Art and the Environmental Crisis: From Commodity Aesthetics to Ecology Aesthetics

Art Journal

Volumn 51, Issue 2, 1992, Pages 72-76

  Luke, Timothy W ^a  

^a VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE AND STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84954674536     PISSN: 00043249     EISSN: 23255307     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00043249.1992.10791570     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. For examples of how artists and art collaborate in the rationalization of capitalist commodity production, see Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire (New York: Pantheon, 1986); Bevis Hiller, The Style of the Century, 1900–1980 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1983); Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Knopf, 1986); Bryan Holme, Advertising: Reflections of a Century (New York: Viking Press, 1982); Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H. Pilgrim, and Dickran Tasjian, The Machine Age in America. 1918–1941, exh. cat. (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1986); and Chester H. Liebs, Mainstreet to Miracle Mile: American Roadside Architecture (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985).
2. See Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land; A Bioregional Vision (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985); Jonathan Poritt, Seeing Green (London: Blackwell, 1984); and, most important, Thomas Berry, The Dream of Nature (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988).
3. See Timothy W. Luke, “Notes for a Deconstructionist Ecology,” New Political Science 11 (Spring 1983): 21–32.
4. For one comprehensive critical overview of this hyperecological cycle, see Bill McKibbon, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989).
5. See Timothy W. Luke, Screens of Power: Ideology Domination and Resistance in Informational Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 19–58. Also see Wolfgang F. Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
6. See Siegfried Gideon, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948); and James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960).
7. As Edward W. Soja suggests, modernity always is composed of “both context and conjuncture. It can be understood as the specificity of being alive, in the world, at a particular time and place; a vital individual and collective sense of contemporaneity. …Spatiality, temporality, and social being can be seen as the abstract dimensions which together comprise all facets of human existence. More concretely specified, each of the abstract existential dimensions comes to life as a social construct which shapes empirical reality and is simultaneously shaped by it. Thus, the spatial order of human existence arises from the (social) production of space, the construction of human geographies that both reflect and configure being in the world.… The social order of being-in-the-world can be seen as revolving around the constitution of society, the production and reproduction of social relations, institutions, and practices.” Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 25.
8. See Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic, 1988).
9. See Elisabeth Sussman, ed., On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957–1972 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).
10. See, for a parallel argument, Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1986); and Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984).