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REFERENCES
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The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats*
EMILY APTER
Life forms are vanishing, landmasses are eroding, holes are widenin
ozone, and nations subsist in a state of increasing mineral depletion. If,
ten years, considerable debate has focused on "continental subjectivity" (
ing Eurocentric theories of the subject across nations in the wake of pos
theory), it may now be time to consider the broader implications of how
continents." Thinking "continentally," that is to say, seeing the world as
landmasses interlinked by industrial damage and wastage, can be a risk
since it colludes all too easily with the denationalizing logic of corporate sover
and the obfuscation of class injustice. As Gayatri Spivak puts it, with h
knack for articulating crucial political blind spots: "A classless vision of
justice made in the USA is hopelessly inadequate to come to grips
spectralization of the rural."I Certainly, many activists, critics, and ar
vulnerable to Spivak's charge of a green globalism that consigns the po
class to the shadows. But despite these legitimate concerns, and despite
past affiliations with the genres of land art, earthwork, pictorial neo-Rom
art made with natural materials,2 and so on, a number of contemporary
giving substance to what might be called an aesthetics of critical habitat
be framed by the politics of antiglobalization.3
* Warm thanks to Mary Kelly, Hal Foster, Anne Higonnet, Aamir Mufti, and Tony Vidl
comments and suggestions.
1. Gayatri Spivak, "Megacity," in Grey Room 01 (fall 2000), p. 21.
2. A recent installation by Liga Pang provides a good example of the return of art that
natural materials as a medium of choice. Her massively scaled wave fabricated of bamboo
knotted fiber aligns its pro-nature position with an implicit critique of late-industrial s
despoil the earth while professing veneration of natural beauty. Liga Pang, exhibition of
Santa Monica Museum of Art,July 28 to September 2, 2001.
3. For a useful overview of the intersecting genres of land art and ecologically informed
practice, see Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art (London: Phaidon
1998). According to Kastner, land art was "the apotheosis of formalism and the e
Minimalism." For Wallis, the tenets of this Greenbergian formalism are challenged by th
and ecological functionalism of earthworks made by Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, H
and others in the late 1960s. Miwon Kwon's classic piece "One Place After Another: N
Specificity" also clarifies the genre issue in its discussion of how site-specific work relates
minimalist installation, and topographical realism, in October 80 (spring 1997), pp. 85-110.
OCTOBER 99, Winter 2002, pp. 21-44. ? 2002 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of
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22 OCTOBER
Broadly spea
by geopoetic
Kinsella has
media and e
lines propos
Empire. Here
jurisdictions i
ends: the con
worldwide i
interests are
parameters o
even if Neg
invites probl
World Trade
eco-activist
modification
2001 G-8 summit.4 This transnational "Multitude," committed to worldwide social
and environmental justice rather than to the nation-state (and as such, the left
counterpoint to the venture capitalist who sees the globe as a stockpile of
resources ripe for exploitation), contests the environmental fallout of globalization
while seeking to move beyond the parochialism of identity or single-issue politics
predominant throughout the 1980s and '90s.
And yet, to simply make a pitch for critical habitat as an ecologically correct
version of "global-think" is not enough; such a move calls out for further
qualification. If habitat is invoked here, it must not be in the naive belief that it
necessarily achieves a more successful calibration of the local and the global, nor
in the hope that it offers an aesthetic ideology fully resistant to globalization theory,
but primarily because it focuses attention explicitly on how global financial and
information economies are being embedded within geopoetic signifying practices
across media. Fredric Jameson's idea of "the communicational signifier," discernible
in "visions of financial transfers and investments all over the world," is useful here
because it takes account of the extent to which media and environment are
increasingly difficult to disentangle as a semiotic system. Similarly,
rethinking of the rural in terms of information technology points
imbrication of habitat in the economy of capital flow: "The rural," she wr
not trees and fields anymore. It is on the way to data."5
If, following Jameson and Spivak, media and environment are conce
codes capable of mutual translation, then the idea of critical habitat c
4. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000
5. Fredric Jameson, "Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue," in The Cultures of Glob
ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyosi (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), p.
Spivak, "Megacity," p. 20.
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The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats 23
6. Kenneth Frampton, "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resist
in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay
1983), pp. 21, 26, and 27, respectively.
7. Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Pr
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 164.
