Antennae Issue #61-Earthly Mattering (2024)

Aesthetic intervention can reveal new views of the world that work towards undermining the prevailing anthropocentric ideas that undergird the catastrophe of climate change. This paper outlines "catastrophe aesthetics," an artistic strategy that attempts to deal with "the mess" of the Earth in an effort to "turn the world anew." To exemplify this aesthetic orientation, I examine three geologically themed films that feature the "matter" of the Earth: Adrien Missika's Darvaza, Sasha Litvintseva and Isabel Mallet's The Stability of the System, and Terra Jean Long's Notes from the Anthropocene. These works share commonalities with new materialist philosophies in that they examine the way in which the "stories" of rocks, fossils, dirt, and other subterranean substances are deeply entangled with humans and have a key role in creating meaning in the world. These films contest the stance that the ground materials of the Earth are...

JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM, 2020

Aircraft were to play a decisive role in the short career of Robert Smithson. In 1969, when he published his article Aerial Art, Walther Prokosch, an architect specializing in aviation, put him in contact with TAMS engineering. This gave rise to his involvement in a land altering operation as vertiginous and brutal as the construction of Dallas Fort-Worth International Airport. At that point Smithson became aware of the human capacity to transform Mother Earth and the importance of contemplation from the air. He incorporated these interests into his artistic creation, thus paving the way for earthwork, crucial to the evolution of Land Art. The study of the documents included among Robert Smithson’s Papers at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art allows us to reconstruct a history that shared interests and concerns with Moholy-Nagy’s New Vision or Le Corbusier’s Loi du Méandre.

Landscape, 2020

The following essay provides a brief historic overview of the tendencies of the 1960s and 70s that have challenged ideas associated with art making, aesthetic categories and location. It was first conceived as a keynote address at the inaugural symposium opening the international summer school Alps Art Academy and its resulting exhibition Art Safiental in the heart of Swiss Alps.Together with newly founded Institute for Land Art and Environmental Art (ILEA), they aspire to revisit the question of what it means, in the cultural-political landscape of today, to make and to encounter Land art.This paper appeared in: Johannes M. Hedinger and Hanna B. Hölling, eds., Landscape: Institute for Land and Environmental Art, Berlin: Vexer Verlag, 2019.

Актуальные проблемы теории и истории искусства / Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art, 2020

This paper intends to investigate various practices in contemporary art that intervene inlandscape surroundings. These forms of art have a privilege of not just depicting or imagining natural phenomena, but using them directly as essential components of the work. Thus, in this essay the category of horizon is treated in a very “palpable” way, though metaphorical and poetical at the same time. The physical and symbolic presence and interpretation of horizon in the art of the last five decades constitute the subject of this survey. The artistic strategies reviewed here include artificial creation or accentuation of the horizon line, massive interventions in the surface of the Earth, mechanisms of visual perception and focusing attention,exploration of spatial as well as temporal aspects of the notion, and many more. The concept of the horizon is present in the works of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Antony Gormley, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Maya Lin, Walterde Maria, Robert Morris, Charles Ross, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, James Turrell, and other artists. By addressing this theme, they utilize a wide range of media to remind us that the horizon is a utopian expression of the eternal longing for the unreachable.

Open Cultural Studies, 2019

In 1970, J.G. Ballard used a London gallery as a laboratory in which to test ideas he was toying with, ideas that eventually found their way into his 1973 novel, Crash. Ballard found that art and literature were a fecund combination. Considering the richness of his imagery and the complexity of his ideas, it is not surprising that Ballard’s works have gone on to inspire artistic responses. Perhaps the most well known of these is Robert Smithson’s masterpiece, Spiral Jetty, 1970. However, most works inspired by Ballard’s writing respond to vague notions of things Ballardian rather than to a particular novel or short story. In this essay I will focus specifically on recent contemporary Australian artworks which were made in direct response to Ballard’s 1962 novel, The Drowned World, for a 2015 exhibition I initiated and coordinated titled Mapping The Drowned World. Using my own artworks as examples, as well as work made by fellow Australian artists Roy Ananda, Jon Cattapan and Janet T...

Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 2023

The Time of Nature and the Time of Cities: regarding art dealing with the disconnection between urban life and the natural world, 2015

This thesis aims to understand the underlying motivations and contexts of artists who question the disconnection between urban life and nature especially with respect to aspects of time. The methodology used is largely about the analysis of artwork. The strategies adopted by the artists discussed here vary from critiquing the ambitions of city builders in their pursuit of controlling time to shunning urban time altogether and reaching for the rhythms of nature. In order to ground this understanding of artwork in the contemporary context the thesis explores how contemporary urban life changes our experience of time and how this separates us from the natural world. Theories regarding the relationship of the human, the natural world and the passage of time are covered in order to contextualize this analysis. These include the study of entropy by Robert Smithson, Martin Heidegger’s theory of the “earth and the world” and Georges Bataille’s ideas about the human impulse to annul the passage of time. The eastern philosophy of Zen and the aesthetics of Wabi Sabi that in many ways corroborate the ideas proposed by western thinkers have also been considered.

