Proposal Toward Visual Eco-Criticism

Proposal Toward Visual Eco-Criticism

via Worldchanging: Bright Green by Katie Kurtz on 8/7/09

Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions.
It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated.
–Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art

In February 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its most strongly worded assessment to date: a statement declaring that "global warming is "unequivocal" and the rise in global temperatures is "very likely" the result of human activity. This news item appeared on the front page of The New York Times and was accompanied by a picture of polar bears stranded on melting ice caps in the Bering Sea. The photograph was taken in 2004, but was not widely circulated until it was paired with the Panel's announcement. Coincidentally, the front page of that same New York Times also featured a news item and photograph of a Florida tornado's aftermath – an aerial view of flattened buildings and felled trees.
Over the past few years, this combination of images and headlines – coincidental and otherwise – has become an increasingly familiar sight. Nature is now delivered to our doorstep and found online through news of weird and previously unimaginable events caused by global climate change – extreme weather, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, and the like. These events cast new light on the age-old question about our relationship to nature: Where does it end and we begin?
 
Eighteenth century philosopher Edmund Burke argued that the wildness and scale of nature provokes a special kind of fear, and that this fear is inherent to our experience of the sublime. He also asserted that the sublime cannot be conjured: picturing the awesome expanse of the ocean while staring at an open field is impossible. Following Burke's logic, nature can never accurately be depicted and humans must experience it directly in order to encounter the sublime. The 21st century introduces a new fear about natural occurrences –- the sublime as experienced in catastrophic weather events. At the same time, while some of the effects of climate change are writ large, the vast majority of its consequences remain invisible.
Borrowing from Burke, I want to suggest that perhaps we cannot be moved by representations of rising sea levels. Just like we can't adequately imagine the ocean while staring at a field, we are unable to visualize rising sea levels while standing on the beach. These things will not be real to us until the oceans are flooding our homes and swallowing up loved ones. If the weather itself illustrates the dire place we've reached with anthropogenic global warming, what does it take for pictures of polar bears floating on ice caps or art installations about sea levels to be meaningful? What does it mean to depict nature in light of 21st century global climate change – one that does not hearken back to an idealized past but recognizes the complexity that globalization introduces in terms of how we respond to the natural world?
I come to these questions from the perspective of an urban environmentalist and from the position of a cultural critic. What I am interested in outlining is a proposal toward visual eco-criticism, a methodology that draws on literary eco-criticism and visual culture studies to consider cultural production from an eco-centric perspective.

In an essay about visual culture, W.J.T. Mitchell (editor, Critical Inquiry) suggests that, "…the questions to ask about images are not just, 'what do they mean?' or 'what do they do?' but 'what do they want?'" The question of what images want sets up the proposition for a more ethical reading of images, one that reveals the social, cultural, and political entanglements embedded therein. So what does a photograph of a polar bear stranded on a melting ice cap want?
While there is a long legacy of landscape art and a more recent tradition of land and environmental art, the fact of climate change ushers in a whole new paradigm in which to consider representations of nature. The effects of both man's intervention into the environment coupled with the ways climate change contribute to land loss and species extinction were not typical considerations for early landscape painters or Land Art artists.

Photograph of oil drums by Chris Jordan

A newer strain in environmentally related art records man's abuses of the environment. Given the popularity of such photographers as Chris Jordan, we seem to be becoming more interested in mountains of throwaway objects than in Mount Fuji. Considered retrospectively, representations of nature -– paintings, photographs, and film –- now act as a kind of preservation, visually archiving sites and habitats before they disappear forever.
While visual eco-criticism borrows from some of the strategies of literary eco-criticism, the argument is located within the field of visual culture, allowing for an interdisciplinary examination of a fuller spectrum of images about the environment – of both artworks and mainstream imagery such as advertising and photographs accompanying news stories. As a starting point, I propose that visual eco-criticism:

1. Revisits both art and non-art representations of nature and the environment with an eco-critical lens.
2. Interprets contemporary art and media through an eco-conscious framework.
3. Recognizes the role of race, class, gender, and sexuality as critical components to any examination of visual culture and that visual eco-criticism has a stake in addressing these issues.
4. Encourages a dialogue between cultural producers and the environmental community in order to advance an ecological agenda.
5. Considers the sustainability of the process and materials in a work's production.
Through visual eco-criticism, an object or image is interpreted not only in terms of its political, social and cultural meaning but also for its environmental implications. That is, when one considers U.S. artist Matthew Barney's productions through the lens of visual eco-criticism, questions are raised about Barney's lavish use of unsustainable materials that complicate the artist's conceptual insistence on "restraint."
This proposal was conceived in order to instigate a deeper dialogue about the very curious place we find ourselves in natural history.

Editor's Note: This is an advance excerpt of a longer essay that Katie Kurtz is working on to describe the need for, and her vision of, visual eco-criticism. We are pleased to be able to preview it for our readers here on Worldchanging. If you live in the Bay Area, we encourage you to see Katie present this topic in person at the Headlands Center For the Arts in Sausalito on Sunday, August 16. Learn more
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(Posted by Katie Kurtz in Features at 7:30 AM)

Proposal Toward Visual Eco-Criticism