 So I would like to say hello to everyone who's joining us. My name is Anna Reid and I'm head of research here at the PMC. A warm welcome to this fourth event and first keynote session of the Paul Mellon Centre's autumn series, British Art and Natural Forces, a state of the field conference. The series includes more than 10 sessions and we'll conclude with a panel discussion on the Thursday, the 3rd of December, so please be sure to join us for that. The recordings of these events are accumulating on the PMC website, so refer to those. This year the Centre marks its 50th anniversary as an institution dedicated to the study of British art and architecture. And it's a year in which artistic practice and the practice of our history have met with the unprecedented force of a global pandemic. As a result, this series of events focuses on the encounter between artistic and art historical practice and the forces of the natural world. And it's also focusing on the human agency and reflexive awareness or natural forces in their own right. It places such encounters in both contemporary and historical perspectives. In doing so it aims not only to respond to the exigencies of the current moment but to foreground some of the most vital activities and conversations taking place within the field. Today's first keynote session will be chaired by Mark Hallett and Mark is director of studies at the Paul Mellon Centre. Thank you Mark and I'll turn it over to you. Thanks very much indeed Anna, and I just wanted to say thanks to Anna to Ella Fleming and to Danny Convoy. Danny Convoy all colleagues here at the PMC who help make not just this event but the whole programme of events across this remarkable series of webinars and lectures right through the autumn happened so many thanks to Anna to Ella and to Danny. Yes, I'd like to begin however by just giving you some some housekeeping notes if I can. It's a very exciting moment to be able to see that we've got more than 50 almost 60 people already signed up to this event. And just to list some of the points that we would like you to bear in mind as as part of this event. I think you'll be automatically muted when you join the webinar can only communicate verbally if we the hosts unmute you. Andrew's talk is going to last around 45 minutes. And as you'll have seen we've scheduled plenty of time more than half an hour for discussion where we invite you to ask questions and that's a really crucial part of making these events work as well as possible. There are two questions that you'd like to ask Andrew that relate to his topic to his discussion to his imagery as you as you listen. There are two ways you can ask questions, we'd actually prefer it if at all possible. If you can use the virtual raise hand button that you'll see as part of your repertoire of instruments. If you have a question or comment, and then we can unmute you and you can use you can make that you can, you can actually ask directly Andrew directly verbally a question. But if for any reason you prefer to do it slightly differently, please do use the Q&A box to ask or write your questions as well. And at the end of the Andrews talk, we'll be able to draw on those questions and repeat them to Andrew and get his responses to them. So please use the chat box that we have, or the Zoom has to make comments or to let us know if you're experiencing any technical difficulties and our team will try and remedy that remedy any difficulties you might be facing. So as it says there the session will be recorded but no photographs should be taken please. And of course as it goes without saying any offensive behavior will not be tolerated and attendees can be removed from the webinar by the host. Either the housekeeping things I wanted to report, but now I'd like to turn over to introduce Andrew himself and Andrew as of course many of you will know holds the chair of Scottish visual culture at the University of Edinburgh. And he teaches and writes in two main areas and it's interesting to see how someone can become such a specialist and such an expert and such an authority in two very distinctive areas. It's a really admirable thing to have achieved, I think. First of course Andrew is a specialist on Scottish post 1945 art. He's written text for artists and exhibitions since the late 1980s, 1980s in this area. But secondly, and I guess of course most importantly for us, he's become a really one of the most interesting thinkers and writers about ecological artists themes and methods. And of course that current thinking is represented most fully in his book, the ecological I assembling an ecological art history which was published by Manchester University Press in 2019. That's already emerged as a really crucial text in the field in the field that this conference, this conference program addresses. So to devise a theme for this state of the field program. We were very keen indeed that Andrew might that might join us because if he's someone who's writing in thinking really gets to the heart to the centre of this topic we felt. And so we were delighted that he accepted invitation and did so with such enthusiasm. I'm so delighted that he's here and I can introduce him right now to you all. And as I said, we'll be talking for 45 minutes, be plenty of time for discussion after as we really look forward to the debate that follows but also, and especially, we really look forward to Andrew's own talk. Now, a keynote lecture which is entitled great title apocalyptic conjunctures, the weather of art history. Andrew, thanks very much and over to you. Mark, let me just get my sharing screen up. I take it that's all visible. Yes. Great. Okay, thank you very much Mark. Thank you everyone at Paul melon centre, particularly to Ella and to Anna for the invitation to speak it's an honour of course to be part of the celebrations and to mark the 50th anniversary of the centre. It's a wonderful research programme, British art and natural forces I've been following most of the panels so far and the richness of the work that's being done is is really inspiring. And actually this richness in the community of our history and practice, our practice is something that I want to talk about. But keep momentum going over the next 45 minutes or so, and I'll be jumping to warn you I'll be jumping between close textual readings, some, some thoughts on methods and creative art practices of course, but set within a wider reflection on the prospects for environmental humanities and for our history today. So in this kind of assemblage that I put together it, there's some sense can be made. And I will jump around between my slides. So epigraph I've chosen for the talk today as a passage from the great American poet, Adrienne rich. She is a writer and a spectator hypnotised by the gorgeousness of a destructive force launched far beyond her control. She can feel the old primary appetites for destruction and creation within her. She chooses for creation and for language. These words by Adrian rich concern the problem of how to write poetry about the experience of watching a nuclear test on television. She captures themes I want to explore here, the tension between spectatorship and action between creativity and the words that accompany them. There's an ambition enriches words to blend politics and formal method, which fits my purpose. The historical focus is around the apocalyptic presence of World War two, the subsequent nuclear threat, and today's climate collapse. And this is in line I guess with my wider explorations on the ecological possibilities in art history, and the new urgencies that surround this inquiry. I hope everyone here who has been kind enough to spare some time today will have reactions and comments at the end and as Mark said I would really welcome that and I'm very pleased there's there's a good time for that. Let's get real about our current situation. As Anna has already said and the poor melon center acknowledges in its publicity for the whole program. This event like all events across the globe has been hit by a natural force. So I'm going to have a room with you all now and enjoying all the natural feedback and presence that that event would entail. The center talks about quote the exigencies of the current moment and rightly sets them alongside ongoing scholarship in British art studies, which evidences a new intensity, as it says quote a new intensity on the overlaps between geophysical, biological and ecological bodies of knowledge. There's indeed a new