Art and the Planetary: Art, Water, Bodies

This panel draws on an understanding of the planetary as a part of a wider debate on the historical, social, and material order of the planet. Our focus is on material and aesthetic means of sensing and environmental transformations as forged through visual art. Here, we turn to the process philosopher Gilbert Simondon’s notion of “associated milieu” and Donna Haraway's coinage of the term “Cthulucene” to describe different types of relational forces and transformations on earth. Through this relational, processual framework, we aim to discuss how artistic practices within the environmental humanities offer great potential for “on-the-ground action” and practical exploration of the planetary. Often, artistic practice and artworks are reduced to mere vessels for environmental themes; for instance how they respond to important issues such as climate change or problems of extraction. Our panel will meet this issue head-on by exploring how transdisciplinary artistic practice, history, and theory can contribute to the environmental humanities through aesthetic modes of visualization of planetary information. This panel will present art historians and visual artists dealing with planetary aesthetics; the awareness of the environment and crisis in the making of art; conceptions of ecology, configurations, and modes of perception and sensing emerging within artistic practices. Our main ambition is to discuss visual art’s role and contribution to new perspectives for the environmental humanities. For my contribution to Art and the Planetary, I will take the work of the artist Carolina Caycedo as a starting point to discuss how contemporary artworks create other environments or “worlds” of affective relations—weather sensitivities— that are, it seems, political and collective. I assert that the work of Caycedo rehearses questions of subjectivity and nature by providing what may be defined as planetary aesthetics.