chairs /
- Siobhan Angus, Yale University/Carleton University
- Ivana Dizdar, University of Toronto
This panel examines the production of visual culture through toxic and potentially fatal materials. Toxicity poses significant problems: medical, social, and environmental—but also artistic. We invite scholars working on topics across periods, from dangerous pigments in historical painting to toxic waste in contemporary art. What does it mean to construct with the destructive? How do artistic engagements with toxicity reframe our understanding of purity and contamination? Should we—and if so how—reconcile personal and environmental dangers with pursuits to create images and objects of beauty (i.e. the toxic sublime)? We encourage submissions from scholars working on intersections among visual culture, material history, science, environment, and the medical humanities.
keywords: toxicity, contamination, danger
L.1.1 Toxic Airs, Melancholic Bodies, and The Pope’s Palatial Strongholds
- Dijana O. Apostolski, McGill University
Distinguished households in sixteenth-century Rome vigorously pursued “good air.” Good air –pure, light, dry air– was thought of as propitious for the balance and quality of the bodily humors and spirits. In contrast, toxic air, foul gases, and miasmas directly affected one’s complexion and instigated lethargic behaviors, obfuscated thoughts, and melancholy. Fortunate residents developed the habit of relocating and moving around Rome and its campagna as a therapeutic practice. Powerful patrons, Cardinals, and Popes such as Pope Paul III, also known as Alessandro Farnese, commissioned opulent palazzi, villas, and gardens on auspicious sites to secure access to wholesome air and delight their spirits. Designed and built as medical devices, such estates directly engaged winds, light, and their environments and modified the air quality through ornament, form, frescos, and spatial distribution. By examining three Farnese properties: The Villa Farnesina, the Villa Farnese at Caprarola, and the Palazzo Farnese, in this architectural-historical study, I map the estates’ air quality in reference to the humoral body and focus on areas that had the most noxious atmospheres. Demonstrating that the patron rarely frequented putrid quarters, I theorize the toxic spaces as instances of “the toxic sublime.” Recognizing the privileged distance deemed indispensable for “sublime” experiences, I challenge “the toxic sublime” notion through the melancholic bodies of the quarters’ destitute dwellers.
Dijana O. Apostolski (MPhil 2014, MArch 2016) is a doctoral candidate at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University. Dijana’s research critically re-examines conventional European architectural histories at the intersection of architectural history, histories of the human body, materials, and matter, history of medicine, and premodern critical race studies focusing on constructions of whiteness. The McGill Engineering International Doctoral Award, the Peter Guo-hua Fu Graduate Award, the Schulich Graduate Fellowship, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s predoctoral fellowship support her research.
L.1.2 Toxic Invaders: Nature Aesthetics and Indigenous Kinship in ‘Wilderness’ Parks
- Rowan Red Sky, University of Toronto
‘Wilderness’ emparkments are contrived aesthetic landscapes that ‘make up’ nature and manage human relationships to the environment, much like the demonstrative natural environments built in museum dioramas. These parks are sites where I challenge the theoretical basis of the ‘wild’ and ‘civilizing’ discourses that situate settler-colonial aesthetic theories and contribute to the suppression of Indigenous land tenure across Turtle Island. Land romanticized as untouched wilderness by settlers is treated by Indigenous people as a site of reciprocity between all beings on the land, including humans. In my case study of Tommy Thompson Park, the botanical composition includes noxious and invasive species. Noxious plants must be understood in terms of kinship relations between humans and non-humans, and even abiotic beings. With this understanding, emparked scenes that promise a pleasant aesthetic experience for humans can be recognized as materially toxic or even deadly for non-human Indigenous kin. It is the categorizing veil of wild vs civilizing discourse that allows many toxic florae to remain innocuous from a human point of view. The contradiction of a site like Tommy Thompson Park is that the environment managed by humans is also regarded as a wilderness set apart from humans. In aesthetic theory this contradiction is an underlying condition of the viewer’s pleasure, but in Indigenous relational theory the contradiction cannot be reconciled without dissolving claims to our home territories and abandoning our responsibilities to Indigenous non-human kin. For this reason, Indigenous aesthetic enjoyment of ‘innocuously toxic’ emparkments requires a double consciousness. In this way, settlers occupy and manage the land both physically and ideologically.
Rowan Red Sky (Oneida Nation of the Thames) is a PhD student in the Art History department and the collaborative Book History and Print Culture program at the University of Toronto. Her research investigates the development of the ‘Indian’ image in North America, the use of these images by settler-colonial artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the cross-appropriation of the ‘Indian Princess’ by Indigenous performance artists. Her visual art and writing have been published by CBC, Shameless Magazine, Canthius, Maisonneuve, and Broadview.
L.1.3 Landscape Detox: Remediation in Site-Specific Art
- Noni Brynjolson, University of Indianapolis
A wheat field, a tree-covered hill, roots slowly extending downwards, a summoning circle meant to remedy toxic energies. Attempts by artists to detoxify contaminated natural sites have taken many different forms. This paper focuses on Remediation Room, a project curated by Alana Bartol that brings together a number of Alberta-based artists whose works collectively explore remedies for natural sites contaminated by the fossil fuel industry. The projects that are part of Remediation Room attempt to address the after effects of oil extraction, but also advocate for removing the source of the damage in the first place. One project, for example, focuses on the tailings ponds close to the Athabasca Tar Sands, which cause harm to numerous species. Nearby groundwater has been contaminated, oil on the ponds traps migratory birds, and accumulated acids and heavy metals kill fish and other animals. Many First Nations communities are affected by their proximity to these tailing ponds and have suffered serious health consequences. Remediation Room can be compared with other examples of site-specific land art focused on detoxification, including work by Robert Smithson, Helen and Newton Harrison, Agnes Denes, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Mel Chin. This paper explores such practices in the context of reclamation, healing and repair, but also considers the uniquely forward looking nature of Remediation Room. While the prefix ‘re’ might suggest returning to an earlier, pre-industrial state of supposed harmony with nature, the project’s focus on decolonial aesthetics emphasizes acts of detoxification meant to rethink and construct a healthier, more sustainable future. Repair is theorized as targeting the toxic impact on both the environment and indigenous peoples under colonialism. How are material and conceptual forms of poison acted upon through the various projects within Remediation Room? What is involved in remedying toxic landscapes? What can artists reimagine, invent, and build through these gestures of repair?
Noni Brynjolson is an art historian who studies collaborative public art projects and examines how they connect with broader themes of repair and construction. She is currently working on a book focused on large-scale, long-term works in which artists address the politics of housing and neighborhood redevelopment through forms of cultural production and community organizing. Noni is a member of the editorial collective of FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism and her writing has appeared in FIELD as well as in Public Art Dialogue, Hyperallergic and Akimbo. Noni completed her PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism at the University of California, San Diego in 2019. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Indianapolis.
