In Beyond the World's End T. J. Demos explores cultural practices that provide radical propositions for living in a world beset by environmental and political crises. Rethinking relationships between aesthetics and an expanded political ecology that foregrounds just futurity, Demos examines how contemporary artists are diversely addressing urgent themes, including John Akomfrah's cinematic entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats, the visual politics of climate refugees in work by Forensic Architecture and Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, and moving images of Afrofuturist climate justice in projects by Arthur Jafa and Martine Syms. Demos considers video and mixed-media art that responds to resource extraction in works by Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann, as well as the multispecies ecologies of Terike Haapoja and Public Studio. Throughout Demos contends that contemporary intersections of aesthetics and politics, as exemplified in the Standing Rock #NoDAPL campaign and the Zad's autonomous zone in France, are creating the imaginaries that will be crucial to building a socially just and flourishing future.
ISBN-13: 9781478009573
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication Date: 09-04-2020
Pages: 270
Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.57(d)
T. J. Demos is Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture and Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of several books, including The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, also published by Duke University Press, and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today.
What People are Saying About This
Alexander Alberro
“Beyond the World's End rethinks the complex relationship between political ecology and artistic practice. Written in the clear, provocative prose for which T. J. Demos is already widely admired, this important book operates within the framework of environmental and by extension climate justice, and provides a glimmer of hope in the midst of the current catastrophe.”
Fray: Art and Textile Politics - Julia Bryan-Wilson
“T. J. Demos has for some time charted intertwining artistic and activist responses to environmental catastrophe, and here he is at his best. This book is powerful and necessary.”
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction. The World's End, and Beyond 1
1. Feeding the Ghost: John Akomfrah's Vertigo Sea 23
2. Blackout: The Necropolitics of Extraction 43
3. The Visual Politics of Climate Refugees 68
4. Gaming the Environment: On the Media Ecology of Public Studio 96
5. Animal Cosmopolitics: The Art of Gustafsson&Haapoga 116
6. To Save a World: Geoengineering, Conflictual Futurisms, and the Unthinkable 137
7. The Great Transition: The Arts and Radical System Change 163
Acknowledgments 195
Notes 199
Index 249
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