This book analyzes how contemporary visual art can visualize environmental crisis. It draws on Karen Barad’s method of “agential realism,” which understands disparate factors as working together and “entangled.” Through an analysis of digital eco art, the book shows how the entwining of new materialist and decolonized approaches accounts for the nonhuman factors shaping ecological crises while understanding that a purely object-driven approach misses the histories of human inequality and subjugation encoded in the environment. The resulting synthesis is what the author terms a border ecology, an approach to eco art from its margins, gaps, and liminal zones, deliberately evoking the idea of an ecotone. This book is suitable for scholarly audiences within art history, criticism and practice, but also across disciplines such as the environmental humanities, media studies, border studies and literary eco-criticism.
Author(s): Ila Nicole Sheren
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 231
City: Cham
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Objects
Decolonizing New Materialism
Diffraction and Entanglement
Border Ecology
Eco Art
Chapter Overview
Chapter 2: The Boundaries of the Map
What is Missing? as an Interactive Digital Experience
Maya Lin and the Memorial
Land Art
New Communalism and Techno-Utopianism
The Database and the Archive
Digital Eco-Spectacle and the Call to Action
Connection and Disjuncture: The 2015 What is Missing?
Chapter 3: Landscapes of Slow Violence
New Landscapes and Unregistered Cities: Modernization and Development in Chinese Photography
Ambience and the Drone Aesthetic in Mitra Azar’s Scars & Borders
Leveling Human and Nonhuman: Gideon Mendel’s Drowning World
Conclusions and New Questions
Chapter 4: Entanglements
Manthan in Context
The River as Paradox
The Toxic Sublime
The Scene of Crime
Conclusions
Chapter 5: Border Crossers
Watershed Cairns
Crossing from the Material to the Virtual
Border Thinking and Vital Materialism
Glass, Light, and the Romantic Sublime
Bear 71
Borders Crossers as Disobedient Objects
Chapter 6: Conclusions and New Directions: Border Art for a Border Ecology
Bibliography
Index
