Introduction: Implication

Braddock, Alan C.

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Introduction: Implication

Alan C. Braddock

Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History

This book identifies a selection of terms for ecocritical interpretation in art history and explores their complex significance in relation to creative works from a variety of contexts...

Author

Alan C. Braddock

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00341.1

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23298

Chapter subject tags:EcocriticismEcology in artEnvironmentalism in artBataille, Georges, 1897-1962

Introduction: Implication

Sooner or later the artist is implicated or devoured by politics without even trying.

—Robert Smithson

The History of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.

—Rachel Carson

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.

—Martin Luther King Jr.

Black ash and basket makers are partners in a symbiosis between harvesters and harvested: ash relies on people as the people rely on ash. Their fates are linked.

—Robin Wall Kimmerer

—

This book identifies a selection of terms for ecocritical interpretation in art history and explores their complex significance in relation to creative works from a variety of contexts. Each chapter unfolds as a distinct case study, probing interpretive possibilities instead of offering tidy definitions. For reasons explained more fully below, the title word “dictionary” therefore functions loosely and somewhat ironically here, as the volume deliberately resists typical expectations of that genre. Instead of supplying compact nuggets of meaning that foreclose discussion, the book opens up a multiplicity of interpretive threads that interlace, or implicate, art and ecology with one another.

The book’s basic purpose: to underscore the intrinsic ecology of art in its many manifestations. Art is a form of ecological practice that helps to navigate environments and make sense of the world. By “ecocritical interpretation,” I refer to a mode of inquiry that engages ecology as a constitutive element of artistic practice, regardless of place, period, medium, maker, or message. Understanding the importance of ecology in art history necessarily entails investigating environmental history and the history of ecological thought, whether consciously theorized as such or through other vocabulary. Building on ideas such as those expressed by Rachel Carson (1907–1964) and Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) in the epigraphs about historical “interaction” and “inescapable” relations of “mutuality,” ecocritical art history asserts the implication, or inherent interconnection, of all beings, artifacts, and matter—including humans and their creative works—within a dynamic mesh over time.

I call the book Implication to capture this immanent ecological condition of art. From the Latin implicare, to entwine, the word aptly refers to the ineffable quality of creative works as interwoven and emergent in their environments. My invocation of such a word undoubtedly says something about my Euro-American cultural background, but I believe it resonates with ideas in other traditions, such as the one articulated above by Robin Wall Kimmerer, an Indigenous Potawatomi scientist and writer, who describes black ash trees and Native American basket artists as coexisting in a symbiotic relationship. Indeed, Kimmerer’s eloquent and beautiful book Braiding Sweetgrass insists throughout on cross-cultural resonance and collaboration as necessary conditions of life. To recognize the ecological implication of art enriches understanding while fostering ethics through empathetic respect for other living beings, traditions, and phenomena. Embracing the intrinsic implication of art makes the discipline of art history more generous and interesting. Doing so also fosters catalytic interdisciplinary relationships between art history and other fields.

Before I proceed, still more needs to be said about ecocritical interpretation in art history. Such interpretation, while historically specific in its approach, finds motivation in mounting concern about ecological problems today as well as revisionist desires to make scholarly work more relevant, sustainable, and just in an era of crisis. It does not operate in a vacuum. As an interdisciplinary mode of inquiry, ecocriticism brings together knowledge from various domains in examining the environmental significance of art, literature, and other creative products. In art history, it focuses particular attention on aesthetic, visual, and material expressions of creativity while still engaging diverse epistemologies and sources of information. Unlike traditional scholarship that viewed ecology narrowly in terms of science and therefore outside its purview, or that considered only landscape aesthetics and “nature” idealized as pristinely nonhuman and exurban to be relevant, ecocritical art history operates with an expansive vision of ecology that encompasses science and the humanities. It engages science when appropriate and considers any environment or creative artifact worthy of consideration, regardless of location, medium, or constituents.1 For other introductions to ecocritical art history, see Alan C. Braddock and Karl Kusserow, “Introduction,” in Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, ed. Karl Kusserow and Alan C. Braddock (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2018); and Alan C. Braddock, “From Nature to Ecology: The Emergence of Ecocritical Art History,” in A Companion to American Art, ed. John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill, and Jason D. LaFountain (Malden, Mass.: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 447–67.

