Art & Social Issues

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Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies

edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin

Taking as its premise that the proposed geologic epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, this book explores the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in an era of ecological crisis, with contributions from artists, curators, theorists and activists. Contributors include Amy Balkin, Ursula Biemann, Amanda Boetzkes, Lindsay Bremner, Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr, Heather Davis, Sara Dean, Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse (smudge studio), Irmgard Emmelhainz, Anselm Franke, Peter Galison, Fabien Giraud & Ida Soulard, Laurent Gutierrez & Valérie Portefaix (MAP Office), Terike Haapoja & Laura Gustafsson, Laura Hall, Ilana Halperin, Donna Haraway & Martha Kenney, Ho Tzu Nyen, Bruno Latour, Jeffrey Malecki, Mary Mattingly, Mixrice (Cho Jieun & Yang Chulmo), Natasha Myers, Jean-Luc Nancy & John Paul Ricco, Vincent Normand, Richard Pell & Emily Kutil, Tomás Saraceno, Sasha Engelmann & Bronislaw Szerszynski, Ada Smailbegovic, Karolina Sobecka, Zoe Todd, Richard Streitmatter-Tran & Vi Le, Anna-Sophie Springer, Sylvère Lotringer, Peter Sloterdijk, Etienne Turpin, Pinar Yoldas, and Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer & Marina Zurkow.

“This brilliant collection of essays and projects, gathered from all over the world, reflects the limits and possibilities of how visual art might respond to what Sylvère Lotringer describes as a “state of emergency.” Art in the Anthropocene is at once an investigation and an homage to the natural world. It describes what we possess and what we have lost.” Chris Kraus – author of Where Art Belongs

“Art in the Anthropocene is an art book like no other, embracing an extraordinary range of subjects that affect what we call “our” environment. Visual artists are, for once, equal participants in these imaginative, intelligent, and informative discussions of the most pressing issues of our time, and deep time.” Lucy R. Lippard – author of Undermining: A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics and Art in the Changing West

“Call it the Anthropocene, the #misanthropocene, or something else—there’s a growing recognition that these are damaged times, even if nobody is quite sure how to see, think, or feel them. That’s why Art in the Anthropocene is so important. Davis and Turpin have gathered up the seeds for a whole biome of art and thought about the things that really matter in this world.” McKenzie Wark – author of Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/art-in-the-anthropocene/

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The Art of Protest - Momus

The relationship between art and protest has never been a stable one. It’s also a relation that perhaps suffers from being posed in the...

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Guillaume Leblon OF LIFE, 2010 plaster, sand and various elements (mussels, foam, stones...) 12 x 35 cm approximately. Edition of 6

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Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Freshkills Landfill, 2001 Staten Island, New York Courtesy of Ronald

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A 13,000 years-old “underground forest” in Pretoria, South Africa. Photographed by Rachel Sussman.

Botanists believe the 13,000-year-old underground forest in Pretoria evolved to survive forest fires. All that is visible are the tips of the branches poking out of the soil. But beneath the ground is a mass of branches and roots. “If a fire roars through, only the tips are burnt. It’s the equivalent of getting your eyebrows singed.” says Sussman.

The Guardian

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Rachel Sussman

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Without an awareness of the past and our connection to it, we’re doomed to repeat today’s problems tomorrow. Maybe by looking wide-eyed  into deep time, we can understand what it really means to live beyond this blink of an eye.

Joe Hanson adapts Rachel Sussman’s remarkable decade-long photographic masterpiece, The Oldest Living Things in the World, into a short video explainer. 

See more of Sussman’s humbling photographs here, then revisit my conversation with Sussman about the ethos of her project.

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Ana Mendieta - Imagen de Yagul from Silueta Series, 1973

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Ana Mendieta, Untitled (from the Silueta series), 1980, Gelatin silver emulsion print; 39 ½ x 53 ¼ inches. PAFA, Art by Women Collection, Gift of Linda Lee Alter. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

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Ana Mendieta

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Ana Mendieta - She got love - veduta della mostra presso il Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli 2013

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Navjot Altaf, "Nalpar" (handpump site) project, drainage culvert, Bandhapara, Kondagaon, Central India, 2003-04.

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Mierle Laderman Ukeles

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A single shot of an abandoned beach at low tide in jumpy, color super-8 film, Ana Mendieta’s "Bird Run" (1974) has a wistful quality of emptiness for most of its silent two-minute duration.

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Ana Mendieta. Siluetas

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Rachel Sussman’s photographs of the oldest living things in the world – a masterpiece at the intersection of art, science, and philosophy.

With an artist’s gift for “aesthetic force” and a scientist’s rigorous respect for truth, Sussman straddles a multitude of worlds as she travels across space and time to unearth Earth’s greatest stories of resilience, stories of tragedy and triumph, past and future, but above all stories that humble our human lives, which seem like the blink of a cosmic eye against the timescales of these ancient organisms — organisms that have unflinchingly witnessed all of our own tragedies and triumphs, our wars and our revolutions, our holocausts and our renaissances, and have remained anchored to existence more firmly than we can ever hope to be.

Above all, however, the project raises questions that aren’t so much scientific or artistic as profoundly human: What is the meaning of human life if it comes and goes before a patch of moss has reached the end of infancy? How do our petty daily stresses measure up against a struggle for survival stretching back millennia? Who would we be if we relinquished our arrogant conviction that we are Earth’s biological crown jewel?

See more here.