T. J. Demos
Day 2: Museums as Spaces for Recognizing Differences
Keynote 2 – 6 November 2021
T. J. Demos, Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History and Visual Culture, and Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies, UC Santa Cruz; Santa Cruz, USA.
Abstract
Whose Climate Emergency? Neoliberal Recognition and Radical Futurity
At a time of world-historical environmental change—comprising ecosystem breakdown, growing climate migration, and sociopolitical transformation—the crisis of climate emergency parallels a crisis of democratic institutions. Post-representational politics, in which multitudes feel increasingly alienated and un-represented by elected officials as much as by cultural institutions, energizes apocalyptic populism, leading to social media expressions of outrage and xenophobia. Matters are worsened by reactionary politics that, in the attempt to foster ethnonationalist unity to overcome growing class antagonisms, scapegoat racialized, minoritized, and migrant populations. With this intensifying state of affairs, the neoliberal politics of recognition (celebrating difference but without practicing equity) can only fail to assuage popular demands for inclusion and participation. With reference to current North American and European cultural politics and climate activism, this presentation will consider a few examples, as well as alternative proposals for future justice.
Biography
T. J. Demos is an award-winning writer on contemporary art and global politics. He is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He researches the intersection of visual culture, radical politics, and political ecology, and is the author of numerous books, including Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (Duke, 2020); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology (Sternberg, 2016); and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today, (Sternberg, 2017). He recently co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-21). Demos is also Chair and Chief Curator of the Climate Collective, providing public programming related to the 2021 Climate Emergency > Emergence program at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Maat) in Lisbon. He is presently working on a new book on radical futurisms.