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T. J. Demos

University of California, Santa Cruz, History of Art and Visual Culture, Faculty Member

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Address: http://havc.ucsc.edu/faculty/tj-demos

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Papers by T. J. Demos

T. J. Demos, “Photography in/of the Anthropocene,” in Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2024), 137-150.

Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape, 2024

This essay—a catalog contribution to Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporar... more This essay—a catalog contribution to Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, 2024)—investigates the various tensions that problematize photography in/of the Anthropocene. Whether it portrays the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or Chthulucene (the era of multispecies relationality and being), the contemporary image complex couldn’t be more representationally riven— with social media’s recommendation engines, AI-generated simulations, the unregulated production of fake news, and corporate media producing an end- less stream of fabrication. Cutting the ties between image and reality, sign and referent, representation itself has become deeply tenuous, no longer able to sustain the truth claims once made on its behalf. Majorities no longer extend faith and trust to the institutions that once guaranteed confidence—whether correctly or incorrectly—in representational authenticity and legitimacy, making discussing photography in/of the Anthropocene all the more challenging. Perhaps the current era is and will be postrepresentational...

Counterinsurgent: Cop City, Abolition Ecology, and the Aesthetics of Counterreform

e-flux Journal, 2024

“If, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò warns, ‘climate apartheid’ is on the rise, then Cop City Atlanta offer... more “If, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò warns, ‘climate apartheid’ is on the rise, then Cop City Atlanta offers an ominous flashpoint. For not only is Cop City an exemplary story of the violent repression of community activism at the nexus of abolition, decolonization, and environmentalism; it also spotlights the forces of counterinsurgency that are operating to prevent any political transformation beyond the status quo. If the environmentalist movement is losing in the struggle to stop world-ending climate change, then continuing to focus on practices of ecological repair is increasingly myopic, even escapist, without taking into account the forces blocking any meaningful change.”

www.e-flux.com/journal/143/590415/counterinsurgent-cop-city-abolition-ecology-and-the-aesthetics-of-counterreform/

"Climate Change as Culture War The Aesthetics and Politics of Environmental Struggle," in Oliver Ressler: Barricading the Ice Sheets (Berlin: n.b.k., 2023)

Oliver Ressler: Barricading the Ice Sheets, 2023

Organizing and recording a public conversation be- tween activists about just these questions, th... more Organizing and recording a public conversation be- tween activists about just these questions, the Austrian activist-artist Oliver Ressler created "Barricade Cultures of the Future" (2021, 38 min), resulting in a video that foregrounds speakers who review the recent history of environmentalist struggles, considering their gains and challenges, and debating future priorities. Originally taking place in Graz on February 27, 2020, just before the pandemic spread to Europe, the video’s exchange includes five discussants – Marta Moreno Muñoz (performance artist and Extinction Rebellion activist), Nnimmo Bassey (COP climate negotiator and member of the Nigerian Health of Mother Earth Foundation), Aka Niviâna (Inuk poet and environmentalist), Jay Jordan (member of The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, based on the ZAD), and Steve Lyons (of the traveling pop-up museum The Natural History Museum and art-activist collective Not An Alternative). Presented in a carefully edited choreography, speakers comment on different approaches to the struggles for climate justice, and for political transformation more broadly, including the role of art, or aesthetic practice more widely, within those struggles, and consider what tactics and strategies future engagements may require.

In pondering what future barricade cultures will look like – where “barricade cultures” suggests the strategic and tactical priorities, social values and formations, and aesthetic elements of resistance movements op- posing fossil capital, from land-based struggles to digital insurgencies – Lyons ends the conversation with the following propositional question, which I paraphrase: If what is most needed is not simply a massive climate movement, but an anti-imperialist politics more expansively opposed to the extraction of life, land, and labor – where it’s not simply the fossil fuel industry but the entire capitalist system that is oppressing the majority of human population – then how should activists and artists mobilize internationally toward this goal as a shared political horizon?

“War Ecology: Petropolitics, Contemporary Art, and the Middle East”

The Environment and Ecology in Islamic Art, 2023

T. J. Demos, “War Ecology: Petropolitics, Contemporary Art, and the Middle East,” in The Environm... more

T. J. Demos, “Undisciplining Visual Studies,” Visual Studies 36/3 (2021), 226-228.

Visual Studies, 2021

T. J. Demos, “What is Radical? A Questionnaire,” ArtMargins (2022), 23-27.

ArtMargins, 2022

The Right to Opacity

The Migrant Image, 2013

What is Radical?

