Readymade Rurality and Ecological Non-knowledge: Imagining the Art Farm
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Roberdeau, Wood. 2015. 'Readymade Rurality and Ecological Non-knowledge: Imagining the Art Farm'. In: Re-imagining Rurality, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment. University of Westminster, United Kingdom 27 - 28 February 2015. [Conference or Workshop Item]
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For Bruno Latour, political ecology is possible thanks to (in)habitual experimentations with givens such as ‘nature’, ‘culture’, and what it means to be ‘human’. These necessarily elaborate tasks or consistent activations promote states of flux so that formations and dispersions might inform collectivity at the register of everyday life. In 1973, Gianfranco Baruchello founded his Agricola Cornelia, a farm in Italy that served as a visceral laboratory for the artist and that was theoretically tested through a Duchampian paradigm for imagining a slice of life as a total work of art. An example of what Arnold Berleant identified as the ‘new arts’ that extended the study of aesthetics to the ‘environment’, Baruchello’s farm marks a point for thinking rurality within visual culture; it inaugurated a critical engagement with the humanist perspective that creativity is indebted to the earth for re-sourcing and challenged the authorial/architectural mode for both private and public space. Similarly, in 1999, Atelier Van Lieshout exhibited Pioneer Set, a pop-up farm conceived near the millennium that was to fulfill ‘a nostalgic, utopian, and even romantic idea of living: longing to go back to nature, to be independent or even not to be a part of this world.’ The work scrutinized our relationship to dwelling sites and problematized the concept of sustainability or permaculture. This paper argues that both of these historical moments within the art world connote a turn towards political ecology, in the sense that Latour defines it, primarily due to the contentiousness within pre-established categories of art (or artifice) and nature (as a condition of labour and perseverance). The formalism of the artwork that once inhibited the fluid experience of everyday life by isolating a disinterested aesthetic encounter has since been deconstructed to allow for slippages between art, design, and activism. Following ‘the ecological thought’ of Timothy Morton via Schopenhauer’s problematic claim that art provides an escape route from reality to a space-time of contemplation, the paper also considers selected projects by Futurefarmers, a contemporary collective of ‘artists, researchers, designers, architects, scientists and farmers with a common interest in creating frameworks for exchange that catalyze moments of “not knowing”.’ In line with Morton’s observation that the essentialism we sometimes afford to an artwork is exactly what might help to deconstruct our delusions surrounding the nature||culture dichotomy, this non-knowledge is also grounded in ‘ecomaterialism’ (or acknowledgement of a thing’s agential capacity when disconnected from human interference), ‘postmedievalism’ (or the postmodern/contemporary moment recalibrated through the pre-modern ), and ‘uncivilization’ (or the willful refusal of emancipatory logic regarding environmental crises). As such, ‘not knowing’ suggests a clearing in which the limits of the everyday, the urban, and the rural might be revealed as possibilities instead.
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Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
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University of Westminster, United Kingdom |
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| Date range: |
27 - 28 February 2015 |
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| Item ID: |
35617 |
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| Date Deposited: |
15 Mar 2024 15:33 |
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| Last Modified: |
15 Mar 2024 15:33 |
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