ABSTRACT
Just as science is entangled with histories of Enlightenment science, colonialism, and capitalism, so too is art. In order to engage critically with the climate crisis – understood not simply as a physical phenomenon, but as a complex, socially engendered set of processes rooted in those histories – art must engage with contemporary legacies of those logics. Artists have to consider what happens to art’s agency, and its potential for innovation, subversion, connection, or critique if it is enacted from within a socio-economic system structured by those histories. As a way of addressing this situation, I discuss what art has to offer as a way of knowing in terms of “averted vision.” Averted vision is a way of looking at things obliquely in non-goal-oriented and playful manner. When it acts obliquely to challenge the existing order, practices of averted vision, when performed collectively, become yet another way of knowing.
