‘Atmospheres’ of Art and Art History

Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture #61, 2023

Andrea Conte: Art, Sustainability, and the Climate Emergency text and images: Andrea Conte (Andreco Studio) Andrea Conte is an Italian artist and activist with a background in environmental engineer specializing in sustainability. His conceptual imagery is characterized by the presence of natural elements, such as rocks and minerals. Through these symbols, Conte intertwines ecology, urban planning and environmental sustainability. "One of my main projects is called Climate Art Project (CAP), started in Paris, 2015, during the Climate Change conference COP21 as a trans- disciplinary initiative that overlaps scientific and artistic research to raise awareness on social and ecological urgency as Climate Change. CAP uses the language of visual art to underline open questions in the contemporary debate and envision climate actions and possible scenarios for the future. Started as one of my artist practices, CAP became also a cultural association based in Rome, that coordinated all the initiatives. It is an itinerant and multimedia project that uses: installations, sculptures, paintings, wall paintings and performances as political ecology and nature-culture agency. CAP builds a network of partners and relations to develop complex projects on vulnerable territories. In every chapter of the project a network is built between scientific research centers, cultural institutions, museums, theaters, galleries, festivals, independent art organization, art foundations, environmental associations, schools, universities, grass roots organizations and civil society. In Venice the focus was on sea level rise, in Portugal, drought and wildfires, in Puglia, the desertification process in the Mediterranean south, in Delhi, air pollution, in Rome green spaces conservation and river pollution, in the Alps the glaciers melting and the rivers flooding and drought. Nomad Landscape is an installation made of plants, soil, metal sculpture and tapestries, realized for the exhibition Future Landscapes. The plants are a different variety of ferns and hemps, chosen for their ability to treat the soil from metal pollutants. It’s not only about moving the plants in the white cubes, as many artists did it before me. I have other motivations, I want to address the latest scientific research on Climate Chance, political ecology and on nature-based solution (NBS). I study the ecosystem process able to self-regenerate and transform the pollutants generated by the industrialized societies. I am interested in the relation between human / plants / geology / ecosystems. In my installations I am not showing the plants themselves but the invisible chemical- physical transformations that happen between the plants and the rest of the ecosystem. NBS promotes ecological process to mitigate impacts due by human beings, are effective for the Climate Change adaptation and mitigation. It’s been more than fifteen years that I’ve been doing this kind of installation with the plants that sometimes are combined with metal sculptures, textiles, paint- ings, photos or other artworks. In this case, tapestries that represent plant leaves and knives are hung on the walls. Leaves are “imaginary weapons” considering the regenerative role that plants have in the ecosystem. plants : ecosystems = revolutionaries : society Plants in the ecosystems, with their capacity to rebalance and regenerate it, are like the revolutionaries in society when they become oppressive, authoritarian and liberticidal. This equation theoretically connects environmental science with critical thinking and political ecology." After the article a conversation between Andrea Conte ( Andreco .org ) and Giovanni Aloi - Editor in Chief of Antennae Journal and Professors at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Editor in Chief Giovanni Aloi – School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Sotheby’s Institute of Art Academic Board Steve Baker – University of Central Lancashire Melissa Boyde – University of Wollongong Ron Broglio – Arizona State University Matthew Brower – University of Toronto Eric Brown – University of Maine at Farmington Carol Gigliotti – Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver Donna Haraway – University of California, Santa Cruz Susan McHugh – University of New England Brett Mizelle – California State University Claire Parkinson – Edge Hill University Cecilia Novero – University of Otago Jennifer Parker–Starbuck – Royal Holloway Annie Potts – University of Canterbury Ken Rinaldo – Ohio State University Nigel Rothfels – University of Wisconsin Jessica Ullrich – University of Art Münster Andrew Yang – School of the Art Institute of Chicago Global Contributors Sonja Britz / Tim Chamberlain / Conception Cortes / Amy Fletcher / Katja Kynast / Christine Marran / Carolina Parra / Zoe Peled / Julien Salaud / Paul Thomas / Sabrina Tonutti / Joanna Willenfelt Advisory Board Rod Bennison / Helen J. Bullard / Claude d’Anthenaise / Lisa Brown / Chris Hunter / Karen Knorr / Susan Nance / Caroline Picard / Andrea Roe / David Rothenberg / Angela Singer / Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson Copy Editor and Design Erik Frank and Giovanni Aloi Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (ISSN 1756-9575) is published triannually by AntennaeProject, Chicago. Contents copyright © 2020 by the respective authors, artists, and other rights holders. All rights in Antennae: The Jour- nal of Nature in Visual Culture and its contents reserved by their respective owners. Except as permitted by the Copy- right Act, including section 107 (fair use), or other applicable law, no part of the contents of Antennae: The Journal of Na- ture in Visual Culture may be reproduced without the written permission of the author(s) and/or other rights holders.