intensity around these conjunctures between art aesthetics, writing and curatorial practices, and the ecological geophysical and I would add political aspects of our situation. Despite the gloom and the restrictions, I want to try to be more hopeful with my conclusions than the current condition might allow. So a lot of my ideas are set out fully in the book I published last year the ecological eye is based on the hardly controversial belief that our historians need to calibrate somehow in their own immediate professional interests, and alongside the threats and injustices posed by human induced climate change. We do not know yet whether the formal adoption of the term Anthropocene by the International Commission on Stratigraphy marks a fatally negative force that the human race has inflicted on itself. But we surely do know that any corrective route out of it will be forged by communities who have paid attention to the right kinds of things and acted accordingly. Historians would concur that intensity produces an understanding of the complex webs of interaction that play out in compact ecologies and material form, artworks, cultural situations, politically induced opportunities and the like. I can see this already in the previous talks given as part of this program at the melon. A paradigm shift in what is the true object of humanity's work, not a rejection of all that has gone before, but a repurposing and refocusing within our discipline as a cultural practice. We work within an ecology of practices to use Isabelle Stenger's great phrase for whom a practice does not define itself in terms of its divergence from others. As she says, quote, its own positive and distinct ways of paying due attention. Some of you may be very familiar with Wolfgang Beringer's the cultural history of climate. There he states that pre-enlightenment European culture believed in the link between weather and human transgression. The term eco-sin captures the religious framing for devastating floods, harvest failures and pestilence. He writes, the sin economics of the time produced the key link between nature and culture. It was the mechanism that helped a meteorological event to acquire its social significance. He draws the distinction between a punitive God of earlier centuries directing wrath against sinning populations and the sins of the capitalist scene where nature itself punishes humans. Unfortunately, as Rob Nixon in the classic slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor noted, this punishment is not meted equally. Forgive the historical compression of this slide I'm showing which captures the cultural and spiritual arc we have traversed. And that Beringer's book covers, namely the move from the sky as medium through which biblical symbols fly to emerging of vaporous atmospheres into which the symbols disappear and the weather is the apocalypse to a flooded field and an insurance claim. To say this as directly as I can, the Anthropocene denotes a cultural force, the negative force of developed world humans on our planet. We are the force upon which we wreak our own violence. Art history needs to become a post human practice rather than a humanist one to capture that change. At the end of my talk I'll discuss a few select artists practices that speak particularly to the geologic atmospheric and nuclear, but I also want to work towards that through a more technical aspect, and the form and method of art historical writing and how politically engaged can such formalities be. When Richard Enrich, the author of my opening epigraph deals beautifully with the problem that I think many eco critical art historians face, crafting their work from within the discipline, whilst recognizing the existential threat that environmental collapse represents. When Rich writes in someone is writing a poem that I can't write a poem simply from good intentions, wanting to set things right, make it all better, the energy will leak out of it, it will end by meaning less than it says. She captures one objection I have heard from art historians, good intentions such as environmental awareness will not make good art history. And I think we can also add exploring ecologically engaged themes in art does not necessarily lead to making good or even interesting art. As you know it, rich turns to language and word Smithery, but one inflected with ideals of natural force, our theme here. Words are being set down in a force field. It's as if the words themselves have magnetic charges, they veer together or in polarity, they swerve against each other. Part of the force field the charge is the working history of the words themselves. This is something about not her own poem but one by Lynn Emmanuel, inspired by the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Nevada. Rich recognizes that the power of the poem, and that of the bomb have to be different. She recognizes the problems, the problem in these distant events, observing that as I opened with. She can't remain a spectator hypnotized by the gorgeousness of a destructive force launched far beyond her control. The form then for rich is a way of handling the horror, avoiding being swamped by it. As art historians we hear the visuality of riches language spectatorship and hypnotism for example, we recognize common themes in modern and avant garde art around destruction, creation language and human appetites. Many critical art history and perhaps any art history at all concerned with specific periods or places is about the mismatch between our craft practice through writing or creating and the immensity of the environmental issue. Not surprising then that there is an increasing amount of reflection on the weather or atmosphere in the humanities in history and in art history. There is a turbulence in the current system, we could say from deep ash Chakrabati seminal, the climate of history 2009. Two years later to Kathleen Stewart's essay atmospheric achievements. It sets up an atmosphere as a force field and as a lived effect, a capacity to affect and be affected that pushes a present into a composition and expresses expressivity, the sense of potentiality and event. I would like a wonderful contribution to a new journal called venti from art historian Mark Cheatham, the speaker in this program. In atmospheres of artist art and art history, Mark expresses a desire to see our history as less restful and more distressed and more uncomfortable threatening and inevitable. My point here is that histories have weather, just as weather has history. Again, another visual expression of what what I want to turn to now, however, activist or inactivist one wish one wishes one's work to be. What I think cannot be denied is that environmental apocalypse implies a collapse of critical methods and need for wider epistemologies that marks a move from the first art historical methods that were fashioned in the 19th century, when romanticism, industrial and colonial expansion produced some heavy weather towards the atomic age, and now to find methods appropriate for the Anthropocene, where everything has culminated in a perfect storm. This slide of three images spanning three centuries of British art, again stands in front of another arc across the atomic scale. This is why I think Herbert Reed has such a pivotal place, much of his work is steeped in 19th century romanticism, but his journey took him through the Second World War, the nuclear threat, the Cold War, and on towards political ecologies that had more influence than is recognized. Alan Antliff, an artist historian who's studied closely anarchist cultures notes, Reed searched for art that prefigured anarchisms open structures on a metaphorical level as form. I go into some detail on Herbert Reed in the Ecological Eye, particularly his anarchist views published mainly in writings dating from the 1940s. He drew on radically organic and romantic political models of the past, but created a speculative space I suggest into which an ecocritical art history might use today. He invigorated certain dimensions in 1930s and 1940s anarchist culture. Reed seems important, not least because his political and educational texts in the 1940s profoundly influenced the later politics of radical thinkers looking for alternatives in the 1960s to Marxism, and of course were against the dominance of free market capitalism. First and foremost in that later effort was American intellectual and ecological writer Murray Bookchin, a giant in anarchist and ecological ideas and their