Rethinking the Human/Non-human relationship: (Institute of Social Justice)
https://isj.acu.edu.au/researching/human-nonhuman/
Currently, planetary ecological crisis challenge us to generate new modes of theory and practise that illuminate destructive driving dynamics, disclose new possibilities, and contribute to powerful ethical-political responses
• How might we re-conceptualise the human, the non-human and their myriad relationships?
• What is revealed and concealed by the proliferating terminological debates over the characteristics of our time?
• What are the implications for our understandings of agency, ethical responsiveness, responsibility, and relationships amidst nonhuman beings, things, and complex dynamical systems?
• Nikolas Kompridis: is re-examining the ontological and ethical question of the human and the human/non-human relationship in relation to a critique of humanism and post-humanism, and to the complex temporalities of human and non-human time.
To the End of the Earth: Art and the Environment (Nicholas Alfrey, Stephen Daniels and Joy Sleeman, 2012)
https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/17/to-the-ends-of-the-earth-art-and-environment
The group of articles devoted to the theme of art and environment in Tate Papers no.17 aims to explore new research frontiers between visual art and the material environment. The papers arise from a conference held at Tate Britain in June 2010 at which a range of practitioners and scholars – artists, writers, curators, theorists, historians and geographers – presented case studies of artworks addressing specific sites, spaces, places and landscapes in a variety of media, including film, photography, painting, sculpture and installation. The conference considered relations between artistic approaches to the environment and other forms of knowledge and practice, including scientific knowledge and social activism. The papers addressed cultural questions of weather and climate, ruin and waste, dwelling and movement, boundary and journey, and reflected on the way the environment is experienced and imagined and on the place of art in the material world.
In this environment, artistic interventions generate an awareness of the concurrent processes of ruination and productive activity.
Projects by contemporary practitioners were also presented at the conference. Lara Almarcegui and Heather and Ivan Morrison participated in the Barbican’s Radical Nature exhibition and, like the other artists in that show, their work is instrumental in character, designed to promote awareness of the relationship between nature and the urban environment and often involves community participation and affirmative action. Almarcegui has campaigned to preserve empty lots from development and improvement, resisting the strategies of planners in order to let ‘natural processes of decay, transition and entropy’ take their course. In designating empty spaces and wastelands as artworks her tactics are reminiscent of those of John Latham, but she works within an ecological agenda, seeking to bring about the greening of urban space:
“Wastelands are important as places of possibility, because one can only feel free in this type of land, forgotten by town planners. I imagine that, in a few years’ time, those wastelands that were protected by my projects will be the only empty spots within built areas”
Art and the Ecological: (Ben David, 2013)
https://miamirail.org/summer-2015/art-and-the-ecological/
Indeed, for European art, understanding its relationship to a changing sense of nature in the early modern period is key to grasping its dynamics. For the philosopher Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (1790), aesthetic experience primarily was the experience of nature; the beauty found in human art was merely a derivative subset - the “Imitation of Beautiful Nature.”
Plays a key role in present-day ecological thought essentially, that humanity’s influence on the Earth has grown to be so significant that it justifies being conceptualized as an entirely new epoch.
As for art’s relation to nature, it is no surprise, perhaps, that the same era also saw artists propose new strategies for relating to the environment, as well, attempting to escape the gallery and museum space via the various forms of Land art. Much like Church’s landscapes, this new artistic incursion into nature bore the stamp of the very urban realities it was trying to vision an alternative to; the monumental engineering of Land art, particularly in its more macho varieties, was (and is) heavily criticized for representing the human will to dominate nature rather than embodying a holistic celebration of it
Building on Klein’s point, my case is that, worthy as they are, the mainstream articulations of eco-art mentioned above implicitly participate in the logic of moderation. They are able either only to sound the alarm about incipient disaster, adding to the dystopian image gallery (the “alarmist” strain), or imagine small-scale solutions (the “remediationist” strain). This predicament is particularly significant in that, whereas artists are stereotyped as impractical lefty dreamers, it is currently the right that is pushing its agenda through big-picture reimaginings of society.
Interactions Between Human Behaviour and Ecological Systems (E.J.Milner-Gulland, 2012)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3223800/
Research on the interactions between human behaviour and ecological systems tends to focus on the direct effects of human activities on ecosystems, such as biodiversity loss. There is also increasing research effort directed towards ecosystem services