The word “ecology,” etymologically rooted (like “economy”) in the Greek oikos, describing a home or household, refers to the dynamic environmental relationships that bind various life-forms and matter together in space and time. Coining the term in 1866, the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) wrote: “By ecology we mean the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature—the investigation of the total relations of the animal to both its inorganic and its organic environment; including above all its friendly and inimical relations with those animals and plants with which it comes directly or indirectly into contact—in a word, ecology is the study of all those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for existence.”2 Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Berlin: Reimer, 1866), 286–87. My translation. On the etymology of “ecology” and “economy,” see Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 192.

As a European writing during the heyday of colonialism and empire, Haeckel elsewhere endorsed imperial impulses of racism and White supremacism by articulating (through words and images) supposedly natural hierarchies that placed people of color and nonhuman animals lower in the chain of being. A whiff of this imperial perspective perhaps informs his reference to “total relations,” but the idea of ecology he coined ultimately calls such impulses into question. After all, even for Haeckel, the category “animal” encompassed human beings, including Europeans like himself. Darwinian in orientation yet subtler than social evolutionary theory about “survival of the fittest,” ecology concerns the study of “complex interrelations” at once “inorganic” and “organic,” “friendly” and “inimical,” direct and indirect in “the struggle for existence.” In other words, ecology addresses the infinite yet ineffable interconnection of beings and things in a web of relationships, wherein autonomy, isolation, or independence can only ever be relative, never absolute. This again gets to the meaning of implication here. Nothing and no one can be an island in any perfect or pure sense, not even an island. The ocean is swallowing islands and saturating them with anthropogenic heat and plastic as you read this.3 On islands and climate change, see Lalit Kumar, ed., Climate Change and Impacts in the Pacific (New York: Springer, 2020). Evidence of Haeckel’s hierarchical vision of race appears vividly in the frontispiece he designed for his book Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Berlin: Reimer, 1868), in which he shows different human types arranged in a descending scale, beginning with the European, modeled on the Hellenistic Belvedere Apollo, and proceeding through Asian, African, and various nonhuman examples, concluding with the gorilla. Haeckel also famously manipulated images of embryos to promote his evolutionary views. See Nick Hopwood, Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). For historical perspective on “ecology,” see Frank N. Egerton, Roots of Ecology: Antiquity to Haeckel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Worster, Nature’s Economy; and Derek Wall, ed., Green History: A Reader in Environmental Literature, Philosophy and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1994). See also Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (London: Pearson, 2020); and Peter Dickens, Social Darwinism (London: Open University Press, 2000).

Although “ecology” as a term emerged in modern Europe, the interrelationships it describes have always existed, and no group or cultural tradition has a monopoly on their understanding. For example, while Kimmerer identifies as an ecologist and has a Ph.D. in biology with academic expertise in botany, she is also well aware that Indigenous people around the world—not to mention some marginalized European people outside the enclaves of authoritative institutional science—had knowledge of “complex interrelations” long before Haeckel invented the word “ecology.” Rather than jockeying for priority in a parochial pursuit of recognition and originality, Kimmerer seeks information and wisdom wherever she can find it, using a synthetic, cross-cultural approach that pragmatically combines the best knowledge from multiple traditions, calling on Western scientific discourse and Indigenous insight as needed. Ultimately, she says, “here we all are, on Turtle Island, trying to make a home.” As a way of contributing to this inclusive project, in which disparate traditions and terminologies collaborate toward understanding and healthy coexistence, I offer Implication, drawing on my particular background and research while freely acknowledging my limitations as a scholar trained in a discipline that still struggles with its legacy of Eurocentric bias. I wish I had another life at my disposal to broaden my perspective, but now a diverse and growing body of scholarship is expanding the scope of ecocritical art history.4 Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 8. For other scholarship in ecocritical art history, see, e.g., Karl Kusserow, ed., Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Art Museum, 2021); De-nin D. Lee, Eco-Art History in East and Southeast Asia (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars, 2019); Sugata Ray, Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019); Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart, eds., Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2019); Christopher P. Heuer and Rebecca Zorach, eds., Ecologies Agents Terrains (Williamstown, Mass.: Clark Art Institute in association with Yale University Press, 2018); Mark Anderson and Zélia M. Bora, eds., Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film, and Literature (Washington, D.C.: Lexington Books, 2016); and Karen E. Milbourne, Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in association with Monacelli, 2013).

