Art and the Anthropocene

ARTS/ENVS 314

Fall 2023

M, W 7:30-9:30pm

FCVA 124

Office Hours: Friday 1-4pm

Zoom: https://whitman.zoom.us/j/2208648525

Welcome to the home page and syllabus for ARTS/ENVS 314 Art and the Anthropocene. Here you will find all the resources you’ll need to immerse yourself in thinking and making this semester.

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course takes as its subject the tangled web of relations--aesthetic, ecologic, and political--at the center of the concept of the Anthropocene. An idea first pronounced by geologists but now embraced more broadly, the Anthropocene articulates the ways in which human activity (economic, material and behavioral) has achieved planetary scale and effect, resulting in changes to the earth and its climate. This course examines the methods, practices and discourses employed by artists to address the following subjects: how climate change takes shape visually; how ideas about nature are culturally produced and ideologically situated; how representation of the natural world is situated vis-a-vis power relations. This is an advanced, studio art, practice-based seminar; all projects will be realized in various visual media, aligned with faculty areas of specialization and interest. When taught during the fall semester, this course will include a 4-day canoe trip on the Wallowa River. This course is, at its heart, an interdisciplinary inquiry, incorporating scientific analysis and cultural criticism in service of artistic production.

This syllabus functions contractually, and as such delineates course objectives, expectations and obligations. You are responsible for the information herein, so please take time to read through this document carefully.

COURSE GOALS:

• Understand the history and trajectory of art practice as it relates to environmental issues and representations of nature/the natural.

• Learn about the history and use of the concept of the Anthropocene, as well as arguments against its usage.

• Develop a vocabulary for analyzing, critiquing and making works of art through readings, discussion of historic and contemporary works of art, and class discussions and research presentations.

• Learn a variety of artmaking strategies for realizing creative projects, interventions, and actions, capitalizing on art’s unique rhetorical, expressive and communicative tools.

• Understand the necessity and benefits of using a variety of lenses through which to critique/subvert/reframe/behold climate change (scientific, philosophical, aesthetic, political, etc.)

• Be able to locate and engage manifestations of the Anthropocene in local and global phenomena.

COURSE TEXTS: 

*Art & Ecology Now, Andrew Brown

*Against the Anthropocene, T.J. Demos

*please acquire these two main texts in the bookstore, the rest will be provided in hard copy and/or pdf

Bestiary of the Anthropocene, Nicolas Nova

Love Letter to the Earth, Thich Nhat Hanh

Plastic Matters by Nicole Seymour

Pollution is Colonialism by Max Liboiron

Becoming Animal, David Abram

How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell

Biomimicry, Janine Benyus

Ways of Being, James Bridle

Podcasts: 

Janine Benyus, On Being

Robin Wall Kimerer, For the Wild

James Bridle, For the Wild

PROJECTS:

Text a Rock  - (5 pts.) first day activity modeling class content and process.

Gatherings - (5 pts.) Collect 100 objects from the natural world. These may be any shape or size. 

Making the Path - (5 pts.) Together we will assemble wooden platforms that can be stacked and unstacked in order to make a path. This is a performative, interactive “object” designed to activate a collaborative process that is both bodily and conceptual. In addition to getting you acquainted with handling materials, basic building and cutting techniques, this project is meant to stimulate your thinking about the design process as it functions practically as well as how artworks function as a lever for ideas.  

Don’t Fence Me In - (5 pts.) A second group project is designed to get you manipulating materials and more fully inhabiting the many, many possibilities that inhere in the objects and materials of the built world. This project is designed to foster collaboration, work-flow, playfulness, curiosity, divergent thinking, and skills of photographic documentation.

Guardians -  (15 pts.) figurative works clay, wood, earth, straw, plaster, site-specific, hybrid, in conversation with Styx and Horn, figurative, steel, place, carving, collage, energy

OR

Soil  - (15 pts.) You will be given a large bag of soil purchased from the local Home Depot. You may manipulate/transform this material in any way that you like using the skills and materials available to you here in the Sculpture studio or from other studio practices with which you are familiar. Your making should reflect an analysis of this object/material through the lens of the Anthropocene. It’s a good idea to make a few material experiments, then proceed in the strongest direction. Consider all your options: formal, material, conceptual.

Communion - (15 pts.) 

GRADES: I keep a running log of your performance in this class re: presence, attendance, process and product. I will also give you both written and in-person feedback on each major project. My feedback will come in a set of written qualitative comments and a quantitative grade. However: I encourage you to dissociate your learning from systematic evaluation and to trust that you will learn/benefit most from giving yourself wholly to the processes and prompts at hand. Around mid-semester we will schedule a one-on-one meeting to discuss your progress in the course and to answer any questions you might have.

