Burning Matters: The Limits of the Image in a “World on Fire”

In the context of rising global temperatures, raging wildfires, blazing conflict in the Middle East, and ever more incendiary political speech in Western liberal democracies, the politics and aesthetics of fire have become an increasingly important area of study, crucial to understanding a world caught in the throes of environmental crisis and unrest.

This panel considers the role of representation in a “world on fire.” When the flames abate, they leave behind a world changed, but this change needs nuance. How are images of fire deployed in art and media and what are the limits of these images in representing this new reality? How do the frames of art and artworks conflict with and appease the boundaries of representation? Is it possible for burning to be a generative and transformative process, as well as a destructive one? What does studying burnt matter and fire-affected objects reveal about the wider social causes of disaster, both contemporary and historical, and what challenges do they present to the art historical method?

These papers will address modern and contemporary or historical topics including but not limited to the aesthetic politics of fire, fire and non-human agency, fire and environmental politics, fire and conflict, the language of fire and burning, and burnt matter as art and/or testimony.

Session Convenors:

Elsa Perryman Owens, University College London

Jacob Badcock, University College London

Speakers:

Joëlle Dubé, Concordia University

Burnt Matches and the Performed Refusal of Audie Murray in Token Generosity (2024)

The viewers entering the space of the exhibition To Make Smoke (2024) are met with Token Generosity (2024); a grouping of neatly stacked blue books of matches propped on a pedestal and adorned by Cree syllabics (that reads “to make smoke”). The matchboxes are intended for the viewers to take home but, unbeknownst to them, the matches of every single box have been meticulously lit and burnt by the artist. What is offered in this participative artwork, then, is not so much memorabilia as it is the very process of fire consumption, the spectral presence of smoke, the labor of the artist, and the matches’ charred remains.

From the impossibility to capture—and so to offer up—smoke, the inexhaustibility of Token Generosity, to the very intentional refusal of the artist to create a work that conforms to regimes of legibility settler-states often impose on contemporary Indigenous artists, Murray’s participatory work firmly resists appropriation and reads as a form of active refusal in more than one way. Drawing from Performance Indigenous studies scholar Lilian Mengesha’s definition of ‘performing refusal,’ as “methods of wielding of opacity and obscurity, as a tactic to negate the call of minoritarian subjectification,” I argue that Token Generosity uses fire consumption, smoke and charred remains as an artistic tactic of performed refusal deployed to avoid being consumed by the Canadian settler art world that tends to tokenize Indigenous artists, all the while demanding that they produce legible, and so assimilable and easily digestible, artworks.

Clara de Massol, Kings College London

Slow Violence and Toxic Geographies: Commemoration, Hauntings and Grief in Grenfell by Steve McQueen (2023)

This presentation takes its inspiration and subject from the short memorial film Grenfell by Steve McQueen, exhibited at the London Serpentine Gallery from April to June 2023. The analysis, drawing from environmental memory studies and new materialism, is an investigation into contemporary politics of grief and commemoration in neoliberal climate-affected societies.

The Grenfell Tower fire which took place on June 14th, 2017, in West London, resulted in seventy-two deaths and exposed failures in fire safety regulations, building norms, and emergency response procedures, all disproportionately affecting low-income residents. The catastrophe led to public outcries and calls for housing and policy reforms across the UK.

The catastrophe foregrounded critical issues of contemporary neoliberalism, austerity and social inequality and their entanglement with slow violence and toxic contamination. The presentation looks at the politics of mourning in association with necropolitics, hauntology, and toxic geographies to apprehend the ways in which contemporary catastrophes are, and can be, commemorated. In parallel, it apprehends McQueen’s memorial film from a posthumanist and new materialist angle through the idea of more-than-human/inhuman hauntings and ‘burning matter’ (the film is a one-shot drone sequence, mostly silent, with no discernible human figures, except for the human at the centre of it all: both differentially the victims of the fire and the cause of it).

Overall, this presentation has a dual intention, first to explore how the disciplines of critical race studies, posthumanism and new materialism can bring to an examination of contemporary politics of commemoration. The second aim is to interrogate whether, and how, our common moment of the Anthropocene (and by extension ecological crisis) as an epistemic panic disrupts and affects practices and politics of commemoration, and by extension questions the ‘limits of the image in a world on fire’.

Benjamin Mehigan, Royal College of Art

Forging Wildfire Narratives

In 1911, the ‘Great Porcupine Forest Fire’ which burnt half a million acres of Ontario forest, killing upwards of 70 people made international headlines. It was described by the media at the time as “the worst disaster in Ontario history”.

The few visual records which exist of this event largely concern photographs of the fire’s aftermath and the town’s recovery effort. It has since been identified that the iconic image of the blaze itself, the one reproduced in the national press which galvanised support for financial relief, was faked. Its photographer, Henry Peters had produced a composite image of the town’s high street with an image of clouds emulating the appearance of black smoke.

This paper will focus on interpreting this forged image in relation to two paradigms that have continuously surrounded the visual representation of wildfire. One, the technical and practical challenges of photographing ephemera that is bright, hot and fast moving, resulting in fire’s reproduction often bearing little resemblance to reality. Two, that environmental narratives are inaugurated through the images we produce and the knowledge or emotion the general public attaches to them (Pyne, 2018). 

The events in Porcupine; a gold rush community which emerged when North American forested areas were rapidly transformed into various forms of capital, were mediated through photographs; postcards and newspaper reports. Analysis of this media will demonstrate how wildfire images become discursive and socio-political events. By linking this material to contemporary examples, this paper will reflect on ongoing debates surrounding how we communicate the significance of larger, more frequent fires today in the heat of a twenty-first century environmental emergency.

Esme Garlake, University College London

Representing fire with animals: Piero di Cosimo’s The Forest Fire (c.1505)

This paper presents an ecocritical reading of the spalliera painting The Forest Fire (c.1505) by Florentine painter Piero di Cosimo. Art historical discussions of Piero’s representations of fire tend to primarily focus on associations with ancient classical conceptions of early human civilisation, and the humanist implications of skilfully depicting natural phenomena. This paper proposes that Piero’s emotionally resonant animal representations in The Forest Fire also play a crucial role in how the fire – at the painting’s literal centre – was understood by early-sixteenth-century viewers. By taking seriously questions of affect, as well as the domestic setting in which the painting was originally intended for display, this paper aims to recover some of the more emotional responses to fire that this painting may have evoked in contemporary viewers. It considers the extent to which Piero’s semi-human and nonhuman animals provided empathetic points of contact with the viewer, and what this meant for viewers’ interpretations of the fire itself. In what ways do Piero’s animal representations potentially reinforce or contradict the destructive and generative effects of fire, and connected implications of human society? This reading of The Forest Fire also develops critical reflections on the (often anthropocentric) ways in which animal life is used visually and narratively in images of wildfires today (from silhouettes of kangaroos in Australian wildfires to emotive stories of rescuing domestic pets and livestock), and how these dynamics play into collective imaginaries of the climate, ecological and biodiversity crises.