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practitioner of visual poetry and graphically notated music. ‘Sound art was invented in Canada.’ Did you know that? Well, Christof Migone says so, in the third part of this collection, which offers what it calls a ‘Historical Cartography of Sound Art’, comprising 12 research studies from different parts of the globe. And indeed, when you think about it, the concept and name of the ‘soundscape’ was coined in 1977 by the Canadian composer Murray Schafer; the neologism ‘plunderphonics’ came from Canada in 1985; and classical pianist Glenn Gould’s pioneering experimental radio programmes were conceived and made there. Rather than an inert collection of historical research papers, this section also includes some less formal interviews laced with charmingly discursive anecdotal recollections, often venturing into the borderland between high and low culture – such as David Toop’s references to the early influence on him of Wilson, Keppel and Betty, and the Goons. This is, on one level, a grand Christmas annual of a book, bursting at the seams with intriguing opportunities for sonic explorations. Encyclopaedic it may be, but like any good work of reference it lends itself to the extreme likelihood that you will become absorbed in something you didn’t intend to look up. ‘Sound is immaterial and fugitive’, pronounces Martin Sondergaard in this book. The same cannot be said of the book itself, which weighs 3.4 kg and is impossible to ignore. The word unwieldy is seldom used literally in a book review, but here it can be. It is as if the publishers have attempted to embody in their book the intellectual weight of sound art that is itself often insubstantial and evanescent. Sound Art: Sound as a Medium of Art, ed Peter Weibel, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe/MIT Press, 2019, 744pp, £55, 978 0262029 66 7. David Briers is an independent writer based in West Yorkshire. Along Ecological Lines – Contemporary Art and Climate Crisis The year 2019 – the second hottest on record in the hottest decade on record – will be remembered as the moment when there was a significant shift in the conversation surrounding the climate crisis. Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion have brought the impending catastrophe into mainstream conversation and pushed it further up the political agenda; although the rise of fascism and hard right-wing politicians getting into power has seen an increase of public dismissal of scientists’ warnings, creating further polarisations within a debate that shouldn’t be happening in the first place. The recent bushfires in Australia are concrete evidence of this, and we know that we have already gone too far. Alongside the sobering statistics presented to us in the media, a plethora of images shot on iPhones of the disaster looped the internet. research project by its editor, Barnaby Drabble, which he opens with the question: ‘What does it mean that art is now being made in the context of climate crisis that threatens our very existence on the planet?’ Tracing a wider shift of the global climate movement that has significantly risen since 2010, Drabble documents a select group of European socially engaged artists whose practices reflect this ecological turn. From divestment to forest law, a wide range of ecological issues are explored, reflecting the complexities and nuances required when addressing the topic. Practices of collaboration are championed in the book, heralded as offering opportunities to work together towards a future that is ecologically conscious and emancipatory. Akin to some of these collective practices, the publication provides a platform for a polyphony of voices, including artists, academics and activists, and shows how artistic practice can positively and proactively contribute towards an ecological project, in turn demonstrating how this can intersect with the political or scientific discourse in which the crisis is most commonly discussed. During a time when the art market has become increasingly financialised, and has coerced the artist into the role of a neoliberal subject that produces ‘assets’, working as a collective offers a mode of resistance to market pressures. This can be seen in the work of INLAND, an organisation initiated by Fernando Garcia-Dory that seeks to build bridges between contemporary art and the rural to form new modes of living, or in Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares’s Forest Law, a project for which they worked closely with the indigenous communities in Ecuador that are protecting the forest from encroaching oil companies. One of the most compelling arguments emerges out of TJ Demos’s essay ‘Denaturalising the Economy’, originally published in 2015, in which he unpacks the significance of the work of Oliver Ressler (Interview AM405), a video artist who makes work around demonstrations such as the aftermath of the 2016 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, an event that failed to address fossil fuel use, reflecting a lack of care for the environment and a prioritisation of the economy (more oil means more capital). Demos focuses on Leave It in the Ground, 2013, a film about oil drilling in the Norwegian archipelago of Lofoten, one example of oil exploration and its continued use that has catastrophic global impact. Demos criticises the mainstream undiscerning acceptance of the economy and argues that it has been subsumed as human nature, ‘the current reigning ideology of our era’. To describe this contemporary phenomenon, he conceives the term ‘economysticism’. The most popular ‘solutions’ to climate change have already been absorbed by capital, as evidenced by the emergence of green capitalism and the co-option Along Ecological Lines offers art as an antidote to these spectacular images; contemporary art can be the means through which we think about the climate crisis in a caring and productive way, conceptualising the future. The book is the result of a three-year Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares, Forest Law, 2014, video 38 Art Monthly no. 434, March 2020
page 41
