Why Look at Plants?: The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art

ISBN-13: 9789004375246 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 308 str.

Giovanni Aloi

Opis

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.

Recenzje

"The emergence of the botanical from quiet, passive existence that constantly hums around us to active/interactive politicization on gallery walls, in installations, and in critical studies is so potent that it has become a full-fledged art movement. This book both unravels and invites an artistic reimagining of the human relationship to plants, in all its manifestations. [...] in light of the ongoing environmental crisis, the book is invaluable. [... It] could not be more timely." - J. Natal, Columbia College Chicago, in: Choice Magazine, Vol. 57 No. 1 (September 2019)

"In sum, Why Look at Plants? is essential reading for anyone interested in the role of the arts in considering human/non-human interactions, plant blindness, posthumanist thought, or the myriad implications of the Anthropocene." - Stephen Goddard, in: Esse, issue 99 (2020), p. 111.

Spis treści

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 Çolakoglu 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

O autorze

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.