What's new about new materialisms? Collectivizing the terrain of decolonial struggle in contemporary art

In the wake of onrushing ecological crises, riddled with an urgency seemingly irreconcilable with our temporalities, how might we cultivate curatorial and artistic practices that resist the coloniality of the Anthropocene’s self-mythologisation? With every fiber of our being intertwined in webs of processes that require repatterning, this time of precarity urges us to undertake the daunting task of a collective recuperation at the intersection of myriad disciplines, one that resists capitulating to humanist paradigms. Just as contemporary scholars appeared to reach a consensus that problematized the human exceptionalism of modern humanism, we were confronted by the indelibly marked presence of the human on Earth, and swiftly ushered in the so-called geological epoch of the Anthropocene. If, in the Enlightenment intellectual tradition, human exceptionalism was envisaged as the vehicle for progressive transformation in the world, the centrality of the human as Earth’s single sovereign in Anthropocentric thought lies in a regressive transformation of unprecedented ecological decline (Conty, 2016, p. 19). It is against this universalizing disavowal of differentiated responsibility that various alternative strands of political ecology have been forged. Sharing the common denominator of post-anthropocentrism, these stances have prompted a wider conversation on the material-discursive possibilities of curatorial and artistic practices within the framework of ecological thinking, which functions as both a thinking and a doing. 

In particular, this essay will examine the recent emergence of new materialisms- Bruno Latour’s formulation, to be precise- as a theoretical point of departure for ecologically-minded intellectual practices, using Anselm Franke’s exhibition Animism and Jimmie Durham’s work as its case studies. Described as an “ontological reconceptualization of the material world” (Benson, 2019 p. 253), new materialism problematizes what Latour termed ‘the Great Divide’- the nature/culture dualism that authorized the capitalist imperative to own and control nature (1993, p. 99). It therefore holds that the fault of humanism originates in its denial of nonhuman agency, inviting a dialogue amongst a wider host of agents within “an enlarged democracy”. The revolutionary character of such a recognition lies in its adoption of decolonial thought in considerations of ecology, destabilizing the discursive foundations of colonialism upon which the Anthropocene has been theorized. What is striking, however, is that after some thirty years of postcolonial critique, there has been relatively little engagement between new materialist philosophy and Indigenous scholarship. Once we take into account long-standing Indigenous traditions of agent ontologies, the putative ‘new’ in ‘new materialisms’ instantiates a European developmental schema that stymies the radicality of a project that seeks to dismantle precisely the coloniality of European modernity. Drawing on Jessica Horton and Janet Berlo, I will then discuss the difficulty in incorporating new materialisms with Indigenous ontologies, and subsequently underscore the risk posed by the absence of this reciprocal engagement: the reproduction of settler colonial practices of extraction and ultimately a recolonization of indigeneity. To conclude, I will posit that, if the radicality of new materialisms is located in its ability to act as a mirror, turning the European colonial gaze ascribed to ‘primitive’ societies back onto the ‘moderns’, as demonstrated by Animism, it is impeded by its denial of an Indigenous critique on its own terms by relegating it to a deconstruction of the foundational binaries of Europe. Short-circuiting this Eurocentric gaze is the Indigenous artists whose practices, while located in a shared contemporary landscape, mobilise materiality as a bridge instead of a mirror, imaging a mutually affecting terrain of equal agents. 

