Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology

by T.J. Demos

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 globe—and looking at cutting-edge theoretical, political, and cultural developments in the Global South and North—Decolonizing 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 University

“Astute 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 University

“Demos 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 Mexico

“With Decolonizing Nature, Demos extends his formidable intellectual project to a realm that has until recently often been characterized by varying degrees of naïveté, 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 Condition

“Demos’s 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

Genres: Art, Ecology, Nonfiction, Politics, Environment, Theory, Art History

296 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2016

About the author

T. J. Demos is an award-winning writer on contemporary art, global politics, and ecology. He is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Founder and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely on the intersection of contemporary art, global politics, and ecology, and his essays have appeared in magazines, journals, and catalogues worldwide. His published work centers broadly on the conjunction of art and politics, examining the ability of artistic practice to invent innovative and experimental strategies that challenge dominant social, political, and economic conventions.

Reviews

[Carmen · Rating 5 out of 5]

"How, we must ask, can artistic activity contribute to and expand the activist imagery, infusing protests, demonstrations, and direct action campaigns with creativity and effective poetics, building on social and political engagement at multiple levels, from the local to transnational? How can the arts work toward and realize a transitional culture, joining ecological sustainability and social justice, in the widest sense of these terms?" (pg. 263)

Decolonizing Nature is a book about imagining a post-anthropocentric world in which climate justice is a real possibility, and how art can be a means to help us get there. It does a great job of explaining the root causes of our climate crisis, the failure of the international community over decades to present meaningful solutions, nuanced critiques of previous environmental art movements, the uneven impacts on the global North vs. South, and what we need to do to move forward to create a future we actually want.

I picked this book up because I thought it was about art—and it is, but there is much more to it. It's rather dense, and I'm impressed how Demos was able to tie together ideas from a vast array of fields (art, agriculture, economics, indigenous lifestyles, philosophy, social activism, and more) to form a compelling central argument: environmental concerns are inextricable from social, political, and economic forces.

This is a must-read for any artist or climate activist looking to mindfully and radically create change. If you grew up in a Western culture, you can learn a lot from this book as it includes histories of local/indigenous communities around the world and how they have been affected by the climate crisis. It's telling stories that are rarely being told.

A couple of my favorite quotes:

"Presenting truth has itself become the most radical act on earth today, which even political regimes governed by the best of ideologies fail to encourage." (pg. 194)

"Eco-aesthetics traverses not just the domain of art practice but also of social and political theory—the links between humans and non-human formations, debates on political ecology, and the possibility of alternatives beyond the present." (pg. 173)

"The problem with the generic quality of terminology like 'sustainable development' is that it tends to present a 'a classless vision of ecological justice made in the USA,' ... a vision that appears ideologically, and falsely, as uncontestable—who, after all, would oppose sustainability?—even while it furthers corporate interests." (pg. 36)

"... the dignity of climate justice demands 'that equity between North and South can only be reached when the Northern notion of sustainability (preservation of resources for planetary needs and future generations) is matched with the Southern demand for social sustainability (equity, and full social, environmental, political and cultural rights)'" (pg. 155)

"Klein states we need to get over our cultural addiction of imagining apocalyptic scenarios in favor of engaging with the deathly politics of corporate globalization today in order to invent a hopeful future." (pg. 246)

"Christov-Bakargiev's project risked a (non)-position of uncommitted theoretical pluralism, a tendency familiar in the liberal milieu of contemporary art, eager to allude to crises and emergencies—even to aestheticize them—but taking no clear stand in relation to them." (pg. 240)

"Distinct from multiculturalism, which implies multiple perspectives on a self-same nature, multinaturalism asserts that human and nonhuman epistemologies—or ways of seeing—are continuous, but that the object of their gazes is itself different, insofar as nature is a site of diverse ontological becoming (what may be blood to us may be beer to a jaguar)." (pg. 226)

"'What do they mean by development?' he asks. 'We too want development. But when all humans are equal in authority, when all humans are equally respected, when all humans live together in equality, that's the development we too want, the whole world wants, every human wants.'" (pg. 178)

"Shiva explains how the perception of backwardness (articulated frequently by government and corporate officials) is due to the inappropriate projection of Western measurements of wealth—in relation to the satisfaction of non-vital needs—onto cultures of an 'original affluent society,' ... their 'impoverishment lies in the fact that resources which supported their survival were absorbed into the market economy while they themselves were excluded and displaced by it'." (pg. 180)

"While the transition is eminently doable, these ideas will inevitable strike some as idealist. But a dismissive reflex overlooks the fact that the truly irresponsible thinking today is accepting the assumption that we can simple continue down the same path forever, or that we can't do anything to change our direction. Another irresponsible reaction is to think our current hegemonic system of neoliberal capitalism, which is responsible for the problems in the first place, will provide the solution" (pg. 262)

[Egor xS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Acutely clarifying orientation for art and politics in the age of climate crisis. I mean, the stakes!

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deeply important, but the message tends to get lost under a pile of jargon.

[melancholinary · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very comprehensive writing on the relation of contemporary art and the global ecological crisis with the aim to decolonising the meaning of 'nature' itself. As our perception of 'nature' shaped by the romanticism of entanglement with the outside, in this book T.J. Demos provides many concept regarding the 'nature.' Through an extensive dissection of artistic practices, Demos also questions the subject-object relation between the division of human and nonhuman from a vast perspective of political side and philosophical endeavour—with a critique of the inadequateness of 21st western philosophical branch to moves beyond the discourse. However, I think contemporary art's mechanism resembles similar tactic. It is really hard to move beyond the discourse of any categorical discipline—perhaps the Hegelian sublation of renouncing art itself might be more impactful for the art and ecology to be fuller. Demos critics on green capitalism and documenta is important. This is a critical entry for anyone who are interested in, as it puts on the subtitle, the contemporary art and politics of ecology.