5 Projects – 5/10/15 pts. Each = 50 pts.

Classroom Presence = 50 pts. 

Total pts. 100

EVALUATION Course prompts and daily activities are designed to develop your creative muscle, enlarge your knowledge of contemporary artists, and activate your imagination in totally new and divergent ways. This course focuses thematically on how Ideation, Process and Interpretation  unfurl in a 3-D context. All final works will be considered according to the following criteria:

1. Visual Power: Makes you want to look at the work; form demonstrates visual interest, surprise, intrigue; has a potent subject; evidences imagination and creativity.

 2. Transformation: Works to alter the viewer’s perception in some way, materially, formally; suggests a new thing; the Piggyphant!

 3. Design: Effectively employs visual logic and language; utilizes Principles of Design to organize the Visual Elements.

 4. Craft: Attention to the inherent properties and personality of the material, engaging and responding to how it behaves, latent cultural and/or psychological resonances it carries.

 5. Critique: Active participation, commenting and questioning; effective installation of the work.

 6. Classroom Presence: Daily clean up of studio; quality of attention and work in class; peer-support and attention to others.

 7. Work Ethic/Process: Evidence of a variety of attempts to discover, experiment, resolve; development of ideas over time; overall effort and attention to process.

 *response to critique: if you make a substantive alteration to your project within 5 days of the critique, based on feedback received in the critique, you can improve your grade.

CLASSROOM PRESENCE: I use the term Presence to indicate your performance in the studios with regard to participation, work ethic, cleanup, organization, and safety. But it is more than a measure of the quality of your engagement with the course content; it’s about your attentiveness to the larger learning environment/culture and collective intelligence that we generate (or thwart) together. There are many, many ways we can each uniquely contribute to the vitality of this space and experience, it’s not just an extrovert’s game. Please feel free to check in with me throughout the semester about how you are performing in this or any area. Art making requires a particular kind of mindfulness, presence, and an ability to execute from places of intuition/embodied intelligence. We will cultivate these throughout our time together.

Artists are engaged in some of the most exciting research around--research into what it means to be alive and human right here and right now.  Art, if you let it, will blow your hair back, get your heart revving, and even make your skin tingle. My teaching celebrates this through experimentation and exploration; it’s not art if there isn’t risk-taking, trial, error, revision, frustration, failure and epiphany. Art is messy. Art is hard. I understand the classroom as a dynamic space, full of emergent and sometimes radical possibility. That said, it is always a collective space, where we can all benefit, support, encourage and challenge each other’s most genuine endeavors. A spirit of cooperation befits this and I exhort you to contribute to it.  The quality of your presence and attention to course content is indispensable.

ME + YOU I have conceived an overall architecture for the course, but I am also excited to tailor our investigations to our interests and needs as they evolve and present themselves. I expect you to make a serious and sustained effort to wrestle with the ideas proffered, to take notes during lectures, to come prepared to actively discuss readings or assigned videos, and to spend time at least twice during the week to further your projects outside of class. It will be important to develop habits of mind that keeps you moving forward and connected to the course goals at regular intervals, rather than making binge-y, spastic, all-or-nothing gestures constrained heavily by time, i.e. “cramming” an art work into being.

Please feel free to be in contact with me as much as you need: in class, during office hours, via email. Like most folks, I can get overwhelmed by email and therefore need to practice good boundaries with it, so please give me 24 hours to respond in that way. Also, I’ll expect you to check your email once every 24 hours or so, because I’ll occasionally want to communicate via this medium (about assignments, materials, etc.) and need to rely upon the certainty of your being on the other end of these electronic missives. Thank you, in advance!

RITUAL + CEREMONY I approach the classroom as a performance, play and at times sacred space, wherein we will cultivate a transformative quality of focus and attention. 

TRUST, CONSENT, RESILIENCE, SAFETY and TRAUMA are current culturally resonant concepts that we will want to keep in mind as we navigate our making, dialogues, and interpretations. Ultimately, no 100% safe space exists, but we can clearly set our intentions to care for each other to the best of our ability. Learning should be transformative. Which means it might make you uncomfortable at times. We’ll set the tone for these ideas as we work out our Community Agreements together and re-visit them as necessary throughout the semester. I’m an advocate of the hard labor of transformative justice and believe deeply that conflict can be very generative when carefully and thoughtfully navigated.

The imagination is truly our greatest berm to tyranny!

COURSE STRUCTURE & REQUIREMENTS: This is a hands-on advanced studio/seminar art course with a heavier dose of critical readings than is typical; your effort to understand the larger intellectual and artistic framework of your makings will be paramount. Class time will be used for discussion of readings, interpretation, demonstration, looking at art, individual mentoring and consultations, critiques and working.