variants that he branded as social ecology. Herbert Reed also broadened the scope of art historical and practical interest, for example, with the support of the independent group in the 1950s around the establishment of the ICA in London, whose outline policy he wrote, and which he saw as quote, a microcosm of a modern anarchist society, and quote, around the same time he was active in the nuclear disarmament movement. Scholar Jerry Zaslov makes a strong claim for Reed's future relevance, asserting that Reed's example represents something of a lost opportunity. The moment when British art history sought to embrace wider contextual perspectives, a larger sense of purpose, and a radical political vision. That moment was missed. The celebratory exhibition hosted in 1993 at Leeds City Art Gallery called Herbert Reed, a British vision of world art, largely ignores his politics, which Alan Bones in the book called quote impossibly utopian, end quote, and points to the contradiction that Reed's anarchism didn't stop him accepting a knighthood in 1953, when of course the anarchist movement rightly abandoned him as an ally. Nevertheless, Reed predated by more than 20 years the renaissance in British anarchism of the 1960s. The work Education Through Art was a work motivated by Reed's dissatisfaction with anarchism's association with political violence. Quote, it is not often realized, he reflected. How deeply anarchist in its orientation, a work such as Education Through Art is and was intended to be end quote. In this book, he argued that aesthetic education could remodel social relationships on a non hierarch in a non hierarchical fashion. Importantly, in a context like today's that is focused on British culture and art. Matthew Adams claims Reed as embodying the presence of an indigenous strand of radical thought that sought novel solutions for the problems to the age, end quote. And I cannot help but observe that Reed's example is precisely the same as that which faces eco critical art history today in 2020. Morris student of Peter Kropotkin, that's than that of the medievalism of William Morris. He followed the former Kropotkin's model of hybridizing technological sophistication with the politics of localism. He called for social change on the cellular and molecular levels to something that has become incredibly powerful now in, for example, the attention paid to grassroots roots activism. And I would refer you to a book like Lucy Niels playing for time of 2015 on activist environmental creative strategies. I mentioned Murray Bookchin, author of the classic The Ecology of Freedom, among many other books, made numerous comments on Reed quoted him at length and acknowledged Reed's formative part in his own political awakening. These decades for Reed the 1940s and 1950s, so an overlaying of one environmental environmental crisis over another, the mass devastation of nature, humans and other than humans. This was the Second World War, released the world into a nuclear future. Wolfgang Beringer quotes rights of the 1950s as a period of epochal changes with the rise of domestic equipment, where resource colonialism and energy hungry appropriation was the order of the day. And struck by a similar overlay we are experiencing now, one dominated by decades long environmental crisis, first registered around the time following the Second World War, and now injected with a sharper pandemic that radically has changed behaviors globally in a way that the silent ecological revolution has not. Here is a great passage by David Thistlewood, anarchist, historian working through Reed's aesthetic, which caught the merging of the nuclear as the dominant natural force of its time and the artwork that so closely echoes today's theme. This new sculpture respected the organic but not as an exclusive priority. It expressed materializing forces earth, air, fire, water, and harness them to a collective psychic anxiety in the presence of the atomic threat, creating restless linear symbols of energetic nervousness, or casting in the solid state the visual characteristics of molten liquidity. The sculptor would exercise uncontroll in rescuing from the formless flux of molten materials solidified moments of intense significance. The gentle organic archetypes of the generation that had matured in the 1930s receded before archetypes shot through with anxiety, the tensed animal, the scuttling insect, the water, the stranger flexed for flight. Natural forces shaped much of Reed's writing from the organic metaphors that shaped his political ideology to the blitz under which he penned education through art. And to the apocalyptic tone that prefigured the geometry of fear of the 19 other sculptures of the 1950s that Thistlewood has just described. I think today our fears come in ecological form, rather than geometrical form and ecology of fear, if you will, expressed in contemporary artworks as they seek to process combustible landscapes flooding plastic poisoning GM food distribution and pandemics of many kinds. Art historians of an eco critical turn cannot fail to recognize that artworks are indices of natural forces and that consequently British art, along all others is itself a natural force. I want to pick up this thread of method I started with using a few ideas that are still very much green. And I mean green in both the political sense, and in the sense that I haven't developed them very far. I sense that cultural studies might have something useful for us through the writings of Stuart Hall and his colleagues on the conjunctural nature of cultural analysis. All arrived in Britain from Jamaica to take up a scholarship at Merton College Oxford in 1951. Coincidentally of course the same year that growth and form by Richard Hamilton, and others in the independent group was put on the ICA. And what I've seen and what I've offered in relation to Herbert Reed, the numerous thematic conjunctures adhere to any art historical approaches that deal with environmental concerns. I turn briefly to Hall's idea of conjuncture and explore how ecological and environmental, it might be as a tool. The idea of conjuncture will help formalize a model, the complex array of themes and agents that circle around eco critical art history, and make it tell a better set of stories about art, and the diverse cultural periods we are all working with. Conjunctural thinking is a way of getting cultural analysis right, and reflecting its complexity. We avoid overly abstract theorizing at one extreme. And on the other hand, not to drift into an excessive particularism and description. Objects never float unsituated and free from ecological and environmental urgencies. What is conjunctural analysis. Broadly it was a term that Hall took from grant she to capture convergent and divergent tendencies that might operate in a field of study over a particular period of time. At a primary level, moments of political struggle become key. In our context, this is clearly about those who are concerned about climate, either in their life beyond academia, or within their writing, and those who are ignoring or supporting climate degradation. A second level would be the interstitial problems that cut across these positions. Again, we and others are working with the problems of nature and modernity and trying to tease out the tensions produced in not seeing them in relation. Then a third level is how the crisis, in our case the eco critical crisis plays out in on the ground in real time and at this moment. For example, I've been fascinated to see in recent writing how recurrent issues of race, so crucial to Hall are joining in complex ways with other forms of injustice. And that includes environmental justice, something that the other two keynotes, I believe will address in far more depth with far more insight than myself. Marxist ideas of power relations. Now, I seem to include wider energies and forces beyond class governance towards embodiment care, responsibility, nature and place. The social field expands towards an energetic field, more akin to Adrienne Rich's magnetic field of words I quoted above. All of us attempting to do eco critical art history will share this sense of vertical and challenge, trying to capture what is going on, and what questions need to be asked of this contradictory and fragmented landscape. And being honest about how potentially paralyzing the complexity is when you're stuck in the entangled nature of an environmental emergency and cultural practices that it is producing. Stuart