Ecocriticism tends to resist bias by inquiring about the environmental significance of creative work in potentially any place or moment, past or present, while attending to historically specific frames of reference. The present book examines ancient Roman mosaics, Song dynasty Taihu rocks, a Tlaxcalan lienzo, a Kongo dibondo, early modern European engravings and altarpieces, nineteenth-century landscape paintings, French impressionist urban scenes, and some contemporary activist art, among other works, but other scholars are exploring a much wider range of possibilities across every imaginable creative domain. Consistent with the ecological principle of interconnectedness, ecocritical interpretation views diverse human beings and their creative artifacts as part of a larger biotic community to which everyone has an ethical obligation to live as sustainably as possible, while recognizing far-reaching inequities as well as the fact that many artists, writers, and other figures of study were not necessarily environmentalists. In other words, ecocritical art history does not limit itself to explicitly “green” creators or environmental activist works but insists that creative expressions regardless of context inevitably have some sort of ecological significance—some sort of implication—for better or worse.

Ecocriticism also regards politics as both important and unavoidable, a fact grudgingly acknowledged by the artist Robert Smithson (1938–1973) in the epigraph above. Questions of environmental justice are central to ecocriticism in art history and other fields. By expanding interpretation beyond traditional humanist, anthropocentric issues without ignoring the predicament of human beings (since doing so would contradict ecology’s emphasis on interconnectedness), ecocriticism seeks to enrich understanding while fostering justice, sustainability, and ethical responsibility across species and geographies. The fact that art and its makers exist and interact within a web of relationships invites ecocritical inquiry into how creative works touch, embody, and mingle with their environments in manifold ways. Efforts to constrain meaning and interpretation within strict categories such as “human” or “intention” inevitably fail, for such categories are themselves porous and differential; art has always unfolded within a richer fabric of forces and factors that inflect its implications.

The latter point deserves emphasis. Implication encompasses the ways in which artists make things without always having full knowledge or appreciation of their intentions, because their practice harnesses existing ideas, habits, and materials. Artists shape and redirect those elements in their works, but they do not control or transform them completely, nor do they necessarily know everything that made such elements available and how other people understand them, much less all the downstream consequences resulting from their use. The intentions of artists certainly matter—they are more than merely incidental to the outcome and significance of their works—but artistic intentions do not exhaust or fully explain the implications of art. Did every Western sculptor who made an idealized human figure in marble entirely comprehend the tradition of classicism that made such subject matter and artistic material available when he or she or they intended to create a particular statue? Did conscious intention completely govern its creation, or did ingrained habit and cultural assumptions come into play? That is, were the implications of classicism to some extent internalized, such that the artist did not fully recognize and articulate them? An exclusive focus on the explicit intentions of an artist radically forecloses structural analysis of history by forbidding any consideration of unspoken conventions and systemic patterns of behavior, including classical systems of representation but also more pernicious tendencies like systemic racism. Since racists often disavow their racism by dismissing racist intentions, a mode of analysis based solely on consideration of stated or conscious intentions effectively absolves such people of systemic bias, even when their pattern of behavior is obvious.5 For a recent example of intentionalism in the interpretation of art, see Walter Benn Michaels, The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). A classic study undermining strict intentionalism is Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Workshop Journal 9, no. 1 (1980): 5–36.