of sustainability by global corporations. There is also the argument that technological progress will be able to save us from our own ecocide; however, this is not being built quickly or affordably enough and a reliance on this narrative risks appearing as conjecture. Demos is highly critical of such arguments and demonstrates the urgency to overturn capitalism as a whole, pointing to Ressler’s video work as successfully imagining a world beyond capitalism. Along Ecological Lines foregrounds the importance of the arts in such tumultuous times. Before it seemed uncertain, but the recent intensification of events in Australia make both the present and the future abundantly clear – there is no reversing the damage that has been done. It is more important now than ever that interdisciplinary collaboration is utilised to offer up spaces of possibility and new modes of thinking and being, especially as we know that the future world already looks so bleak. Along Ecological Lines, ed Barnaby Drabble, Gaia Project, 2019, 226pp, £17, 978 0 993219 25 2. Alexandra Hull is a curator, writer and Art Monthly’s subscriptions and distribution manager. Fiona Anderson: Cruising the Dead River – David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront Jonathan Weinberg: Art and Sex Along the New York Waterfront As epic architectural symbols of New York’s 20th century boom and bust, the vacant, ruined Manhattan piers offered an unforeseen ‘sexual theatre’ for cruising gay men in the years immediately before and the decades after the Stonewall Riots, the 1969 demonstrations which catalysed modern gay liberation. Through the post-gay liberation period to the early years of the AIDS crisis, the act of cruising and the implicit risk factors – arrest for trespassing the piers and prohibitions against sex work and public sex, or mugging and queer bashing from teenage gangs, notwithstanding the structural dangers of the piers themselves – all added a frisson of fear and violence to outlaw acts as denizens of the newly visible gay bars, sex clubs and bath houses of the Village spilled onto the truck parks and abandoned piers at night. At the same time, New York’s Downtown area became a beacon for new kinds of radical art and exhibition-making by artists who took advantage of the piers as creative sites to expand their practices beyond studios and galleries to forge new audiences. Cruising The Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront by Newcastle University art historian Fiona Anderson sets out to establish a queer feminist cultural, critical and art-historical survey of cruising on the New York piers and cruising as artistic and literary methods. Anderson focuses her thematic study on a critical purview ‘around’ artist, writer, photographer, curator and would-be activist David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992), who acutely chronicled Reagan-era US life before he died of an AIDS-related illness at the age of 37. Adopting Wojnarowicz’s queer temporal literary style and the erotic and aesthetic zeitgeist of post-Stonewall, pre-HIV public sex as a ‘demonstration’, Anderson echoes Mark W Turner’s Backwards Glances. Turner’s study of cruising in cultural modernity expounds upon Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin’s thesis of the ephemeral, contingent and fragmented nature of modernity, adding Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘disintegration of the senses’ and Jacques Derrida’s ‘hauntology’ to an aggregate philosophy and visual culture of cruising in ruins. This creative and erotic impulse, and cruising as artistic and literary method, is explored through fellow pier chroniclers and habitués including photographers Alvin Baltrop, Leonard Fink, Peter Hujar, Shelley Seccombe, Stanley Stellar, Arthur Tress and writers Edmund White, John Rechy and Andrew Holleran. A broader sphere of influence considers artists who worked in or captured the piers – Vito Acconci, Chantal Akerman, Joan Jonas, Gordon Matta-Clark and ShunkKender – and curatorial pier projects by Willougby Sharp and Wojnarowicz whose Ward Line Pier project is the linchpin of successive art interventions on the piers. The deeply historical, utopian proselytising on early gay public sex by piers authors privileged the piers as part of the enduring cultural imaginary of queer New York in ways ill-afforded to bars and bathhouses which Leo Bersani described as ‘ruthless, ranked, hierarchised and competitive’. Inverting the purportedly profane act of cruising as sacred – for White the piers were ‘a Cathedral’ and for Wojnarowicz the cruisers were ‘monks of the dead river’ – they were prophets of an unabashedly gay life to eager audiences and, in turn, to outraged moral critics. In that context Wojnarowicz’s literary reveries of cruising his literary forbears in the ruined piers compounds embedded histories of furtive, dockside same-sex cruising across time, from Walt Whitman to Hart Crane, and, as Anderson keenly demonstrates, through the artistic and literary archive. This looks to past and future-facing queer temporal notions to consider both cruising men and the artists of the piers as being fellow travellers in the search for new erotic and aesthetic possibilities that, quoting Jack Halberstam, lie outside ‘the paradigmatic markers of lived’ (ie ‘straight’) ‘experience’. Anderson links Derrida’s concept of hauntology, a way to describe the hauntedness of time and the temporal, to Wojnarowicz’s cruising method as a ‘linking of modalised presents’, the now of past, present and future, and these ideas are brought to bear on the ruined piers, almost as readymades of queer temporality. In the 2000s, Every Ocean Hughes fka Emily Roysdon (b1977) repurposed Wojnarowicz’s iconic collaborative photographic essay ‘Arthur Rimbaud in New York’ as ‘David Wojnarowicz in New York’, revisiting the cultural and social milieu of Wojnarowicz’s waterfront that displaced Rimbaud into New York of the 1970s. This posits a series of returns in a mode of queer kinship and, as Anderson (quoting Jean Carlomusto) notes, plays with ideas of history ‘to incorporate a play of gender’. Anderson sees such cross-temporal methodology as a crucial way to challenge what she calls a ‘viral momentum’, a heteronormative teleology of HIV/AIDS propelled by promiscuity at the piers in the 1970s precisely to reconsider how we experiment, remember and historicise. As she states: ‘The value of returning to the queer time of the preAIDS era is not that it offers us a vision of sex without Art Monthly no. 434, March 2020 39