The growing sense of urgency surrounding climate change has generated a dialogue among artists, critics, and theorists regarding the role of art in this contemporary crisis. Contributions to this discussion come from a range of sources, including artists' reflections on their own work, catalog essays from topical exhibitions, art reviews, and academic articles from a variety of disciplines. Artistic engagements with climate change have attracted attention from scholars in art history, environmental policy, cultural geography, and the history, philosophy, and social studies of science, among other fields, whose divergent aims and methodologies lead theorists to focus on different but complementary issues. This body of work isolates a central set of questions: What is the role of art and artists in responding to climate change? How can art communicate scientific information? Can art help people to perceive the effects of climate change and to comprehend its underlying physical processes? Is art an effective means of motivating political action or changing individual conduct? How should nature be imagined in a period when the global environment is undergoing profound transformation as a consequence of human actions? The responses offered to these questions suggest in turn new answers to enduring questions about the definition and purpose of art and the relations between art, nature, science, and politics. Contemporary art that thematizes climate change participates in a rich art historical tradition of representing and critiquing humanity's relationships to nature. The turn from the representational 91 Select Citation Style:

Along Ecological Lines - Contemporary Art and Climate Crisis , 2019

Along Ecological Lines - Contemporary Art and Climate Crisis is a critical anthology edited and curated by Dr. Barnaby Drabble and published by Gaia Project Press in partnership with édhéa, Valais School of Art, Sierre. It brings together essays, interviews and case studies, which introduce and examine the work and ideas of a range of environmentally engaged artists working in Europe today. Providing readers an insight into practices that are dealing in different ways with the urgent and complex manifestations of climate change, this book addresses questions about how art can positively enter a discourse which is often dominated by political and scientific voices. Spanning seven chapters of writings by artists, activists and academics, this volume brings together various interconnected themes from self-sufficiency and civil disobedience, to inter-species justice, divestment, de-growth and environmental ethics. The collected texts reveal a new immediacy amongst a growing network of practitioners collaborating across disciplines to bring creative, at times visionary methods to bear on environmental and ecological challenges. All rights reserved © 2019.

Zygon®, 2018

Abstract. This essay examines various contemporary artistic responses to climate change. These responses encompass multiple media and diverse philosophical and emotional forms, from grief and resignation to resistance, hope, and poignant celebration of spiritual value and natural beauty. Rejecting much of the terminology of current theory, the author considers the artworks in relation to interrelated and arguably unjustly discredited aesthetic and theological categories, namely the sublime and the beautiful as well as the via negativa, the latter adapted from Thomas Aquinas by theologian Matthew Fox. Art’s power is seen largely as the ability to “humanize” the science by rendering it emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually relatable to individuals. The broken relationship between humanity and nature seems related to the need for a renewed religious sense of integration with, and belonging to, the cosmos, something in the bringing about of which art might play a pivotal role. Key Words: Anthropocene, art, beauty, climate change, nature, oceanic feeling, religion, science, spirituality, the sublime, technology, truth.

Christian Danielewitz — PO4 (Blackout) - RAW Material Company, 2019

Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research in Art Education, 2012

Keener Perception (2009) has sought to highlight research in American art history with an ecocritical perspective, the ethical integration of visual analysis, cultural interpretation, and environmental history. Editors Alan Braddock and Christoph Irmscher have questioned how art historians and scholars who care about climate change can respond through scholarly inquiry in a way that fosters solutions through the transformation of environmental perception and historical understanding. They have offered this book as a re-imagination of environmental relations and possibilities for our planet, through its highlighting of environmental contexts of past cultural artifacts, bringing attention to neglected evidence of past ecological sensibility, casting canonical works and figures in a new light regarding environmental concerns, and emphasizing the particular ways in which human creativity unfolds within different environments. They have asserted that ecocritical art history challenges anthropocentrism while fostering a greater awareness of environmental relationships, the predicament of nonhumans, and limits of human dominion. I recommend this book as a model and content resource to inspire both art teachers and curriculum developers to reimagine how we teach about historical and contemporary

