Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth
Author: Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin, Germany)
Publisher: Mack
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2016
Genre: Photography, Artistic
ISBN: 9781910164471

This catalogue accompanies a touring exhibition held at Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany on March 4-May 29, 2016, at Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany on June 11-September 18, 2016, at High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia on October 16, 2016-January 8, 2017, and at St Louis Art Museum, St Louis, Missouri in Fall 2017.

Politics of Nature

Politics of Nature
Author: Bruno Latour
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2009-07-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0674039963

A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology—transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: “Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks.” Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society—and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced. In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a “commonsense” division—which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of “mononaturalism” and “multiculturalism,” Latour develops the idea of “multinaturalism,” a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by “diplomats” who are flexible and open to experimentation.

Nature, Politics, and the Arts

Nature, Politics, and the Arts
Author: Hermione de Almeida
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2015-03-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611495415

This interdisciplinary book honors Columbia professor and New York intellectual Carl Woodring. Chapters on Romantic and Victorian literary culture written by leading scholars in the field join in conversation with Woodring’s teachings on literature and visual art and his commentaries on American culture. A multiple-authored chapter of postscripts on the aesthetic range of Woodring’s intellectual interests across cultural disciplines, his contributions to English studies and his informing influence on several generations of scholars, and their areas of interest, follows. A chapter from Woodring’s unpublished autobiography, on his childhood in small-town America, then concludes the volume with an ironic retrospection on intercultural origins. Topics addressed among the chapters include portraiture and self-fashioning, landscape art, physiognomy and caricatures, radical print ephemera, illustrated picaresque verse, social and political satire, traditions of the sublime in art and literature, transatlantic influences and aesthetics, chaos theory and the laws of thermodynamics, the Caribbean slave trade, revolutionary history, Napoleonic wars, the politics of multicultural communities, gender and race, marginalia and textual revelations, Native America, historical interchanges in curating museum shows, and contemporary American sculpture and art. Cultural figures of the nineteenth century that are featured in the discussions include Henry Adams, Beethoven, Blake, Byron, Willa Cather, Thomas Cole, Coleridge, James Fenimore Cooper, George Cruikshank, Ugo Foscolo, Washington Irving, Keats, Willibrord Mähler, George Romney, Rowlandson, Shelley, and Wordsworth. Chapter essays, commentaries, and Carl Woodring’s unpublished writings function together in Nature, Politics, and the Arts: Essays on Romantic Culture for Carl Woodring—with a depth of original perspectives and a multi-voiced and intercultural coherence. The book as a whole testifies to Woodring’s living and intellectually potent legacy for future students of nineteenth-century transatlantic culture and twenty-first century scholarship on literature and art.

Ecological Aesthetics

Ecological Aesthetics
Author: Nathaniel Stern
Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2018-07-03
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1512602922

With this poetic and scholarly collection of stories about art, artists, and their materials, Nathaniel Stern argues that ecology, aesthetics, and ethics are inherently entwined, and together act as the cornerstone for all contemporary arts practices. An ecological approach, says Stern, takes account of agents, processes, thoughts, and relations. Humans, matter, concepts, things, not-yet-things, politics, economics, and industry are all actively shaped in, and as, their interrelation. And aesthetics are a style of, and orientation toward, thought - and thus action. Including dozens of color images, this book narrativizes artists and artworks - ranging from print to installation, bio art to community activism - contextualizing and amplifying our experiences and practices of complex systems and forces, our experiences and practices of thought. Stern, an artist himself, writes with an eco-aesthetic that continually unfurls artful tactics that can also be used in everyday existence.

Decolonizing Nature

Decolonizing Nature
Author: T. J. Demos
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-09-02
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3956790944

A study of the intersecting fields of art history, ecology, visual culture, geography, and environmental politics. While 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.

Sites of Exposure

Sites of Exposure
Author: John Russon
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2017-08-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0253029414

John Russon draws from a broad range of art and literature to show how philosophy speaks to the most basic and important questions in our everyday lives. In Sites of Exposure, Russon grapples with how personal experiences such as growing up and confronting death combine with broader issues such as political oppression, economic exploitation, and the destruction of the natural environment to make life meaningful. His is cutting-edge philosophical work, illuminated by original and rigorous thinking that relies on cross-cultural communication and engagement with the richness of human cultural history. These probing interpretations of the nature of phenomenology, the philosophy of art, history, and politics, are appropriate for students and scholars of philosophy at all levels.

Man Is by Nature a Political Animal

Man Is by Nature a Political Animal
Author: Peter K. Hatemi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2011-09-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226319113

In Man Is by Nature a Political Animal, Peter K. Hatemi and Rose McDermott bring together a diverse group of contributors to examine the ways in which evolutionary theory and biological research are increasingly informing analyses of political behavior. Focusing on the theoretical, methodological, and empirical frameworks of a variety of biological approaches to political attitudes and preferences, the authors consider a wide range of topics, including the comparative basis of political behavior, the utility of formal modeling informed by evolutionary theory, the genetic bases of attitudes and behaviors, psychophysiological methods and research, and the wealth of insight generated by recent research on the human brain. Through this approach, the book reveals the biological bases of many previously unexplained variances within the extant models of political behavior. The diversity of methods discussed and variety of issues examined here will make this book of great interest to students and scholars seeking a comprehensive overview of this emerging approach to the study of politics and behavior.

The Politics of Rights of Nature

The Politics of Rights of Nature
Author: Craig M. Kauffman
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021
Genre: Environmental policy
ISBN: 9780262366601

"On the global development of legislation, treaty negotiations, constitutional measures, and litigation resulting in legal recognition of Rights of Nature (RoN), including the cultural and political influences that determined how these legal rights were framed, the method of adoption and, importantly, the evolution of RoN enforcement through judicial decisions and growing cultural familiarity with the new legal concept"--

Thoreau's Nature

Thoreau's Nature
Author: Jane Bennett
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2002
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780742521414

Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild explores how Thoreau crafted a life open to 'the Wild,' a term that marks the startling element of foreignness in every object of experience, however familiar. Thoreau's encounters with nature, Bennett argues, allowed him to resist his all-too-human tendency toward intellectual laziness, social conformity, and political complacency. Bennett pursues this theme by constructing a series of dialogues between Thoreau and our contemporaries: Foucault on identity and power, Haraway on the nature/culture of division, Hollywood celebrities on the Walden Woods Project, the National Endowment for the Humanities on politics and art, and Kafka on the question of political idealism. The pertinence to the late 20th century of Thoreau's pursuit of independent judgment, ecological foresight, and moral nobility becomes apparent through these engagements.