Space–Object–Landscape

This chapter interrogates a number of normative assumptions about “landscape” as an art-historical category current in the discipline. It proceeds by means of some very diverse thought-objects significantly separated by time and space—Chinese pagoda paintings found in the Dunhuang caves that are simultaneously concrete poems, British stone circles such as Stonehenge and standing crosses including that at Bewcastle, Roman wall paintings from Pompeii—because the issues are not specifically historical or historicist but rather more broadly conceptual and span the archaeological history of art from the Neolithic to modernity, not least interrogating certain practices in contemporary earth art. The intent is to interrogate what is meant by ‘landscape’ when treated as an art-historical category.

MONOLITH IN A HOLLOW: PALEOFUTURISM AND EARTH ART IN STANLEY KUBRICK’S 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

This article analyses 2001 in terms of what I term paleofuturism. Fusing deep future and deep past, this cyclical figure reconciles rational machinic intelligence with diverse repressed temporal layers: archaic cultures, the embryonic state of individuals, and bygone biological and geological eras. In 2001, paleofuturism is nourished by Nietzsche’s Übermensch of the future, reborn as a child, and by Jungian ideas of individuation, the reconciliation with the shadow of the collective unconscious that leads to the black cosmos itself. Further paleofuturist contexts for 2001 are explored in the so-called “ancient astronaut thesis” of science fiction, speculative science, and pseudo-science. Finally, in minimalism and earth art of the late 1960s we meet a structural parallel to 2001’s bypassing of the organic human body, one that bridges the inorganic entropic realities of deep future and deep past.

Planetary art beyond the human: Rethinking agency in the Anthropocene

A growing number of transdisciplinary art-science projects across the world are taking up the challenge of representing geological and cosmic time and of rendering visible, audible and tangible the powerful forces that shape the planet’s systems. While art historians have often found the earth art movement to exemplify a new awareness of the geological impact of human activity on the planet, I argue that art may engender a more genuinely planetary perspective when it pays attention to those forces we cannot compel. Gesturing towards the limits of human agency with regard to the Earth may ultimately be a more effective way of challenging anthropocentrism, and of locating human history within planetary time. My analysis draws on works by four contemporary artists – Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Canada/Mexico), Claudia Müller (Chile), Paul Rosero Contreras (Ecuador) and Michelle-Marie Letelier (Germany/Chile) – that explore the science of turbulent dynamics that are impervious to human action, such as solar flares, earthquakes, winds, tides, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. As Nigel Clark argues, the fundamental asymmetry that governs our relationship with a volatile planet is often lost in accounts of the entanglement of human and nonhumans that have recently prevailed in the humanities and social sciences. The works I discuss revise the practices of earth art to create a ‘planetary art’, cultivating a sense of the planet beyond the human that allows us to understand its dynamics more fully, and to resituate human agency more properly within geohistories of matter and energy. In many cases, this art remains fully alert to the geopolitics of the Anthropocene, focusing on the increased vulnerability of the Global South to climate change and environmental disaster, and gesturing towards a decolonial critique of the objectification of nature and the dissociative, rationalist knowledge produced by modern science.

Deep Time, Dark Time

By engaging interventionist art by women of color at two different scales—ephemeral body/earth art and monumental public art—this chapter supplements post-humanist theories of “deep time”—in particular, the temporality of the Anthropocene—with a concept of “dark time.” The intensive, alchemical, and obscure temporality of “dark time” is crucial to understanding black and brown feminist performance interventions against the violence of expropriative capitalism in the Americas. The chapter reads the art work of Kara Walker and Regina José Galindo through the poetry of Harryette Mullen and philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

Eco-Deconstruction

This book launches a new mode of philosophical and ethical reflection with respect to the challenges posed by the degradation of the natural environment. While the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), with its relentless interrogation of the anthropocentric metaphysics of presence, has already proven highly influential in posthumanism and animal studies, the present volume builds on these insights in addressing the most pressing environmental issues of our time. The volume brings together fifteen scholars from a wide variety of related fields, including eco-phenomenology, eco-hermeneutics, new materialism, posthumanism, animal studies, science and technology studies, environmental humanities, eco-criticism, earth art, and analytic environmental ethics. Overall, eco-deconstruction offers an account of differential relationality explored in an ecological context, both quasi-ontologically and quasi-normatively, with attention to diagnosing our times. Accordingly, the book is divided into four sections—Diagnosing the Present, which suggests that our times are marked by a flattened-out understanding of time and thus in need of deconstructive dispositions; Ecologies, which mobilizes the spectral ontology of deconstruction to argue for the constitutive ecological embeddedness of mortal life; Nuclear and Other Biodegradabilities, in which contributors reflect on the remains and by-products of human culture, including nuclear waste and species extinctions; and Environmental Ethics, which uncovers a demand for justice that emerges as a response to original differentiation and the mortality and alterity it installs in living beings. As such, the book may resonate with readers not only in philosophy, but across the humanities and the social and natural sciences.