Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape, 2024
This essay—a catalog contribution to Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporar... more This essay—a catalog contribution to Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, 2024)—investigates the various tensions that problematize photography in/of the Anthropocene. Whether it portrays the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or Chthulucene (the era of multispecies relationality and being), the contemporary image complex couldn’t be more representationally riven— with social media’s recommendation engines, AI-generated simulations, the unregulated production of fake news, and corporate media producing an end- less stream of fabrication. Cutting the ties between image and reality, sign and referent, representation itself has become deeply tenuous, no longer able to sustain the truth claims once made on its behalf. Majorities no longer extend faith and trust to the institutions that once guaranteed confidence—whether correctly or incorrectly—in representational authenticity and legitimacy, making discussing photography in/of the Anthropocene all the more challenging. Perhaps the current era is and will be postrepresentational...
“If, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò warns, ‘climate apartheid’ is on the rise, then Cop City Atlanta offer... more “If, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò warns, ‘climate apartheid’ is on the rise, then Cop City Atlanta offers an ominous flashpoint. For not only is Cop City an exemplary story of the violent repression of community activism at the nexus of abolition, decolonization, and environmentalism; it also spotlights the forces of counterinsurgency that are operating to prevent any political transformation beyond the status quo. If the environmentalist movement is losing in the struggle to stop world-ending climate change, then continuing to focus on practices of ecological repair is increasingly myopic, even escapist, without taking into account the forces blocking any meaningful change.”
Organizing and recording a public conversation be- tween activists about just these questions, th... more Organizing and recording a public conversation be- tween activists about just these questions, the Austrian activist-artist Oliver Ressler created "Barricade Cultures of the Future" (2021, 38 min), resulting in a video that foregrounds speakers who review the recent history of environmentalist struggles, considering their gains and challenges, and debating future priorities. Originally taking place in Graz on February 27, 2020, just before the pandemic spread to Europe, the video’s exchange includes five discussants – Marta Moreno Muñoz (performance artist and Extinction Rebellion activist), Nnimmo Bassey (COP climate negotiator and member of the Nigerian Health of Mother Earth Foundation), Aka Niviâna (Inuk poet and environmentalist), Jay Jordan (member of The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, based on the ZAD), and Steve Lyons (of the traveling pop-up museum The Natural History Museum and art-activist collective Not An Alternative). Presented in a carefully edited choreography, speakers comment on different approaches to the struggles for climate justice, and for political transformation more broadly, including the role of art, or aesthetic practice more widely, within those struggles, and consider what tactics and strategies future engagements may require.
In pondering what future barricade cultures will look like – where “barricade cultures” suggests the strategic and tactical priorities, social values and formations, and aesthetic elements of resistance movements op- posing fossil capital, from land-based struggles to digital insurgencies – Lyons ends the conversation with the following propositional question, which I paraphrase: If what is most needed is not simply a massive climate movement, but an anti-imperialist politics more expansively opposed to the extraction of life, land, and labor – where it’s not simply the fossil fuel industry but the entire capitalist system that is oppressing the majority of human population – then how should activists and artists mobilize internationally toward this goal as a shared political horizon?
T. J. Demos, “War Ecology: Petropolitics, Contemporary Art, and the Middle East,” in The Environm... more T. J. Demos, “War Ecology: Petropolitics, Contemporary Art, and the Middle East,” in The Environment and Ecology in Islamic Art, ed. Radha Dalal, Sean Roberts, and Jochen A. Sokoly (New Haven: Yale University Press, Forthcoming, 2023), 108-27.
What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism con... more What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism connected to earlier moments, for example, in the 20th century? What can be the role of radical art and scholarship under the conditions of late capitalism? More generally, how can art and artists serve the ongoing struggle for social justice and the agendas of emancipatory social change? Finally, what kinds of art criticism and art historical scholarship are necessary to address the great challenges of our uncertain future?
There appears to be a certain anxiety expressed in the present questionnaire about the institutio... more There appears to be a certain anxiety expressed in the present questionnaire about the institutional status of visual studies. Visual studies’ academic legitimacy and intellectual integrity seem pressured by its sheer methodological diversity, its plurality of approaches and expansiveness of analytic objects, threatening to render its practice incoherent, ‘intellectually rudderless,’ as a discipline. That anxiety may stem from a presupposed fidelity to disciplinarity as such, as if institutional legitimation is something that should be valued—but why, for what, and for whom?