The long history of art’s unintended environmental consequences provides still more glimpses of implication, as when Morris Louis (1912–1962) died prematurely of lung cancer hastened by inhaling fumes from the turpentine he used to thin his paint and stain his canvases. Turpentine was essential to Louis’s practice, but it had implications beyond his control or intention. This further underscores why an exclusive focus on the artist’s conscious intention restricts interpretation excessively, impoverishing the complexity of art and knowledge about it. Indeed, a strict emphasis on intentionality in art history disturbingly parallels the current corrosive trend of “originalism” in law, religion, and other circles. Think of the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court insisting on strict readings of the Constitution or certain strains of Christian evangelicalism and ultrafundamentalist Islam—all of which seek to construct utopian, autonomous islands of static meaning and social behavior shorn of historical context and change. Art and ecology resist such fitful parochialisms by insistently revealing implication as an unavoidable condition of entanglement, interconnection, exchange, and semantic drift—akin to what Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) once called différance.6 On Louis, see Lon B. Tuck, “Artist Morris Louis Dies of Cancer, Rated among Best of U.S. Painters,” Washington Post, September 8, 1962. On différance, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).

Because understanding implications and implied meanings requires attention to subtle nuances of artistic imagination, practice, form, materials, and context, ecocritical art history sometimes raises difficult questions about current environmental activism, including activist scholarship, which often espouses idealist conceptions of nature and representation. In pursuit of subtlety and to avoid idealism, my argument builds on the richly nuanced work of Kimmerer and Smithson as well as Gloria Anzaldúa, Jane Bennett, Robert Bullard, William Cronon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ramachandra Guha, Claire Jean Kim, Achille Mbembe, Walter Mignolo, Timothy Morton, Timothy Pachirat, Mary Louise Pratt, and Raymond Williams, among many others. Some of these writers, in revealing “nature” and the related concept of “wilderness” to be politically overdetermined Western cultural constructs, have subjected them to withering critique, several even calling for their abandonment in favor of an anti-idealist, transnational, and transspecies ecological ethics. Mignolo, a leading scholar of decolonial theory, notes in his influential book The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011) the alienating effects of nature as an imported European concept that selectively objectifies ecology and displaces Indigenous ideas about Earth as a living entity. Accordingly, the present book devotes an entire chapter to ecocritical investigation of nature and its construction by a Euro-American artist closely identified with ideal visions of wilderness, Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900).7 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 10–12. See also Steven Vogel, Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015); Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015); Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 219–20; William Cronon, “Introduction: In Search of Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 25; Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11, no. 1 (1989): 71–83; and Raymond Williams, “Nature,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Croom Helm, 1976), 184–89.

Implication also respectfully pushes back against certain forms of activist scholarship that, in my view, neglect historical art and nuances of implication in the rush to respond with political urgency to today’s worsening environmental crisis—a crisis that unfortunately unfolds in a climate of intensely partisan orthodoxy. Exacerbating the intensity, some powerful scholarly voices have sought to impose rigid ideological and formal constraints on creative practice in pursuit of militant, utopian ecological imperatives. For example, several scholars have advocated “decolonizing nature” in hopes of rectifying centuries of settler-colonial invasion, genocide, and planetary transformation wrought by the “Global North” at the expense of the “Global South.” In addition to turning the planet into a theater of binary geographical abstractions, such activist rhetoric reifies nature as a category of otherness—a pristine place of alterity from which the colonus (after the Latin colere, to farm or cultivate) must somehow be extracted and uprooted in order to restore an idealized precolonial, precultivated state of being. Rhetoric of this sort evinces a quixotic desire for purity reminiscent of deep ecology and risks slipping into a regressive antihumanism in its pursuit of a supposedly authentic, untainted nature.8 Frank Obeng-Odoom, The Commons in an Age of Uncertainty: Decolonizing Nature, Economy, and Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021); Ande A. Nesmith et al., “Decolonizing Nature: The Potential of Nature to Heal,” in The Intersection of Environmental Justice, Climate Change, Community, and the Ecology of Life (Berlin: Springer, 2021), 105–34; T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016); William Adams and Martin Mulligan, Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-Colonial Era (New York: Routledge, 2003).