‘’In the Anthropocene epoch, we are using the climate change scenario and the collective responsibility oratory –that are effective to get our attention on ecological crises issue-although are not much helpful when it comes to understanding the causes of the contemporary crisis, as are: capitalism, colonialism and rather simplistic/unsophisticated ideas about nature, in contrary we could think that it (Anthropocene) will justify radical political, social and economic interventions. When no doubt left, that the socio-economic and environmental spheres are interconnecting, which is art role on global environmental crises?’’

2021

(Eds. TJ Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, Subhankar Banerjee) International in scope, this volume brings together leading and emerging voices working at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, activism, and climate change, and addresses key questions, such as: why and how do art and visual culture, their ethics and values, matter with regard to a world increasingly shaped by climate breakdown? Foregrounding a decolonial and climate-justice based approach, this book joins efforts within the environmental humanities in seeking to widen considerations of climate change as it intersects with social, political, and cultural realms. It simultaneously expands the nascent branches of ecocritical art history and visual culture, and builds toward the advancement of a robust and critical interdisciplinarity appropriate to the complex entanglements of climate change. This book will be of special interest to scholars and practitioners of contemporary art and visual culture, environmental studies, cultural geography, and political ecology.

Oceanologia, 2020

In contemporary visual culture, the subject of climate change and the need for commitment to counteract it (Demos, 2016; Körber et al., 2017; Tsing et al., 2017) are increas- ingly being addressed. The artists’ observation concerns not only the natural effects of climate change but also their impact on the social and cultural heritage of the inhabitants of regions of the most endangered areas. Areas most vulnerable to destruction: oceans, coral reefs and po- lar regions are becoming a particular subject of interest for artists. A reflection of this interest can be the increasing number of exhibitions devoted to the current state of the environment (i.e. the project Plasticity of the Planet presented in 2019 in Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw). In the article selected artistic strategies to publicize the problems of ecology will be indicated. The first strategy is the exhibition of the beauty of the natural environment and the melancholy associated with its disappearance. An example of this can be Art of the Arctic by environmental photographer Kerry Koeping who focuses the audience’s attention on ocean literacy by means of affecting landscapes of the Arctic or the artistic residence in PAN Hornsund Polar Station of Janusz Oleksa. The second way is to indicate the physical and biological effects of climate change. An example would be the work of Kelly Jazvac who, in collaboration with an oceanog- rapher Charles Moore and a geologist Patricia Corcoran, presents plastiglomerate by Agnieszka Kurant —new forms of fossils, resulting from the combination of shells and stones with plastics or artificial compounds. The third method is the presentation of the residents’ experience. The examples are works of Subhankar Banerjee, who draws inspiration from ethnographic research and documentary films and Jakub Witek’s documentary about Polish emigrants living in Iceland. The artist presents the consequences of climate change for the inhabitants of the polar regions. The fourth way is to build a metaphor for the presence of a ‘stranger’ — a traveller, an explorer or a scientist. An example is a photographic performance entitled Polaris Summer by Kuba Bąkowski conducted during a scientific expedition to Spitsbergen, or three-screen projection by John Akomfrah’s showing the relationship between man and oceans in the context of exploitation of natural and human resources. For the artistic practices described in the article, I use the theoretical framework of environmental art that binds together aesthetics, ethics and politics. The purpose of the article is to check whether such a connection can be attractive to the audience.

Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 2024

This article reviews Western perspectives—in a fruitful dialogue with nonWestern perspectives—on the climate emergency and artistic experiences amid the ongoing debate about futures currently at stake in the climate crisis or climate emergency. Moving beyond the various ways of naming this crisis, we focus on how art can communicate, envision, and activate ways of inhabiting this problem, opening communities to an other-than-human coexistence and reconfiguring matters as we understand them in a geological, natural, or material sense. The analyses indicate that, instead of aiming at a singular solution, multiple exercises and imaginative and speculative avenues of narratives can tell different stories and envision alternative futures. If the climate crisis ignited in the Anthropocene is a shared crisis—both political and aesthetic—then art, inseparable from life and hence nature, holds a crucial role in nurturing care and the potency of imagining other possible worlds.