From the ancient Greek anthropos, human, and kainos, new, the term Anthropocene was popularized by Paul Crutzen in 2000 to describe our current geological epoch, wherein humans have become the primary determinants of transformation upon Earth. In one era, we have single-handedly charted the course of our planetary future in which “the impact of current human activities is projected to last over very long periods” (Crutzen, 2002). The primary point of contention with the term Anthropocene is betrayed by its etymological roots; the prefix anthropo- secures the centrality of ‘mankind’ as the singular driver of this entire epoch, “a tragic story with only one real actor” (Haraway, 2016, p.39). For all its universalizing talk of “humankind”, the Anthropocene signals a planetary crisis engendered by the activities of a population far narrower than ‘humankind’ might suggest (Grear, 2017, p.2). By envisaging causality through the narrative of an undifferentiated species agent, this is an epoch which serves as an extension of a Eurocentric developmentalist timeline that locates its foundations in the Enlightenment, rationalised through the same dualisms that have permitted the exercise of colonial power. That is, the superspecies designation of anthropos reproduces the same logocentric oppositions- the nature/culture divide- so central to Enlightenment humanist thought, authorising humankind’s imperatives to act upon rather than to interact with nature. It at once relegates nature to a non-agential domain and humankind to a unidirectional force, eschewing asymmetries of wealth and ecological impact between the global North and South (Triscott, 2017, p. 378). Dipesh Chakrabarty contends that thinking in climate change necessitates a negative universality, all differences notwithstanding, because climate precarity co-situates us all insofar as “there are no lifeboats here for the rich and privileged” (2009, p. 221). Yet, as Andreas Malm notes, “Species-thinking on climate change only induces paralysis. If everyone is to blame, then no one is” (2015). Such is the typical conclusion derived from the Anthropocene’s universalizing logic, a regressive figuration that lends itself all-too-readily to the “game over, it’s too late” rhetoric, in Haraway’s terms. If not the apocalypse verdict, Anthropocentric thinking fosters capitalist-technocratic solutions. By collapsing recent Earth history to its industrial and technological dimensions, the Anthropocene disavows the political ideologies which drive them and, in turn, rationalises further technological interventions in the earth’s systems via geoengineering, as if the causes of ecological crisis can be its solutions (Demos, 2017, p. 21). 

Challenging the viability of this conceptualization, Bruno Latour’s politics of nature advocates for the dissolution of the nature/culture dichotomy, calling for a horizontal redistribution of agency amongst other living beings as well as non-living entities. For Latour, the fault of Anthropocentric thought lies in its denial of nonhuman agency, and as such, he images a profoundly relational world which recognises our reliance on “the agency of other actants to accomplish both the feats and the horrors of human history” (Conty, 2016, p. 28). Tracing this fault back to modernism, Elmar Altvater contends the nature/culture divide possesses no basis in reality, but only in the European rationality of world domination (2016, p.149). For such moderns, the domain of nature consisted of natural environments, nonhuman species, and many human beings relegated to a subhuman status by virtue of race, gender and class. On the other hand, all non-modern societies were nature-cultures, conceptualizing ‘culture’ as a hybridized field constituted by a wider host of agents. As these hybrids proliferated, Latour would claim that the nature/culture dichotomy is a case of modern European bad faith, and that, citing from his book of the same title, “we have never been modern” (Conty, 2016). This theoretical turn away from dualisms has seen the emergence of new materialisms— a reconceptualization of the material world as possessing agency, entangling humans in a network that precedes and exceeds our representation of it. If the division of nature and culture and its subsequent “purification” of both domains relied on “the repression of the middle ground, the mediation that connects subjects with objects” (Koskentola, 2017, p. 41), a theoretical shift away from it inevitably necessitates its resurfacing. As per Latour, new materialism then locates its radicality in its capacity to turn the anthropological gaze back upon Europe, a mirror affirming that the European representation of the Other is a projection. Jessica Horton and Janet Berlo aptly parallel this mechanism to what Edward Said’s Orientalism exposes: “that when Europeans attempt to represent the Other, what they produce most accurately is an image of the self” (2013, p. 19). 

New materialism’s attentiveness to the ‘vitality’ of non-living entities has rendered it an apposite theoretical point of departure for curatorial practices engaged in ecological thinking. The shift away from Anthropocentric thought in artistic practices has manifested itself largely through a critique of subject-centred visuality: “Are there alternative ways of embodiment in nature that are not based on the visual gaze?”, asks Sabine Wilke, and calls for multisensory, materialized responses to the natural world that resist the paradigm of subjectivity (2013, p. 69). Testifying to the reciprocal entanglements between ecological thinking and contemporary art, Anselm Franke’s touring exhibition Animism employs new materialisms as both its subject matter and curatorial model. Animism situates itself reflexively, acknowledging the paradoxical position of the museum and the medium of the exhibition as it pertains to agent ontologies. In Animism: Notes on an Exhibition, Franke encapsulates this dilemma, asking, “what is a museum if not a grand de-animating machine?” (2012). If animism is a set of practices that resists objectification, Franke claims that an exhibition about animism is impossible within a European exhibitionary complex. Historically, museums have served as apparatuses for propagating mythologies of European colonial power, and central to these mythologies is the deanimating nature/culture divide; thus, if anything that enters a museum becomes an object of conservation, producing a unidirectional subject-object relationship, it could be argued that the ontological basis of museums reifies such dualisms. As Vincent Normand argues, the spatial logics of the museum reinforce the “ontological template” born at the nexus of scientific, political, and aesthetic projects of modernity (Davis and Turpin, 2015, p.14). With this in mind, what might a curatorial model that steps outside this matrix of modern dichotomies look like? Franke registers the futility of attempting to abandon this matrix; instead, he opts to act on and transform that which presents itself as a given “reality”— a decolonization of the modern colonial imaginary (Franke, 2012). Such a formulation owes much to postcolonial theory, revisiting animism as a constellation of European desires that enacts the very fetishisms it ascribes to the Other (Horton and Berlo, 2013). Like Latour, Franke seeks to turn the anthropological gaze ascribed onto colonized subjects back onto the moderns. Acknowledging the primitivist imprint left on ‘animism’, a term associated with “images of fetishes, totems,... savagery” (Franke, 2010, p. 11), Animism mobilises the term and its baggage as “an optical device”, a mirror that unveils the transgressive impurities that modernity’s dualisms had repressed. 

