Beyond the World's End: Arts of Living at the Crossing

by T.J. Demos

In Beyond the World's End T. J. Demos explores cultural practices that provide radical propositions for living in a world beset by environmental and political crises. Rethinking relationships between aesthetics and an expanded political ecology that foregrounds just futurity, Demos examines how contemporary artists are diversely addressing urgent themes, including John Akomfrah's cinematic entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats, the visual politics of climate refugees in work by Forensic Architecture and Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, and moving images of Afrofuturist climate justice in projects by Arthur Jafa and Martine Syms. Demos considers video and mixed-media art that responds to resource extraction in work by Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann as well as the multispecies ecologies of Terike Haapoja and Public Studio. Throughout, Demos contends that contemporary intersections of aesthetics and politics, as exemplified in the Standing Rock #NoDAPL campaign and the Zad's autonomous zone in France, are creating the imaginaries that will be crucial to building a socially just and flourishing future.

264 pages, Hardcover

Published September 4, 2020

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

[Kai · Rating 3 out of 5]

some interesting artistic texts analyzed here and put into juxtaposition in some expected and some unexpected ways. a bit of an environmental humanities theoretical grab bag somewhat tenuously held together by the concept of "intersectional ecology." the import of this term is supposed to point us towards how social justice and environmental concerns cannot be separated out from each other, which i guess is particularly important in the art world where things get classified as being "about" climate or nature or whatever rather than politics. i kind of find this to be a rather small argument (and Demos acknowledges that more complexity is possible). it's just...liberalism is totally fine with uniting social justice and environmental concerns, so long as they're united within distributional, recognition, or participatory frameworks of justice. as a read, Beyond the World's End is also tough. it is peppered with sentences made overly long by several clauses and em dashes, leading my eyes to skip over large sections. Demos' heart is in the right place, and I did follow up on some of the pieces which seemed most compelling to me, so it was still a worthwhile if uneven text.