Bodies between Scales in Neganthropic Performative Arts
Mateusz Borowski
mateusz.borowski@uj.edu.plJagiellonian University in Kraków (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9631-8843
Abstract
This article offers an analysis of selected performative projects which, using a variety of technological and media dispositives, problematize scaling procedures and confront audiences with non-human scales. This perspective guides the analysis of activist projects of the artist collective Earth Art Studio, which uses existing digital infrastructure and Google maps as instruments of care for the environment. Yuyan Wang’s video installation The Moon Also Rises (2022), in turn, serves as an example of a technological dispositive thanks to which the viewers can have a bodily experience of planetary-scale phenomena. Also evoked is one of the key works of land art, Robert Smithson’s The Spiral Jetty (1970), and, most importantly, his film under the same title, made in collaboration with Nancy Holt. This return to the past of performative arts clearly shows that they have been problematizing the question of scale for at least half a century, anticipating, as it were, the critics of the Anthropocene, who have relatively recently begun to call for a revision of the scalar regime of modernity.
Supporting Agencies
Keywords:
Bernard Stiegler, performative arts, scaling, scale, NeganthropoceneReferences
Boeke, Kees. Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps. New York: The John Day Company, 1957.
Google Scholar
Boetzkes, Amanda. The Ethics of Earth Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816665884.001.0001
Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. „Afterword: On Scale and Deep History in the Anthropocene”. In Narratives of Scale in the Anthropocene: Imagining Human Responsibility in an Age of Scalar Complexity, edited by Gabriele Dürbek and Philip Hüpkes, 225–232. London: Routledge, 2022.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003136989-17
Google Scholar
Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Późny kapitalizm i koniec snu. Tłumaczenie Dariusz Żukowski. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Karakter, 2015.
Google Scholar
DiCaglio, Joshua. Scale Theory: A Non-Disciplinary Approach. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctv22fqc19
Google Scholar
Hobbs, Robert. Robert Smithson: A Retrospective View. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1983.
Google Scholar
Horton, Zachary. Cosmic Zoom: Scale Knowledge and Mediation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226742588.001.0001
Google Scholar
Loe, Hikmet Sidney. The Spiral Jetty Encyclo: Exploring Robert Smithson’s Earthwork through Time and Place. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1353/book57738.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/book57738
Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Google Scholar
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence or the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674061194
Google Scholar
Smithson, Robert. „The Spiral Jetty: The Essay (1972)”. In Hikmet Sidney Loe, The Spiral Jetty Encyclo, 13–22.
Google Scholar
Stiegler, Bernard. The Neganthropocene. Edited and translated by Daniel Ross. London: Open Humanities Press, 2018. https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/the-neganthropocene/.
Google Scholar
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaput. „On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales”. Common Knowledge 18, no. 3 (2012): 505–524. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-1630424.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-1630424
Google Scholar
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Andrew S. Mathews, and Niels Bubant. „Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology”. Current Anthropology 60, no. 20 (2019): 186–197. https://doi.org/10.1086/703391.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/703391
Google Scholar
Authors
Mateusz Borowskimateusz.borowski@uj.edu.pl
Jagiellonian University in Kraków Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9631-8843
Mateusz Borowski - Professor at the Jagiellonian University, PhD, defended his doctoral thesis on recent European drama at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in 2005. His main areas of interest are speculative fiction and counterfactual narratives on current ecological and civilizational crises. He has recently published Strategie zapominania. Pamięć i kultura cyfrowa(Academic Bookstore 2015) and, with Margaret Sugiera, Sztuczne natury. Performanse technonauki i sztuki (Academic Bookstore 2017) and, as co-author, the work Performanse pamięci w literaturach i sztukach (Academic Bookstore 2020) produced as part of the Beethoven research project (NCN and DFG). In collaboration with Małgorzata Sugiera, he has translated numerous scholarly works and plays from English, German and French.). Since 2022, he has directed the OPUS 22 NCN grant After Climate Crisis: Non-Scalable Survival Strategies in Speculative Fabulations of the Last Two Decades, as well as the work of the Polish team in the CELSA grant Re-Familiarizing the Body and its Umwelt: the Uncanny Imaginary as a Tool to Cope with Contemporary Societal Challenges in post-2004 Europe (REFAM).
Statistics
Abstract views: 29PDF downloads: 14
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Mateusz Borowski
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The author grants a royalty-free nonexclusive license (CC BY 4.0) to use the article in Pamiętnik Teatralny, retains full copyright, and agrees to identify the work as first having been published in Pamiętnik Teatralny should it be published or used again (download licence agreement). By submitting an article the author agrees to make it available under CC BY 4.0 license.
From issue 1/2018 to 3/2022 all articles were published under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. During this period the authors granted a royalty-free nonexclusive license (CC BY-ND 4.0) to use their article in Pamiętnik Teatralny, retained full copyright, and agreed to identify the work as first having been published in our journal should it be published or used again.
Most read articles by the same author(s)
- Mateusz Borowski, Towards the Negantropocene: The entanglements of bodies and technology in speculative performative arts , Pamiętnik Teatralny: Vol. 73 No. 3 (2024): Towards the Negantropocene
