Fluid Materialisms: Contemporary Art, Posthumanism, and the Ages of Water

Abstract

Fluid Materialisms: Contemporary Art, Posthumanism, and the Ages of Water charts uses and representations of water in post-sixties art in the United States. While discussions of ecology in contemporary art tend to focus on the history of land art and the analytic of “earth matter,” my research indicates that closer attention to water reveals a largely overlooked engagement with a specifically cinematic, fluid ecology. To that end, my project examines the work of contemporary artists who have used water as media in ways that gesture toward the moving image or who have used moving images as if they are water. Through artistic engagement with water’s “cinematic” qualities of light, motion, and time, I contend that art media liquefied in the post-sixties period. This liquefaction ultimately rendered the boundaries between humans, nonhumans, and their shared environments more porous. This project draws on a fluid historical methodology for navigating global issues in contemporary art history. This fluid approach to contemporary art history connects artists across decades and links artists of the same generation who are rarely discussed together. My fluid methodology provides an alternative to geological metaphors that undergird dominant historiographical models in the Humanities.