<p>Susan Schuppli, still from <em>Atmospheric Feedback Loops</em>, 35mm vertical film, colour with stereo sound, 18 mins., 2017, courtesy of the artist</p>
<p>Susan Schuppli, still from <em>Atmospheric Feedback Loops</em>, 35mm vertical film, colour with stereo sound, 18 mins., 2017, courtesy of the artist</p>

No. 22: How to See the Anthropocene

Managing editors: Paweł Mościcki, Magda Szcześniak

Susan Schuppli, still from Atmospheric Feedback Loops, 35mm vertical film, colour with stereo sound, 18 mins., 2017, courtesy of the artist

This issue was supported by the Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education, from the funds of the program for the popularization of scholarship in 2017, and by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, from the Fund for the Promotion of Culture.

Table of Contents

Introduction

  1. The New “View”

    ”The New View”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 22 (2018), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2018.22.1831

  2. How to See the Anthropocene

    ”How to See the Anthropocene”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 22 (2018), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2018.22.1769

Viewpoint

  1. Longing for Landscape – Photography in the Anthropocene

    CUCO — curatorial concepts berlin e.V.
    CUCO — curatorial concepts berlin e.V. , ”Longing for Landscape”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 22 (2018), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/2018/22-how-to-see-the-antropocene/longing-for-landscape

    Essay and presentation of the project Longing for Landscape—Photography in the Anthropocene, constructed around the figure of the photographer as a researcher of anthropogenic structures. The exhibition took place at the Tieranatomisches Theater Berlin (2016-17).

    keywords: antropocene; landcape; photography

  2. Buckthorn Slag Heap

    Diana Lelonek
    Diana Lelonek, ”Buckthorn Slag Heap”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 22 (2018), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/2018/22-how-to-see-the-antropocene/buckthorn-slag-heap

    Presentation of the art project Buckthorn Slag Heap by Diana Lelonek.

    keywords: coal; anthropocene; art; buckthorn; Diana Lelonek

  3. A Creeping Disaster

    Joanna B. Bednarek
    Joanna B. Bednarek , ”A Creeping Disaster”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 22 (2018), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2018.22.1811

    An analysis of Diana Lelonek's art project Buckthorn Slag Heap. 

    keywords: Anthropocene; contemporary art; sea-buckthorn

Close-Up

  1. Deep Times of Planetary Trouble. Notes on the Cultural Politics of Media and Materiality.

    Jussi Parikka
    Jussi Parikka, ”Deep Times of Planetary Trouble”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 22 (2018), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2018.22.1793

    Translation of the article „Deep Times of Planetary Trouble” published in journal Cultural Politics 2016, no 3.

    The article is devoted to the geology of media shedding light on the deep connections between the field of cultural and media exchange, and hidden geopolitical and climatic processes. 

    keywords: geology of media; Anthropocene; climat change; technological voilence; media theory

  2. World of Matter. An Eco-aesthetic Approach to the Complex ‘Ecologies’ of Matter

    Ana Varas Ibarra
    Ana Varas Ibarra, ”World of Matter”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 22 (2018), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2018.22.1802

    Whereas corporate media and the entertainment industry present an endless stream of apocalyptic scenarios where environmental catastrophe is our unavoidable fate, the new wave of eco-aesthetics aims to bring to the foreground the complex ‘ecologies’ of global forces which contributed to the transition to the new geological epoch.

    This paper concentrates on the case study World of Matter, an international media, art and multidisciplinary research collective that investigates the synergies of social, political, environmental and economic spheres. Touching upon critical aspects of decolonial critique, this paper argues that World of Matter presents new stances to the understanding of the environmental crisis, the democratisation of the Anthropocene discourse and brings a new kind of social aesthetics to the foreground.

    keywords: anthropocene; world matter; art; visual culture; visual activism

  3. The Climate Witness: A Visual Phenomenon Developed by the Climate Movement to Address Responsibility in Matters of Climate Change and Expand Experiential Space

    Henning Arnecke
    Henning Arnecke, ”The Climate Witness”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 22 (2018), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2018.22.1770

    NGOs involved in the climate movement try with the help of so-called "climate witnesses" to show a chain of responsibility from the victims of climate change to individual perpetrators. Through event-oriented images and the testimony of those affected, the dangers of the anthropogenic climate change should also, though, be conveyed to people in climatically-speaking less exposed parts of the world. The pictorial strategies associated with displaying the visible phenomena of climate witnesses can be seen as a response to the widespread but very short-lived thesis of the "non-representability" of climate change.

    keywords: climate; witness; anthropocene; victim; perpetrator; image

  4. Nature as Curator: Cultural Heritage in the Anthropocene

    Monika Stobiecka
    Monika Stobiecka, ”Nature as Curator”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 22 (2018), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2018.22.1813

    The paper is an attempt to reflect on the status of cultural heritage in the age of the Anthropocene in connection to new materialism theories. The questions that are posed concern the condition of material artifacts and monuments that are being transformed naturally and postnaturally, a character of those metamorphoses, as well as potential strategies for heritage threatened by the spectrum of destruction. Theses are illustrated within an example of intensified processes of (post)natural erosion at the archaeological site of Petra, Jordan. Considerations serve as a ground for reevaluation of the concept of material cultural heritage with an application of selected lens coming from new materialism (vitalistic materialism, agential realism and nomadic subjectivity). The reflection on the dynamism and biologism of heritage allows eventually to connect the new ontology of objects with the alternative ways of protection and care of the monuments.