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24 OCTOBER
privileged sp
dispossessed
For about a
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'30s, by the w
The Volsche
not unrelat
majestic pri
is celebrate
history is a
are documen
8. William Ken
further referen
Left:J. H
Right: Ja
Robertson
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The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats 25
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The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats 27
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28 OCTOBER
This conjugat
with critical h
Kelly's recent
lint photogra
drawn from w
Beirut 1982, Sa
an internation
an antiwar pro
technologies
explosives dro
through gray
erupting bene
presence thro
Kentridge use
surface as a bu
In a nod to B
characters-th
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at his desk in
and cash regis
bars, exhaust
60). Coetzee c
underground
human histo
Freudian ana
Kentridge's d
The pastoral f
brainscape, a
geological met
and Wanting
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The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats 29
g.
OX
Xx
Ig
AA
... Embedded within the rock.. . are memory layers, fossilized like primordia
records of long extinguished species" (VWK 71).
The allusion to "extinguished" rather than "extinct" species points me to
poem called "Dispossession" by the contemporary Australian language poet Jo
Kinsella, whose work parallels Kentridge's in its depiction of landscape po
marked by industrial waste and the traces of assault on native peoples. Kinse
employs the word "extinguishment" (accentuated by an exclamation point) in
riff on the history of Australia's indigenous population, driven off ancestral lan
by mining companies and white hunters:
Dispossession
protection
aggravated
destruction
Almighty
construction
proclamation
probability
autonomy
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30 OCTOBER
links
quality
vis-5.-vis
the centralised
London dealer in native art
landing
like something out of songlines
the press
commission/s
traditional
punishments
appropriate
authentic
threads
heresy
controls
white hunters
alcohol
abuse
custody
motivating
sit-down
leaders
nominated
by
mining companies
pastoral leases
progressive
impacts
and sustain
extinguishment!
As assistance
modifies acts
presence
traces
the local
and maintains
representatives
authentic
claims
to constitutional
strategy
faith
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The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats 31
and ownership
rifles
revisionist
histories: lights
rain the sky
shackles1'
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32 OCTOBER
own dialectal
tribespeople /
radio talks ba
English, and a
sound slippag
man") or th
anticipated "m
Our educatio
on the koori radio.
While Kinsella's own language games are clearly indebted to Fogarty's loc
formalism, he also crosses theory with pastoral genres in ways that tie him to
American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, a loosely linked group including Cha
Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Jed Rasula that by the mid-1980s w
translating continental theory into writing praxis. Many of the texts in Kinse
Visitants collection experiment with ecological phenomenology and transformational
grammar. The poem "Skeleton weed/generative grammar (for Noam Chomsky),"
example, suggests a genetics of language or agrilinguistics in its play on langua
trees. Several poems bear epigraphs drawn from Jacques Lacan, Jacques-A
Miller, and the Australian Lacanian feminist Elizabeth Grosz, and these frame t
function as more than intellectual captions. Kinsella uses psychoanalytic conc
developed by these theorists-panic, fear, anxiety, the uncanny--to stage wha
Spivak has referred to as "the spectralization of the rural." In the poem "keepi
your mouth shut--against conspiracy," the rural is erased by the alien presence
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The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats 33
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34 OCTOBER
a painted ba
has no part i
you is const
the sheds, th
cybernetic a
fashionable
birds that fly
and grace of
while wearin
to mytholog
Oiseaux sur des branches relevant
... ....
. .. ..
. ....-.... .S ~ jI
..... ..
V - 4i
lab '
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36 OCTOBER
that every
attention to
produce a kin
the relations
visually soft
dithering. W
by ditherin
assume their
The effects
directed at
send-up of p
like a Europe
in Indonesia,
(1993), that s
effect. As Al
(a picture of
real), and th
final results
the view of
visual field
motorists fr
deflect the g
reveal how f
of piles of s
managed ecol
Gursky blu
habitus in a
in his repert
logical treat
draws the vi
Opposite t
Mettman.
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?4 A,
ItS
Xx.
P
oer
t7-
?x, -vQ M?
ggg-p:
Vx 141
Al
Sol
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n,
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APR,
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'gt -mw "i
. ...... . .. - .
--iii~i'i'i?iiiiiiiiii!i! i! WNW.
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mysteriously and deteriorating to rubble and construction, what is this other than a climbing out of
nothingness, tempted every time to search for the other side. (And no trace of it so that we could
contain it in cycles!) Just as a sand dune is blown by the wind and takes on a certain shape for a while,
and then again, is gone with the wind? What is everything we do other than a nervous fear of being
nothing: starting with pleasures that aren't any, but rather instead are just noise, a stimulating chatter
to kill time, because a dark certainty warns us that it will ultimately kill us. All the way through to those
transcendent inventions, and meaningless heaps of money that kill the spirit, whether one is sustained
or smothered by it, the fearful, impatient modes of the spirit, of clothing, which changes continually.
