Art and Ecology in the Pre-Modern World
Over the past twenty years the mounting
environmental crisis of global scale has led
many scholars to question the dominant
anthropocentric models of interpretation
inherited from the Enlightenment. A growing
repertoire of frameworks embraces post-human, post-colonial, and materialist
standpoints to challenge binary distinctions
between nature and culture and write
histories in which human and material
agencies come to converge. Art history and
its associated fields have been averse to
engaging with this trend thanks to their
foundational investment in creativity as an
archetypal act of mastery, marking
humankind’s transcendence over its
material and zoological conditions. Nature is
of interest only in as much as it is a subject
of representation amenable to iconographic
and cultural decoding. The aim of this course
is to bring out the neglected ecological
implications of a broad range of pre-modern
art historical materials. We will draw on
recent writings in new materialism,
technicity, network theory, and craft studies
to explore the biopolitical belief systems that
conditioned processes of artistic
manufacture, display, and reception across
different regions of the Eurasian continent.
In so doing, we hope to re-center our
interpretations around issues of socio-material interconnectedness and justice and
recover art and material culture as powerful
resources in facing our current
environmental challenges. 3 credits.
Satisfies either the geocultural or
chronological requirement.