This schema is nowhere more apparent than in Franke’s interpretation of Jimmie Durham’s installation in Animism, The Dangers of Petrification I. The work consists of a series of vitrines housing pseudo-scientific displays of stone specimens, accompanied by handwritten labels identifying these stones as petrifications of a strip of bacon, a piece of bread, some Portuguese sausage. Franke champions the artist’s canny use of stone as a force of subversion; by taking into account how the European tradition uses stone to symbolise its desire for eternity, and in the form of carvings, to document its understandings of mimetic representation, The Dangers of Petrification locates its radicality in the inversion of such representation (Franke, 2012). Affirming the agency of material, the work is a mimicry of this mimesis enacted through natural, rather than cultural, processes. It is against this notion of an immortalizing mimetic representation that Durham short-circuits different temporalities— the unstable condition of a strip of bacon and the extensive process of turning-to-stone— and positions the states of ‘life’ and ‘nonlife’, of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ as relative extremes, offering a deconstruction of the subject-object dichotomy. 

The Dangers of Petrification I, 2007

Such a reading, consistent amongst Franke’s writings on the work of Jimmie Durham, places his previous claim- the impossibility of representing animistic modalities within a European exhibitionary framework- under scrutiny. What is suggested here is that representation is possible on the condition that it “pulls aside the rationalist veil” that shapes Europe’s perception of the Other (Franke in Horton and Berlo, 2013, p. 19). This formulation begs the question of what opportunities are available to Indigenous practitioners who wish to draw on cultural traditions while engaging modern art institutions (Horton and Berlo, 2013, p. 19). Franke’s insistence of the impossibility of representing animistic modalities within an exhibitionary complex, one that inevitably subjects them to a fantastical projection, appears to concretize the very binary he set out to dismantle: Indigenous animistic practices are circumscribed to the ‘environment’, a domain distinct from Europe, and therefore outside the realm of representation. And what he then offers as the exception- the harnessing of “strong negativity” to incite what modernity had repressed- seems no more virtuous or radical than a denial of it altogether. 

It is precisely this conditionality in Franke’s conception of Animism that betrays the limitations hindering the larger project of new materialisms. Is such a condition not the reification of the very dualisms Franke seeks to deconstruct in demanding that a practice originating in Indigenous knowledge occupies subject positions made available solely by the colonizer? Notwithstanding that the dismantling of colonialism’s discursive foundations is vital to any posthumanist political ecology, new materialisms must take into account the paradox of relegating Indigenous practices to a deconstruction of Europe’s foundational binaries (Horton and Berlo, 2013). Advocating for a schema “beyond the mirror”, Jessica Horton and Janet Berlo contest that global equity, the political promise of new materialisms, necessitates a transcultural engagement that enables Indigenous practices on their own terms. Such a criticism rouses another dilemma facing new materialisms: the modifiers of ‘new’ in new materialism and ‘post’ in posthumanism suggest a European developmental timeline that disregards the longstanding Indigenous tradition of agent ontologies. In the absence of an inclusive politics of citation, Jerry Lee Rosiek contends that new materialisms runs the risk of reinstating long-standing practices of Indigenous erasure, and consequently, enacting a performative inclusivity with the ethics of social inquiry claimed as its promise. This underscores the need for Eurocentric new materialists to recognise the pervasive context of settler colonialism in which they are working and, at minimum, pursue a reciprocal exchange to which all parties consent, an exchange which must be concomitantly underpinned by a robust solidarity in the work of promoting the well-being of Indigenous peoples (Rosiek, et al., 2020, p. 343). Such an approach would collectivize the terrain of decolonial struggle, foregrounding relationality and mutual sacrifice as the vehicle by which colonial systems can be sabotaged in favour of liberatory alternatives. Prioritizing relationality, Horton and Berlo propose a conceptualization of material “as a bridge, instead of a mirror”; in this formulation, the materials conceptualized and enacted in the work of Indigenous artists are no mere actants, but rather “enlivened with spirit” (Todd, 2015, p. 248). Contrary to Franke’s reading, Horton and Berlo interpret Durham’s work as mobilising materiality in the name of joining viewers into a shared fate with “material friends and foes”, a reminder that allies are vital to flourishing in a relational world wherein we all hold precarious positions (2013, p. 20). 

