Spatial Orders for the Masses

Abstract

activism, [and] climate sensing techniques” (8). This expansion reverberates with other recent scholarship such as Heather Houser’s Infowhelm: Environmental Art and Literature in an Age of Data (Columbia University Press, 2020), which frames data visualizations and climate predictions as matters of aesthetics and speculation—that is, as humanistic, not just technoscientific, endeavors. Further, contributors to the Companion insist that art and visual cultures have a unique role to play in an era of climate crisis. For one thing, while “nobody can feel average temperatures,” Schneider argues that art “can make this and other ways of perceiving the climate crisis possible” (264, emphasis in original)—given its general capacities to “sensitize[e] us, or mak[e] us more sensitive, to the world around us” (149). Sara Mameni agrees, calling the “aesthetic act” “a configuration of experience that can create new modes of sensory perception, induce new forms of political subjectivity, and anticipate futures, that is, build other possible worlds” (93). Many others echo the latter part of that sentiment; the editors offer the premise that “the world-altering emergency of climate breakdown demands the emergence of new imaginaries, social formations, and societal organizing principles” (385, emphasis in original) and Issa concludes that “art and visual culture are where questions of futurity are best imagined and explored” (102). Beyond art’s capacities to sense, sensitize, and speculate, this collection articulates more specific functions. “I want to build the capacity to handle complex environmental, internal, and spiritual situations,” artist Simpson declares to Horton—to make humans feel “empower[ed]” and capable of “adapt[ing]” (317). Kanouse reflects on her performance art practice as “a process of trying one thing, and then another, evaluating the result, and then trying again”; such “practices of experimentation, iteration, and improvisation,” she asserts, are “necessary to move through the impasse of climate change” (162). Such takes are optimistic, even instrumentalist. But at least one contributor is concerned about the opposite: that much contemporary art and visual culture in the era of climate crisis entails the proverbial fiddling while the world (literally) burns. “Why make an installation about refugees being stuck at the border when you could design tools to cut through the fences?” John Jordan demands in another memorable, controversy-stoking chapter (390). I therefore wondered at first why he bothered to write this essay instead of designing such tools, but the answer soon becomes clear. Living in an autonomous “Zone to Defend” outside Nantes, France, which has been occupied for several years by activists opposing the construction of a new airport, Jordan sees himself as answering Michel Foucault’s call for an “art of living”: “When you no longer outsource your problems and needs, everyday life goes from being unthinking automatic behavior, to being a question of technique, of skill and grace: of art,” Jordan insists (395). Thus, his polemic-turnedpersonal-reportage is itself, arguably, a work of art. Beyond what art is or does—or could or should do—another question emerges from the collection: Who is it for? The obvious, general answer would be “humans,” but Inez Blanca van der Scheer’s chapter offers another answer in considering Jason deCaires Taylor’s statue series Vicissitudes, installed underwater in Grenada’s Molinere Bay. Van der Scheer explains how the work serves nonhumans figuratively as well as literally: the statues’ “immersion is performed as the inversion of the plunder of overfishing or the contamination of pollution,” while the statues themselves serve as “artificial reefs to assuage the threat to natural coral reefs from environmental distress, climate change, and tourism” (377). On the statues today, van der Scheer reports, sponges, algae, and other lifeforms thrive, in bright and brilliant shades.