Book description: This volume of 12 essays fills a broad gap in modernist art history. Taken toge... more Book description: This volume of 12 essays fills a broad gap in modernist art history. Taken together, these case studies on artists and concepts present Dada as a coherent movement with a set of operating principles. Among the " tactics" elaborated are the hyperbolic mimicry of ...
With reference to three international examples of contemporary art—those of Thirza Jean Cuthand, ... more With reference to three international examples of contemporary art—those of Thirza Jean Cuthand, The Otolith Group, and Black Quantum Futurism—this essay discusses current modelings of radical futurisms and worlds-to-come that refuse surrender to capitalist realism. Where radical imagination meets radical praxis is in the material forces of solidarity, the political form of belonging, more than ever necessary today in the collective battle against international fascisms and global neoliberalisms. While acknowledging the bankruptcy of Eurocentric universalisms, this presentation defends approaches to insurgent political formations beyond identitarian fragmentation, including a political aesthetics of abolition—ultimately of racial and colonial capitalism.
Potential Worlds: Ruins of Today and Eco-fictions of Tomorrow, 2020
“Potential worlds” offers a speculative proposition that is profoundly generative—helping us to d... more “Potential worlds” offers a speculative proposition that is profoundly generative—helping us to defeat nihilism and despair—and as such it carries an explosive quality within it. For it implicitly recognizes the bankruptcy of the present world, the one most live in, an expansion- ist one-world world that tries to dominate all others, erasing all alter- natives. As a container for petrocapitalism’s climate catastrophe, beyond-grotesque economic inequality, endless war, surveillance capital, algorithmic oppression, and anti-democratic politics, that world is as grievable as it is condemnable. Not surprisingly, we are increasingly surrounded by end-of-world narratives within our global culture industry, which, pathetically, even as it continually represents the end-times in endless dystopian sci-fi iterations, fails repeatedly to imagine any polit- ical and economic order meaningfully different from the present one. What hopes and creative practices exist for cultivating and realizing an emancipatory imagination, a liberationist eco-fiction, for envisioning and building another world, another future?
T. J. Demos, “Anthropocene India: The Art of Building New Worlds,” MARG Magazine (Mumbai, India), vol. 71, no. 3, (March 2020), 16-27., 2020
“If one could speak of an Indian Anthropocene, it would be along similar lines—that is, by avoidi... more “If one could speak of an Indian Anthropocene, it would be along similar lines—that is, by avoiding the universalizing and flattening notion of the term and acknowledging its contradictions. It would identify the situated, regional and uneven impacts of neoliberalism’s technocratic logics of domination, and open a critical space of post- anthropocentric thinking. Such an approach would offer cutting perspective on the world-destroying operations of extraction, and also provide an interdisciplinary platform merging independent scientific research, biocentric legality, and political inclusivity of diverse stakeholder communities. It would draw on humanities and artistic thinking, where science and justice, released from any overriding economic imperative, might join and take on aesthetic forms as creative ecologies that are anti-ecocidal as much as anti-genocidal.”
T. J. Demos, “The Scopic and the Scaped: Anthropocene Landscapes,” Gerhardt Richter: Anthropocene Landscapes, ed. Lisa Ortner-Kreil, Hubertus Butin, and Cathérine Hug (Zurich and Vienna: Kunsthaus Zürich, Kunstforum Wien, and Hatje Cantz, 2020), 190-99., 2020
Anthropocene landscapes are mutating geographies, merging nature and culture. As naturalcultural,... more Anthropocene landscapes are mutating geographies, merging nature and culture. As naturalcultural, they provide a post-binary composite of mutual determination: land has been inextricably shaped biogeophysically by capital, just as the latter has internalized nature for its reproduction. 1 "Anthropocene" and "landscape" are thus conflicted terms, containing unstable, shifting meanings and references. While scape unevenly conjugates vision and labor, the seen and the shaped-the implications of which I discuss below-land, coming from Old English, splits ground and property, signifying a definite portion of the Earth's surface; home region of a person or a people; territory marked by political boundaries. Circum-scribed as such, landscapes identify geopolitical determinations subjected to dispute, while its soil increasingly includes human byproducts: chemical and toxic agents unleashed by industrial capital. Microplastics-found in water, soil, and air-proliferate, as plastic derives from petrochemicals sourced in coal and oil, the products of ancient plants undergone anaerobic decomposition over millions of years. With the nonorganic