Fixing the Sea: Case Studies Toward a Critical Environmental History of Ocean Art and Science since 1970

Combining art practice and historical methods within environmental humanities, my dissertation critically examines the interactions between oceanographers, artists, and technical objects in Southern California’s university and military research complex during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. I mobilize evidence from research spanning the studio, laboratory, and archives to reinterpret the US ecological art movement through an oceanic turn in visual culture driven by interdisciplinary networks of artists and marine scientists. Focusing on tightening proximities between oceanographers and an ecological art avant-garde, I examine the institutional contours of modernism’s integration with environmentalism. I track these developments through three case studies: a critical analysis of Helen and Newton Harrison’s artwork The Second Lagoon: Sea Grant (1974), artist and writer Allan Sekula’s engagement with capitalism’s oceanic fix and marine environmental traumas in Fish Story (1995), and a participatory account of present-day seaweed research conducted by artists and scientists in relation to intersecting histories of how colonization, maritime capitalism, and globalization are modeled and understood. Today, these histories are crucial because the mediated convergences of visual arts, marine science, and modernism are key to understanding the contested narrative of the world’s ocean as a primary site of representation and mitigation for climate crises.