And the way this addiction to renewal in one's existence makes one perpetually mobile, is motivated by
nothing other than destitution, between one's own nebulousness and the already foreign shell that has
hardened over one's predecessor, which once again is a kind of fake self, an approximate group-soul
that is shoved onto one. And if one pays just a bit of attention, one can always see in the newly arrived
past the future of coming ancient times (translation by Zaia Alexander).
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The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats 39
21. Roland Barthes, "The Image," in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley, Calif
University of California Press, 1986), p. 352.
22. "Programming languages have eroded the monopoly of ordinary language and grown into a ne
hierarchy of their own. This postmodern Tower of Babel reaches from simple operation codes who
linguistic extension is still a hardware configuration, passing through an assembler whose extension
that very assembler. In consequence, far-reaching chains of self-similarities in the sense defined
fractal theory organize the software as well as the hardware of every writing. What remains a problem
only recognizing these layers which, like modern media technologies in general, have been explicitly co
trived to evade perception." See Friedrich Kittler, "There Is No Software," in Friedrich A. Kittler: Literatu
Media, Information Systems, ed. JohnJohnston (Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, 1997), p. 158.
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40 OCTOBER
In a piece c
treacherous waters connected to an actual fish tank. "Go Fish" examines
. . . . . . . . ....
..........
NoO
Me
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The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats 41
...................
.. .......................
zo.
Ay,
... .. .....
.. ...... ... .
... . ..........
. . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . ...
Me:
...... .......
.................
. . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
Klima reveals the extent to which media environments, governed by the law of
"your loss is my gain," and long-distance ethics, coordinate the cooperative
relationship between globalization and ecological exploitation. Interface
emerges as a habitat in which ecological responsibility is shown to be dissolved
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42 OCTOBER
and rearticul
that masks th
they also sym
into ecosystem
nature in the
Klima uses t
way to enviro
is causally imp
sharply with,
fish (Ocean Ear
Allan Sekula'
industry), or
toxic swimm
debris in an ominous storm). Each of these fish-themed works enlists an
environmental conceptualism in its treatment of medium, and each depicts a
growing social panic about the death of oceans, the ingestion and circulation of
PCBs in the food chain, the precariousness of fishing economies, and the
apparition of that supranational sea monster currently crashing the Kyoto
Protocols that Negri and Hardt associate with Empire. But in Klima's installations,
the computer medium itself is both the tool of environmental damage and the
representational vehicle of critique. The visible conversion of data transfer
into nature (and the reverse) allows the viewer to pinpoint where the survival
of natural habitat becomes critically endangered.
Unlike many artists working with digital technology, Klima avoids the
temptation to show what digital art can do as the next fine art-its success at
mimicking, in a new medium, the naturalist topoi of the sublime or the conventions
of pastoral genres. Nor does he simply affirm the naturalization of technologically
saturated representation (as some critics have accused him of doing, dismissing
him as a superficial technophile interested in computer games and high-jinks
interactivity).23 If anything, his work denaturalizes digital imaging, making the
viewer hyper-conscious of the technological mediation of the world and its
images; extending the reach of environmental activism and providing ecosystems
access to self-representation in a visual form other than landscape or nature
pictures. In this regard, Klima is complemented by the artist Wolfgang Staehle,
whose 2001 "live" WebCam projection of the New York skyline became an
overnight sensation due to its inadvertent capture of the World Trade Center
attack. Like Klima's project based on the Japanese game "Go" (in which satellite-
23. Barbara Pollack's review of Bitstreams designates Klima's ecosystm as "the weakest link" in the
show. "Despite the initial thrill of seeing a computer animation projected on a wall, the ultimate wide-
screen video presentation, only those completely unfamiliar with Nintendo 64 or Sony PlayStation
could be dazzled by Klima's graphics. The thrill, if any, comes from finding a video game-gee
whiz!!!-in an art museum" (Barbara Pollack, "Back to the Future with 'Bitstreams,'" in Art in America
9 [September 2001], p. 61).
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The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats 43
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44 OCTOBER
networks an
cannot simp
demystified
resistance as
be made pro
that resist
acceptance o
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