transformation of land, all manner of spaces-geographical , technological, industrial, virtual-expand the meaning of Anthropocene landscapes: these are as much a mountain pass mined for bauxite, a toxic river filled with micropolymers, as a field of lettered plastic squares on a cybernetic device energized by fossil fuels used to type out those two words. As a geopolitical term, the Capitalocene is perhaps more accurate-geogra-phies of capital, natural systems dominated by corporations and their financial elites over the course of modernity. Capitalocene landscapes, in their current guise, represent not only expanding frontiers of extractive industry (mining sites, drilling rigs, pipeline networks, electricity grids, urban infrastructure, architecture, production factories), but also the becoming-technological of geography (server farms, stacks, virtual territories, screen visions, neural nets). This includes legal, political, economic, and trade networks, merged with natural resources-the managed forests, industrial agricultures, greenhouse gas filled atmospheres, pharmaceutical and genetically modified seeds and animals-as well as the remainder-growing swathes of Earth abandoned to dead zones of pollution, mass extinction, and uncontainable toxicity and radiation. More than naturalcultural, these landscapes are biopolitical, critically highlighting the governance of life (and death) under late liberalism, which continues in the current green convergence of science, cybernetic technology, and capital. Early modern landscapes of the Anthropocene (the geological age structured by human activities) and of the Capitalocene (that age defined, more specifically, by modern capitalism), were largely shaped by expansionist colonial regimes producing notions of territory and race by commodifying land and trading people as currency. These were driven by military control, assisted by cartographic, anthro-pological, and botanical knowledge to assert sovereignty. The Plantationocene
This essay addresses extraction—a key logic of global capitalism—as well as the politics and aest... more This essay addresses extraction—a key logic of global capitalism—as well as the politics and aesthetics of emergent forms of resistance today. In view of spreading sacrifice zones given over to resource mining, abetted by exploitative international trade agreements and the finance of debt servitude, what forms do the cultural politics of resistance take, and how are artists—including Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann—materializing images and sounds of emancipation and decolonization?
What if we measure geo-engineering climate-change fixes by social-justice and speculative approac... more What if we measure geo-engineering climate-change fixes by social-justice and speculative approaches to Afrofuturism (including Arthur Jafa’s video Love is the Message, the Message is Death, 2016), where climate signifies more than just the biogeophysical? What are the stakes of competitive accounts of the not-yet? How is technoscientific rationality currently colonizing what’s to come? What hope do we have to decolonize our future? Picking apart these questions, T. J. Demos will speak about his current research in progress concerning the end/s of the world/s and what comes next…
Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, 2019
A surge of recent art has engaged ecology in newly complex ways, including by confronting environ... more A surge of recent art has engaged ecology in newly complex ways, including by confronting environmental injustice and social violence in aesthetically provocative forms. Consider the visual culture abetting pipeline blockades and Indigenous sovereignty struggles, including at Standing Rock; the creative social engagements motoring the recent campaigns to remove arms and drug dealers and petrocapitalist climate deniers from the governing bodies of cultural institutions; and the social media feeds and direct actions driving recent Extinction Rebellion mobilizations. Building off the insights of political ecology, my work addresses such practices by approaching ecology as a mode of intersectionality, insisting on the inseparability between environmental matters of concern and sociopolitical and economic frameworks of injustice. Intersectionality, emerging from a long history of African American activism and antiracist, antisexist politics, more recently codified in the Black feminist legal theory of Kimberlé Crenshaw, and underscored within multiple struggles for decolonization, refuses to divide overlapping systems of oppression (such as those tied to race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability) and thereby challenges the essentialization of one or another term in isolation. Ecology, in my view, functions similarly as a site of indissoluble relationality that highlights, and indeed is constituted by, interaction (or even "intra-action," in the sense posited by Karen Barad, whose whose theorization within the field of feminist science studies rejects the separateness and purity of originary categories, arguing instead for a political ontology of being-in-relation).
Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape, 2024
This essay—a catalog contribution to Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporar... more This essay—a catalog contribution to Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, 2024)—investigates the various tensions that problematize photography in/of the Anthropocene. Whether it portrays the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or Chthulucene (the era of multispecies relationality and being), the contemporary image complex couldn’t be more representationally riven— with social media’s recommendation engines, AI-generated simulations, the unregulated production of fake news, and corporate media producing an end- less stream of fabrication. Cutting the ties between image and reality, sign and referent, representation itself has become deeply tenuous, no longer able to sustain the truth claims once made on its behalf. Majorities no longer extend faith and trust to the institutions that once guaranteed confidence—whether correctly or incorrectly—in representational authenticity and legitimacy, making discussing photography in/of the Anthropocene all the more challenging. Perhaps the current era is and will be postrepresentational...
“If, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò warns, ‘climate apartheid’ is on the rise, then Cop City Atlanta offer... more “If, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò warns, ‘climate apartheid’ is on the rise, then Cop City Atlanta offers an ominous flashpoint. For not only is Cop City an exemplary story of the violent repression of community activism at the nexus of abolition, decolonization, and environmentalism; it also spotlights the forces of counterinsurgency that are operating to prevent any political transformation beyond the status quo. If the environmentalist movement is losing in the struggle to stop world-ending climate change, then continuing to focus on practices of ecological repair is increasingly myopic, even escapist, without taking into account the forces blocking any meaningful change.”
Organizing and recording a public conversation be- tween activists about just these questions, th... more Organizing and recording a public conversation be- tween activists about just these questions, the Austrian activist-artist Oliver Ressler created "Barricade Cultures of the Future" (2021, 38 min), resulting in a video that foregrounds speakers who review the recent history of environmentalist struggles, considering their gains and challenges, and debating future priorities. Originally taking place in Graz on February 27, 2020, just before the pandemic spread to Europe, the video’s exchange includes five discussants – Marta Moreno Muñoz (performance artist and Extinction Rebellion activist), Nnimmo Bassey (COP climate negotiator and member of the Nigerian Health of Mother Earth Foundation), Aka Niviâna (Inuk poet and environmentalist), Jay Jordan (member of The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, based on the ZAD), and Steve Lyons (of the traveling pop-up museum The Natural History Museum and art-activist collective Not An Alternative). Presented in a carefully edited choreography, speakers comment on different approaches to the struggles for climate justice, and for political transformation more broadly, including the role of art, or aesthetic practice more widely, within those struggles, and consider what tactics and strategies future engagements may require.
In pondering what future barricade cultures will look like – where “barricade cultures” suggests the strategic and tactical priorities, social values and formations, and aesthetic elements of resistance movements op- posing fossil capital, from land-based struggles to digital insurgencies – Lyons ends the conversation with the following propositional question, which I paraphrase: If what is most needed is not simply a massive climate movement, but an anti-imperialist politics more expansively opposed to the extraction of life, land, and labor – where it’s not simply the fossil fuel industry but the entire capitalist system that is oppressing the majority of human population – then how should activists and artists mobilize internationally toward this goal as a shared political horizon?
T. J. Demos, “War Ecology: Petropolitics, Contemporary Art, and the Middle East,” in The Environm... more T. J. Demos, “War Ecology: Petropolitics, Contemporary Art, and the Middle East,” in The Environment and Ecology in Islamic Art, ed. Radha Dalal, Sean Roberts, and Jochen A. Sokoly (New Haven: Yale University Press, Forthcoming, 2023), 108-27.
What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism con... more What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism connected to earlier moments, for example, in the 20th century? What can be the role of radical art and scholarship under the conditions of late capitalism? More generally, how can art and artists serve the ongoing struggle for social justice and the agendas of emancipatory social change? Finally, what kinds of art criticism and art historical scholarship are necessary to address the great challenges of our uncertain future?
There appears to be a certain anxiety expressed in the present questionnaire about the institutio... more There appears to be a certain anxiety expressed in the present questionnaire about the institutional status of visual studies. Visual studies’ academic legitimacy and intellectual integrity seem pressured by its sheer methodological diversity, its plurality of approaches and expansiveness of analytic objects, threatening to render its practice incoherent, ‘intellectually rudderless,’ as a discipline. That anxiety may stem from a presupposed fidelity to disciplinarity as such, as if institutional legitimation is something that should be valued—but why, for what, and for whom?
Book description: This volume of 12 essays fills a broad gap in modernist art history. Taken toge... more Book description: This volume of 12 essays fills a broad gap in modernist art history. Taken together, these case studies on artists and concepts present Dada as a coherent movement with a set of operating principles. Among the " tactics" elaborated are the hyperbolic mimicry of ...
