Abstract
In 2007, San Francisco’s Natural World Museum in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme launched a climate change themed exhibition entitled Melting Ice – A Hot Topic: Envisioning Change. As evident in its title, the show considered the ways in which art can envision and engender social and environmental change. While the exhibition took its title from that year’s World Environment Day theme (with whose celebrations it coincided), it was harbinger of the trajectory of art in the next decade. Climate change has become very much the ‘hot topic’. There has been a wave of recent exhibitions and publications on art and climate change: The Garden (Aarhus Art Museum, 2017), The Edge of the Earth (Ryerson Image Centre, 2016), Till It’s Gone (Istanbul Modern, 2015), Unfold (CAFA Beijing, 2013), Art in the Anthropocene (Davis and Turpin, 2015), Eco-aesthetics: Art, Literature, and Architecture in a Period of Climate Change (Miles, 2013), to name just a few. These works similarly assume that art has a role in negotiating the environmental crisis. But what can art really do in the face of climate change? For there always remains the danger that it only amounts to an aesthetic equivalent of recycling: a green-capitalist practice that allows individuals to feel like they are contributing to a solution without really having to change any of their consumption patterns, a practice that perpetuates a system intent on destroying the earth while disavowing those structures and institutions really at fault.
This is the crux of TJ Demos’s Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, a far-reaching, urgent book that both tackles the tough realities of the roots of the environmental crisis and convincingly shows how art can and is doing something about it. For Demos, climate change is a political problem that needs not more techno-scientific solutions but a serious reconsideration and interrogation of ideas that ground the modern orientation towards the Earth. This position is indebted to Michel Serres (1995), who two decades ago discerned that global warming threatens to undo the achievements of modernity. Serres located the root of the problem in Cartesian dualism, which posits human beings as the subjects of the world while relegating everything else to the status of object – something to be conquered, appropriated, and exploited for human gain. As evident in the title of Demos’s book, such a relationship of mastery over the natural world is ultimately a colonial stance and our concepts of nature and ecology are intricately linked to the history of European colonialism. Decolonizing Nature thus aligns itself with Serres’ call for a new relationship between humankind and earth that is ‘based on postcolonial equality between human and nonhuman life’ (p. 14).
To ‘decolonize nature’, Demos argues for the need to oppose the corporate–industrial, politico–economic structures that guide a neoliberal globalization of international free trade policies, deregulated environmental protections, the patenting of biological matter, and so on. He thus adopts the perspective of political ecology, according to which environmental concerns are inextricable from social, political, and economic forces. But we must also decolonize ‘our conceptualization of nature in properly political ways’ (p. 18). And this is where art can come into play. Demos asserts: I’m convinced that art, given its long histories of experimentation, imaginative invention, and radical thinking, can play a central transformative role here. In its most ambitious and far-ranging sense, art holds the promise of initiating … creative perceptual and philosophical shifts, offering new ways of comprehending ourselves and our relation to the world differently than the destructive traditions of colonizing nature. (pp. 18–19)
Decolonizing Nature comprises seven chapters. With the exception of the first, which traces the emergence of discourses of sustainability, systems ecology, and the concomitant advent of environmental art, all the chapters focus on contemporary art. Organized thematically, geographically, or by sole case studies, these chapters consider a diversity of artworks from around the world that more or less successfully ‘decolonize nature’.
‘Art’ in this book is broadly construed. In addition to gallery works, Demos discusses broadcast media, experimental film and video, and internet-based work, as well as creative activism, collective social movements, and the practices of NGOs. This is a strong point of the book; it exemplifies the value of addressing a broad visual and aesthetic realm that is actively involved in ‘redistributing the sensible’, as Jacques Rancière puts it, but in ways not often considered by institutional and academic scholarship. In keeping with the framework of political ecology, Demos puts the artworks in conversation with the socio-economic currents structuring their historic moment.
