13502

Art and Environment

Eric de Bruyn

Kommentar

This seminar will address the “environmental turn” which has taken shape in the visual arts and has been reflected upon in the fields of art history, political theory, biology and the social sciences since the 1950s. To this purpose, we will address the intellectual history of such concepts as ‘milieu’, ‘ecosystem,’ ‘ecology’ and ‘environment’ as well as their application within artistic practice. In part, we will consider the critical relation of artistic practice to histories of environmentalism (e.g. James Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments and Energy Systems in the Art of the 1960s and 1970s) Land Art) as well as the Anthropocene (e.g. T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature). Beyond such eco-critical debates, however, we will also address the wider repercussions of an environmental turn in contemporary art and society according to which the environmental not only refers to ‘nature’ or even to a critique of an anthropocentric understanding of nature (e.g. Bruno Latour, Critical Zone), but to other modes of political ecology as well. Think, for instance, of the digital systems of governmentality, which enmesh humans within algorithmic environments (media ecology), but also the rise of multiple environmental disciplines since the 1960s (e.g. environmental design, environmental psychology), which have impacted artistic practice. The central focus of the seminar will be, then, on the various “environmentalities” (Michel Foucault) of art and the social whereby the boundaries between ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’ ecologies are constantly being contested (e.g. the work of Pierre Huyghe). Course languages: German and English. Schließen