"Umgebung" / "Umwelt:" Art History's Aesthetic and Biological Milieus

Grey Room, 2019

Art Journal, 2012

Environment and History, 2000

The introduction of histories of nature in the late eighteenth century posed the epistemological problem of how to bring the diversity of empirical laws into theoretical unity. Whilst Goethe and Humboldt argued for the possibility of objective histories of nature through modes of disciplined perception, Schelling emphasised the inevitable subjectivity of such histories and the impossibility of displaying visually or instrumentally the internal processes generating manifest forms. Each of these three figures used different technologies of representation to produce their environmental histories. But all three gave a central role to aesthetic judgment in representing their view of a unified history of nature.

Isis, 2010

This essay tells the story of early French ethology--"the science dealing with the habits of living beings and their relations, both with each other and with the cosmic environment." The driving force behind this "ethological movement" was the biologist Alfred Giard (1846-1908). The essay discusses how the ethological viewpoint of Giard and his pupils developed in a period in which the current disciplines of field biology were not yet crystallized. It also shows how concepts and research interests could travel within Giard's network from one working context to another, even from one discipline to another. By studying this traveling process, the essay reveals that, unlike the modern ethology of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, Giard's ethology was not a discipline at all but, rather, a scientific attitude. This scientific attitude triggered a reappraisal of fieldwork, but at the same time Giard's ethology was never limited to the field alone. It also found its way to the laboratory, the museum, and the zoo.

In this paper I return to an old idea in art, art history, and aesthetic theory – the gestalt – in order to catalyze its resuscitation. In breathing new life into the gestalt, I tease out what goes overlooked in the realm of art and design: namely, its wet, biological origins.

Sometime around 1800, towards the end of his period of programmatic neo-classicism, Goethe took time out from his official duties at the Weimar Court, and from his own scientific research, to compose a perfect Petrarchan sonnet addressed to the relationship between “art” and “nature.” While seemingly in flight from one another, we are told in the opening stanza, the apparent divergence of the entities thus named actually effects their unforeseen reunion: “Natur und Kunst, sie scheinen sich zu fliehen,/Und haben sich, eh man es denkt, gefunden.” Reassured by this realisation of the newfound unity of nature and art, the speaker declares that his antipathy (Widerwille) (whether to the one or the other or, perhaps, to their apparently antipathetical trajectories) has also disappeared, and he now finds himself seemingly drawn equally to both. This bold beginning begs a series of tricky questions that are only partially and indirectly answered in the following stanzas (on which, more anon). “Nature,” as Raymond Williams remarks in Keywords, is “perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language,” and, judging by the lengthy entry in Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch, the same can certainly be said for Natur in German. One wonders, then, what conception and dimension of said “nature” is in play here? “Art” is a somewhat less multivalent term, but it was significantly more-so in Goethe’s day. While we tend to associate this word primarily with the sphere of aesthetic production, as in the creation of works of art, around 1800, Kunst, like art in English, could also refer to activities that would today be classified in terms of “craft.” Such crafty “arts” could also include the experimental techniques deployed by those who had adopted Sir Francis Bacon’s novum organon in order to induce “nature” to surrender “her” closely guarded secrets. What kind of “art” is this, then, that is seemingly so at odds with which “nature”? Why are they in flight from one another? And on what basis, and in what manner, might their apparent re-unification be understood to have been effected? In this article, I propose to explore these questions from an ecocritical and ecophilosophical perspective. In particular, I wish to reconsider German romantic-era understandings of the interrelationship of art and nature in relation to the burgeoning new field of multi- and inter-disciplinary study that became known in the 1980s as “biosemiotics,” entailing the examination of those multifarious and multifaceted communicative processes (semiosis) that are intrinsic to the existence and interactions of all living organisms (bios).

Nature is not natural and can never be naturalized." -Graham Harman "Nature is the daughter of God and the Mother of things." -Alain de Lille Rationale: At the heart of this course is the phenomenon of ecology as a system that creates networks and boundaries that are constantly shifting. Materiality, the body, environment, language, medicine, scientific observation, and the highly-contested boundary/network of the human and the non-human will all fall under the sway of our investigations. One of the principal challenges of this course will be to experience the displacement of the human across ecological boundaries and networks as they shift. These shifts of ecology are physical, historical, and conceptual and they leave traces in visual culture. These visual traces will become our guides. In treating the ecology of medieval art, we will study not only art objects produced by and of the natural environment, but also the interaction of living beings with and within that environment produced by those objects. After a conceptual exploration of ecology and nature, we will start to ask questions of the materials and representations of landscapes, rocks, gardens trees and flowers, and, for the last half of the class, animals. Human agency will not always be primary -far from it. Be prepared to conceive of agency as residing elsewhere than in personhood, and with surprising effect. At stake in this course are the conceptualizations of nature and the natural, the role of memory and origins in articulating nature in conjunction with culture, and the symbiotic agency that nature and humanity have to each other.

Balance-Unbalence , 2018

The question of value in art seems twofold. On the one hand, we have the values internal to art, those that dominate the field of art, and, on the other hand, the values that an artwork defends or advocates for the whole society. These two sets can go in divergent or even opposite directions. Through the cases of ecology and the works of art that deal with this topic, this paper proposes to approach the question of the relations between these two levels of values, to conclude by affirming the need for a convergence between them.