Hall's primary problem was set around race in releasing the crisis. Stuart Hall saw the task to calibrate black culture in Britain, with the impact of law and order policies as channeled through politicians and the judiciary, and the idea of local communities. Then something as intangible and atmospheric as the popular mood of the people and the communities at the time, and the effects of localized poverty and discrimination. Stuart Hall was writing the new art history of the 1970s was a parallel kind of response. All well and good, but now the situation requires amplification and translation for post human, as well as human life worlds. This is where eco critical art history is so important yet so challenging. It is in trying to capture the epochal nature of our subject. Art history isn't used to doing this, and that is why eco critical art history is currently challenged to be both environmentally attuned and methodologically sure footed. This is also why natural forces atmospheres, weather and climate shape our language and practice, more than they have since art history was formally established two centuries ago. This is the weather of art history that I'm seeking seeking to partner up with and all other environmental humanities work. It needs close analytical work and it is not easy. Jeremy Gilbert, a cultural studies supporter of Hall's method insists rightly that ecological and environmental factors not traditionally considered to be significant conjunctural factors must be taken into account for the serious analysis of many contexts. Struggles and analysis at the level of the national popular are no longer separable if they ever were from those affecting the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Geological Stabilities and flows or the organic or the organic cycles of local ecosystems. To read this, I hear echoes of that passage in Herbert Reed's education through art, where he draws attention to his sedate writing environment in dramatic contrast to the blitz and the violent geopolitics that ravaged the world beyond his book. He wrote of the Burnham trees, casting their golden rain against the hedge of vivid beach leaves, whilst hearing simultaneously about the biggest air raid in history, taking place over Cologne and destroying it. Again, simultaneously he notes major battles occurring in Ukraine and Libya, taking out innocent lives as he called quote in a fury of mutual destruction. So I want to turn in my in my last section to a couple of artists Susan Schupley and Ilana Halperin, neither British, but both working from here, who have something to contribute to our topic in a positive spirit of research led art practice and deep engagement with natural forces. Ilana Halperin describes art practice itself in conjunctural terms in his book eco aesthetics 2014, and he writes of art as interruption, intervention and contradiction. And I think our history also interrupts, intervenes and plays with contradiction. That's why it's so testing to do art history well. So in operations and offering sites outwards on climate change cultural awareness. But back to the practice. Susan Schupley is an artist and researcher based in London and part of forensic architecture at the goals at Goldsmiths College. She can be put alongside a number of other artists who work with nuclear and environmental border. Borders such as Jane and Louise Wilson series of photographs at Adam grad nature of whores a vacuum 2010. Or I think an undervalued artist who I've written about elsewhere. I'm Stefan Jack a British artist of a Ukrainian background, whose work is inspired by Chernobyl. The Elephant's foot, which is a glass reproduction of the foot like an extremely radioactive remains of the reactor core and the fuel rods found at the bottom of reactive for Chernobyl. She also sifts through material evidence from war and conflict to environmental disasters. She also explores the way in which toxic ecologies from nuclear accidents and oil spills to the dark snow of the Arctic are producing an extreme image archive of material events, always alert to the way that material that weather nuclear material and other natural forces have both national and global aspects that play out across geopolitical boundaries. She like many artists continues some of her but reads activist concerns in the 1950s and 60s around nuclear testing and disarmament. The sonic feedback loops of 2017 is a 35 mil vertical film lasting 18 minutes and was commissioned for the vertical cinema and sonic acts in Amsterdam. She was researched in this case took her to just south of Amsterdam in a rural setting where an open air laboratory called the Cabau experimental site for atmospheric research is tuned in to the atmospheric frequencies of nature. Its subject is the complex behavior of clouds aerosols, radiation, precipitation and turbulence and how they interact with terrestrial events. Since 1970 the lab has been measuring and monitoring the changes that take place in the feedback loops between land surface processes and the airborne dynamics of our planet. Atmospheric feedback loops uses vertically stacked video projection to echo the shape of the tower at Cabau. The video follows two scientists who analyze climate and weather and creates a soundscape made by the research instruments at the site. As one of the scientists based there said, quote, we look at the atmosphere, we listen to the atmosphere. As we are humans, we have to interpret our measurements. So we like to make them audible or visible to ourselves. End of quote. I'm interested in the work because it seems to be about environmental attentiveness by the scientists and also by the artist. The science is a metaphor for the job of a critical art history, which is to pass a situation for its desirable and useful character and leave out everything else as excess dissonance or obstruction to make things visible to ourselves. There is a long lineage around sensing the earth from the handmade to the technologically complex, which is interested at numerous artists, not to say environmental scientists and worldwide. In another trip to have images to capture that arc. I'm showing you Frank Perry, a very famous well conologist from the early part of the 20th century. I'm still from a work by Ursula Beeman from acoustic ocean. And a Glasgow based artist called Stephen Hurrell. Working with seismic sounds of deep geology. So this takes me to my second artist, Alana Halperin. Basically, and Beeman's work, for instance, and many others show urgency and deferral play out today on global scales as the climate crisis is articulated through the noisy voices of environmental science, whether modeling temperature comparisons, fires droughts and floods. The drama one attaches to such manifestations. All depends on how long you are prepared to wait to see the difference that will make a difference. This de disorientating pivot between acceleration and urgency marks a very peculiar historical moment where the waiting for confirmatory data, for example, in relation to temperature rising or glacial disappearance continue yet seems now unnecessary. And this waiting and urgency are coded excruciatingly in current climate narratives. And this double aspect is conjuncture between fast and slow themes is embodied by this artist Alana Halperin, who I worked with and written about for over a decade. This is natural forces as collaborator or agent in her work, whether it be through the production of work in calcifying caves in France, silica rich lagoons in Iceland, volcanic regions around Vesuvius and Hawaii, the internal human mineral flows that produce body stones around magma heated thermal pools in Beppu, Japan, where you can boil eggs by the heat coming from below the pavement. And here are two geothermal sculptures one being as it's extracted from the blue lagoon in Iceland. And the one on the left is the silica encrusted template exhibited as a final sculpture a bridge between the living and the dying. That was installed in the exhibition, I calculated with Sarah Barnes called Steiner in the Medical History Museum in Berlin in 2012. I'm going to share one other work to have a performance Halperin did outside or at the mouth of Fingals cave staffer and the outer hebrides in 2014. And very carefully, you can see me sitting on the rocks in front for reasons of both time, maybe both deep time and today's time. I'm only going to focus on one work and boiling milk, so for Tarris of 1999. It's a much simpler analog and