To be clear, the problem here pertains not to decolonial theory or history in general, which provides a much-needed critical alternative to Western epistemology and colonization. Rather, the problem has to do with the notion of decolonizing nature. Such an imperative rekindles a type of romantic idealism famously criticized by the geographer William Denevan as “the pristine myth” for its historical amnesia about large-scale environmental transformations wrought by ancient Indigenous communities. In a different register, the literary philosopher Timothy Morton (borrowing from George W. F. Hegel, 1770–1831) invokes the term “beautiful soul” to describe this mythic perspective as one that “washes his or her hands of the corrupt world, refusing to admit how in this very abstemiousness and distaste he or she participates in the creation of that world.” In other words, certain forms of environmental activist discourse ironically promote and entrench Western dualism by representing nature as a space apart, a place of purity that might somehow escape the touch of human beings. To imagine decolonizing nature is to imagine, falsely, a world without implication—a world from which it is possible to detach and obtain a privileged position of objective distance—when in fact art and ecology insistently prove otherwise. Implication provides a humbling reminder than no one’s hands are completely clean.9 William M. Denevan, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (1992): 369–85; Morton, Ecology without Nature, quotation at 13; see also 7, 81, 101, 109–23, 131–32, 135–43, 156, 160, 164, 169–70, 175, 181, 183–87, 192, 195–96, 203, 205. Related to the problem of the “pristine myth” is a lingering tendency in some decolonial scholarship to idealize Indigenous people monolithically as natural ecologists. Anthropologist Shepard Krech critiqued this romantic tendency in his book The Ecological Indian: Myth and Memory (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). Krech’s myth-busting study, revealing historical evidence of wasteful and unsustainable practices carried out by some Native American communities in the past, spawned considerable debate among critics who felt that he had downplayed the relative impacts of Euro-American industrialism and settler colonialism. On this debate, see, e.g., Gregory D. Smithers, “Beyond the ‘Ecological Indian’: Environmental Politics and Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Modern North America,” Environmental History 20, no. 1 (2015): 83–111; and Paul Nadasdy, “Transcending the Debate over the Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism,” Ethnohistory 52, no. 2 (2005): 291–331. Versions of the debate continue. One focus of controversy in recent years has been the Indigenous-owned Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, the largest Alaska-based oil company, which has persistently advocated for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, despite the strong opposition of other Indigenous groups and environmental activists. See Nathaniel Herz, “Opening the Arctic Refuge Brought Alaska’s Largest Native Corporation $22.5 Million from BP and Chevron,” Alaska Public Media, January 8, 2020, https://alaskapublic.org/2020/01/08/for-alaskas-largest-native-corporation-opening-arctic-refuge-to-oil-drilling-brought-22-5-million-from-bp-and-chevron/; and Sally Hardin and Jenny Rowland-Shea, “The Most Powerful Arctic Oil Lobby Group You’ve Never Heard Of,” AmericanProgress.org, August 9, 2018, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/powerful-arctic-oil-lobby-group-youve-never-heard/.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the segregating impulse noted above sometimes accompanies another troubling trend in recent environmental activist scholarship: a radical narrowing of allowable artistic strategies and formal possibilities. For example, one leading scholar in the environmental humanities and environmental justice literature has endorsed “representation” and “narrative” as the strategies for addressing ecological inequities while disparaging the “fetishism of form” in much academic cultural interpretation. Similarly, another writer specializing in contemporary art and ecopolitics privileges photography, or “photographic-like imagery,” as primarily capable of challenging the “universalizing discourse” in data-generated planetary visions of Earth conceived by and for the “Western-based military-state-corporate apparatus.” This same scholar also warns against “seductive” uses of photography that threaten moral clarity by producing “pleasurable” visual effects that risk “aestheticizing” and “mesmerizing” environmental problems.10 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 31, quoting Anne McClintock; T. J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017), 17, 19, 22, 62, 65. For a similar critique of aesthetic “seductiveness,” focused on the art of Claude Monet, see Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Anthropocene (An)Aesthetics,” Public Culture 26 (2014): 222. I thank the Smithsonian American Art Museum fellows who discussed these texts with me in a Terra seminar that I led on “Environmental Aesthetics? The Beauty Debate in Art of Ecological Destruction,” March 14, 2022, especially the predoctoral scholar who referred to such discourse as exemplifying “moral panic.”

