Art History and Ecology: A Drama in Three Acts

Oikos (οἶκος, home) is a concept that split in modernity as it became “eco”: the oikos of economics and of ecology (quantification versus study of our home). In this essay, both derivations will be touched upon since the quantification of our natural home (econometrics) is arguably the modern source of the current climate crisis, while its study (ecology) claims to name that crisis—the Anthropocene—in order to begin to cure it. What role can art history play in this agonistic drama? There is already an architectural history (as in Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles of “Four Ecologies,” 1971). Art history, too, has ecological frameworks from the 1970s that need to be unearthed; this essay argues that they must necessarily be tied to economic ones. We get no ecological art history without the social history of art. Economic relations are found in art that represents or enacts human cultural patterns of extraction (what Marx himself identified as an “irreparable rift”); parallel ecological perceptions follow the Humboldtian logics of geographical niches hosting specifically local forms of life. Art history emerged as a discipline to deal with both these modes. It is coeval with the naming of “ecology,” and its many relations to the oikos deserve to be engaged. In three acts, this brief essay charts a dramatic arc from extraction to relation, with ecology as mediation throughout. The first act looks at a significant moment in which the economic aspects of social art history were foregrounded in Michael Baxandall’s classic Painting and Experience (1972). Baxandall theorized the “experience” of capitalist reckoning as a visual practice conjoined to aesthetic valuation. Relatedly, the quality of ultramarine, visually assessed and theologically charged, was contractually bound to systems of extraction and trade. In the second act, the essay considers Earthworks artists such as Robert Smithson, and anti-Gestalt psychologists, from Anton Ehrenzweig to perception scientist James J. Gibson. Gibson’s 1979 book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception created a second mode of approaching the oikos: as a set of productive visual “habits” formed by the human body interacting with affordances of the planet. Act Three builds a simultaneous expansion and refutation of Gibson, privileging the non-visual senses in relation to strange media objects that can be analyzed by an art historian—epistemologies departing from vision to embrace amodal senses as ways of knowing environmental disaster in the Anthropocene. This necessarily engages the cultural polemic of symbiontics. Crafted in response to the newest forms of BioArt, this new ecological theory of aesthetics draws on the philosophical category of ontics, viz, symbiontics: symbiosis as that which is. Defeating the isolation fostered in Western art (think of Dūrer’s exceptionally precise and utterly alienated 1504 Hare), the symbiontic art discussed in Act Three is fully entangled. These relational aesthetic gestures are radical—a word whose root is radix, literally, root. Symbiontics engage us in a revolution in rooted sensibility, taken up in art that is in reciprocity with life. Presenting a mutual interdependence, second-wave BioArt performs itself on a planet that is oikos—art in reciprocity with the more-than-human species that maintain this garden of a home.