ARTMargins, 2021

What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism con... more What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism connected to earlier moments, for example, in the 20th century? What can be the role of radical art and scholarship under the conditions of late capitalism? More generally, how can art and artists serve the ongoing struggle for social justice and the agendas of emancipatory social change? Finally, what kinds of art criticism and art historical scholarship are necessary to address the great challenges of our uncertain future?

Undisciplining visual studies

Visual Studies, 2021

There appears to be a certain anxiety expressed in the present questionnaire about the institutio... more There appears to be a certain anxiety expressed in the present questionnaire about the institutional status of visual studies. Visual studies’ academic legitimacy and intellectual integrity seem pressured by its sheer methodological diversity, its plurality of approaches and expansiveness of analytic objects, threatening to render its practice incoherent, ‘intellectually rudderless,’ as a discipline. That anxiety may stem from a presupposed fidelity to disciplinarity as such, as if institutional legitimation is something that should be valued—but why, for what, and for whom?

Extinction Rebellions

Afterimage, 2020

According to the environmental activists of Extinction Rebellion (XR), we must decarbonize by ... more According to the environmental activists of Extinction Rebellion (XR), we must decarbonize by , otherwise we will confront the death of our future. 1 Their demand, based on recent science stressing the limited timeframe before the planet crosses irreversible tipping points leading to climate catastrophe, poses new imperatives-not just to political engagement, but also to scholarship unaccustomed to operating in post-Anthropocene emergency conditions. Indeed, long-established humanities practices founded upon distanced observation, critical thinking, and slow research are now threatened by urgency activist temporality and its explicit ends-oriented politicization. If we care about life on earth, there appears no alternative but to participate energetically, in the same way that many scientists, renowned in the past for their political neutrality, have recently come to push for policy shifts, even embracing direct action and getting arrested at protests where research and advocacy converge. Exemplary is Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of XR, who originally trained as a molecular biophysicist before entering movement organizing and advocating civil disobedience. 2 Yet rather than abandon historical consciousness and critical thinking in the embrace of pressing climate response, we should recommit to those very resources now more than ever-or so I will argue. Far from outmoded, those resources are imperative in helping us determine future courses of action. This remains true politically no less than art historically, in carefully considering, for instance, how aesthetic practices and media, including XR's, operate in the context of climate emergency, how emergency is defined, and how we might productively amplify and join those struggles. One might first direct critical analysis toward XR's claims, scrutinizing how the group moves from abstract statistics (atmospheric carbon measured in parts per million) to arguing for urgent political action. "Unfortunately, because of years of delay and inaction we have reached a crisis where we will only meet our [carbon] targets if we. .. take urgent emergency action!," they write. 3 Their definition of emergency rests largely . See Extinction Rebellion, https://rebellion.earth. . See "This Is Not a Drill: + Arrested as Extinction Rebellion Fights Climate Crisis with Direct Action," Democracy Now!, October , , www.democracynow.org////extinction_rebellion_global_actions_ climate_crisis. . As XR writes on their website dedicated to "The Emergency": "Carbon dioxide concentrations are at a record high of  parts per million (ppm) (an increase of over  percent on pre-industrial levels). Concentrations are now at the highest levels in at least the last  million years (i.e. since before modern humans had even evolved on this planet). To stabilise temperatures emissions need to reach net-zero. Indeed, the climate will keep slowly warming for

Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology

Third Text, 2013

This special issue of Third Text, dedicated to contemporary art and the politics of ecology, inve... more This special issue of Third Text, dedicated to contemporary art and the politics of ecology, investigates the intersection of art criticism, politico-ecological theory, environmental activism and postcolonial globalization. The focus is on practices and discourses of eco-aesthetics that have emerged in recent years in geopolitical areas as diverse as the Arctic, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Europe and Mexico. The numerous contributors address new aesthetic strategies through which current ecological emergencies-including but not limited to the multifaceted crisis of climate change-have found resonance and creative response in artistic practice and more broadly in visual culture. Numerous key questions motivated our investigation: If ecological imperatives are frequently invoked by governments, corporations and certain strands of environmental activism in the name of a post-political 'green' consensus for which nothing less than the life of the planet is at stake, how might critical art contribute to an imagination of ecology that addresses social divisions related to race, class, gender and geography in the North and South alike? How might the concept of biopolitics, as elaborated by figures ranging from Bruno Latour to Vandana Shiva, enable a rethinking of hitherto articulated discourses of eco-aesthetics, especially as regards the relationship between ecological art and eco-feminism, or the art and ecology of democratic political composition? How might cultural practitioners contest the financialization of nature by neoliberal globalization, as analysed in Marxist approaches to political ecology, and how might they provide alternatives to the economic valuation of nature or promote a new articulation of the commons against its corporate enclosure? To what extent are recent philosophical writings associated with the so-called 'speculative realism' movement (for instance, those of