    keywords: cultural heritage; nature-culture; post-nature; Anthropocene; new materialism

  5. Self-Capture in the Anthropocene: The Expedition Paintings of Alexis Rockman

    Rachel Magdeburg
    Rachel Magdeburg, ”Self-Capture in the Anthropocene”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 22 (2018), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2018.22.1776

    In this article, I will be considering contemporary paintings by American artist Alexis Rockman under the proposition of the Anthropocene and provide a commentary upon ironies the concept encapsulates as played out in Rockman’s iconography of the human, nonhuman and posthuman. I focus on Rockman’s paintings from the global South that encompass visual metonyms of capture which snare the human as trapped in ‘his’ own Anthropocene. Rockman uses self-portraiture to represent the predicament created from expeditions that re-enact past artist-colonial explorations. I extend T.J. Demos’ ‘decolonization’ to a reading of Rockman’s work, baring serious dilemmas, and argue for both painting and the human figure to be included in the emerging Anthropocene art field, and for the importance of artistic engagement with the Anthropocene to support science colleagues pitted against political impediments.

    keywords: Anthropocene; self-portrait; colonization; colonialism; Alexis Rockman; contemporary painting

  6. The Avant-Garde of Sensitivity: On Grzegorz Królikiewicz’s “The Trees”

    , ”The Avant-Garde of Sensitivity”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 22 (2018), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2018.22.1787

    The author analyses Grzegorz Królikiewicz’s Trees (1994) in two ways: as a metaphor of the Polish post-1989 transition, and as an eco-horror presenting the complexity of relations between human and plant world. This binary interpretation attempts to answer the question about the causes of  the failure of Trees as a film project. The film itself may also be interpreted as a story about historical conditions that affect the ability to create visual representations of the social costs of political changes, as well as ecocritical issues.

    keywords: Grzegorz Królikiewicz; Trees movie; Polish post-1989 transition; Anthropocene; off-screen space

  7. Language, Body, Nature: Tackling the Representation of the Kyshtym Disaster in Kate Brown’s Plutopia

    Kamila Gieba
    Kamila Gieba, ”Language, Body, Nature”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 22 (2018), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2018.22.1804

    The article examines ways of representing nuclear catastrophe in Kate Brown's Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. In 1957 an explosion in the Mayak works - a plutonium production site - led to massive contamination of the surrounding areas. The event remained a closely kept secret till 1992, absent from the public sphere and cultural texts, despite of the fact that the scale of contamination was as big as the Charnobyl explosion. One of the reasons for this was the difficulty of representing nuclear radiation. The author focuses on three contexts of this impossibility: in relation to the cognitive theory of the metaphor, the figure of the sick body as bearer of memory, and the invisibility of the nuclear landscape. 

    keywords: Kate Brown; Plutopia; nuclear power plant; nuclear explosion; Anthropocene; catastrophe; representation of catastrophe

Panorama

  1. Three figures of a peasant. About the studio photographs of Feliks Boroń from 1861

    Agata Koprowicz
    Agata Koprowicz, ”Three figures of a peasant”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 22 (2018), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2018.22.1781

    The article analyzes three studio photographs of Feliks Boroń, a peasant from a village near Krakow called Kaszow. In 1861 Boroń set out on a walking pilgrimage to Rome, and in 1863 to Palestine. During his stay in Warsaw in October 1861, Karol Beyer photographed him in his studio. The first of the pictures served for propaganda purposes, for the needs of a patriotic manifestation (figure of a peasant-patriot). The second one became an inspiration for the illustrator of the report of Boroń journey with the moral contribution of its author Walery Wielogłowski (figure of a peasant-role model). Eventually, the third one was published in the memoir of Boroń in “Tygodnik Ilustrowany” (The Weekly Illustrated) (figure of a peasant-individualist).

    keywords: Feliks Boroń; Karol Beyer; Polish photography – XIX century; Polish peasants

Snapshots

  1. Photosynthesis of memory. The plants' memory of the catastrophe

    Aleksandra Brylska
    Aleksandra Brylska, ”Photosynthesis of memory”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 22 (2018), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2018.22.1779

    The review of the book The Chernobyl Herbarium. Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness by Michael Marder and Anaïs Tondeur. The author addresses the question of non-human forms of knowledge. Treating the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as the first symptom of the crisis of cognition in the Anthropocene era, the author examines how the plants contained in the book are an example of co-creating with humans the representations and memories of (environmental) traumatic events.

    keywords: Chernobyl; photography; posthumanism

  2. Forget Latour? Global Warming and the End of the Postmodern Condition

    Łukasz Moll
    Łukasz Moll, ”Forget Latour?”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 22 (2018), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2018.22.1782

    The article is a review of the book The Progress of This Storm. Nature and Society in a Warming World by Andreas Malm.

    keywords: Anthropocene; postmodernism; critical theory; Andreas Malm; climate change

  3. Three Earthly Exhibitions

    Aleksander Kmak
    Aleksander Kmak, ”Three Earthly Exhibitions”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 22 (2018), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2018.22.1796

    The article is the review of three exhibitions devoted to the issues of antropocene organized recently in Poland.

    keywords: Anthropocene; contemporary art; exhibitions

  4. Unavoidable End

    Adam Robiński
    Adam Robiński, ”Unavoidable End”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 22 (2018), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2018.22.1806

    A review of recent books devoted to the Anthropocene. 

    keywords: Anthropocene; helplessness; essay writing