Performance Art Performativity and Envir

Performance Art, Performativity, and Environmentalism in the Capitalocene
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature

Performance Art, Performativity, and Environmentalism
in the Capitalocene
Jane Chin Davidson
Subject: Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Theater and Drama
Online Publication Date: Feb 2019 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.93
Summary and Keywords
Since the late 20th century, performance has played a vital role in environmental
activism, and the practice is often related to concepts of eco-art, eco-feminist art, land
art, theatricality, and “performing landscapes.” With the advent of the Capitalocene
discourse in the 21st century, performance has been useful for acknowledging indigenous
forms of cultural knowledge and for focusing on the need to reintegrate nature and
culture in addressing ecological crisis. The Capitalocene was distinguished from the
Anthropocene by Donna Haraway who questions the figuration of the Anthropos as
reflexive of a fossil-fuel-burning ethos that does not represent the whole of industrial
humanity in the circuit of global capital. Jason W. Moore’s analysis for the Capitalocene
illustrates the division between nature and society that is affirmed by the tenets of the
Anthropocene. Scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer had dated the Anthropocene
age to the industrial acceleration of the late-18th/mid-19th century but Moore points to
the rise of capitalism in the 15th century when European colonization reduced indigenous
peoples to naturales in their modernist definition of nature that became distinct from the
new society. As material property, women were also precluded from this segment of
industrial humanity.
By the 20th century, the Euro-American system for progressive modernism in the arts was
supported by the inscription of cultures that represented un-modern “primitivist” nature.
The tribal and the modern became a postcolonial debate in art historical discourse. In the
context of the Capitalocene, a different historiography of eco-art, eco-feminist art, and
environmental performances can be conceived by acknowledging the work of artists such
as Ana Mendieta and Kara Walker who have illustrated the segregation of people
according to the nature/society divide. Informed by Judith Butler’s phenomenological
analyses of performative acts, the aesthetic use of bodily-oriented expression (with its
effects on the viewer’s body) provides a vocabulary for artists engaging in the subjects of
the Capitalocene. In the development of performances in the global context, artists such
as Wu Mali, Yin Xiuzhen, and Ursula Biemann have emphasized the relationship between
bodies of humans and bodies of water through interactive works for the public, sited at
the rivers and the shores of streams. They show how humans are not separate from
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nature, a concept that has long been conveyed by indigenous rituals that run deep in
many cultures. While artists have been effective in acknowledging the continuing
exploitations of the environment, their performances have also reflected the “self” of
nature that humans are in the act of destroying.
Keywords: performance art, performativity, eco-art, eco-feminism, Capitalocene, Anthropocene, indigeneity
Performance art, happenings, and performative actions in the United States often
emulated the activism of the 1960s and 1970s, and they included visual art expressions
that served the environmental cause. By the end of the 20th century, artists were using
the interactive form to express environmental issues performatively and to engage with
the environment, often under the concept of “performing landscapes” for art sited outside
in nature.1 Integrated with the theatricality of minimalism and land art of that period, the
performative turn has since come to be understood as viewing engagements in which the
viewer’s embodied reactions to objects are considered as performative.2 Audience
reception also became a means to involve communities in advocacy. The artistic
development of performance emerged around the same moment that Judith Butler
questioned how gender is performed, articulating the need to “rethink performativity as
cultural ritual, as the reiteration of cultural norms” in the ontological dimensions of the
medium.3 The body-art focus of performance contributed to its use in expressing identity
as representations of ecofeminist art came to be included in the genre of eco-art, or art
created on behalf of ecological concerns.4 By the 21st century, the reinterpretation of eco-
art in relation to the human as a specific industrial identity was influenced by the
Anthropocene discourse, with its focus on non-human, post-human, animal, robotic, and
technological engagements that renege the polluting impact of humans on all planetary
life.
But in the larger scope of environmental studies, the acknowledgment of indigenous ways
of ecological knowing has come to be aligned with the Capitalocene, a distinction
different from the Anthropocene. The debate was defined by Donna Haraway, who
questions the figuration of the “Anthropos” as reflexive of a “fossil-fuel-burning humanity”
that “doesn’t even speak to all of industrial humanity, but specifically the formations of
global capital and global state socialisms.”5 Referring to life in the age of capital, the
Capitalocene does not pertain to the historical discourse in economic and social relations
among industrial societies. Instead, the term has been used to acknowledge the way in
which capitalism has become the system in which all species-life must circulate, not just
human life within a specific demographic topos. Haraway advocates for the use of the
terminology of the Capitalocene to describe the exchange networks in the “third great
age of carbon” by recognizing that the concept of “the Human” refers to only a certain
class of individuals.6 In this different approach to environmental advocacy, the arts under
the Capitalocene came to be connected to the indigenous “non-Western” traditions and
performative rituals centered on processes of animism and natural ecological systems.
This connection, however, appears as a contradiction, belied by the “non-Western”
category itself that is associated with the classification of the “primitive” in the modern
Euro-American system for art history. Modernity and art was always ideologically
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connected to “nature,” and as updated by Jessica L. Horton, “the contemporary world

