Why Look at Plants?

The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art

Buch | Hardcover

308 Seiten

2019
Brill (Verlag)
978-90-04-37524-6 (ISBN)

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Why Look at Plants? proposes a thought-provoking look into the emerging cultural politics of plant-presence in contemporary art through the original contributions of artists, scholars, and curators who have creatively engaged with the ultimate otherness of plants in their work.

Winner of the 2019 Outstanding Academic Titles award in Choice, a publishing unit of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL)

Why Look at Plants? proposes a thought-provoking and fascinating look into the emerging cultural politics of plant-presence in contemporary art. Through the original contributions of artists, scholars, and curators who have creatively engaged with the ultimate otherness of plants in their work, this volume maps and problematizes new intra-active, agential interconnectedness involving human-non-human biosystems central to artistic and philosophical discourses of the Anthropocene.

Plant’s fixity, perceived passivity, and resilient silence have relegated the vegetal world to the cultural background of human civilization. However, the recent emergence of plants in the gallery space constitutes a wake-up-call to reappraise this relationship at a time of deep ecological and ontological crisis. Why Look at Plants? challenges readers’ pre-established notions through a diverse gathering of insights, stories, experiences, perspectives, and arguments encompassing multiple disciplines, media, and methodologies.

Giovanni Aloi is an art historian in modern and contemporary art specializing in the representation of animals and plants in contemporary art. Aloi currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sotheby’s Institute of Art New York and London, and Tate Galleries. He is the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (www.antennae.org.uk). He is the author of Art & Animals (2011) and Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene (2018). With Caroline Picard, Aloi is the co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press series Art after Nature.

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Figures

Notes on Contributors

About This Book

Introduction: Why Look at Plants?

Giovanni Aloi

Part 1: Forest

1 Lost in the Post-Sublime Forest

Giovanni Aloi

2 The Humblest Props Now Play a Role

Caroline Picard

3 Ungrid-able Ecologies: Becoming Sensor in a Black Oak Savannah

Natasha Myers

4 An Open Book of Grass

Jenny Kendler

Part 2: Trees

5 Trees: Upside-Down, Inside-Out, and Moving

Giovanni Aloi

6 Animation, Animism … Dukun Dukun & DNA

Lucy Davis

7 Tree Wound Portraits

Shannon Lee Castleman

8 Contested Sites: Forest as Uncommon Ground

Greg Lee Ruffing

9 Quercus velutina, Art of Fiction, No. 11111011

Lindsey French

Part 3: Garden

10 Falling from Grace

Giovanni Aloi

11 Hortus Conclusus: The Garden of Earthly Mind

Wendy Wheeler

12 Eden’s Heirs: Biopolitics and Vegetal Affinities in the Gardens of Literature

Joela Jacobs

13 Thoreau’s Beans

Michael Marder

Part 4: Greenhouse

14 The Greenhouse Effects

Giovanni Aloi

15 Solarise

Luftwerk

16 The Glass Shields the Eyes of the Plant: Darwin’s Glasshouse Study

Heidi Norton

17 The Lichen Museum

Laurie Palmer

Part 5: Store

18 Hyperplant Shelf-Life

Giovanni Aloi

19 Life in the Aisles

Linda Tegg

20 Roomba Rumba: Interview with Katherine Behar

Fatma Çolakoğlu and Ulya Soley

21 Home Depot Throwing Out Plants

Various Contributors

Part 6: House

22 Presence, Bareness, and Being-With

Giovanni Aloi

23 Houseplants as Fictional Subjects

Susan McHugh

24 Seeing Green: The Climbing Other

Dawn Sanders

25 Plant Radio

Amanda White

Part 7: Laboratory

26 Psychoactives and Biogenetics

Giovanni Aloi

27 Of Plants and Robots: Art, Architecture and Technoscience for Mixed Societies

Monika Bakke

28 Boundary Plants

Sara Black

29 The Illustrated Herbal

Tova Flores

Index

Part 8: Of Other Spaces

30 (Brief) Encounters

Giovanni Aloi

31 Places of Maybe: Plants “Making Do” Without the Belly of the Beast

Andrew Yang

32 The Neophyte

Lois Weinberger

33 Herbarium Perrine: Interview with Mark Dion

Interviewer:Giovanni Aloi

34 Burning Flowers: Interview with Mat Collishaw

Interviewer:Giovanni Aloi

35 A Program for Plants: In Conversation, Coda

Giovanni Aloi, Brian M. John, Linda Tegg and Joshi Radin

Bibliography

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	24.01.2019
Reihe/Serie	Critical Plant Studies ; 5
Verlagsort	Leiden
Sprache	englisch
Maße	193 x 260 mm
Gewicht	1067 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Ethik
	Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Botanik
ISBN-10	90-04-37524-4 / 9004375244
ISBN-13	978-90-04-37524-6 / 9789004375246
Zustand	Neuware