Stretching Out: Species Extinction and Planetary Aesthetics in Contemporary Art

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Notes

1. Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 5. Serres describes a series of ecological tipping points, arguing that it is necessary to rethink the relationship between species, beginning from the discourses of mastery and control that frame everything in terms of war and property. He suggests that without this fundamental rethinking of our ‘contract’ with nature, we will be ‘unprepared for some possible catastrophe’.

2. The phrase ‘when species meet’ is the title of a book by Donna Haraway and my readings of her work pervade this essay. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

3. T. J. Demos has shown how art history is a practice that both documents and challenges what it is that artists are doing, adding that it too must turn towards the larger frames of thinking offered by the Anthropocene. T. J. Demos, ‘Decolonizing Nature: Making the World Matter’, Social Text, 8 March 2015, http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonizing-nature-making-the-world-matter/ (accessed 8 May 2017).

4. For more recent approaches to the human–animal relationship, see: Human Animal Research Network Editorial Collective. Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-human Futures (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2015); and Laurence Simmons and Philip Armstrong, Knowing Animals (London: Brill, 2007).

5. This approach is challenged by recent work in Animal Studies, see: Annie Potts, Philip Armstrong and Deidre Brown, A New Zealand Book of Beasts: Animals in our History, Culture and Everyday Life (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2013).

6. See Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Sydney: Open Humanities Press, 2015).

7. Fiona Pardington, Ake ake huia, 2016. Audio, Auckland Art Gallery, 3:24 mins. http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/page/fiona-pardington-ake-ake-huia (accessed 8 May 2017). See: Fiona Pardington, Portrait of a female huia, heterolocha acuitirostris, 2004. Gelatin silver photograph printed on fibre-based archival paper. Pardington is represented by Stark White Gallery, Auckland.

8. Spivak introduces ‘planetarity’ in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). She further extends the potential of the concept in a number of essays including: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘World Systems and the Creole’, Narrative 14, no. 6 (January 2006): 102–12; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching’, Diacritics 32, nos 3–4 (2002): 17–31. Rpt. in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 316–34; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet (Wien: Passagen Verlag, 1999).

9. Spivak's argument is for the disciplines of comparative literature and area studies to figure themselves differently, which means to imagine themselves ‘as planetary rather than continental, global or worldly’. (Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 72.) Claiming the planet in this way presents an ethical alternative to globalisation. Spivak's issue is with the way that ‘globalisation is the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere’ (Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 72). Thinking the global enforces the circulation of geographical inequalities. At a material level the global world is cartographic. It is drawn all over with latitude and longitude measurements now translated into Google Earth systems that trace and map movements. Spivak says, ‘The globe is on our computers. No one lives there’ (Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 72). This is the computerised economics of globalisation. It is pervasive and ancient but has somehow transformed everything. The wealthy fly above, the goods travel by ship, and the dispossessed attempt small journeys in boats not up to the task. Small journeys that are deeply global, yet not understood by the planet.

10. International Commission on Stratigraphy, Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, ‘Working Group on the Anthropocene’, 23 February 2016, http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/ (accessed 8 May 2017).

11. Richard Monastersky, ‘Anthropocene: The Human Age’, Nature 519, no. 7542 (11 March 2015), http://www.nature.com/news/anthropocene-the-human-age-1.17085 (accessed 8 May 2017).

12. Peter Hannam, ‘Confirmed: Southern Hemisphere CO₂ Level Rises Above Symbolic 400ppm Milestone’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 May 2016, http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/confirmed-southern-hemisphere-co2-level-rises-above-symbolic-400-ppm-milestone-20160515-govfq7.html (accessed 8 May 2017).

13. This challenge to the scientific framing of the Anthropocene has begun to happen in other humanities disciplines as well. In literary studies, Rob Nixon turns to writers whose work addresses the overlooked and dispersed events of the Anthropocene that are ‘incremental and accretive … playing out across a range of temporal scales’. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2013), 2. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has also identified how in the context of the Anthropocene distinctions between natural history and human history have collapsed. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197–222. Nixon and Chakrabarty draw on the knowledges of both postcolonial theory and environmental criticism while highlighting how the repercussions of the Anthropocene are driving the need to shift disciplinary boundaries.

14. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 101.

15. Spivak, ‘World Systems and the Creole’, 108. For an application of Spivak's work to literary studies, see Duncan McColl Chesney ‘Humans among the Other Animals: Planetarity, Responsibility, and Fiction in Disgrace and Wolf Totem’, Concentric: Literacy and Cultural Studies 40, no. 2 (September 2014): 175–201.

16. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 103.

17. This work has been happening in the fields of animal studies, creative writing, and eco-criticism for a number of years. See, for example, Joshua Lobb's short story that entangles Jacob Von Uexküll's Umwelt with the Anthropocene. Joshua Lobb, ‘What he Heard’, Animal Studies Journal 4, no. 2 (2015): 176–180.

18. MOCA, ‘Diana Thater – Light and Space - The Artist's Studio’ MOCAtv, 1 October 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm1Xy34kJMA (accessed 8 May 2017).

19. Diana Thater, Science, Fiction, 2014. Installation for two video projectors, watchout system, and lights, dimensions variable. The work was first exhibited at David Zwirner Gallery, New York, in 2015. Documentation of the work available at: http://www.thaterstudio.com/collections/view/works/science-fiction/ (accessed 8 May 2017).

20. Marie Dacke, Emily Baird, Marcus Byrne, Clarke Scholtz and Eric Warrent, ‘Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation’, Current Biology 23 (18 February 2013): 298–300.

21. Freya Matthews, ‘Planet Beehive’, Australian Humanities Review 50 (May 2011): 171, http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-May-2011/mathews.html (accessed 8 May 2017). See also David Biello, ‘Insects Provide Billions in Free Services’, Scientific American, 3 April 2006, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=insects-provide-billions (accessed 8 May 2017).

22. Diana Thater, Visual Voyage: Milky Way to the Virgo Cluster, 2015. Nine-monitor video wall and media player, 9:35 min loop, HDTV visual excerpt from ‘Runaway Universe’ (2000), Courtesy NOVA/WGHB and PBS, Tom Lucas Productions. Documentation of the work available at: http://www.thaterstudio.com/collections/view/works/science-fiction/ (accessed 8 May 2017).

23. Dacke et al., ‘Dung Beetles’.

24. Shannon Te Ao, ‘Part Tree, Part Canoe’ (MFA Thesis, Massey University, Wellington, 2015), 41.

25. Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (wie man dem toten Hasen die Blider erkärt), Schelma Gallery, Dusseldorf, 26 November 1965. Documentation available at: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/434.1997.9/ (accessed 8 May 2017).

26. Ann Temkin, ‘Joseph Beuys: An Introduction to His Life and Work’, in Thinking Is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys (Philadelphia and New York: Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, 1993).

27. Shannon Te Ao, ‘Part Tree, Part Canoe’, 45.

28. I explore the connections between bar-tailed godwits and art history in a short post for the MECO research network. Susan Ballard ‘Godwits and Planetary Aesthetics’ MECO360, 1 March 2016, https://www.uowblogs.com/meco/2016/03/01/godwits-and-planetary-aesthetics/ (accessed 7 May 2017).

29. Stephen T. Garnett and Gabriel M. Crowley, ‘The Action Plan for Australian Birds 2000’, Australian Government, Department of the Environment and Energy, https://www.environment.gov.au/node/14674 (accessed 8 May 2017).

30. Department of Environment and Conservation New South Wales, ‘Recovery Plan for the Bush Stone-curlew Burhinus Grallarius’ (Department of Environment and Conservation: Sydney, 2006), http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/resources/nature/recoveryplanBushStonecurlew.pdf (accessed 8 May 2017).

31. Mahasweta Devi, ‘Pterodactyl’, in Imaginary Maps, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London: Routledge, 1993), 95–196.

32. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 72.

33. Devi in Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 80.

34. Agnieszka Golda and Martin Johnson in conversation with the author, studio visit: Mount Keira, Wollongong, 19 July 2016.

35. Agnieszka Golda and Martin Johnson in conversation with the author, studio visit: Mount Keira, Wollongong, 19 July 2016.

36. Object was exhibited as part of the International Society for Electronic Arts exhibitions in Hong Kong, May 2016. A copy of the full video is available at: Jinyi Wang and Nathan Hughes [Black Moss], ‘Object’, Technoculture: An Online Journal of Technology in Society, 6 (Creative Works, 2016), http://tcjournal.org/drupal/vol6/blackmoss (accessed 8 May 2017).

37. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 101.

38. Neel Ahuja, ‘Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World’, PLMA: Modern Languages Association 124, no. 2 (March 2009): 556–63.

39. Ahuja, ‘Postcolonial Critique’, 556.

40. Ahuja, ‘Postcolonial Critique’, 559.