order stood not for liberating flows of capital and people, so much as the continued reign
of colonial elites over a disenfranchised earth.”7 Industrial humanity was never again
considered as part of nature after the establishment of “civilized society” as defined by
Adam Smith’s 18th-century treatise, The Wealth of Nations.8
Species life has been divided into the modern categories for “culture” and “nature” in
binary terms: Culture is “civilized” humanity while nature is the “primitive” wild. Since
the 1980s and 1990s, contemporary artists such as Ana Mendieta, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and
James Luna have adopted the performance practice to trace, represent, and embody
indigenous ontologies in order to resist the ongoing Enlightenment assumptions of the
culture/nature division. Against the rhetorical judgment of the primitive and the modern,
they were among the performative artists who early on had problematized the system
dividing humans from nature in the various ideological meanings of both terms.
Mendieta’s performances, in particular, exposed the deep resistance to aligning humans
with nature while emphasizing the conflicted association to women. Represented in
photographs, her Tree of Life series (1976–1979) captured the artist covered in mud, her
body merging with the tree behind her in an essentialist expression of the body of nature.
Feminists and art critics in the 1990s had criticized Mendieta for subscribing to long-
standing primitive associations between women and nature. But as Jane Blocker explains
in her analysis, the Cuban American artist “distanced herself from what she called ‘white
feminism’” along with its views of the “earth as goddess,” and instead practiced the
“primitive” magic of an expression “strongly influenced by Mendieta’s knowledge of the
rituals of Santeria (an Afro-Cuban religious tradition).”9 The connections among woman,
nature, primitive—or as phrased by artist Trinh T. Minh-ha “woman, native, other”—have
long been attributed to the unmodern sign of nature as the antithesis of modern culture.
In her 1989 film Surname Viet Given Name Nam, Trinh performed the primitivist
assumptions placed on Vietnamese women by using conceptual performance to
problematize the gendered portrayals of nationalism.10
Performance’s ritual function in visualizing human relationships with nature has deep
historical connections in many cultures. The most well-known concepts emanate from
indigenous societies in the United States, described by Joe Sheridan and Roronhiakewen
“He Clears the Sky” Dan Longboat as the Pre-Columbian imagination, expressed “when
the transformative powers of the land speak” because the environment is “the timeless,
living ontology” of the indigenous mind.11 Viewed in the global context, contemporary
artists have adapted performances of the ritual function that stems from epistemologies
and ontological ways of being that emanate from cultures and regions outside or on the
borders of industrial humanity. Diverse performative forms of environmental expression
relate to nature/culture in the Capitalocene. A different historiography of eco-art emerges
by acknowledging the particular contribution of indigenous knowledge and by rejecting
the modernist judgments of non-Western primitivism that defined the fine-arts category.
Artists such as James Luna reveal the ways in which the artistic use of performance can
honor the indigenous mind and the living ontology of nature as inextricable from
environmental activism. It is for this reason, perhaps, that Luna’s body of work created
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during the latter part of the 20th century was set apart from the eco-art “canon,”
exemplified by artists such as Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke, Helen and Newton Harrison,
and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. A study of Luna’s work, as well as the generation of
expression represented by Kalisolaite ‘Uhila, acknowledges their contribution to ritual
practices in the global 21st-century context. They provide a way to understand
environmental systems that are ultimately performed in conjunction with human
processes in the Capitalocene, a position that is quite different from the Anthropocene’s
separation of human activity from natural processes.
The Anthropocene/Capitalocene discourse emerges from the discipline of science;

