Painter/ WYSO reporter Susan Byrnes interviewed me in the Paw Paw Circle, which California artists Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves created in 2012 to accompany "Green Acres: Artists Farming Fields, Greenhouses and Abandoned Lots" at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati.
After contributing the essay "The Hills are Alive: In search of a Mystical Materialism" to Ulrika Sparre's catalog"Ear to the Ground," Index invited us both to chat about rocks on the occasion of her solo exhibition there.
I was invited to present a paper during the exhibition "Apoidea," which featured artworks inspired by bees and bee activities. This talk integrates 25 years of research regarding artists' projects to augment/defend biodiversity with my 3 published philosophy of biodiversity papers in order to explain the connection between diverse communities and biodiversity.
This zoom-interview looks back at my earliest museum exhibitions: "Action Station: Exploring Open Systems" (1995), Santa Monica Museum of Art; "An Active Life" (2000), Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), Cincinnati, OH; "sprawl" (2002), CAC; and "Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies" (2002), co-curated with Amy Lipton, CAC.
In this talk, I introduce the "Artistic Strategies Diamond of Opposition" and attempt to explain why human beings cannot escape the Anthropocene. I offer myriad examples of what artists have done/are doing to improve life on Earth. Rather than envisioning colonizing Mars, we must take the mindset that we left Mars to inhabit Earth, so there's no going back.
In this talk, I show both the rise of exhibitions focused on ecology and ask numerous questions related to artistic practices. In this talk I introduce the "cognitive states problem," such that people perceive the world differently. I thus explain that ecoventions reach climate deniers/skeptics in ways that scientific facts have not, because they operate on the level of values and inspire people to rethink their values.
In 2017, Pieter Van Bogaert accepted the task to tour Europe via bike and train to discover various artist's ecological practices. Before setting out, we sat down for this chat at Cafe Sablon in Bruxelles.
Invited to the XIV International Forum conference on "Sculpting Nature: landart, ecoart, bioart," I took the opportunity to introduce my recent research toward my 2017 exhibition in Sittard, NL. Interesting enough, the dates on the screen are 1962-2017, yet by the time the exhibition opened a year later, I had discovered the Stedelijk Museum exhibition "Natuur en Kunst" (1957), pushing the start date back five years.
When Mark Harris invited me to present a paper at a Goldsmith College colloquium, I opted for this paper because it enabled me both to itemize philosopher Kevin Melchionne's handling of "aesthetic unreliabiliy," which I consider one of the most interesting new developments in Aesthetics, and to reckon its compatibility with my notion of spectators' producing and distributing exhibition narratives.