Out with the Anthropocene: Art for an Animate Earth

Abstract

Ensnared in but fed up with the inanity of late capitalism and environmental ruin, this thesis examines the ways in which contemporary artists are working against the grain of the dominant anthropocentric Western culture to seek new pathways out of the so-called Anthropocene. The artists under discussion, Carolina Caycedo, Krista Caballero and Frank Ekeberg, and Natalie Jeremijenko, create participatory projects that simultaneously critique the entanglement of human practices and loss of species and encourage their audiences (and the larger global public) to formulate new relationships with our fellow Earthly critters and our damaged ecosystems. This research takes a leaf from new materialist methodologies and the work of scholars such as Donna Haraway and T. J. Demos to consider how artists have deviated from the accustomed Western humanist notion of the individual as separate from nature to instead become recognizant of our critical role as one animal among many imbricated in a remarkably complex but endangered system of exchange. With its implications of collectivity and becoming-with each other, audience participatory art lends itself well to this thinking. The three case studies therefore work through the advantages and potential limitations of art serving as a medium for small-scale social change at a moment when larger global movements toward ecological sustainability are absent. The discussed participatory projects make apparent that there does exist an elasticity to human thought that can open potential futures in which the human species is less toxic and more responsive to the multifarious animacies that mill about this imperiled planet.