indexical version of the research intensive work by Schuply, but they speak to similar points on natural forces and how to capture them. The boiling milk so for Tarris is not so much framed by geological fishes or eruptions, but by the slow transfer of geothermal heat around the springs of Kravla, Kravla volcano in North Central Iceland. The heat passes through an extraordinary confluence of different scales, resulting in a transition from deep time to human time. So for Tarris is the name for the geothermal phenomena of bubbling and bursting surfaces mud, water lava that Halperin suggests captures the action of the milk to. We could go further and said that the incompatibility lies also in the temperature as well as well as the temporal. The artist is waiting for the hostile and inhuman temperatures of the Earth's magma to turn into the hospitable heat of one of Iceland's geothermal pools. She does this in a way that removes most of the artifice and intervening instruments that geological research around volcanic regions requires. The work of boundaries and surfaces. As Robert Smithson wrote, quote, the deeper an artist sinks into the time stream, the more it becomes oblivion. Because of this, he must remain close to the temporal surfaces, end quote. Halperin has described boiling milk as more like waiting for all the layers of geological time and activity to make their way up to the surface, to the point that it's humanly viable to connect with it with as little mediation as possible. Geological intimacy is a key term for her. Geological intimacy can only happen at the conjuncture where both phenomena, the human and the inhuman cohabit. Even as short durational performance captured in the photograph somewhat hides the fact that once it is over, the geothermal pool, the geothermal pools work goes on, doing what it does, regardless of human activity around its edges. In an abstract sense, boiling milk captures transference, equilibrium and patience, but there's also a very simple idea of cooking too. Halperin points to impatience as the reverse side of patience, collapsing geological time through art. She asks, how can you facilitate the potential to feel something about geological time in an emotive way? Waiting upon becomes a form of honouring. The subordinate artist conducting a modest ritual in honour of the earth's molten interior, lying not far below the Icelandic pool's surface. Ultimately, I see boiling milk sulfataris as an indigent work in the sense that Karl Lavery uses the term indigence is a word that translates as poverty, but that also contains the word indigeneity in its root. Etymologically then, to be indigenous is to be both poor and also of the earth, and perhaps the most most penuous state that we encounter is to be exposed to the elements to live without shelter, as an orphan, exile or animal. The kind of boiling and waiting time that Halperin enacts in this work is ordinary, anonymous, endless, insuperable, and very much to hand and in front of us. Okay, to start to draw things to a close. For the anarchist writer Kropotkin, whose influence on Herbert Reed and later anarchist thought is beyond measure. The prime force in nature was, as he put it, mutual aid. Kropotkin observed the vast majority of species thrive because of spontaneous patterns of cooperation that also permeate into species relationships. Qualities like altruism, the desire for justice and equal rights was the expression of an evidence for mutualities central place. In the tough neoliberal and innovating work of research metrics, league tables, and artificial internal markets and competition between universities and between cultural institutions. To see to lose sight of the humanities in particular the environmental humanities as being a place of collaboration, mutual aid, and the expression of justice. You might also add resilience, feedback, responsibility, proximity and intimacy. To work in ecocritical art history, alongside colleagues and collaborators in the arts and environmental humanities is to work in a highly energized and inspiring area. And I note that over the last few hours, I did a tiny bit of work on this, it didn't take long, which I think is part of the point that in this window of eight hours of now, a few hours ago up to a few hours hence. There will be an environmental humanities network group in Edinburgh reading texts on black ecology. Will Ray of Leeds University speaking in my own department about history on what our history might tell us about pandemics drawing on Nigerian culture. In an hour or so you can move over to our catalysts talk by system of systems on migration extraction and climate. All of this taking place eight hours today. And what only needs to think of this research program itself at the Paul Mellon Center to see the significant evidence to the number of brilliant emerging and established scholars and artists researchers currently working on this material. Rosie Bridotti in her very well known book, The Post Human, promotes the idea of the humanities as an expression of affirmative politics. In the same vein, art historian Marsha Moskiman has explored the idea of affirmative criticality, so affirmative politics, affirmative criticality. Moskiman did this in contemporary art and the cosmopolitan imagination, written in 2011. Exploring how we do humanities research and teaching in such environmentally testing times. And I think there are plenty of positive signs out there right now, in terms of creative practice, and also in terms of eco critical art history. Okay, just to finish for my part when I was writing this paper on the weather of art history and conjuring with that term. At the moment when I was a teenager was about 15 or 16. And I was walking around my hometown of Dunfermline in five Scotland in winter. And I passed to women at an old and pretty basic bus stop. By the way, this really happened. It's not a joke. So I passed these two women at this bus stop. And one of the women was complaining about the awful weather we were experiencing at the time. The snowy rain was as forbidding as Turner's snowstorm illustrated here. This is terrible weather, she said. Well, her friend replied philosophically, it's better than nothing. The bad weather is better than no weather. And those two five women offered a wonderfully optimistic anticipation, I would say of Rosie Brodotti's affirmative politics. Thanks very much indeed Andrew that was really wonderful thanks so much so. So many things that we could turn to so yeah just to back up what I think Danny's been saying under chat, please feel free to raise your hand if you'd like to ask a question, and I should be able to see those who have done so. I should be able to identify people who I might be able to ask to to who may want to ask a question first of all. In fact, right away before I even have the chance to ask Andrew question Mark cheating who's listening would like to ask Andrew your question Andrew so Danny can we turn Mark's audio on and maybe see him and then we can hear Mark's question in live as it were. No problem. Mark, you can now speak. Great, thank you I was just trying to give you a break mark. Thank you so much Andrew for such a probing an interesting paper and I also wanted to thank Mark and Anna and Ella and no dead others at the palm Ellen Center just echoing gratitude on the part of many of us for setting this up it's really tremendous. Andrew, there are so many things that one wants to hear you say more about but I was especially delighted with the idea that you have in your book as well about recuperating Herbert read. Perhaps as you intimated chances have been missed in the past but let's not miss them again and seeing education through art the cover up there from 1943 leads me to this question about pedagogy. I imagine not being able to see who's actually in this webinar but that many of us are fortunate enough to be university teachers. And I wonder if you could say a little bit about how eco critical art history and the ecological crisis has changed your teaching over whatever span of time, you think is appropriate. And also going beyond your own practice in the classroom how how it might or how you would suggest that it change other people's teaching whether they've been in the profession for years or whether they're starting out. Yeah. Thank you Mark. Nice to chat to you at last. And those are those are really germane questions. I'm going to back up one stage and say that I'm always very aware because partly I