'Art After Ecology' by Zachary Korol-Gold

I was glad when Elina Suoyrjö approached me to write an essay to accompany the second episode of the Withstanding podcast with Ama Josephine Budge and Essi Vesala responding to the themes of art, ecology, and sustainable curating. These are subjects that I have been considering with my curatorial project Garden and my recent foray into academia. Through Garden, I began considering art and ecology together. Now, I am returning to foundational questions: What is ecology? And what role does art play in answering this? In this essay, I narrate my own path with Garden and how I developed my current thinking on these topics.

I arrived at my interest in ecology through Garden, a curatorial project that is a collaboration with my partner Britte Geijer, the name “Garden” perhaps an unconscious premonition of where the project would lead. Britte and I selected the name to evoke cultivation and growth, and as I cultivated and grew my own curatorial interests, I arrived at the discourse of ecology and ecological art. In line with Budge and Vesala’s brilliant conversation on the Withstanding podcast, Garden was conceived as a sustainable project where we could host shows and events. Because the exhibition space merged with our living space there was no overhead or rent and because we did as much as possible ourselves the costs remained low: little more than white paint, installation photography, Tecate, and La Croix. We sought to make space in our home and yard where people could gather for challenging conversations around art.

Like many working in art, the writing of Timothy Morton opened the door to ecocriticism for me. In Ecology without Nature, Morton argues that the dualism between the natural and the unnatural can be collapsed into the ecological, and in Hyperobjects he invokes Object-Oriented Ontology to describe climate change itself as an object albeit massively distributed.* But when Morton turns to art he employs illustrative artworks, ones that enact his theories but reveal little about ecology itself. For me, art does more.

But what is ecology? Historically, the discipline of ecology was developed by Darwin’s follower Ernst Haeckel in the late 19th century to describe the relation of animals to their environments (or their home, “oikos”), and it is this relational approach that persists. Ecology seems to now describe a broad range of formerly “unnatural” topics—ecologies of mind, media, technology. Often, ecological approaches dissolve disciplinary boundaries, incorporating scientific knowledge, new materialism, non-Western cosmologies, and more into hybrid models, such as the ones described in Vesala’s essay.

Philosopher Erich Hörl traverses this “ecologization” through a compelling combination of German media theory, phenomenology, and Felix Guattarian politics.** For Hörl, a condition of general ecology has emerged in tandem with, or perhaps determined by, technology. As technologies become more and more diffused, designed to monitor and control human and nonhuman environments and relations in urban, online, and wilderness settings, so too do contemporary views of nature. These technologies mold our perceptions, and a new ontology emerges that discards individual subjects and objects in favor of their relations. Scientific apparatuses reveal the technicity of nature, which loses its Aristotelian teleology, and new technologies are increasingly seen as autopoietic. In such an ecological view, nature and technics lose distinction.

While Hörl’s framework has been recently applied to Pierre Huyghe’s open-ended ecological situations***, I propose that art not only has the potential to illustrate ecological notions, or to behave environmentally, or even to open itself to natural and non-natural ecologies. More radically, art has the potential to reveal a contemporary state of ecology. Meaning, if ecology has become general as Hörl argues, art has the potential to make us conscious of a ubiquitous, unconscious, and ongoing process of ecologization. This, I describe not as ecological art but art after ecology.

Ecology is by no means over. On the contrary, ecology has permeated every corner of contemporary life and thought. In leaving behind an essentialist understanding of nature, ecology expanded its boundaries, absorbing all that was previously decidedly unnatural: the mind, culture, the commodity, technology, architecture, etc. If ecology comes after nature, or “without nature” in the words of Morton, what comes after ecology?

My curatorial work seeks to organize moments in art after ecology, when ecology becomes self-reflexive. If ecology has become a ubiquitous field permeating our contemporary worldview, then my work is to locate knots in which ecology twists upon itself to reveal its structure by its own gaze. By way of example, a selection of Garden exhibitions: Genevieve Belleveau is an artist and ecofetishist who produced her 2018 solo show Circlusion in collaboration with her husband Themba Alleyne and an ecosystem of friends. As a fetishist, Belleveau incorporates natural elements into her sex life and work—she fluidly traverses natural materials and their simulacra. Her practice does not attempt to commune with nature, but instead simulates it within a kink framework to interrogate both power relations and ecological relations. In Sarah McMenimen’s Mud (2019), interspecies relations are treated as simultaneously linguistic, material, and embodied. Aquatic bodies accumulate, cast into aluminum tendrils, while other mudied resin and clay casts transmit the recordings of paw imprints in terrestrial ground. Communication, movement, and consumption are entangled as semiotics blurs with metabolism. Finally, in Jeffrey Stuker’s Mimicry and the Monte Carlo Predator single-channel video work (2019), the process of rendering occurs in both the computer graphics and butterfly mimicry. Second nature collapses into first nature in Stuker’s mysterious network of evolution, history, computation, and poison. Living in a state of ecology, art after ecology need not be rooted into the soil (although it certainly can be!)—it need not locate itself in the garden, even if it often arrives in Garden.

This essay is a snapshot, a summary of my current thoughts in the midst of ongoing inquiry adjacent to always ongoing ecologization. Garden itself is by no means separate from its ecosystem. Due to the pandemic, we paused our in-person programming for nearly two years. In February 2022 we will return from hibernation to participate in Frieze Los Angeles with a solo presentation of new work by Sarah Rosalena Brady. We also plan to reopen in the new year in our new home in the Mount Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles with exciting projects by Dan Levenson, Marcus Zúniga, and Pierre Clement.

* Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Posthumanities 27 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
** Erich Hörl, “Introduction to General Ecology: The Ecologization of Thinking,” in General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, ed. Erich Hörl and James Burton, Theory (London: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017), 1–74.
*** See the multiple entries Grey Room no. 77 on this topic. Hörl’s approach is critiqued in Eric C.H. de Bruyn, “A Proposal: Must We Ecologize?,” Grey Room, no. 77 (October 1, 2019): 58–65, https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00279.

Zachary Korol-Gold is a curator and researcher living in Los Angeles. He directs the contemporary art gallery Garden with his partner Britte Geijer and he is 1/2 of Cultivar, a curatorial collaboration and podcast with Matthew Schum. He is currently a PhD Student in Visual Studies at UC Irvine.

Zachary Korol-Gold’s essay has been commissioned by the FCINY for Withstanding as a continuation for the discussions in Episode 2: On Art, Ecology, and Sustainable Curating with Ama Josephine Budge and Essi Vesala.