Particularly rich is chapter four, ‘¡Ya basta! Ecologies of Art and Revolution in Mexico’, which considers artist–activist works that examine the environmentally deleterious and violent consequences of NAFTA in Mexico. Demos brings together more typical gallery artworks, such as Maria Thereza Alves’s mixed-media installation Return of a Lake (2012), with the practices of the revolutionary Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Return of a Lake examines the seemingly spontaneous reappearance of a lake that had been drained a century ago for farmland use in Mexico City. Alves’s project considers the lake as a phenomenon brought about by a host of heterogeneous ‘actants’ – water, animals, indigenous populations, colonial legacies, real estate development, government – suggesting that ‘the lake has “returned” by a complex set of causes beyond the solely human’ (p. 162). In the section on the Zapatistas, Demos shows how their community employs a variety of aesthetic means in an effort to realize a model for a sustainable degrowth, thus providing ‘a crucial antidote to the sociopolitical, agrarian–economic system designed to maximize corporate profits’ (p. 153). And while Demos acknowledges that the Zapatistas and the Mexico City art scene are in many ways worlds apart, thinking these practices concurrently opens the horizon for different modes of expressions and ways of living. It functions as the kind of ‘cultural wilding’ called for by the environmental activist Nicholas Powers (2014).
Chapter five, ‘Nature’s Sovereignty: Conflicting Environments of Development in India’, is also worth mentioning, particularly Demos’s analysis of Amar Kanwar’s ongoing mixed-media installation The Sovereign Forest (2011–). Kanwar’s work is indicative of the chapter’s overarching thematic: how differing notions of development in India bring tribal villagers, such as the Adivasi, who maintain traditional practices of sustainable life into conflict with the ‘profit-based extractivism of the neoliberal corporate-state complex’ (p. 185). The Sovereign Forest reveals the Adivasi’s mode of living as a sustainable alternative but one that is being violently squeezed out by corporate practices. Demos convincingly shows how the various components of Kanwar’s installation provide an example of an investigation of ‘epistemologies alternative to Western realist objectivity and its exploitative pragmatism, touching on a post-secular space of Indigenous knowledge and cultural ritual, one appropriate to portraying alternative modes of community building, animist environmentalism and nonviolent activism’ (p. 186). And he makes a short but convincing argument for adopting Adivasi perspectives on nature in ways that do not merely romanticize indigenous cultures.
But Demos does not laud all the examined artworks’ approaches to ecological problems. He deconstructs how certain pieces outwardly express an environmentalist activist position but ultimately reinforce the structures and systems that they are purportedly contesting. In chapter two, ‘Climates of Displacement: From the Maldives to the Arctic’, for example, he examines a photo series by the Argos collective, which documents people and lands that rising waters are making precarious. Looking closely at their images of Maldivians, Demos submits that this work ultimately objectifies them, treating them as little more than anthropological evidence and addressing their situation by their own humanitarian standards, which constructs them as victims and denies them political self determination.
Demos’s own rich interpretations of the artworks make up much of the content of the chapters, but he weaves into his analyses theories and perspectives from a plurality of thinkers. In line with the main argument of the book, he makes a commitment to ‘decolonize methodology’, asserting that ‘we need … new methodologies to acknowledge the voices of historically oppressed peoples, which stand to strengthen the basis of ethico-political solidarity around ecological concerns by joining with current struggles for cultural and environmental survival against corporate globalization’ (pp. 23–24). He thus addresses indigenous cosmologies, climate justice activism, and voices from the Global South – particularly Vandana Shiva – alongside the more typical theoretical and environmentalist literature from scholars popular in the environmental humanities, such as Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, Donna Haraway, Graham Harman, Jason Moore, Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben. And while there is always more work to be done in diversifying scholarship, Demos makes an important intervention in this regard.
Decolonizing Nature is a dense and ambitious book and Demos is an engaging writer with a keen critical eye on what is at stake in the environmental crisis. The book contains a myriad of diverse information about histories, theories, art, and activism from around the world. And if sometimes it might feel a bit too packed with differing contexts and interdisciplinary ideas, this is maybe precisely the point. The ecological crisis is so enormous and so exceedingly complex that we have to consider multitudes of perspectives on the relationship between human beings and nature in ways that push beyond disciplinary, institutional, geopolitical, philosophical, and artistic boundaries. Art may or may not be capable of ‘doing’ something about climate change, but we need to recognize the value of the cultural sphere ‘in constructing a different form of life’ and its potential to ‘decolonize nature within and beyond the human’ (p. 272). If anything, art, as his book shows, opens up the possibility for us ‘to glimpse the beauty of living otherwise’ (p. 272).