Necrolandscaping on the Border

In recent calls for an ecological aesthetics capable of reckoning with global Anthropocene crisis,

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Clark Art Institute

landscape’s colonial and neo-colonial dreamwork, master-of-all-I-survey perspectives, and distanced way of seeing that reduces nature to object appear under the sign of negation. However, as I develop in this lecture based on work-in-progress for the current book project Necrolandscaping that draws on current artistic experimentation that confronts and works through the damage of the landscape form, what I term “necrolandscaping” offers a new ars moriendi that contests and endeavors to transform the necropolitical conditions of settler colonial occupation from the position of the already dead and yet still active through an aesthetic tactics of landscape in the deformative that mines the volatile, strangely resilient powers of death for Necrocene ethics.

Jill H. Casid is professor of visual studies in the Departments of Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since the publication of Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minnesota, 2005) which received the College Art Association’s Millard Meiss award, she continues to write on postcolonial, queer and feminist approaches to landscape while pursuing work on the materializing effects of imaging with Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minnesota, 2015) and approaches to the global with Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Clark Art Institute, 2014) which she co-edited with Aruna D’Souza from the Clark conference convened in 2011. As the Clark-Oakley Fellow, she will be completing Necrolandscaping, the first part of a two-book project on Form at the Edges of Life.