ABSTRACT
In a 2009 jeremiad, whose fervency and topical neologism, “Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,” garnered influential attention, artist, writer, and curator Rasheed Araeen anachronistically denounced “the extreme self-entered individualism of art today.” Eco-art had originated forty years earlier, and while socially engaged art was central to the feminist art movement from the 1970s, it had gained traction in the mainstream already sixteen years before in the controversially political work prevalent in the 1993 Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art. In turning his attention away from subject matter of common experience, the poet or artist turns it in upon the medium of his own craft. Although his research, teaching, activism, and art share the subject of species loss and other consequences of climate change, these practices' rhetorical strategies differ: the science experimentation is published in journals and the art in striking visual formats that merge science's objectivity and art's potential to evoke and provoke.
