Toward an Ecocritical History of Contemporary Ocean Art and Science since 1970

Joe Riley
Visual Arts
UC San Diego

My dissertation delves into histories of interaction between artists, oceanographers, and marine organisms in late 20th- and early-21st-century ecological art. My research methods are grounded in the subfield of ecocritical art history, an emergent area of scholarship concerned with interpreting the immanent ecological conditions of art and probing possibilities for humanities scholars to intervene in environmental problems. Mobilizing evidence from research spanning the studio, laboratory, and archives, I argue for a critical oceanic turn of recent and contemporary American art led by interdisciplinary and multispecies networks situated in Southern California. I track this development through ecocritical case studies of the marine life embedded in Helen and Newton Harrison’s ecological artwork “Survival Piece VII,” artist and writer Allan Sekula’s late-career engagement with marine environmental traumas, and a participatory ethnographic account of seaweed research conducted by artists and scientists. In addition to revising standard narratives of ecological art and drawing new connections between art history and multispecies studies (a subfield of anthropology), the unique contribution of this dissertation centers on its embedding in methods of creative practice and environmental science beyond the need-to-know basis of much interdisciplinary scholarship.