Zurich dada: The aesthetics of exile

Book description: This volume of 12 essays fills a broad gap in modernist art history. Taken toge... more

The Migrant Image

The Migrant Image, 2013

“Radical Futurisms: Documentary’s Chronopolitics”

Trigger #2: Uncertainty, FOMU: Photography Museum, 2020

With reference to three international examples of contemporary art—those of Thirza Jean Cuthand, ... more With reference to three international examples of contemporary art—those of Thirza Jean Cuthand, The Otolith Group, and Black Quantum Futurism—this essay discusses current modelings of radical futurisms and worlds-to-come that refuse surrender to capitalist realism. Where radical imagination meets radical praxis is in the material forces of solidarity, the political form of belonging, more than ever necessary today in the collective battle against international fascisms and global neoliberalisms. While acknowledging the bankruptcy of Eurocentric universalisms, this presentation defends approaches to insurgent political formations beyond identitarian fragmentation, including a political aesthetics of abolition—ultimately of racial and colonial capitalism.

“Beyond Despair: Potential Worlds and Eco-fictions"

Potential Worlds: Ruins of Today and Eco-fictions of Tomorrow, 2020

“Potential worlds” offers a speculative proposition that is profoundly generative—helping us to d... more “Potential worlds” offers a speculative proposition that is profoundly generative—helping us to defeat nihilism and despair—and as such it carries an explosive quality within it. For it implicitly recognizes the bankruptcy of the present world, the one most live in, an expansion- ist one-world world that tries to dominate all others, erasing all alter- natives. As a container for petrocapitalism’s climate catastrophe, beyond-grotesque economic inequality, endless war, surveillance capital, algorithmic oppression, and anti-democratic politics, that world is as grievable as it is condemnable. Not surprisingly, we are increasingly surrounded by end-of-world narratives within our global culture industry, which, pathetically, even as it continually represents the end-times in endless dystopian sci-fi iterations, fails repeatedly to imagine any polit- ical and economic order meaningfully different from the present one. What hopes and creative practices exist for cultivating and realizing an emancipatory imagination, a liberationist eco-fiction, for envisioning and building another world, another future?

Anthropocene India: The Art of Building New Worlds

T. J. Demos, “Anthropocene India: The Art of Building New Worlds,” MARG Magazine (Mumbai, India), vol. 71, no. 3, (March 2020), 16-27., 2020

“If one could speak of an Indian Anthropocene, it would be along similar lines—that is, by avoidi... more “If one could speak of an Indian Anthropocene, it would be along similar lines—that is, by avoiding the universalizing and flattening notion of the term and acknowledging its contradictions. It would identify the situated, regional and uneven impacts of neoliberalism’s technocratic logics of domination, and open a critical space of post- anthropocentric thinking. Such an approach would offer cutting perspective on the world-destroying operations of extraction, and also provide an interdisciplinary platform merging independent scientific research, biocentric legality, and political inclusivity of diverse stakeholder communities. It would draw on humanities and artistic thinking, where science and justice, released from any overriding economic imperative, might join and take on aesthetic forms as creative ecologies that are anti-ecocidal as much as anti-genocidal.”