Although activist critiques of neoliberalism and environmental injustice are often admirable in their political goals, I find their frequent use of binary oppositions and unexamined commitments to conventional modes of representation limiting. By imposing rigid creative straitjackets, they impoverish and instrumentalize art while inadvertently mirroring the normalizing impulses of the “Western-based military-state-corporate apparatus” they ostensibly oppose. When conjoined with moral condemnations of aesthetics and pleasure, such critiques begin to look almost puritanical. Moreover, in focusing exclusively on the present, they have nothing to say about the provocative ecological implications of historical art, which I place at the center of the present book.

I prefer to pursue a line of inquiry suggested by Morton in The Ecological Thought (2010), where he says that all art—“not just explicitly ecological art—hardwires the environment into its form.” For Morton, art “isn’t just about something (trees, mountains, animals, pollution, and so forth),” it “is something” and “does something.” I wish to adapt this insight in examining historical works of visual art that do something ecologically significant with form by revealing implication, which I view as an intractable state of entanglement, interconnection, and mutual responsibility. The point I wish to underscore is that art discloses implication through a wide variety of forms, not just seemingly transparent representational critiques but subtler maneuvers of divulgence, display, and institutional critique—a practice with rich relevance for ecocritical art history. I also argue that artistic form—viewed carefully and ecocritically—questions the apparent transparency of much activist art by unleashing complexity in even the most adamant political expressions.11 Morton, Ecological Thought, 11. See also Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009).

Through a series of chapters exploring diverse creative strategies and formal responses to environmental relationships in the past, Implication forcefully affirms the ecological significance of historical art while also making contemporary connections. In adopting this deliberately untimely approach, my book draws additional inspiration from two unlikely historical precedents. One of these is Georges Bataille’s “Critical Dictionary” (1929–30), a surrealist counterdictionary almost a century old. In a subjective selection of words and accompanying statements, Bataille (1897–1962) did not so much define meanings as broach unexpected possibilities and operations of language in order to challenge idealist assumptions about human values, politics, intentions, and culture. Though by no means an environmentalist, Bataille believed that language, philosophy, and art should embrace their earthly, material foundations instead of cloaking the world in abstract concepts. As he observed in his entry on “formless”:

A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meanings of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world. . . . What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.12 Georges Bataille, “Formless,” Documents, no. 1 (1929): 382, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 31.

In 1987, the art historians Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss published a book titled Formless: A User’s Guide, taking Bataille’s term as the point of departure for writing a counterhistory of modernist art. The book cover featured Alberto Burri’s Combustione plastica, of 1964 (fig. 1), which reflected recent abstract expressionism back at itself as if in a funhouse mirror, embracing formless materiality without idealistic notions of transcendence or purity. Following Bataille’s lead, Bois and Krauss explored the amorphous, excessive, and entropic facets of modernism that eluded orthodox formalist critics such as Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) by defying conventional binary oppositions of form and content. Neither Bataille nor Bois and Krauss espoused any interest in ecology per se, but their approach offers an intriguing foreshadowing of ecocritical art history, for it opened important doors to a nonnormative mode of interpretation resistant to idealism, formalism, purity, integrity, sublimity, and autonomy—in the human subject and the work of art. Bataille’s interest in the repressed power of earthly matter to contest classical idealism and conventional categories seems particularly relevant today, as artists and scholars across disciplinary domains decolonize the humanities by reclaiming historically externalized agents, forces, conditions, and stakeholders of all kinds—human and nonhuman. Accordingly, we might revisit Burri’s burned plastic piece as a work that not only meditates on modernism and the artist’s own memories of World War II, poverty, and postwar reconstruction but also embodies the emerging forces of petrochemical industrial production and waste, the implications of which are becoming more alarming every day.13 Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 27, 29, 58.

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Description: Combustione plastica by Burri, Alberto

Fig. 1. Alberto Burri, Combustione plastica, 1964. Polyvinyl chloride, calcination, 59 1/4 × 99 in. (150.5 × 251 cm). Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Inv. AM1977-555. Digital image © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome

My other touchstone of inspiration is the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984), who, in the essay “Art as Technique” (1917), drew attention to the power of creative artifacts to “defamiliarize” ingrained perceptions, cursory expressions, and predigested meanings by encouraging people to see things anew, as if for the first time:

If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us. Such habituation explains the principles by which, in ordinary speech, we leave phrases unfinished and words half expressed. In this process, ideally realized in algebra, things are replaced by symbols. . . . By this “algebraic” method of thought we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics. We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. . . . Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.14 Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 11–12.

