Amanda Boetzkes is an associate professor of contemporary art history and theory at the University of Guelph, Canada. Her research and publications focus on the intersection of visual and creative practices with the biological sciences (particularly ecology and neurology). Her first book, The Ethics of Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), considers the development of the earth art movement, focusing on how ecology transitioned from a scientific discourse to a domain of ethical and aesthetic concern. She is coeditor of Heidegger and the Work of Art History (Ashgate Press, 2014). Currently, she is completing a book entitled Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste, which examines the interplay between the aesthetics of contemporary art, global systems of energy use, and the life cycle of garbage. Her upcoming book project, Ecologicity: Vision and Art for a World to Come, analyzes the aesthetic and perceptual dimensions of imagining the ecological condition. Other areas of research and publication include: currency, economic exchange, and the concept of value; theories of consciousness and perception, specifically ecological perception and neuroplasticity; art and visual culture that problematizes the ontological and political status of animal species; phenomenology and art historiography; art of the American counterculture; and landscape art and aesthetics from the eighteenth century to the present.
RCC Research Project: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste: Locating Aesthetic Transformations in Their Relationship to the Oil Economy and Global Warming
Lunchtime Colloquium Video - Contemporary Art, New Materialism, and the Aesthetics of Waste
Selected Publications:
- The Ethics of Earth Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
- “Ecologicity, Vision, and the Neurological System.” In Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Politics, Aesthetics, Environments, and Epistemologies, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, 271–82. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2015.
- “Techniques of Survival: The Harrisons and Environmental Counterculture.” In West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–77, edited by Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner, 306–23. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
- “Waste and the Sublime Landscape.” RACAR (Revue d’art canadien/Canadian Art Review) 35, no. 1 (2010): 22–31.
- “Phenomenology and Interpretation beyond the Flesh.” Art History 32, no. 4 (Sept. 2009): 690–711.
- with Aron Vinegar, eds. Heidegger and the Work of Art History. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2014.