Lecture: Climate Phantasms and the Image of Ice

Lecture by Dr. Amanda Boetzkes, University of Guelph
Friday, June 22nd (4-6 pm)
ASCA, University of Amsterdam [NB not Vrije Universiteit!]
Spuistraat 134, PC Hoofthuis, room 559

This lecture will consider how images of ice are activated by the phantasms of climate change. In his challenging account of phantasmology, Rodolphe Gasché considers how phantasmic images become katabole within scientific knowledge, slumbering material elements that rise up from the “nocturnal pit” of consciousness over which science suspends itself. The katabole cathects the scientific orientation even as it muddies the coherence of its fabric. With this operation in mind, I will address aesthetic renderings of ice in the blind spot between scientific and Inuit knowledge of climate change. This blind spot, however is a gray political zone. That is to say, it occupies a site at which the prostheses of knowledge collapse under the weight of political imperatives, producing a zone of indistinction and indecision. The phantasmic image of ice binds and divides climate between its own atmospheric condition and its rendering as a global perspective.

Amanda Boetzkes is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph, Canada. Her first book, The Ethics of Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) analyzes the ethics and aesthetics of the earth art movement from the 1960s to the present. She is coeditor with Aron Vinegar of Heidegger and the Work of Art History (Ashgate, 2014). Her upcoming book, Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (MIT Press, 2019) analyzes how art defines and aestheticizes waste in the age of global capitalism. She is currently working on a new project entitled Ecologicity: Vision and Art for a World to Come, which considers modes of visualizing environments and ecological phenomena.

For more information, see the ASCA website.