worked as a curator professionally, you know full time for many years before moving into academia, just over 10 years or so before academia and I'm always wary that of course many of these conversations of course they go on sometimes at local community levels they go on in cultural institutions beyond academia, but of course academia is my is my world. I'm absolutely very attentive and very fascinated by how pedagogy and ecological ecological art history works. A couple of things I have this theme as you know in the book about non hierarchy, kind of taking tropes and ideas from from anarchism, but but more broadly than that always looking to kind of flatten hierarchies wherever possible. So one of my responses about pedagogy is to throw it back to students. And it's not very difficult to do. I was teaching entirely Scottish art history post-war Scottish art history. So that included sometimes people like Christine Ball and Ian Hamilton Finley, you know, and there was plenty of you know eco art out there. And then I wrote a course called radical nature that was not Scottish or that included some Scottish material. And what I noticed is a it immediately became full. It's never had a problem it's run for about six years now. It's always fully subscribed a I listened carefully to what the students wanted to, to learn about. So I'm very keen that the learning process is is kind of broad. So I am and that's partly also being careful about the idea of, you know, I'm a white professor in my 50s from, you know, a developed country, how I might want to teach might be different from how students want to learn. So I think the ecological principles in education need to be flipped to empower students. The other thing I would say without going on too too long but just to say what another thing is that what I have noticed is that colleagues, particularly many colleagues in Edinburgh, but also many colleagues elsewhere, and also younger generation academics, get it better than say people who are bi-generational or older. They are already thinking whether they're working with Labour or feminism or medieval art or Renaissance materials. The eco critical or eco attuned our history is being taught in many areas certainly not just the contemporary. So, I mean that's not a complete answer but there's something around that. Thanks Andrew. Okay, thank you. Thanks and thanks Mark for that question. Yes, please. Again, can I encourage people either to submit questions through raising the raised hand function or through our question and answer function. Either way, we'll certainly make sure that Andrew gets to hear about your thoughts, he'll get your question. Can I ask a question, Andrew, I was very struck by the, your reference to the work of Ilana Halperin towards the end of your talk and the way in which her own work gestures to that 18th century volcanic imagery produced by and commissioned by rather, William Hamilton and of course it evoked for me as an 18th century someone has worked on 18th century visual art, the volcanic landscape painting of people like Joseph Wright of Derby and so on. Yes, and then I was thinking about all the imagery that you showed through your talk which was this, which carried, which shared or continued or expressed a certain kind of characteristics and essentially ones which would be in history in the kind of traditional history of art would be linked to landscape. And what I'd like to ask you about is how you think the kind of critical art history that you'd like to see being more widely practiced and you feel should be practiced applies and will work productively in relation to the kind of imagery and objects that's less obviously conducive to that kind of approach. In relation to 18th century art portraits, history paintings. Do you see this is something that's especially alive and powerful when it comes to looking at the representation of the landscaper of nature of climate. What you see is a form of art history that really we should be applying and using in relation to all kinds of visual material. Great. Another great question. Again, a couple of thoughts pop into my mind and indirectly in relation to that one is actually without wishing to mark Cheatham to to over dominate here. His book landscape into eco art does actually deal really well I think with that translation between 18th 19th century tropes of landscape and how they are different from but also in some senses connected to contemporary our practice. And there's a nice trajectory discussed there that I don't really deal with in the ecological eye. But but the main, I think, answer to your question is it is allows me to say a really important point which I, which I do emphasize at the end of the book. What I also emphasized in other conversations is that I think unlike maybe the new art history of the 70s if I can be as bold as that but certainly the more traditional forms of our history that predated that it wouldn't be my role and I'm not going to ever take on that role of of policing or what one might think of as eco critical art history, and I learned that from say colleagues working in Buddhism, Buddhist art, who immediately got back and said there was tons of literature in Buddhist art that wasn't about landscape, but was completely ecological in its thinking. And the answer is as an absolute emphatic. There is no area, and there's no chronological period, and there's no practice that is unavailable to be critical our history, none, none whatsoever. But what form it takes is not for me to say, and, and I would say finally that the lesson here is from literary studies. So what I think is has got some magnificent work that makes this the claim very clear is that the last thing you need to do is keep returning to natural subjects like landscape. You know, yet of course you can do that. And of course that's the first point of call, but portrait chair can be highly suggestive of ecological approaches, and whether that's through materials, whether it's through subjectivity and post humanism or animal representations, critical animal studies can be brought into my job is to give, I would say to give some confidence to emerging scholars that eco critical art history can accompany you and energize your work, wherever you go. It won't for everyone of course it won't just like many approaches don't work for everyone. But to say it's only, it would only be about, you know, the obvious. The great, the great. What's the word the value of eco critical art history is to go, is to go beyond. Thanks very much indeed any other questions that people would like to ask Andrew, either through. Yes. Anna, I think you would like to Anna read one of my would like to ask you a question, Andrew. Thank you for such an exciting paper. I was really lifting off from the idea of the human that you know and portrait chair and and from your very strong sense here about being hopeful and and talking about positivity. I was really struck by the way that you described the Anthropocene, and whether you said that it marks a fatally negative force and I know that the word Anthropocene has become so loaded and so problematic and sort of setting it aside. I was kind of interested in this idea that the kind of the Duke, if you call it the geological age that we're in, and the kind of recognition or the reflex of recognition that takes place in it has a kind of marvellous character to it and it seems to echo through perhaps in the way that some artists originally sort of such as Nash but encountering forces of radioactivity for the first time prior to kind of nuclear atomic weapons or whatever. And could you comment more on the role of the on the position of the human in your thinking on this. I know for such an easy, easy question. So I'm always resistant to, you know, humanism, you know, and I'm much more attuned to a version of post humanism that takes on board subjectivities that are materially distributed. Obviously, you know, other, you know, animals and life forms that includes what you would call inanimate. Which the Anthropocene as a naming strategy, you know, speaks to exactly that animating the inanimate in geology. So, I've talked in the book and I've talked to us where about, you know, Panofsky is great, you know, art history as a humanist discipline is being outdated for precisely that reason that it doesn't account for and too much our history doesn't account for the other than human. I prefer the other than human to the to the non human. So, there's a, there's a