TJ DEMOS & TERRY SMITH, Global Climate Justice and World Art, a symposium March 24 2016, 4:15 pm Frick Fine Arts Auditorium and Cloister
Terry Smith: World Picturing by Contemporary Artists
(Global Studies Faculty Fellow Lecture II)
Away from the glare of headlines about record auction prices, but right there in plain sight is the fact that contemporary art has become a major way through which more and more people seek subtle, acute and truthful imaginings of the world in which we live: its daunting complexities, its divisive differences, and its enabling diversities. Artists and art collectives may be found among the many individuals, groups, and agencies that are tackling the issues caused by climate change, geopolitical chaos, governmental impotence, and the clash of fundamentalisms. This lecture will show how artistic world picturing is contributing towards the reshaping of our consciousness of planetarity.
Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Theory at the European Graduate School.
TJ Demos: Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today
Addressing the current upswing of scientific and environmental arts and humanities-based attention in relation to the recent geological proposition that we have entered a new human-driven epoch called the Anthropocene, this lecture presents a critical overview of that thesis as well as its limitations. Looking at multiple examples of visual culture-including popular science websites, remote sensing and SatNav imagery, eco-activist mobilizations, and experimental artistic projects-it considers how the term proposes more than merely a description of objective geological periodization. Rather, I argue that the Anthropocene terminology works ideologically in support of neoliberalism's financialization of nature, anthropocentrism's political economy, and the 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.
T.J. Demos is Professor of Art and Visual culture at the University of California Santa Cruz, where he is Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies. His most recent book is The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013, winner of the 2014 College Art Association Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism), which explores the relation of contemporary art- including practices from North America, Europe, and the Middle East-to the experience of social dislocation, political crisis, and economic inequality, where art figures in ways both critically analytical and creatively emancipating.
6:00 PM Reception in Frick Fine Arts Cloister
The Coevality Speaker Series is sponsored by the Global Studies Center, the Department of the History of Art and Architecture Humanities Center, and the Year of the Humanities Initiative the University of Pittsburgh