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practitioner of visual poetry and graphically notated music.

‘Sound art was invented in Canada.’ Did you know that? Well, Christof Migone says so, in the third part of this collection, which offers what it calls a ‘Historical Cartography of Sound Art’, comprising 12 research studies from different parts of the globe. And indeed, when you think about it, the concept and name of the ‘soundscape’ was coined in 1977 by the Canadian composer Murray Schafer; the neologism ‘plunderphonics’ came from Canada in 1985; and classical pianist Glenn Gould’s pioneering experimental radio programmes were conceived and made there. Rather than an inert collection of historical research papers, this section also includes some less formal interviews laced with charmingly discursive anecdotal recollections, often venturing into the borderland between high and low culture – such as David Toop’s references to the early influence on him of Wilson, Keppel and Betty, and the Goons. This is, on one level, a grand Christmas annual of a book, bursting at the seams with intriguing opportunities for sonic explorations. Encyclopaedic it may be, but like any good work of reference it lends itself to the extreme likelihood that you will become absorbed in something you didn’t intend to look up.

‘Sound is immaterial and fugitive’, pronounces Martin Sondergaard in this book. The same cannot be said of the book itself, which weighs 3.4 kg and is impossible to ignore. The word unwieldy is seldom used literally in a book review, but here it can be. It is as if the publishers have attempted to embody in their book the intellectual weight of sound art that is itself often insubstantial and evanescent. Sound Art: Sound as a Medium of Art, ed Peter Weibel, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe/MIT Press, 2019, 744pp, £55, 978 0262029 66 7. David Briers is an independent writer based in West Yorkshire.

Along Ecological Lines – Contemporary Art and Climate Crisis The year 2019 – the second hottest on record in the hottest decade on record – will be remembered as the moment when there was a significant shift in the conversation surrounding the climate crisis. Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion have brought the impending catastrophe into mainstream conversation and pushed it further up the political agenda; although the rise of fascism and hard right-wing politicians getting into power has seen an increase of public dismissal of scientists’ warnings, creating further polarisations within a debate that shouldn’t be happening in the first place. The recent bushfires in Australia are concrete evidence of this, and we know that we have already gone too far. Alongside the sobering statistics presented to us in the media, a plethora of images shot on iPhones of the disaster looped the internet.

research project by its editor, Barnaby Drabble, which he opens with the question: ‘What does it mean that art is now being made in the context of climate crisis that threatens our very existence on the planet?’ Tracing a wider shift of the global climate movement that has significantly risen since 2010, Drabble documents a select group of European socially engaged artists whose practices reflect this ecological turn. From divestment to forest law, a wide range of ecological issues are explored, reflecting the complexities and nuances required when addressing the topic.

Practices of collaboration are championed in the book, heralded as offering opportunities to work together towards a future that is ecologically conscious and emancipatory. Akin to some of these collective practices, the publication provides a platform for a polyphony of voices, including artists, academics and activists, and shows how artistic practice can positively and proactively contribute towards an ecological project, in turn demonstrating how this can intersect with the political or scientific discourse in which the crisis is most commonly discussed. During a time when the art market has become increasingly financialised, and has coerced the artist into the role of a neoliberal subject that produces ‘assets’, working as a collective offers a mode of resistance to market pressures. This can be seen in the work of INLAND, an organisation initiated by Fernando Garcia-Dory that seeks to build bridges between contemporary art and the rural to form new modes of living, or in Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares’s Forest Law, a project for which they worked closely with the indigenous communities in Ecuador that are protecting the forest from encroaching oil companies.

One of the most compelling arguments emerges out of TJ Demos’s essay ‘Denaturalising the Economy’, originally published in 2015, in which he unpacks the significance of the work of Oliver Ressler (Interview AM405), a video artist who makes work around demonstrations such as the aftermath of the 2016 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, an event that failed to address fossil fuel use, reflecting a lack of care for the environment and a prioritisation of the economy (more oil means more capital). Demos focuses on Leave It in the Ground, 2013, a film about oil drilling in the Norwegian archipelago of Lofoten, one example of oil exploration and its continued use that has catastrophic global impact. Demos criticises the mainstream undiscerning acceptance of the economy and argues that it has been subsumed as human nature, ‘the current reigning ideology of our era’. To describe this contemporary phenomenon, he conceives the term ‘economysticism’. The most popular ‘solutions’ to climate change have already been absorbed by capital, as evidenced by the emergence of green capitalism and the co-option

Along Ecological Lines offers art as an antidote to these spectacular images; contemporary art can be the means through which we think about the climate crisis in a caring and productive way, conceptualising the future. The book is the result of a three-year Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares, Forest Law, 2014, video

38

Art Monthly no. 434, March 2020

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