Encore Tranquillité, 2008

In his 2008 piece Encore Tranquillité, Durham once again employs stone as a material ally, drawing on the Indigenous tradition of personified stone: “...I do not like the way states turn stone into metaphor. So I decided to use another metaphor, and have stone represent Nature en toto” (Durham in Stauble, 2014). In Encore Tranquillité, the artist staged an encounter between a boulder and an ex-Soviet aeroplane in a Russian airfield outside Berlin, its cockpit demolished by the rock that had seemingly fallen out of the sky. In his ArtForum interview, Durham explains that the antiquated aeroplane had been considered unsafe by European standards and put up for sale in Africa, its fate predetermined by the ethical failures of the neocolonial marketplace (Durham in Ellegood, 2009). The longstanding status of stone as sculpture in art history is inverted here by Durham’s use of stone to sculpt other materials. Evincing stone’s agency, Encore Tranquillité may be read as a disruptive force against European metaphors relegating it to inertia. In Franke’s reading, Durham’s use of stone- a material ranking low in European value hierarchies- locates its subversive power in its possession of “strong negativity”, a “savagery” that disrupts those categories and, in turn, the rationalist veil that frames them. Horton and Berlo employ an alternative schema in their analysis, one that transcends the mirror; by splintering the aeroplane, the lively rock acted as “an unexpected ally in a tale of global injustice, a potential saviour of countless undervalued human lives” (2013, p. 22). Once relocated to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris for Durham’s 2009 retrospective, Rejected Stones, the work posed countless uncertainties to audiences- the stone’s origins, geographical or otherwise, the state of the aeroplane prior to demolition- in motion, stationary, or defunct- all ungraspable. As such, the rock signals the incalculability of material surrounding us in that it not only evinces animation and ethical orientation, but also “the ability to know things”, a concept communicated wordlessly (Horton and Berlo, 2013, p. 22). Without discounting the work of deconstructing colonialism’s discursive foundations, a political ecology that transcends the mirror, as proposed here, gestures us toward a revised vision of collaborative power as shared between human and nonhuman agents in a mutually affecting relationship.

At the nexus of the political ecologies discussed in this essay lies the common premise of precarity; but as evidenced, notwithstanding its unifying powers, the positions forged in response to this precarity must look beyond universalizing discourses. The failings of the Anthropocene thesis are not only reserved to its catastrophizing denial of recuperation, but extend to its disregard for the livelihoods of those situated outside the humanist conception of Man, human and nonhuman beings included. And while new materialisms is attributed to the growing recognition of the inviability of dualist paradigms, without a reciprocal engagement with Indigenous knowledges, it runs the comparable risk of concentrating the voice of Indigenous concerns in white hands. The dualisms it renounces have only ever been endemic to Eurocentric thought, and as such, any ‘post’-humanist political ecology which eschews the problematic temporal schema instantiated by its very terminology may well be at the service of re-entrenching neocolonialisms. With this in mind, this essay contends that new materialisms must make way for the agency of generative Indigenous practices in order to lay the groundwork for a compelling alternative to the Anthropocene. Within this larger critical project, calls for engagement with Indigenous ontologies have not been efforts to displace or supplant new materialisms, but rather calls for new materialisms to not be an agent of displacement (Rosiek, et al., 2020). As such, new materialists must work towards a more robust solidarity that stretches to nonhuman agents as well as the humans who are too often left out of the equation. It is through such a terrain of respectful, consensual convergences between equal agents- Europeans and Indigenous peoples, humans and other-than-humans- that we may begin to identify the principles of an equitable geopolitics that loosens the grip of the Anthropocene’s mythologies.

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