With reference to three international examples of contemporary art—those of Thirza Jean Cuthand, ... more With reference to three international examples of contemporary art—those of Thirza Jean Cuthand, The Otolith Group, and Black Quantum Futurism—this essay discusses current modelings of radical futurisms and worlds-to-come that refuse surrender to capitalist realism. Where radical imagination meets radical praxis is in the material forces of solidarity, the political form of belonging, more than ever necessary today in the collective battle against international fascisms and global neoliberalisms. While acknowledging the bankruptcy of Eurocentric universalisms, this presentation defends approaches to insurgent political formations beyond identitarian fragmentation, including a political aesthetics of abolition—ultimately of racial and colonial capitalism.
Potential Worlds: Ruins of Today and Eco-fictions of Tomorrow, 2020
“Potential worlds” offers a speculative proposition that is profoundly generative—helping us to d... more “Potential worlds” offers a speculative proposition that is profoundly generative—helping us to defeat nihilism and despair—and as such it carries an explosive quality within it. For it implicitly recognizes the bankruptcy of the present world, the one most live in, an expansion- ist one-world world that tries to dominate all others, erasing all alter- natives. As a container for petrocapitalism’s climate catastrophe, beyond-grotesque economic inequality, endless war, surveillance capital, algorithmic oppression, and anti-democratic politics, that world is as grievable as it is condemnable. Not surprisingly, we are increasingly surrounded by end-of-world narratives within our global culture industry, which, pathetically, even as it continually represents the end-times in endless dystopian sci-fi iterations, fails repeatedly to imagine any polit- ical and economic order meaningfully different from the present one. What hopes and creative practices exist for cultivating and realizing an emancipatory imagination, a liberationist eco-fiction, for envisioning and building another world, another future?
T. J. Demos, “Anthropocene India: The Art of Building New Worlds,” MARG Magazine (Mumbai, India), vol. 71, no. 3, (March 2020), 16-27., 2020
“If one could speak of an Indian Anthropocene, it would be along similar lines—that is, by avoidi... more “If one could speak of an Indian Anthropocene, it would be along similar lines—that is, by avoiding the universalizing and flattening notion of the term and acknowledging its contradictions. It would identify the situated, regional and uneven impacts of neoliberalism’s technocratic logics of domination, and open a critical space of post- anthropocentric thinking. Such an approach would offer cutting perspective on the world-destroying operations of extraction, and also provide an interdisciplinary platform merging independent scientific research, biocentric legality, and political inclusivity of diverse stakeholder communities. It would draw on humanities and artistic thinking, where science and justice, released from any overriding economic imperative, might join and take on aesthetic forms as creative ecologies that are anti-ecocidal as much as anti-genocidal.”
T. J. Demos, “The Scopic and the Scaped: Anthropocene Landscapes,” Gerhardt Richter: Anthropocene Landscapes, ed. Lisa Ortner-Kreil, Hubertus Butin, and Cathérine Hug (Zurich and Vienna: Kunsthaus Zürich, Kunstforum Wien, and Hatje Cantz, 2020), 190-99., 2020
Anthropocene landscapes are mutating geographies, merging nature and culture. As naturalcultural,... more Anthropocene landscapes are mutating geographies, merging nature and culture. As naturalcultural, they provide a post-binary composite of mutual determination: land has been inextricably shaped biogeophysically by capital, just as the latter has internalized nature for its reproduction. 1 "Anthropocene" and "landscape" are thus conflicted terms, containing unstable, shifting meanings and references. While scape unevenly conjugates vision and labor, the seen and the shaped-the implications of which I discuss below-land, coming from Old English, splits ground and property, signifying a definite portion of the Earth's surface; home region of a person or a people; territory marked by political boundaries. Circum-scribed as such, landscapes identify geopolitical determinations subjected to dispute, while its soil increasingly includes human byproducts: chemical and toxic agents unleashed by industrial capital. Microplastics-found in water, soil, and air-proliferate, as plastic derives from petrochemicals sourced in coal and oil, the products of ancient plants undergone anaerobic decomposition over millions of years. With the nonorganic transformation of land, all manner of spaces-geographical , technological, industrial, virtual-expand the meaning of Anthropocene landscapes: these are as much a mountain pass mined for bauxite, a toxic river filled with micropolymers, as a field of lettered plastic squares on a cybernetic device energized by fossil fuels used to type out those two words. As a geopolitical term, the Capitalocene is perhaps more accurate-geogra-phies of capital, natural systems dominated by corporations and their financial elites over the course of modernity. Capitalocene landscapes, in their current guise, represent not only expanding frontiers of extractive industry (mining sites, drilling rigs, pipeline networks, electricity grids, urban infrastructure, architecture, production factories), but also the becoming-technological of geography (server farms, stacks, virtual territories, screen