Shklovsky’s assertion about perception as “an aesthetic end in itself” would later acquire a solipsistic orthodoxy in the writings of modernist formalists, but other ideas here have much to offer ecocritical art history, especially regarding the effort to break through “habitual” perceptions, recover “the sensation of life,” and “make the stone stony.” Indeed, by scrutinizing art in new ways with an eye to ecology and environmental history, ecocritical interpretation promises to defamiliarize much of what has become “automatic”—not only in art history but in other disciplines as well.

Tapping Bataille and Shklovsky as sources of inspiration does not constitute fetishistic formalism or hermetic art for art’s sake. Whether making art or doing art history in this era of environmental crisis, creative practitioners and scholars need latitude to engage any pertinent formal strategy or historical material at their disposal, representational or otherwise. Implication affirms the vital importance of various approaches for negotiating ecological conditions in the present and the past. Accordingly, the book avoids prescriptive models and orthodoxies in favor of a capacious, experimental, and even somewhat eccentric range of artistic examples and case studies intended to suggest possibilities, not formulas. The terms and creative works that I discuss all engage with recent art and current environmental concerns in various ways, but they purposely emphasize historical examples, contexts, and trajectories to demonstrate the implication of past and present, thereby counteracting what I regard as the hegemony of the contemporary in art history today, especially when it comes to ecology. Thus, each chapter telescopes back and forth through time and space, connecting historical dots in order to provide a kind of ecocritical archaeology. Each chapter begins with a conventional dictionary definition deliberately in order to complicate and defamiliarize it through the ensuing case study. Taking Bataille to heart, I caution the reader against expecting a neat, explanatory “frock coat” or an abstract theoretical template designed to assemble a totalizing ecocritical art history that checks a standard grid of methodological boxes. If anything, Implication adopts a more haphazard, unpredictable, even “formless” method in order to encourage readers to find their own ecocritical paths, dictated by curiosity, evidence, and an ethical impulse to see art, life, and their interconnections anew.

Epigraphs: “The Artist and Politics: A Symposium,” Artforum, September 1970, 39; Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 5; Martin Luther King Jr., Christmas Sermon on Peace, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, December 24, 1967; Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, Minn.: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 149.

1 For other introductions to ecocritical art history, see Alan C. Braddock and Karl Kusserow, “Introduction,” in Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, ed. Karl Kusserow and Alan C. Braddock (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2018); and Alan C. Braddock, “From Nature to Ecology: The Emergence of Ecocritical Art History,” in A Companion to American Art, ed. John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill, and Jason D. LaFountain (Malden, Mass.: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 447–67. »

2 Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Berlin: Reimer, 1866), 286–87. My translation. On the etymology of “ecology” and “economy,” see Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 192. »

3 On islands and climate change, see Lalit Kumar, ed., Climate Change and Impacts in the Pacific (New York: Springer, 2020). Evidence of Haeckel’s hierarchical vision of race appears vividly in the frontispiece he designed for his book Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Berlin: Reimer, 1868), in which he shows different human types arranged in a descending scale, beginning with the European, modeled on the Hellenistic Belvedere Apollo, and proceeding through Asian, African, and various nonhuman examples, concluding with the gorilla. Haeckel also famously manipulated images of embryos to promote his evolutionary views. See Nick Hopwood, Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). For historical perspective on “ecology,” see Frank N. Egerton, Roots of Ecology: Antiquity to Haeckel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Worster, Nature’s Economy; and Derek Wall, ed., Green History: A Reader in Environmental Literature, Philosophy and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1994). See also Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (London: Pearson, 2020); and Peter Dickens, Social Darwinism (London: Open University Press, 2000). »

