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2023 | Book

Border Ecology

Art and Environmental Crisis at the Margins

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About this book

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Introduction
Abstract
Chapter 1, discusses the relevance of new materialist theories to environmental activism as well as eco art, while according the art object its own particular agency. I then trace the shortcomings of such an object-oriented approach, as well as the critiques of mainstream environmentalism coming out of decolonial theory and subaltern studies. The introduction then gives a brief rundown of Barad’s agential realist solution and sketches out what I mean by “border ecology.” Finally, I address relevant literature in the field of eco art, as well as relevant theories of digital media.
Ila Nicole Sheren
Chapter 2. The Boundaries of the Map
Abstract
This chapter, “The Boundaries of the Map,” considers Maya Lin’s online memorial, What is Missing? (2007–present), as a case study of an interactive digital environment. Lin’s constantly evolving memorial to lost biodiversity provides a concrete connection to a longer history of eco-art and techno-utopianism and serves as a boundary object—giving the viewer an insight into several different paths within the history of art. The site’s world map continuously adds the anecdotes and recollections of a global community, fulfilling Sean Cubitt’s vision of the Internet as the “endlessly updatable world map.” Analyzed as part of a longer trajectory dating back to the minimalism of Land and Earth Art, the systems thinking of 1960s New Communalism, and the archival impulses of Net.art, What is Missing? links this multi-pronged art historical narrative with the anti-Romanticism of Timothy Morton’s early environmental philosophy. I argue, however, that rather than doing away entirely with allusions to the Western Romantic separation of human and nature, such digital landscapes are poised to ask critical questions: what kind of “nature” is represented in such a digitized, data-driven landscape? Can the visual of a schematic, non-mimetic “nature” subsume the iconic vistas of Western Romanticism and ask us to rethink our relationship to the non-human, the environment, and ultimately each other?
Ila Nicole Sheren
Chapter 3. Landscapes of Slow Violence
Abstract
“Landscapes of Slow Violence” analyzes digital photographs and video of environmental devastation and urban development in the Global South. Case studies include the digitally manipulated landscapes of Chinese photographers Yao Lu (New Landscapes, 2007–2010) and Jiang Pengyi (Unregistered Cities, 2008–2010), drone-enabled video pieces from Sardinian-born Mitra Azar (Scars & Borders, 2016), as well as the more straightforward, almost photojournalistic series of South African-born Gideon Mendel (Drowning World, 2007–2010). I analyze these works in terms of Rob Nixon’s theory of “slow violence,” which describes the uneven impact of climate change on the global poor. The object-oriented, thing-centric philosophies discussed in the first two chapters now read through the lens of slow violence, resulting in a troubling elision of lived experience and local knowledges. Ultimately, the desire to reduce the world to a series of objects may eliminate hierarchies, but in doing so, it erases the often problematic histories once encoded in those hierarchies.
Ila Nicole Sheren
Chapter 4. Entanglements
Abstract
“Entanglements” seeks to entwine the narratives of slow violence and object-oriented philosophies by undertaking a sustained study of a single short video piece, Vibha Galhotra’s Manthan (2015). This chapter is where I present “border ecology” as my solution to thinking through the problematic nature of “objects” in regard to postcolonial identities and the Global South at large. Galhotra’s video consists of a depiction of the sacred Yamuna River, steeped in religious discourses of purity and love—that is paradoxically one of the most polluted waterways on earth. I contend that this film not only illustrates how pollution is both materially and discursively constituted but also questions why religion has not yet been harnessed in the service of environmental concerns. In doing so, I engage with the idea of the “toxic sublime” and its purported political impact and touch on the concept of landscapes of extraction and the legal apparatus within which they exist.
Ila Nicole Sheren
Chapter 5. Border Crossers
Abstract
“Border Crossers” takes up Jane Bennett’s notions of enchantment and her broader “vital materialism”—as well as the ethical roles such enchanted objects may play. This chapter examines the connections between new materialism and postcolonial theory using the eco-art project Watershed Cairns (2013–ongoing) by St. Louis-based artists Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan and the interactive web-based documentary Bear 71 (2012), by Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes. The former series bridges photographs, sculpture, site-specific installation, and a virtual mapping project to engage the viewer to think critically about his or her relationship to the Mississippi watershed. I argue that the glass cairns and their digital representations allow us to examine the new materialist ideas of object-oriented ontology and enchantment in relation to Walter Mignolo’s concept of “border thinking,” which privileges the object of study. Although borders stand for “otherness” in Mignolo’s formulation, I contend that the Mississippi watershed presents a metaphorical border and a physical boundary zone that radically de-centers human priorities of mapping the ecosystem. In doing so, I situate Watershed Cairns as an ecocritical work specific to St Louis and its racialized history. Bear 71 places online viewers within a schematic digital landscape in which they are free to move around and explore while the narrative of an individual female bear plays intermittently. Through the use of narration and initially jarring anthropomorphism, the film encourages viewers to understand how the figure of the bear is itself discursively constituted and giving multiple answers to the question of who is the true border crosser depicted in the piece.
Ila Nicole Sheren
Chapter 6. Conclusions and New Directions: Border Art for a Border Ecology
Abstract
Chapter 6, the conclusion, takes up the question of the U.S.-Mexico border and asks what it would look like to make border art for a border ecology. Postcommodity’s 2015 installation Repellent Fence serves as the anchor for this brief discussion.
Ila Nicole Sheren
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Border Ecology
Author
Ila Nicole Sheren
Copyright Year
2023
Electronic ISBN
978-3-031-25953-1
Print ISBN
978-3-031-25952-4
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25953-1