Energy Consumption in Art History: State of the Interdisciplinary Field

Making art demands energy. How do art historians study energy consumption? Taking the form of foodstuff, firewood, coal, oil, wind, sea wave, or direct sunlight, the energy that fuels the production of artworks and cultural artefacts falls into the focus of ecocritical art history. This session invites art historians and their interdisciplinary colleagues to reflect on the analytical frameworks, methods, and theoretical approaches that they employ to tackle art-historical issues regarding energy consumption, its contexts, and its consequences from the anthropocenic past to the foreseeable future. In-depth case studies in transregional and transcultural approaches are as warmly welcome as demonstrations of methodological innovation. Although a spatial boundary is firmly set to include the planet Earth and its only natural satellite, there is no limit in regard to the media, cultures, and traditions of artworks and the form of energy consumption. In addition, the agency and intervention of art historians in the current climate crisis and other ecocritical issues relevant to energy consumption can also constitute a self-reflexive discussion in the session.

Session Convenor:

Feng Schöneweiß, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut

Speakers:

Caterina Franciosi, Yale University

J.M.W. Turner’s Topographies of Heat

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) depicted topographies saturated with the forms of energy that fueled Britain’s fossil modernity. From incandescent views of the mineral districts of the Black Country and Northumberland to landscapes of steam-powered mobility, Turner’s watercolors and paintings wrestle with the spatial, temporal, and material reorientations unlocked by a world dependent on the ongoing production and regulation of heat.

This paper examines the formal, thematic, and medium-specific mechanics of Turner’s landscapes from the 1830s and 40s in the context of the period’s scientific and industrial constructions of heat, light, and fossil fuels. At a time when geology, chemistry, and astronomy troubled the boundaries between human and natural agency, between the visible and the invisible, Turner harnessed the formal and semantic economies of energy sources, like sunlight and coal, to materialize the scalar disjunctions that characterize human experience in an age of combustion.

In making the connection between visual representations and the material, formal, and ideological formations of nineteenth-century energy regimes, this paper synthesizes an attention to the social, political, and ecological histories of energy extraction and consumption of specific topographies with the consideration of energy’s shifting characterization in scientific discourse. Such an approach is key to revealing how energy’s tangible and intangible operations subtend the logic of images and objects at multiple, and often unexpected, moments of their creation and signification. By complicating the status of Turner’s works as celebrations of coal-fired industry, the paper presses for a reassessment of nineteenth-century British art and its complicity with carbon modernity.

Feng Schöneweiß, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut

The Impossible Dragon Bowls: Energy, Climate, and Technical Affordance in Early Modern Jingdezhen

1827, J.M.W. Turner completed a group of watercolors at Petworth House, West Sussex, depicting its interior and furnishings. The pictures capture a number of large blue-and-white porcelain jars and bowls collected by the 6th Duke and Duchess of Somerset in the early 1690s. Made in Jingdezhen, southeast China, extant objects at Petworth and elsewhere are dated to the late seventeenth century. In China, archaeological sites and historical collections have preserved their sixteenth-century predecessors, termed the Dragon Bowls in the magistrate’s records. Missionary reports, potters’ oral history, local gazetteers, and archaeological findings together reveal an absence of large porcelains made during the most of the seventeenth century. Why were there no large porcelains like the Dragon Bowls manufactured in Jingdezhen from the early to late seventeenth century? This paper looks beyond the prevailing cultural-economic explanation of a “transitional period” (1620s-1680s) in Chinese ceramic history. Instead, it delves into two forms of solar energy, grains and firewood, to illuminate how severe climate change, particularly the Little Ice Age, shifted the technical affordance of the Jingdezhen porcelain industry (1600s-1720s). Climate disasters and repeated famines reduced the quantity and quality of pottery corvée that used to fill the industry’s skilled labor force. Extremely low temperature, massive deforestation, and lack of labor rendered sufficient firewood and stable kiln temperature less sustainable. Substantiated with findings in environmental humanities, transcultural histories of collecting, and ceramic studies, the paper demonstrates an ecocritical case of art-historical inquiry through the analytical lens of energy consumption.

Shen Qu, Arizona State University

Metal, Water, and Oxygen: Ching Ho Cheng’s Alchemical Works in Time

Ching Ho Cheng (1946-1989), a Cuban-born Chinese-American artist active in 1960s-1980s New York, transitioned from psychedelic painting to gouache interior scenes, and ultimately crafted intricate alchemical works. Across these mediums, he explored anthropocenic history and future imagination, influenced by 1960s counterculture and politics, examining how energy transformed between humankind and nature.

In this presentation, I will focus on Ching Ho Cheng’s late-life alchemical works. Ching invented this time-consuming method to create abstract tridimensional artworks. During the process, Ching usually laid a piece of paper treated with gesso, iron, or copper powder in a pool of vinegar water to create actual rust via oxidation. During the months of such process, Ching’s work became a growing part of his life as he closely observed how his work and himself aged over time. Ching realized that he was as much a part of the world’s energy transformation as his works were. Toward the end of his life, he created a massive irregular alchemical piece, which was in fact a figurative representation of his last wish – his sister scattered his ashes into the Hudson River following his last wish, and according to the direction of the water flow, the path his ashes flowed through was exactly the shape of that piece. Ching’s artistic method finally collided with his life encapsulating his profound understanding of the loop of energy transformation, which constitutes a demonstration of his own philosophical framework that might inspire our current art historical methodology.

Nicolas Holt, McGill University

Minerally Mediated and Energetically Rich: The Hard Matters of Contemporary Art

Energies—whether electromagnetic, photosynthetic, or metabolic—are often thought in opposition to materials. Despite Einstein’s famous yet deceptive equation of E = mc2, matter and energy appear to constitute two distinct realms of physical phenomena. There are, however, certain materials that hold a privileged relation to energies: copper is ideal for the conduction of electricity; carbon sustains combustion; and fluorite transmits ultraviolet and infrared light especially well. Minerals like these are not just energetically rich—that is, catalytic of energies and energetic processes—they are also the targets of one of humankind’ s most energy-intensive and unsustainably energy-productive activities: industrialized resource extraction. Artists today, like Alejandra Prieto, Athena LaTocha, and Otobong Nkanga, are increasingly mobilizing such materials as their media to explore the entanglements between minerals, energies, and extraction. Their practices deploy mineral media to ground, literally and metaphorically, the energies of contemporary life, the geologic forces that help generate them, and the often settler-colonial legacies that have enabled and sustained their exploitation. This talk looks to these practices to propose the category of mineral media as a privileged site for thinking art’s material relation to energies, their economies, and cultural implications. While minerals have been indispensable to artmaking since humans began making art, the Anthropocene’s energetic intensifications demand new ways of understanding the hard matters of contemporary art; this talk suggests one such way.