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DESCRIPTION:Wednesday, September 28, 2016\nHumanities 1, Rm 210\n\nTJ Demos is 
 Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, 
 University of California, Santa Cruz, and Founder and Director of its 
 Center for Creative Ecologies.\n\nFor the UC Santa Cruz launch of his new 
 book Decolonizing Nature, Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, 
 Demos will read from his book and discuss his research into creative 
 proposals of artists and activists for ways of life that bring together 
 ecological sustainability, climate justice and radical 
 democracy.\n\nSeptember 28, 5:30 pm, Humanities 1, Rm 210\n\nWhile ecology 
 has received little systematic attention within art history, its visibility 
 and significance has grown in relation to the threats of climate change and 
 environmental destruction. By engaging artists’ widespread aesthetic and 
 political engagement with environmental conditions and processes around the 
 globe—and looking at cutting-edge theoretical, political, and cultural 
 developments in the Global South and North—Decolonizing Nature offers a 
 significant, original contribution to the intersecting fields of art 
 history, ecology, visual culture, geography, and environmental politics. 
 Art historian T. J. Demos, author of Return to the Postcolony: Specters of 
 Colonialism in Contemporary Art (2013), considers the creative proposals of 
 artists and activists for ways of life that bring together ecological 
 sustainability, climate justice, and radical democracy, at a time when such 
 creative proposals are urgently needed.\n\nDecolonizing Nature, 
 Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology is published by Sternberg 
 Press.\n\nThis event is presented by The Center for Emerging Worlds and the 
 Center for Cultural Studies. It has received additional support from the 
 Institute of the Arts and Sciences and the Center for Creative 
 Ecologies.\n\n\n“Decolonizing Nature presents a timely critical analysis 
 of the parameters and limitations of philosophical, artistic, and 
 curatorial models responding to anthropogenic climate change. Rich and 
 informative, the book makes an impassioned argument for a 
 post-anthropocentric political ecology, in which the aesthetic realm 
 enjoins with Indigenous philosophies and environmental activism to 
 challenge the neoliberal corporate-state complex. It invites us to confront 
 tough questions on how we might collectively reimagine and realize 
 environmental justice for humans and nonhumans alike.”\n\n—Jean Fisher, 
 Emeritus Professor in Fine Art and Transcultural Studies, Middlesex 
 University\n\n\n“Astute and ambitious. Essential reading for anyone 
 interested in the arts, activism, and environmental change. Demos moves 
 with impressive ease across national boundaries, cultural forms, social 
 movements, and ecological theories.”\n\n—Rob Nixon, Currie C. and 
 Thomas A. Barron Family Professor in Humanities and the Environment, 
 Princeton University\n\n\n“Demos breaks new ground in art criticism. In 
 an expansive analysis of polyvocal artist-activist practices in the Global 
 South and the North, Demos eschews environmental catastrophism, scientific 
 determinism, and techno-fixes to highlight collaborative resistance to 
 neocolonial violence and neoliberal collusion-to-plunder. He is also 
 searching for what the path forward might be. Rigorous, accessible, and 
 rebellious, Decolonizing Nature is an inspiring and indispensible 
 contemporary art manifesto.”\n\n—Subhankar Banerjee, Lannan Chair of 
 Land Arts of the American West and Professor of Art and Ecology, University 
 of New Mexico\n\n\n“With Decolonizing Nature, Demos extends his 
 formidable intellectual project to a realm that has until recently often 
 been characterized by varying degrees of naïveté, obscurantism, and 
 indeed green-washing: the relationship between art and ecology. The first 
 systematic study of its kind, Decolonizing Nature is an exemplary 
 combination of militant research and contemporary art history that will 
 resonate with activists on the front lines as much as those working in the 
 art field, reframing the latter as a site of struggle in its own right as 
 we come to terms with the so-called Anthropocene.”\n\n—Yates McKee, 
 author of Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy 
 Condition\n\n\n“Demos’s ability to distill and interrelate 
 heterogeneous discourses, practices, and eco-political contexts, without 
 flattening them in the process, is a breathtaking feat and, moreover, one 
 that rises to the demands of his complex and urgent subject. As clear in 
 its argumentation as it is dense with information, the meat of this book 
 lies in its detailed discussion of specific artworks and the environmental 
 struggles from which they emerge and to which they ambitiously, and often 
 brilliantly, respond. Decolonizing Nature makes a forceful case for why and 
 how art matters, now more than ever.”\n\n—Emily Eliza Scott, 
 Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, 
 ETH Zurich, and coeditor of Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2016/09/24/18791619.php
SUMMARY:Book Talk with TJ Demos: Decolonizing Nature, Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology
LOCATION:Humanities 1, Rm 210, UC Santa Cruz
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2016/09/24/18791619.php
DTSTART:20160929T003000Z
DTEND:20160929T003000Z
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