"The Scopic and the Scaped: Anthropocene Landscapes"

T. J. Demos, “The Scopic and the Scaped: Anthropocene Landscapes,” Gerhardt Richter: Anthropocene Landscapes, ed. Lisa Ortner-Kreil, Hubertus Butin, and Cathérine Hug (Zurich and Vienna: Kunsthaus Zürich, Kunstforum Wien, and Hatje Cantz, 2020), 190-99., 2020

Anthropocene landscapes are mutating geographies, merging nature and culture. As naturalcultural,... more Anthropocene landscapes are mutating geographies, merging nature and culture. As naturalcultural, they provide a post-binary composite of mutual determination: land has been inextricably shaped biogeophysically by capital, just as the latter has internalized nature for its reproduction. 1 "Anthropocene" and "landscape" are thus conflicted terms, containing unstable, shifting meanings and references. While scape unevenly conjugates vision and labor, the seen and the shaped-the implications of which I discuss below-land, coming from Old English, splits ground and property, signifying a definite portion of the Earth's surface; home region of a person or a people; territory marked by political boundaries. Circum-scribed as such, landscapes identify geopolitical determinations subjected to dispute, while its soil increasingly includes human byproducts: chemical and toxic agents unleashed by industrial capital. Microplastics-found in water, soil, and air-proliferate, as plastic derives from petrochemicals sourced in coal and oil, the products of ancient plants undergone anaerobic decomposition over millions of years. With the nonorganic transformation of land, all manner of spaces-geographical , technological, industrial, virtual-expand the meaning of Anthropocene landscapes: these are as much a mountain pass mined for bauxite, a toxic river filled with micropolymers, as a field of lettered plastic squares on a cybernetic device energized by fossil fuels used to type out those two words. As a geopolitical term, the Capitalocene is perhaps more accurate-geogra-phies of capital, natural systems dominated by corporations and their financial elites over the course of modernity. Capitalocene landscapes, in their current guise, represent not only expanding frontiers of extractive industry (mining sites, drilling rigs, pipeline networks, electricity grids, urban infrastructure, architecture, production factories), but also the becoming-technological of geography (server farms, stacks, virtual territories, screen visions, neural nets). This includes legal, political, economic, and trade networks, merged with natural resources-the managed forests, industrial agricultures, greenhouse gas filled atmospheres, pharmaceutical and genetically modified seeds and animals-as well as the remainder-growing swathes of Earth abandoned to dead zones of pollution, mass extinction, and uncontainable toxicity and radiation. More than naturalcultural, these landscapes are biopolitical, critically highlighting the governance of life (and death) under late liberalism, which continues in the current green convergence of science, cybernetic technology, and capital. Early modern landscapes of the Anthropocene (the geological age structured by human activities) and of the Capitalocene (that age defined, more specifically, by modern capitalism), were largely shaped by expansionist colonial regimes producing notions of territory and race by commodifying land and trading people as currency. These were driven by military control, assisted by cartographic, anthro-pological, and botanical knowledge to assert sovereignty. The Plantationocene

T. J. Demos, “Ecology-as-Intrasectionality,” Bully Pulpit, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 5, no. 1 (Spring 2019), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.1699.

Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, 2019

A surge of recent art has engaged ecology in newly complex ways, including by confronting environ... more A surge of recent art has engaged ecology in newly complex ways, including by confronting environmental injustice and social violence in aesthetically provocative forms. Consider the visual culture abetting pipeline blockades and Indigenous sovereignty struggles, including at Standing Rock; the creative social engagements motoring the recent campaigns to remove arms and drug dealers and petrocapitalist climate deniers from the governing bodies of cultural institutions; and the social media feeds and direct actions driving recent Extinction Rebellion mobilizations. Building off the insights of political ecology, my work addresses such practices by approaching ecology as a mode of intersectionality, insisting on the inseparability between environmental matters of concern and sociopolitical and economic frameworks of injustice. Intersectionality, emerging from a long history of African American activism and antiracist, antisexist politics, more recently codified in the Black feminist legal theory of Kimberlé Crenshaw, and underscored within multiple struggles for decolonization, refuses to divide overlapping systems of oppression (such as those tied to race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability) and thereby challenges the essentialization of one or another term in isolation. Ecology, in my view, functions similarly as a site of indissoluble relationality that highlights, and indeed is constituted by, interaction (or even "intra-action," in the sense posited by Karen Barad, whose whose theorization within the field of feminist science studies rejects the separateness and purity of originary categories, arguing instead for a political ontology of being-in-relation).

Rethinking Site-Specificity

Art Journal, 2003

Where, exactly, is the "site" in "site-specific," a term frequently bandied a... more Where, exactly, is the "site" in "site-specific," a term frequently bandied about in discus-sions of contemporary art but often without specific definition? Is the "site" a geograph-ical area, a representation of that area, its phenomenological experience, an institu-tional grid, a ...

Dark Matter into Light": A Round-Table Discussion

Art Journal, 2005

4. Michel Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). projec... more