Like other art courses, this course will require a substantial amount of work and time spent outside of class. Projects cannot be completed satisfactorily during class time alone. Plan to spend at least five to six hours outside of class time working on assignments each week.

Students are responsible for: Completion of all projects, reading assignments, group critiques and discussion,  one-on-one critiques and evaluation of your work with the instructor, maintaining a clean and safe studio environment. 

Last but not least, this syllabus functions contractually, and as such delineates course objectives, expectations and obligations. You are responsible for the information herein, so please take time to read through this document carefully.

PEDAGOGY: This course is driven by relationship-centered pedagogy. That means we will privilege the relationships we have with each other and as a group, and strive to make connections between course content, materials and larger intellectual themes. Because we are operating within the context of various and interconnected local and global crises (ecological, social, racial, ideological, to name just a few); I sincerely commit to honoring the strangeness of this time with all of its possibilities, limitations and unknowns. As the writer Rebecca Solnit recently said, “we may be in the waterfall part of the river.”

Many aspects of art simply cannot be taught. That said, we will work to tap into places of intuition, creativity and mystery that fuel great human achievements, which sometimes take the form of art. Mostly, making art is simply a way of thinking—a way to construct knowledge from experience.

COMMUNITY AGREEMENTS: We will make space at the beginning of the semester to reflect on how best we can create a deeply intentional human community together. This will include reflection on various learning strategies you can adopt, how to be accountable to self and other, and to articulate your aspirations for taking this course. This is worth the time it takes and we can re-visit these agreements as needed throughout the semester.

COURSE FEE: $150 (This fee covers all of the materials you will use in this space, maintenance and replacement of broken items, etc.)

COURSE READINGS and DISCUSSION: Always print out and/or bring texts to class if we are discussing them. If you do not contribute to discussion in a meaningful way you will lose Presence points.

COURSE EMAIL THREAD: At the beginning of each class we will designate a note taker/transcriber who will take on the responsibility of holding onto what we have been up to and to communicate that to anyone not present in class that day via a short email. You may take pics of the whiteboard(s) and gather any info that is meaningful. Please use the course email thread that we set up on the first day of class. 

CRITIQUES: Critique is a format for discussing work in a more or less public way. Critiques can take many forms, including group-wide scenarios, peer/partner critiques and written reviews. Often they utilize free-association, but they function best when the criteria for analyses are clear. You will be on both ends of the critique, giving and receiving feedback. At the most basic level our interest will be in learning how visual language functions, and how to wield it for certain effect. All artworks make arguments and utilize visual rhetoric to do so. But art also traffics in language that is spacious and even slippery, permitting meanings to function in ways that are not rational or literal but hopefully somewhat oblique, associative and evocative. Interpretation happens best at the deep end of the pool and we will spend a good amount of time there.

OFFICE HOURS: I’ll hold regular office hours each week (see times at top of the syllabus). During these hours, you don’t need an appointment to talk to me – just stop by my office. You can come ask me for assistance with course content/assignments, or you can merely chat with me about the course, college more generally, careers, current events or whatever. Do not feel like you need a so-called “good” question – you can even just say “hello”! If you can’t make these times, I am happy to meet other times – just make an appointment.

THOUGHTS ON POWER, REPRESENTATION AND HISTORY: Art and artists are indispensable to a well-functioning democracy. Democracy requires imagination and flourishes when the imaginative life of a society is cultivated and nurtured. We can only create that which we can imagine, whether our creations are works of art, engineering, public policy, etc. I therefore strive to maintain a classroom that is deeply respectful of differences in ideas, opinions, strategies, and experience. Yet the history of art is affected by the same historical operations of power that play out in the world at large. Cognizance of the ways race, class, gender, sex, ethnicity, religion, age, ability, national origin, and sexual orientation inform our making and interpreting is crucial to our intellectual inquiry. I seek to know and carefully navigate the ways artistic representation makes power and privilege visible. This can be tricky, but again, I endeavor to build a community in which we ask hard questions about how the history of images and objects shapes our experiences, desires and sense of the possible. Building this awareness will assist the effort to decolonize the curriculum. I would be remiss to fail to acknowledge that the forces of empire in their different guises (genocide, slavery, white supremacy and misogyny) have conspired to allow us to inhabit this room on this campus on this land. I do so with the hope that consciousness of these agents can lead us away from their perpetuation.

SAFETY: Your personal safety with the toxic materials, limb-threatening machines and other potentially hazardous processes native to sculpture is my paramount concern. I have well-outlined information, directions and protocol for all the materials and equipment you will engage in the sculpture labs, and I require that you heed these at all times.

