num_pages: 296
description: While ecology has received little systematic attention within art history its visibility and significance has grown in relation to the threats of climate change and environmental destruction. By engaging artists widespread aesthetic and political engagement with environmental conditions and processes around the globeand looking at cutting-edge theoretical political and cultural developments in the Global South and NorthDecolonizing Nature offers a significant original contribution to the intersecting fields of art history ecology visual culture geography and environmental politics. Art historian T. J. Demos author of Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (2013) considers the creative proposals of artists and activists for ways of life that bring together ecological sustainability climate justice and radical democracy at a time when such creative proposals are urgently needed.Decolonizing Nature presents a timely critical analysis of the parameters and limitations of philosophical artistic and curatorial models responding to anthropogenic climate change. Rich and informative the book makes an impassioned argument for a post-anthropocentric political ecology in which the aesthetic realm enjoins with Indigenous philosophies and environmental activism to challenge the neoliberal corporate-state complex. It invites us to confront tough questions on how we might collectively reimagine and realize environmental justice for humans and nonhumans alike.Jean Fisher Emeritus Professor in Fine Art and Transcultural Studies Middlesex UniversityAstute and ambitious. Essential reading for anyone interested in the arts activism and environmental change. Demos moves with impressive ease across national boundaries cultural forms social movements and ecological theories.Rob Nixon Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Family Professor in Humanities and the Environment Princeton UniversityDemos breaks new ground in art criticism. In an expansive analysis of polyvocal artist-activist practices in the Global South and the North Demos eschews environmental catastrophism scientific determinism and techno-fixes to highlight collaborative resistance to neocolonial violence and neoliberal collusion-to-plunder. He is also searching for what the path forward might be. Rigorous accessible and rebellious Decolonizing Nature is an inspiring and indispensible contemporary art manifesto.Subhankar Banerjee Lannan Chair of Land Arts of the American West and Professor of Art and Ecology University of New MexicoWith Decolonizing Nature Demos extends his formidable intellectual project to a realm that has until recently often been characterized by varying degrees of navet obscurantism and indeed green-washing: the relationship between art and ecology. The first systematic study of its kind Decolonizing Nature is an exemplary combination of militant research and contemporary art history that will resonate with activists on the front lines as much as those working in the art field reframing the latter as a site of struggle in its own right as we come to terms with the so-called Anthropocene.Yates McKee author of Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy ConditionDemoss ability to distill and interrelate heterogeneous discourses practices and eco-political contexts without flattening them in the process is a breathtaking feat and moreover one that rises to the demands of his complex and urgent subject. As clear in its argumentation as it is dense with information the meat of this book lies in its detailed discussion of specific artworks and the environmental struggles from which they emerge and to which they ambitiously and often brilliantly respond. Decolonizing Nature makes a forceful case for why and how art matters now more than ever.Emily Eliza Scott Postdoctoral Fellow Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture ETH Zurich and coeditor of Critical Landscapes: Art Space Politics
language: English
title: Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology
publisher: Sternberg Press