breadth there. And yet, and yet, you know, our practices are humanly constructed, although animals have a role in some kind of cultural creation too. So, overly ignoring or overly reducing the human, this is a human event, but the networks and the powers and the, and the vital connections that that go around even the talk like this on zoom are more than human. So, you know, think about including more than is ordinarily included. But of course the another thing to say about the Anthropocene as well is that my position is to just let the geologists get on with it. The aiming of the Holocene was named by a human that the geological epoch with allegedly maybe in but maybe transitioning out of that, whilst I love reading the debates about capitalist scene. And TJ demos speaking later, a few weeks time about the pyrosine, clutocene with Harroway, you know, there's many versions of competing over the term Anthropocene, but that the message is clear is is human agencies destructive capacity uniquely destructive capacity on the geological evolution of the surface of the earth. Thanks very much, Andrew. I think we have a question, Danny from Joy Bailey who would like to ask a question. If you can unmute her joy you should now be able to unmute. Thank you. I'm not going to pretend that I haven't struggled to understand the ideas that you've been talking about. It's a very simple sort of question really the word energy comes to mind with a lot of what you're saying is the energy from the weather or whatever force. How do you think that, as a result of this pandemic, which is another kind of energy which is dictating how we behave and what we do. Do you foresee how that may be translated into art at the moment. Are you a practitioner, Joy, can I ask is it is it something that you work with yourself. I know I'm sorry. Could you ask that again. Yeah, are you a practitioner you're an artist yourself. No, no, it's an art historian. I do paint, I have painted many years, but I couldn't call myself an artist in that in the way you mean. The word energy is being used at the moment in art history. I think you've James Nespots looking at land art and looking at as a form of an energy use, and you've got, you know, historical iconic examples like Joseph Boyce and you've also then of course got artists working in the industry that are continuously very interested in energy flows energy as a resource, whether that's competed for like, you know, oil, or whether it's a kind of form a more spiritual form of vitalism. So energy as a term has become extraordinarily, you know, suitably enough energized and animating in our discipline in the way that we write and think. I think that energy as a as a term, kind of. It seems pre political in a way it doesn't seem automatically to fall into, like if you use the word labor, which is also a form of of of energy, labor has got a very prescribes vocabulary and a very precise center set of meanings. And the short answer is that I can see why energy itself would be inspiring for our practices, and there's plenty of evidence of that. And I think maybe going back to I said to Mark how it's at the beginning, which would be why would one limit how one uses that a form of energy, it should be used by artists in whichever way artists wish to use them, it wouldn't be for an art historian to, to say, you know, how it should be used but it clearly is, you know, an incredibly powerful both metaphor but also material presence. The virus you're quite right the virus is absolutely a form of energy, but also you could pluralize that the energies around virus is a many fold. That's a good question. Thank you. Thanks joy. Andrew we have a question that's come through the Q&A box. And if I can, I'll read it out so that everyone can hear it. Lucy's asked if we have time for one more question I wonder if Andrew would see art history as part of how science claims its authority in the sense that Bruno Latour set this out. That is to say, an aim to reclaim art as part of those networks around our understanding of climate. And if so is that a strong way of understanding this for him. So that, I don't know if that's, yeah. I think when, hi Lucy, it's good to speak to you or see you. Or when you say him, do you mean to me or first you thought you meant Latour. So, yeah, I think this is for you. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, get Bruno on and he could. I've always, I've worked and curated shows in the past and become, you know, very engaged with this, some art science dialogues and of course the binary is now so out of date and so on helpful that you know I'm always nervous about it and actually Latour is more kind of theoretical is very influential on me and many people. I mean it's so influential courses that as Latour himself has started to work with curatorial projects and with artists like Thomas Saraseno, you know, he's become an agent in his own critique. That's not to belittle, you know, his formidable kind of kind of work. So I think my understanding of what Lucy is getting at here is I think quite an imponderable thing for not just art historians. But also I think for members of the public, which is what is so fascinating about thinking ecologically, whether it's to do with art practice or to do with, you know, wider structures within society is the distributed nature of it. And I think the important type of objects comes into play, I think, but also, you know, these distributed energetic flows that so many eco critical writers respond to. So the, so the challenge then becomes how, how is that objectified. How is that understood. How is that made formal in a, in a, in a, in a concrete sense in a material sense in a work of art. I see sometimes members of the public, as well as I think professional academics struggling with that hyper object nature of artworks. I mean some of the artworks that I've talked about, and both of Shoupley and Halperin I would say become more and more revealing the more time you spend with them as they unravel. And that's the case for most good art. But I think particularly for this distributed sense that I say Latua kind of theorized. It's a challenge for for art to have that layered revelation, which I think is part of its power. Thanks, thanks very much Lucy thanks Andrew. We have a question from Rebecca Collins who said many thanks for the talk and really interesting to hear your thoughts and ideas. I also appreciate this, these greener aspects that you shared. What Rebecca's art want. I'm asking on her behalf is she's interested to know whether in future work you plan to incorporate aspects of Stuart Hall's conjuncture with your own within your own writing or approach. And then Rebecca is also interested in the ways in which this might be different differ from or be similar to how a way situated knowledges. How you might think of the differences and or similar overlaps between Hall's conjuncture notion of conjuncture and how are we situated knowledges. Yeah. It's nice to hear from Rebecca. It's nice to have some friendly faces, asking questions. I, I think they're different from each other. But I don't think that is a, is a issue. I don't know that's a negative issue why you, I would like to use and think about Hall's conjunctures, but, but what I think he is dealing with, which I find appealing is how on earth to corral the clear over complexity of ecological situations. You know, I will be the first to put my hand up and say that when I'm dealing with things like ecology and ecocritical thinking and political thinking. I don't understand everything I can't keep up with the reading. There's a lot been happening even since I published the ecological eye. And I think students need to know that to going back to Mark Cheatham's question students need to know that is impossible to know the field because the field is extensive. So I think that's one issue. So I think Hall's way is a way of trying to stop formalize and rest on different layers. Haraway's work I think is has been super important for many and her recent work again she's pivoted so much over recent decades to deal much more with ecological environmental issues in very, very influential ways. But I think that's that's much more to do with being situated in a space and your, your epistemologies coming from your encounter with your environment. So, I see one. This is rather abstract but whole rather more to do with assemblage difference, putting the pieces together, and how away more to do with acknowledging, you