Shoes that cover your entire foot must always be worn in class. Pants that cover your entire leg must be worn to work in the metal shop. You may not eat in the studios, and drinks must be covered and kept in the vestibule. Please do not ever go barefoot in the building or  classroom!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you have ANY concerns regarding the safety of a material or process or project, you are required to consult beforehand with me. Let your guiding principle be to “do no harm,” physically to the building, yourself, grounds, facilities, etc. or emotionally to yourself/others. In certain instances I may ask that you consult with the Physical Plant, Security, and the Dean of Students prior to the implementation/installation of projects or processes. While some actions may be intellectually defensible within the history of art, there are limits to what I will allow to happen in my classroom for both your and my emotional safety. Works involving bio-hazardous materials, body fluids, or reproducing egregious physical or emotional pain, or weapons will NOT be permitted in class.

STUDIO ACCESS AND USE: The main classroom of the Sculpture area is available for your use from 7am to midnight. Access to the Wood and Metal Shops will be restricted to times when a trained Monitor can be present, or I or Safety Tech Benjamin Selby can accompany and/or oversee safe use of materials and machines. The Sculpture Studios will be monitored on certain weeknights and weekends by Sculpture Studio Monitors. Please take advantage of these students and avail yourself of their knowledge. Please always respect a Studio Monitor’s judgment around safety in the shops and yield to their experience. They have your safety in mind above all else.

LATE WORK: Projects unfinished by the designated time are extremely discouraged and will suffer commensurate reduction in the project grade. Project grades will incur a penalty of 5 pts./day, unless we reach an agreement otherwise. Please communicate with me asap if you anticipate not being able to complete an assignment on time.

You may email me or Mr. Selby to arrange a time outside of monitored hours to come in and use the facilities. Because our schedules are often chock full I encourage you to arrange these sorts of meetings with at least 48 hours of anticipation.

ATTENDANCE/TARDINESS: Prompt and consistent attendance is crucial and your success in this class will depend largely upon it. I take attendance daily and the quality and quantity of your attendance will be reflected in your Presence grade. You are required to seek missed notes from a classmate and make up hours missed in the studio. When/if you are absent you should plan to visit with me during my office hours on Friday afternoons between 1-4pm to make sure you stay on track.

***Missing a class Demo is something you really, truly want to avoid. Big demos are accompanied by short but contextualizing lectures and activities. These provide far more than technical information alone. If you miss certain Demos (Wood Shop, welding, moldmaking, etc.) you will need to find time outside of class where you can receive information from me or Ben Selby BEFORE you will be allowed to access the facilities and use the materials associated with the Demo.

Absences will have the following effect on your grade:

Missing 5 classes = you will no longer be able to earn an A in the course;

Missing 7 classes = you will no longer be able to earn a B;

Missing 9 classes = you will no longer be able to earn a C;

Missing 10 classes can result in automatic failure of the class; at this point the ability to successfully complete the course is thrust into serious doubt for me. In the event of extreme circumstances, I reserve the right to make exceptions to these rules in consultation with the Dean of Students and/or Provost. That said, I exhort you to proactively guard your physical and emotional health in every way possible, and to document if/when you are unwell.

Often, at the beginning of class I make important announcements and set up the schedule of activities, answer questions, or reflect on our direction and progress. Routinely missing the first 5-10 minutes is unacceptable and will severely impact your Presence grade.

DAMAGES: Any damages to the art building, the tools and or machines herein, may result in charges beyond the course fee, to your student account.

CHANGE: I reserve the right to alter or modify this syllabus as we proceed through the weeks of the semester.

CELL PHONE USE: Personal cell phone use is not appropriate in this space. We will make a habit of putting our phones in a basket at the beginning of class in exchange for a rock. 

ACCOMODATIONS: If you are a student with a disability who will need accommodations in this course, please meet with Julia Dunn, Associate Dean of Students (Mem. 205, X5213 ,dunnjl@whitman.edu) for assistance in developing a plan to address your academic needs. All information about disabilities is considered private; if I receive notification from Ms. Dunn that you are eligible to receive an accommodation, I will provide it in as discrete a manner as possible.

In accordance with the College’s Religious Accommodations Policy, I will provide reasonable accommodations for all students who, because of religious observances, may have conflicts with scheduled exams, assignments, or required attendance in class. Please review the course schedule at the beginning of the semester to determine any such potential conflicts and let me know by the end of the second week of class about your need for religious accommodations. 

extra resources:

Elizabeth Kolbert Age of Man: Enter the Anthropocene https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/age-man-enter-anthropocene/12th-grade/

Jenny Odell’s essay how to do nothing in Medium

Teju Cole, “What does it mean to look at this?” New York Times, May 24, 2018

Amy Balkin’s Public Smog

Fire maps

Smoke maps

Dr. Max Loboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism

Q&A w Dr. Loboiron

T.J. Demos, “Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology”, introduction

Life & Death in the Anthropocene pdf

Extraction website