visions, neural nets). This includes legal, political, economic, and trade networks, merged with natural resources-the managed forests, industrial agricultures, greenhouse gas filled atmospheres, pharmaceutical and genetically modified seeds and animals-as well as the remainder-growing swathes of Earth abandoned to dead zones of pollution, mass extinction, and uncontainable toxicity and radiation. More than naturalcultural, these landscapes are biopolitical, critically highlighting the governance of life (and death) under late liberalism, which continues in the current green convergence of science, cybernetic technology, and capital. Early modern landscapes of the Anthropocene (the geological age structured by human activities) and of the Capitalocene (that age defined, more specifically, by modern capitalism), were largely shaped by expansionist colonial regimes producing notions of territory and race by commodifying land and trading people as currency. These were driven by military control, assisted by cartographic, anthro-pological, and botanical knowledge to assert sovereignty. The Plantationocene
This essay addresses extraction—a key logic of global capitalism—as well as the politics and aest... more This essay addresses extraction—a key logic of global capitalism—as well as the politics and aesthetics of emergent forms of resistance today. In view of spreading sacrifice zones given over to resource mining, abetted by exploitative international trade agreements and the finance of debt servitude, what forms do the cultural politics of resistance take, and how are artists—including Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann—materializing images and sounds of emancipation and decolonization?
What if we measure geo-engineering climate-change fixes by social-justice and speculative approac... more What if we measure geo-engineering climate-change fixes by social-justice and speculative approaches to Afrofuturism (including Arthur Jafa’s video Love is the Message, the Message is Death, 2016), where climate signifies more than just the biogeophysical? What are the stakes of competitive accounts of the not-yet? How is technoscientific rationality currently colonizing what’s to come? What hope do we have to decolonize our future? Picking apart these questions, T. J. Demos will speak about his current research in progress concerning the end/s of the world/s and what comes next…
Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, 2019
A surge of recent art has engaged ecology in newly complex ways, including by confronting environ... more A surge of recent art has engaged ecology in newly complex ways, including by confronting environmental injustice and social violence in aesthetically provocative forms. Consider the visual culture abetting pipeline blockades and Indigenous sovereignty struggles, including at Standing Rock; the creative social engagements motoring the recent campaigns to remove arms and drug dealers and petrocapitalist climate deniers from the governing bodies of cultural institutions; and the social media feeds and direct actions driving recent Extinction Rebellion mobilizations. Building off the insights of political ecology, my work addresses such practices by approaching ecology as a mode of intersectionality, insisting on the inseparability between environmental matters of concern and sociopolitical and economic frameworks of injustice. Intersectionality, emerging from a long history of African American activism and antiracist, antisexist politics, more recently codified in the Black feminist legal theory of Kimberlé Crenshaw, and underscored within multiple struggles for decolonization, refuses to divide overlapping systems of oppression (such as those tied to race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability) and thereby challenges the essentialization of one or another term in isolation. Ecology, in my view, functions similarly as a site of indissoluble relationality that highlights, and indeed is constituted by, interaction (or even "intra-action," in the sense posited by Karen Barad, whose whose theorization within the field of feminist science studies rejects the separateness and purity of originary categories, arguing instead for a political ontology of being-in-relation).
T. j. Demos, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (Berli... more T. j. Demos, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2023)
(Eds. TJ Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, Subhankar Banerjee) International in scope, this volume brings... more (Eds. TJ Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, Subhankar Banerjee) International in scope, this volume brings together leading and emerging voices working at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, activism, and climate change, and addresses key questions, such as: why and how do art and visual culture, their ethics and values, matter with regard to a world increasingly shaped by climate breakdown? Foregrounding a decolonial and climate-justice based approach, this book joins efforts within the environmental humanities in seeking to widen considerations of climate change as it intersects with social, political, and cultural realms. It simultaneously expands the nascent branches of ecocritical art history and visual culture, and builds toward the advancement of a robust and critical interdisciplinarity appropriate to the complex entanglements of climate change. This book will be of special interest to scholars and practitioners of contemporary art and visual culture, environmental studies, cultural geography, and political ecology.
