Rethinking Art History and Culture: Defining an Ecological Approach

Dear Colleagues,

Imagine how an ecological account of the history of culture that included all life could support efforts to create conditions of sustainability on the planet we share. What if this understanding of connectivity were understood as the foundation for art history and the study of culture? There is no doubt that the relationship of humans to the rest of nature urgently needs to change. Today, the ontological divisions between the domains of the human and all other animals, and between the social and the biological, are fluid. This Special Issue adopts the concept of “post-human” and “more than human” to broaden the scope of what it means to be treated as a valued life form. The advantages of such an ecological approach to conceptualizing the study of culture stem from its ability to institute a more pluralistic historical vision at any scale of study that considers different signifying systems, world views, and contexts of use on equal footing. Efforts to bring the social and the biological together in numerous fields are moving beyond the inherited dichotomy between nature and culture. Indigenous ontologies, once a marker distinguishing savages from civilized peoples, offer promising paradigms for questioning the division between the biological and social realms, "arriving at a place where the line between human and nonhuman becomes nonsensical," to cite Kim Tallbear, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society.[i] Social anthropologist Tim Ingold similarly advocates re-drawing the opposition between innate capacity (biology) and acquired content (culture) to achieve a new "sociobiological synthesis" that describes how all creatures learn through processes of growth and discovery forged “in the crucible of their common life.”[ii] Physicist and feminist philosopher Karen Barad proposes “intra-activity” as a new "ontoepistemological" framework that focuses on the "performative" context in which signification takes place in direct material engagement with the world. Barad’s conceptions and language provide another useful post-human framework, one that can map onto the real-time generation of the live media event. She argues that entanglements between matter and agency, and between performer and “apparatus,” are the primary means by which “relationalities” and “(re)articulations” are produced.[iii]

What is art history’s role in advancing the public’s awareness of its own self-interests and everyone’s interconnectedness with the planetary life-support system that so urgently needs to be restored? This Special Issue invites bold thinking on the future of art history and culture at a precarious moment for social and environmental justice. What is demanded of individual scholars, critics, curators, and artists when human rights, education, and freedom of the press are under attack by authoritarian leaders with fascist ideologies?

References:

Kim Tallbear, "An Indigenous Reflection on Working Beyond the Human/Not Human,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21/2-3 (2015), 231; idem, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

Tim Ingold, ‘Prospect,’ in Biosocial Becomings: Intregrating Social and Biological Anthropology, ed. Tim Ingold and Gisli Palsson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1-12, at 8.

Jo Scott, “Matter Mattering: ‘Intra-activity’ in Live Media Performance,” Parallax 11 June 2014.

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham–London: Duke University Press, 2007).

[i] Tallbear, "An Indigenous Reflection on Working Beyond the Human/Not Human,” 

[ii] Ingold, ‘Prospect’, Biosocial Becomings, 8.

[iii] Scott, “Matter Mattering: ‘Intra-activity’ in Live Media Performance,” citing Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativitiy: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs 28 (2003): 801-831. See also Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway.

Prof. Dr. Claire Farago
Guest Editor

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• study of planetary culture
• intra-disciplinary collaboration
• sociobiological synthesis (interrelationship of biological and social processes)
• nature/culture as a cultural construct
• ecology
• sustainability
• connectivity
• post-human/more than human
• indigenous ontologies
• ontoepistemology
• performative
• relationalities
• (re)articulations
• intra-activity