate Matter and Practicing Environmental Justice

    Jennifer Gabrys

    21 Visualizing Atmospheric Politics

    Amy Balkin

    22 Atmospheres and the Anthropogenic Image-Bind

    Caroline A. Jones

    23 Ways of Saying: Rhetorical Strategies of Environmentalist Imaging

    Suzaan Boettger

    24 Sublime Aesthetics in the Era of Climate Crisis? A Critique

    Birgit Schneider

    25 Inside Out: Creative Response Beyond Periphery and Peril

    Julie Decker

    26 Capturing Nature: Eco-Justice in African Art

    Nomusa Makhubu

    Part V Multispecies Justice

    27 Doing Difference Differently As Wetlands Disappear: (A California Story)

    Elaine Gan

    28 "With Applied Creativity, We Can Heal": Permaculture and Indigenous Futurism at Santa Clara Pueblo

    Rose B. Simpson in Conversation with Jessica L. Horton

    29 Decolonizing the Seed Commons: Biocapitalism, Agroecology, and Visual Culture

    Ashley Dawson

    30 The Politics and Ecology of Invasive Species: A Changing Climate for Pioneering Plants

    Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes

    31 Multispecies Futures through Art

    Ron Broglio

    32 Activist Abstraction: Anita Krajnc, Save Movement Photography, and the Climate of Industrial Meat

    Alan C. Braddock

    33 Alien Waters

    Ravi Agarwal

    34 Everything is Alive: Jason deCaires Taylor’s Vicissitudes

    Inez Blanca van der Scheer

    Part VI Ruptures/Insurgencies/Worldings

    35 The Work of Life in the Age of Extinction: Notes Towards an Art of Aliveness

    John Jordan

    36 The Political Ecology and Visual Culture of the Pacific Climate Warriors 399

    Carol Farbotko and Taukiei Kitara

    37 From Institutional to Interstitial Critique: The Resistant Force that is Liberating the Neoliberal Museum from Below

    Emma Mahony

    38 Beneath the Museum, the Spectre

    Steve Lyons and Jason Jones for Not An Alternative

    39 Our House Is on Fire: Children, Youth, and the Visual Politics of Climate Change

    Finis Dunaway

    40 From The Red Nation to The Red Deal

    A Conversation with Melanie K. Yazzie and Nick Estes

    Biography

    T. J. Demos is Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History and Visual Culture, and Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies, UC Santa Cruz.

    Emily Eliza Scott is Assistant Professor of Art History and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon.

    Subhankar Banerjee is Lannan Foundation Endowed Chair and Professor of Art & Ecology, and Director of the Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities, University of New Mexico.

    "...A stunning achievement. It brings together fifty-five contributors from diverse backgrounds—including the Cherokee Nation, Lebanon, and South Africa—to think through climate-change-themed art and visual culture from regions ranging from Chiapas to Hong Kong. No comparable volume exists."

    --Art Journal

    "Featuring 40 essays and interviews from over 50 global contributors in a nearly 450 page tome that cohesively reaffirms this approach, the book showcases some of the most crucial thinking in the rapidly growing field of contemporary ecological art. ... This volume offers an array of anti-capitalist, decolonial, and climate justice-based responses to art scholarship, art practice, and visual culture more broadly."

    --Antipode