Counter Revanchist Art in the Global City Walls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action , 2024

Introduction from Counter Revanchist Art in the Global CityWalls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action (Routledge, 2024). 9781032195117Book Abstract: Through analyses of public artworks that have taken the form of blockades and barricades since the 1990s, this book theorises artists’ responses to global inequities as cultural manifestations of counter-revanchism in diverse urban centres.This book is the first to analyse artworks as forms of counter-revanchism in the context of the rise of the global city. How do artists channel the global spatial conflicts of the 21st century through their behaviours, actions, and constructions in and on the actually existing conditions of the street? What does it mean for artists—the very symbol of freedom of personal expression—to shut down space? To refuse entry? To block others’ passage? The late critical geographer Neil Smith’s influential writing on the revanchist city is used as a theoretical frame for understanding how contemporary artists engender the public sphere through their work in public urban spaces. Each chapter is a case study that analyses artworks that have taken the form of walls and barricades in China, USA, UK, Ukraine, and Mexico. In doing so, the author draws upon diverse fields including art history, geography, philosophy, political science, theatre studies, and urban studies to situate the art in a broader context of the humanities with the aim of modelling interdisciplinary research grounded in an ethics of solidarity with global social justice work. Collectively these case studies reveal how artists’ local responses to urban revanchism since the end of the Cold War are productive reorientations of social relations and harbingers of worlds to come.By using plain language and avoiding excessive academic jargon, the book is accessible to a wide variety of readers. It will appeal to scholars and graduate students in the fields of studio art, modern and contemporary art history, performance studies, visual culture, and visual studies; especially in relation to those interested in conceptual practices, performance art, site-specificity, public art, political activism, and socially engaged art. Cultural geographers and urban theorists interested in the social and political ramifications of temporary and everyday urbanism will also find the analysis of artworks relevant to their own studies.

Horizons, 2020

The theme for the 2020 APS Mdina Cathedral Contemporary Art Biennale - Regaining a Paradise Lost: The role of the arts – presented all those involved with a difficult challenge and a sense of responsibility. It has provoked debate, contemplation and disagreement. Yet such is the purpose of this project. The publication that accompanies the exhibition is intended not only to record the event, but also add to its discursive and critical nature. The collection of essays all underline the global necessity of the theme of the 2020 APS Mdina Biennale.

Environmental art can reinterpret natural processes, generate awareness about environmental problems, restore damaged ecosystems, and convey the power and beauty of nature and wildlife. The purpose of this project is to investigate the symbolism of color in environmental art and photography and its relationship to human psychology. To survey the field of environmental art, I visited galleries and interviewed artists in the field, with the purpose of analyzing 50 significant pieces of art that represent a variety of genres, colors, and cultural heritages. The final project will analyze the future potential of art as a tool for social change and lead to the creation of a digital platform at Penn to showcase interdisciplinary student projects. Disciplines Art and Design | Photography Comments This paper was part of the 2014-2015 Penn Humanities Forum on Color. Find out more at http://www.phf.upenn.edu/annual-topics/color. This other is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.u...

James Benning's Environments: Politics, Ecology, Duration, Nikolaj Lubecker and Daniele Rugo (eds.) , 2017

Exhibition catalog accompanying show of the same name, Granary Art Center, Ephraim, Utah, 2015

Third Text, 2020

Burlington Contemporary

Analysis of the latent significance to Smithson of dinosaurs as evident in his references to and imaging of dinosaurs across his work from painting to the Spiral Jetty in relation to family trauma and personal identity.

In Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss coins the term ‘entropology’, a lexical blend of ‘entropy’ and ‘anthropology’ signifying that the study of humankind is always, necessarily, the study of humankind’s transformative (disruptive, corrosive) impact. This article traces entropology as an aesthetic practice through Robert Smithson’s Earthwork, particularly the Spiral Jetty, and into twenty-first century ecoliterature. At the heart of the article is an analysis of Lance Olsen’s contemporary fiction Theories of Forgetting, focusing on the interconnected portrayals of human fragility and the environment. Theories of Forgetting embodies entropology both in its material poetics and as a thematic trope. By representing the entropological inseparability of the fates of humankind and the natural world, the novel casts contemporary human life paradoxically as both destructive and vulnerable. These affects subsequently require the characteristically metamodern renewal of historical thinking by bringing into focus the impact of humanity’s past and present actions on the future.