Addressing the current upswing of attention in the sciences, arts, and humanities to the new prop... more Addressing the current upswing of attention in the sciences, arts, and humanities to the new proposal that we are in a human-driven epoch called the Anthropocene, this book critically surveys that thesis and points to its limitations. It analyzes contemporary visual culture—popular science websites, remote sensing and SatNav imagery, eco-activist mobilizations, and experimental artistic projects—to consider how the term proposes more than merely a description of objective geological periodization. This book argues that the Anthropocene terminology works ideologically in support of a neoliberal financialization of nature, anthropocentric political economy, and endorsement of geoengineering as the preferred—but likely disastrous—method of approaching climate change. To democratize decisions about the world’s near future, we urgently need to subject the Anthropocene thesis to critical scrutiny and develop creative alternatives in the present. https://www.sternberg-press.com/product/against-the-anthropocene-visual-culture-and-environment-today/
Videoarbeiten 1999-2011
mit Texten der Künstlerin und Essays by TJ Demos, Jörg Huber, Brian Holme... more Videoarbeiten 1999-2011 mit Texten der Künstlerin und Essays by TJ Demos, Jörg Huber, Brian Holmes. Lentos Museum, n.b.k. Neuer Kunstverein Berlin, Helmhaus Zürich, Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2012
The Migrant Image: The Art and the Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis investigates how ... more The Migrant Image: The Art and the Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis investigates how contemporary artists have creatively and critically imaged a newly global world of shifting borders, states of exception, mobile populations, and increasing economic and political inequality. Focusing on artists in America, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, such as Steve McQueen, Emily Jacir, the Otolith Group, and Hito Steyerl, the book assembles a series of case studies that focuses on the innovative remodeling of the documentary mode in present practices in a present moment. There, the conventional oppositions between truth and fiction cease to function, yet artists are no less intent on exploring the conditions of social, political and economic reality. The book, written in an accessible and lucid style, takes up the conflicts of global culture by looking foremost at the figure of the migrant in contemporary art. By doing so, it draws out migration’s multivalent meanings, aesthetic conditions, and biopolitical implications in regards to theories of globalization, based on the conviction that globalization is not a transparent reality, but rather a conflictual set of cultural, political, and economic narratives. Building on the insights of research architecture, cultural geography, and political theory, as well as on the art history of the modern avant-garde movements and their relation to geopolitical dislocation (which was the focus of my most recent book, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp, MIT Press, 2007), the present volume aims to deepen our understanding of the image regimes in which the politics of migration and the experimental aesthetics of cultural practices are compellingly intertwined.
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Papers by T. J. Demos
www.e-flux.com/journal/143/590415/counterinsurgent-cop-city-abolition-ecology-and-the-aesthetics-of-counterreform/
In pondering what future barricade cultures will look like – where “barricade cultures” suggests the strategic and tactical priorities, social values and formations, and aesthetic elements of resistance movements op- posing fossil capital, from land-based struggles to digital insurgencies – Lyons ends the conversation with the following propositional question, which I paraphrase: If what is most needed is not simply a massive climate movement, but an anti-imperialist politics more expansively opposed to the extraction of life, land, and labor – where it’s not simply the fossil fuel industry but the entire capitalist system that is oppressing the majority of human population – then how should activists and artists mobilize internationally toward this goal as a shared political horizon?
www.e-flux.com/journal/143/590415/counterinsurgent-cop-city-abolition-ecology-and-the-aesthetics-of-counterreform/
In pondering what future barricade cultures will look like – where “barricade cultures” suggests the strategic and tactical priorities, social values and formations, and aesthetic elements of resistance movements op- posing fossil capital, from land-based struggles to digital insurgencies – Lyons ends the conversation with the following propositional question, which I paraphrase: If what is most needed is not simply a massive climate movement, but an anti-imperialist politics more expansively opposed to the extraction of life, land, and labor – where it’s not simply the fossil fuel industry but the entire capitalist system that is oppressing the majority of human population – then how should activists and artists mobilize internationally toward this goal as a shared political horizon?
mit Texten der Künstlerin und Essays by TJ Demos, Jörg Huber, Brian Holmes.
Lentos Museum, n.b.k. Neuer Kunstverein Berlin, Helmhaus Zürich, Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2012