A Certain Kind of Text: Ecological Art Praxis as Political Ecology at the Hydrosocial Turn

Keywords: eco art, hydrosocial, political ecology, ecological art, spatial practice, tactical media ecology
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Shortly before his death in 1973, artist Robert Smithson sketched a rough image of a tugboat towing a barge teeming with trees through the New York City harbor. In 2005, a collaboration between the art group Minetta Brook and the Whitney Museum realized Smithson’s "Floating Island" (1970) when a NYC tug pulled a 30x90-foot barge laden with live trees and other flora around Manhattan. In profound juxtaposition to Smithson’s metaphoric vision, artist Mary Mattingly co-engineered two barge-based ecological art projects (2009’s "Waterpod," and the on-going floating food forest, "Swale") to critically confront ecological collapse, urban food inequity, and uneven hydrosocial crises. In this presentation, I examine Mattingly's and other contemporary artists’ critical approach to ecological art, embracing Paul Robbins’s declaration that political ecology is not a methodology, theory, or field but “a community of practice united around a certain kind of text,” not merely written but including “symbolic content, images, and media that tell stories” as well (Robbins, 2020). Furthermore, I contribute the neologism “tactical media ecology” to a lexicon emerging from literature situated at the fold of spatial production, ecology, and art. From Situationism to new genre public art, relational aesthetics, experimental geography, eco art, and participatory and social practice art (Debord, 1957; Knabb, 1981; Lacy, 1994; Bourriaud, 1998; Finkelpearl, 2000; Paglen, 2008; Weintraub, 2012; Bishop, 2012; Bower, 2014; Thompson, 2015 & 2017), I trace a genealogy of terms and phrases intended to articulate and delimit creative cultural production practices that critically engage with landscape, ecology, and, increasingly, the hydrosocial.