Document Type
Article
Abstract
This article considers the aesthetic strategies and ethical implications of contemporary earth art. Drawing from feminist and ecological phenomenology, I argue that an ethical preoccupation with the earth is identifiable in works that evoke the sensorial plenitude of natural phenomena, but refuse to condense it into a coherent image or art object. By denying a perceptual grasp of the earth, contemporary earth artists question the possibility of representing it as such. They thereby position the earth as a territory of alterity that exists beyond our conceptual and perceptual limits. This approach counters two deeply flawed but nevertheless pervasive stances towards the earth: the instrumental view, that seeks to master the planet through an exclusively human-centered knowledge of it, and the romantic view, that we can return to a state of unencumbered continuity with nature. I will address the site-specific works of the British artist Chris Drury, the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, and the American artist Jackie Brookner, each of which features the contact between the artist's body and the earth. In particular, these artists perform the intermingling, and subsequent partitioning, of the body from the earth's material. That is to say, they assert the body as a surface that separates itself from the earth, and at the same time provides a surface on which the ephemeral materializations of nature occur. The earth appears on the performed body in influxes of light and colour, the appearance of spectral shapes, or in a flourish of growth. While evoking an abundance of sensation, however, these transient expressions disclose the earth's withdrawal from a totalized representation. Raising the ethical paradigms of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray and the eco-phenomenologist Mick Smith, I suggest that the artworks in question retract from an immersive experience of the earth, and enact a 'facing' of its irreducibility. Shifting from the intimacy of dwelling in the earth to the opaque face of nature that confounds our knowledge of it, artists mobilize an aesthetic experience that opens up an ethical acknowledgment of the earth's alterity.
Repository Citation
Boetzkes, Amanda. "Contemporary Art Facing the Earth’s Irreducibility." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 7, no. 2, 2007, pp. 1–19. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol7/iss2/2
Included in
Art and Design Commons, Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Nature and Society Relations Commons