Expanded Aesthetics
Care, Attention, and the Everyday Plant
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v34i69.160660Keywords:
Planthropocene, Everyday Aesthetics, Care, Biodiversity Crisis, Coloniality, Cultural DanishnessAbstract
This paper explores the intersections of care, attention, and aesthetics as they relate to everyday plants, proposing an expanded framework of aesthetic sensibility that moves beyond traditional notions of beauty and attentiveness. Drawing on avantgarde theories and Yuriko Saito’s concept of everyday aesthetics, the paper examines two artworks featuring “everyday plants,” specifically “weeds” and “houseplants.” It demonstrates how these artworks broaden or expand our perception and experience of plants. The paper argues that this “expanded” aesthetic sensibility that entangles historical, political, aesthetic, and economic concerns is emblematic of our climatically changing world. The overall goal of the paper is to uncover current changes in how we look at and understand plants as a culturally constructed category of beings.
References
1 Emanuele Coccia: The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (Polity Press, 2018), 1. Similar statements are made across a wide range of scholars and artists working with plants, all of which have contributed to the current focus on plants: Michael Marder, Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013); Richard Mabey, The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination (Norton & Comp, 2015); Camilla Berner, Black Box Garden, Art catalogue (KOPA printing house, 2014); Line Marie Thorsen, ed., Moving Plants, Art catalogue (Rønnebæksholm, 2017); Why Look at Plants?: The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art. (Brill, 2019), accessed January 20, 2025. ProQuest Ebook Central.
2 Yuriko Saito, “Everyday Aesthetics and Plants,” in Thorsen, Moving Plants, 35-45. When this smaller text is referred and not Saito’s broader authorship on everyday aesthetics, it is because she here refers directly to plants and art.
3 Saito, “Everyday Aesthetics and Plants,” 35.
4 Out of Sync: “Meg Webster – I want you to care more,” interview by Jesper Bundgaard, produced by: Out of Sync and Paula Cooper Gallery, 2016, accessed January 1, 2017, https://youtu.be/PgZhmsiG1X4?si=z-GY9Wn8b-LYQvYG.
5 Anette Vandsø, “The Art of Talking Environment,” in Erlend Høyersteen, Jacob V.Sevel, Anne Mette Thomsen and Anette Vandsø (eds.), The Garden: End of Times, Beginning of Times, (Köenig Books, 2017), 76-86.
6 Berner, Black Box Garden.
7 Saito, “Everyday Aesthetics and Plants,” 35.
8 Saito, “Everyday Aesthetics and Plants,” 40.
9 Bruno Latour, “Why has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry - Special issue on the Future of Critique 30, no. 2 (2004): 225-248.
10 Kristian Sjøgren, “Hvad kan jeg gøre for at hjælpe bierne,” Videnskab.dk/Spørg videnskaben, accessed March 28, 2017, https://videnskab.dk/naturvidenskab/hvad-kan-jeg-goere-for-at-hjaelpe-bierne/.
11 See Høyersteen, Sevel, Thomsen and Vandsø (eds.), The Garden: End of Times, Beginning of Times.
12 Jesper Fredshavn, Bettina Nygaard, Rasmus Ejrnæs, et. al, “Bevaringsstatus for naturtyper og arter – 2019. Habitatdirektivets Artikel 17-rapportering,” 52 s. Videnskabelig rapport nr. 340, (Aarhus Universitet, DCE – Nationalt Center for Miljø og Energi, 2019). https://dce2.au.dk/pub/SR340.pdf.
13 Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (University of California Press, 2004), 7.
14 This description paraphrases the companion species thought in Haraway: Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto - Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (The University of Chicago Press, 2003).
15 Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers, “Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters,” differences 23, no. 3 (2012): 74-118.
16 Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics, Vol. 1. (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
17 Natasha Myers, “From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing Gardens for Plant/People Involution,” History and Anthropology 28, no. 3 (2017): 297.
18 Myers, “From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene,” 298.
19 Myers, “From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene,” 299.
20 We are here paraphrasing Timothy Morton on how the global phenomena “stick” to our everyday lives, see: Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after The End of the World (Minnesota University Press, 2013), 1.
21 Saito, “Everyday Aesthetics and Plants,” 37.
22 Sara Ahmed, Happy Objects, the Promise of Happiness (Duke University Press, 2010).
23 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble - Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (Duke University Press, 2016).
24 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2013).
25 Heather Swanson, “The Banality of the Anthropocene,” Member Voices, Fieldsights, February 22, 2017, accessed feb. 2020, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-banality-of-the-anthropocene.
26 Based on conversation with Webster in Aarhus in 2017. In addition, at Meg Webster’s page at the Paula Cooper gallery it says: “In style, Webster’s work bridges the conceptual vision of Land Art and the formal vocabulary of Minimalism, with a nod to the utopian ideals of early garden design and urban landscaping,” http://viewingroom.paulacoopergallery.com/viewing-room/meg-webster.
27 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (MIT Press, 1996). 28 Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980 [1974]).
29 Foster, The Return of the Real, xi.
30 Foster, The Return of the Real, 38.
31 Foster, The Return of the Real, 43.
32 Foster, The Return of the Real, 71.
33 Line Marie Thorsen and Anette Vandsø “We Don’t Know Where to Land: A Conversation with Latour,” in Høyersteen, Sevel, Thomsen and Vandsø (eds.), The Garden: End of Times, Beginning of Times.
34 See for instance Foster, The Return of the Real, 199.
35 Bruno Latour, “A Plea for Earthly Sciences,” in New Social Connections: Sociology’s Subjects and Objects, edited by Judith Burnett, Syd Jeffers and Graham Thomas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 72. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230274877_5.
36 This is the argument in Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard University Press, 1991).
37 New Materialism would include Karen Barad, Jane Bennet and Rosi Braidotti.
38 We are here referring to the plants Saito calls exotic, Saito, “Everyday Aesthetics and Plants,” 37.
39 Matteo Lucchetti, “Introduction,” in Other Tales, art catalogue (Kunsthal Aarhus, 2020), 16.
40 Lucchetti, “Introduction,” 17.
41 Edward Said, Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978).
42 As Lucchetti writes: “Coloniality is a factor that is still very alive and active to exclude other knowledge from informing a new shared understanding of things, and perhaps most importantly to create fertile ground for an ongoing exploitation in constantly renewed forms.” Lucchetti, “Introduction,” 18.
43 Jacob Lund, Anachrony, Contemporaneity, and Historical Imagination (Sternberg Press, 2019).
44 This “aesthetics of appearing” refers to Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing (Stanford University Press, 2010).
45 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Continuum, 2004), 67ff.
46 Giovanni Aloi suggests in similar ways to rewild or to “keep the plants as ‘feral’ as possible despite them being potted and rooted.” See: Giovanni Aloi: “Brief Encounters,” in Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art (Brill, 2019), chapter 10, 232.
47 The authors of this paper are currently working on the research and dissemination project Hidden Plant Stories (2023-2026) in a collaboration between Aarhus University, Ordrupgaard and The Hirschsprung Collection, supported by the Velux foundation. In this project such an expanded or enriched perspective is used both to explore and exhibit “house plant art.”
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