know, your positionality within a, within a field, which does, you know, brilliantly allows me maybe to say one more thing here which I think is also kind of important, which is that I'm very keen I think I use it in the book, this notion of being very nervous of what I would call the circular firing And I use this term Greta guard the eco feminist is where I first read about this metaphor, but it has been used out there, the circular firing squad being the warning that people who are broadly speaking on the right side of the debate. Don't just pick away and rather priestly way and I think academics can be rather bad at that, picking away between, you know, minor distinctions between meanings and terms or methods that are broadly speaking allied. So the circular firing squad is a negative model, and we actually need to always remember that, you know, that the challenges here are with capital. They were globalization, they were the injustice they were in inequality. You know, those are the, those are always the issues as our historian I kind of want to, you know, make sure I'm on that side. Thank you. We have Emily Brady has asked has raised her hand and Danny again if you can unmute Emily and Emily you have the chance to ask a question. Oh, only seems to have disappeared. To Emily later, that's another friend. Okay. Oh no she's one sec she's nice. She's back again. So you could ask. I think you've got a moment now you have a chance to ask Andrew question. Hi yes apologies I lowered my hand and I think that made me disappear. Hi, hello. I'm so grateful to be able to hear your talk all the way from Texas. But I just wondered if you could expand on your point, you were saying a little bit about this in response to the last question about how good intentions don't always translate into good art history. Because I feel like I'm tackling that same issue as it were in philosophical aesthetics and also trying to present what may be called a kind of new agenda in light of the climate emergency and the anthropocene to my fellow philosophers and I'm not sure that all of them think that we need to be taking these kinds of issues as seriously. And apart from perhaps people simply working on environmental aesthetics. So I just want you to expand a bit more and especially in light of your recent book and discussions you've had with art historians since its publication. Yeah, yeah. And of course Emily you were, you know so incredibly useful in the early stages of me thinking through the book and you know your work has helped a lot in that terms of philosophical aesthetics to do with to do with aesthetic environments. So thank you again for that. A couple of thoughts there I've talked in Warwick about the book, and it was the philosophers that got most annoyed. And I didn't know whether that was because I was being sloppy in my thinking which is probably the case, but also it might have been to do with some nervousness that I think I'm picking up for what you're saying about being dutiful to their own discipline and not want to seem to be derailed by an appeal to you know environmental awareness that for them for whatever reason doesn't appear in their work. So I wouldn't, you know you you would be at the front line of those kinds of discussions in our history which is what you, you asked about. I think I thought there would be more of an ignoring of it. And that is true that there certainly have been our historians who think I'm just not interested in that. I think our historians I've noticed can be rather brutal in what they're interested in. And, and for good reason maybe, but I think increasingly for bad reason, I think there is now an ethical responsibility to at least explore options. I do think though that there is, you know, another way, and that would be that a kind of agency that's outside the discipline, so party activism, you know, certain kinds of engagement beyond your academic field is a completely you know, again, not not for me to judge is completely an adequate response to being a human in a world that is in crisis. It doesn't have to flip over your work on Dutch miniature painting between 1665 and 1667. You know, I'd still think you could do ecological our history within that field. But you know I do think there's an ethical issue about disciplinarians and how you want to take your, your, your discipline in different ways. So one, one response would be the art historians aren't interested stay away from this discussion, and they're not here, you know, and they're doing their work. But the other thing to be honest is that a huge amount of our historians I've been amazed at have have embraced it, or it was already there in their work. And not just younger, mainly younger generation artists joins but not not exclusively. And I don't know whether the way that so many art historians curate, or they, or they know artists there's a kind of an engagement with civic fields beyond academia, I mean I know philosophers have that too, but maybe in our history, it's it's a little bit more explicit. I don't know. I would, I would love to find out how that how your work, the challenges and you know what what's possible in philosophy. Okay, thank you so much I'll follow up I appreciate your answer. Thank you. Yeah, I mean just following on from what you just said, and it's really fascinating to think about whether your own work has been has been as part of a broader is expressive a broader shift that's taking place within the discipline of the field in which more or more people who are curators are entering the field or, or art historians are now so much more likely to curate, and then does feel a need to engage with some of the issues of the moment in their curation, which then is a kind of feedback loop into their research. It's very interesting to think about whether this your own trajectory maps onto a broader change in the field in which the kind of issues that are clearly central for curators, necessarily becoming more central for our historians. Yeah, yeah. I mean it's it's a it's a very open and vital question that my my my nervousness always about this and you know generally I think that's a good thing that this that this happens. My nervousness is the way that in some ways the universities have co-opted this notion of impact. And it, you know, therefore, art historians might be thinking oh my goodness, maybe there's an eco aspect to my work, and I could falsely and impact is is a is a terrible formulation within the universities, and really reductive and really helpful. But the wider idea of, you know, social responsibility civic responsibility for your work, and trying to get that out there is of course a really strong principle, I think. So, yeah, that there have been many, many more shows. And actually, if you treat this as a historical point, earth art, the show in New York in 1969 was really one of the first if not the first. And of course it rode the wave of that 60s land art thinking. But you notice that as soon as Reagan and Thatcher came to power, the eco art exhibitions landscape art exhibitions, they really disappeared, and they started to emerge in the mid 1990s again. And then now, you know, they're all over the place, they're all over the place. So of course they're reflecting broader societal concerns, certainly in the West, and I think wider than that. Well, I could ask you hundreds more questions but it looks like we are probably coming we should really wrap start wrapping things up now I think Andrew and just to. I'm sure I'm speaking on behalf of all of our many participants we've had more than 70, 80 people participating in this event so thanks all of you for attending and for listening. What's interesting is I'm, as I have I'm sure you have and I'm sure there. It's set so many of you away in terms of thinking about your own research and new questions to ask yourselves as researchers as scholars as thinkers about the visual arts and about art history as a discipline that's a perfect way to kick off our series of keynotes, Andrew and it fits beautifully into the overall program of this. The series of events right through the autumn I hope all of you will keep on tuning in and and and signing up to all all our different events this autumn, but I could basically like to thank you all for attending and to thank once more Andrew for giving such an amazingly provocative and stimulating and thoughtful keynote. Thank you very much Andrew. Thank you and everyone for attending I really appreciate it. Thank you.