4 Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 8. For other scholarship in ecocritical art history, see, e.g., Karl Kusserow, ed., Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Art Museum, 2021); De-nin D. Lee, Eco-Art History in East and Southeast Asia (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars, 2019); Sugata Ray, Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019); Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart, eds., Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2019); Christopher P. Heuer and Rebecca Zorach, eds., Ecologies Agents Terrains (Williamstown, Mass.: Clark Art Institute in association with Yale University Press, 2018); Mark Anderson and Zélia M. Bora, eds., Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film, and Literature (Washington, D.C.: Lexington Books, 2016); and Karen E. Milbourne, Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in association with Monacelli, 2013). »

5 For a recent example of intentionalism in the interpretation of art, see Walter Benn Michaels, The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). A classic study undermining strict intentionalism is Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Workshop Journal 9, no. 1 (1980): 5–36. »

6 On Louis, see Lon B. Tuck, “Artist Morris Louis Dies of Cancer, Rated among Best of U.S. Painters,” Washington Post, September 8, 1962. On différance, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). »

7 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 10–12. See also Steven Vogel, Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015); Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015); Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 219–20; William Cronon, “Introduction: In Search of Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 25; Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11, no. 1 (1989): 71–83; and Raymond Williams, “Nature,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Croom Helm, 1976), 184–89. »

8 Frank Obeng-Odoom, The Commons in an Age of Uncertainty: Decolonizing Nature, Economy, and Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021); Ande A. Nesmith et al., “Decolonizing Nature: The Potential of Nature to Heal,” in The Intersection of Environmental Justice, Climate Change, Community, and the Ecology of Life (Berlin: Springer, 2021), 105–34; T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016); William Adams and Martin Mulligan, Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-Colonial Era (New York: Routledge, 2003). »

9 William M. Denevan, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (1992): 369–85; Morton, Ecology without Nature, quotation at 13; see also 7, 81, 101, 109–23, 131–32, 135–43, 156, 160, 164, 169–70, 175, 181, 183–87, 192, 195–96, 203, 205. Related to the problem of the “pristine myth” is a lingering tendency in some decolonial scholarship to idealize Indigenous people monolithically as natural ecologists. Anthropologist Shepard Krech critiqued this romantic tendency in his book The Ecological Indian: Myth and Memory (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). Krech’s myth-busting study, revealing historical evidence of wasteful and unsustainable practices carried out by some Native American communities in the past, spawned considerable debate among critics who felt that he had downplayed the relative impacts of Euro-American industrialism and settler colonialism. On this debate, see, e.g., Gregory D. Smithers, “Beyond the ‘Ecological Indian’: Environmental Politics and Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Modern North America,” Environmental History 20, no. 1 (2015): 83–111; and Paul Nadasdy, “Transcending the Debate over the Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism,” Ethnohistory 52, no. 2 (2005): 291–331. Versions of the debate continue. One focus of controversy in recent years has been the Indigenous-owned Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, the largest Alaska-based oil company, which has persistently advocated for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, despite the strong opposition of other Indigenous groups and environmental activists. See Nathaniel Herz, “Opening the Arctic Refuge Brought Alaska’s Largest Native Corporation $22.5 Million from BP and Chevron,” Alaska Public Media, January 8, 2020, https://alaskapublic.org/2020/01/08/for-alaskas-largest-native-corporation-opening-arctic-refuge-to-oil-drilling-brought-22-5-million-from-bp-and-chevron/; and Sally Hardin and Jenny Rowland-Shea, “The Most Powerful Arctic Oil Lobby Group You’ve Never Heard Of,” AmericanProgress.org, August 9, 2018, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/powerful-arctic-oil-lobby-group-youve-never-heard/. »

10 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 31, quoting Anne McClintock; T. J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017), 17, 19, 22, 62, 65. For a similar critique of aesthetic “seductiveness,” focused on the art of Claude Monet, see Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Anthropocene (An)Aesthetics,” Public Culture 26 (2014): 222. I thank the Smithsonian American Art Museum fellows who discussed these texts with me in a Terra seminar that I led on “Environmental Aesthetics? The Beauty Debate in Art of Ecological Destruction,” March 14, 2022, especially the predoctoral scholar who referred to such discourse as exemplifying “moral panic.” »

11 Morton, Ecological Thought, 11. See also Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). »

12 Georges Bataille, “Formless,” Documents, no. 1 (1929): 382, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 31. »

13 Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 27, 29, 58. »

14 Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 11–12. »

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