however, cultural theorists have contributed to the rapid growth of its interdisciplinary
development. Technically, the terminology involves the different ways in which scientists
mark geological time from the period of the Pleistocene epoch to the current exit from
the Holocene and entry into the Anthropocene. Introduced in the 1980s by biologist
Eugene F. Stoermer, the term Anthropocene appeared in Paul Crutzen’s 2002 essay
defining the profound changes in the geological/glacial conditions due to human
activities.12 In 2011, Crutzen, along with scientists Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, and
John McNeill, established the “conceptual and historical perspectives” by “formally
recognizing the Anthropocene as a new epoch in earth history, arguing that the advent of
the Industrial Revolution around 1800 provides a logical start date for the new epoch.”13
Their argument is premised on the rapid rise of the use of fossil fuels from the years 1800
to 2000 (especially after airplanes and automobiles) alongside the growth of world
population, from one billion to six billion, which saw the exponential expansion of the
carbon imprint and greenhouse gasses. Following Crutzen’s initial argument, however,
others such as Juanita Sundberg, T. J. Demos, and Jason W. Moore have challenged the
Anthropocene thesis, particularly the tendency to universalize the concept of the
Anthropos as a petro-capitalist economic class of culture that is wholly in opposition to
the entity of nature. Sundberg points to the erroneous assumption of the ontological split
between nature and culture in the Anthropocene discourse, while Demos argues that this
universalizing logic “makes it easy to justify further technological interventions in the
earth’s systems via geoengineering, as if the causes of climate disruption can be its
solutions.”14 Moore considers the Anthropos way of thinking as the continuing modernist
separation of humans from nature, viewing “capitalism as a world economy” instead of
“capitalism as world-ecology,” defined as “a relation of capital, power, and nature as an
organic whole . . . the history of capitalism cannot be reduced to the burning of fossil
fuels.”15 Moore, like Haraway, shifts the focus to the Capitalocene in advocacy of a
historical context that recognizes the political development of the modern “class” of
humans, the wealth holders of the new capitalist society that emerged in the 15th
century, not during the 1800s.
The rise of capitalism is attributed by Moore to the development of cheap labor and its
function in accumulating cheap nature, which was the primary European objective during
the explorer years of global conquest from 1450 to 1640. The slave trade from West
Africa had begun in 1450 and would eventually serve the colonialist operations of the
Dutch, English, and French, particularly in the profitable sugar plantations in the
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Americas. Moore explains the ontological status imposed by the New World exploration in
which “most humans were part of Nature and this designation worked through the new
divisions of labor. An African slave was not part of Society in the new capitalist order.”16
The modern class of humanity in this new order was established through the exclusion of
slaves, indigenous peoples, and virtually all “foreigners of color,” along with those
considered as partly human in the case of European women who were still the property of
men. While the Anthropocene replicates the 19th-century capitalist logic establishing the
divide between Humans and Nature, the Capitalocene acknowledges the very way in
which the 15th-century determination of humanity as a category distinct from nature,
indigeneity, and women continues to be the troubling problem to overcome. Resistance to
the privileged assumptions of the human class has served as the premise for activist
performances in relation to the Capitalocene.
The influences on performance art in the 1960s included the actions of the civil rights
resistance and the vocabulary of raced and gendered bodies for expressing dissent. At the
time, individuals standing up to be counted shared mutual theatrical forms of
representation; however, the generation of happenings was segregated, for the most part,
from the embodied demonstrations in Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama, on behalf
of voting and labor rights. In the Capitalocene logic, this segregation is also an outcome
of the nature/culture divide as cogently illustrated by Kara Walker’s 2014 installation
titled A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby. A Subtlety’s theatrical scene and
monumental experience engaged viewers in a performative way, and Walker’s subjects of
race, labor, and slavery can be viewed as a continuation of a specific kind of embodied
dissent in the 21st century.
Environmental activism had yet another performative mission, and the historiographic
review of the nature/culture divide shows correlations of cultural knowledge through eco-
art performances. Beginning in the 1970s, efforts by artists have ranged from restoring
polluted areas to interventions that raised awareness and changed social consciousness.
Artists Dominique Mazeaud, Shai Zakai, and Wu Mali were using performance as a means
to clean the polluted waterways of the Rio Grande, the Ellah Valley in Israel, and the
Danshui River in Taiwan. Always a global effort, artists began to collaborate with
scientists, civic administrators, and community members to stage restorations of polluted
sites, especially rivers and waterways, as they represent the connection to humans in
vital ways. The 21st-century work of Yin Xiuzhen, Patty Chang, and Ursula Biemann
emphasizes the connection between of bodies of water and bodies of humans. The
trajectories of the Capitalocene—from the 1960s to 2018—are therefore recognizable in
the visual art contributions to performance ritual, performance embodiments, and
performativity in environmental activism.
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Bodily Oriented Advocacy and the Diversity of

Artistic Performances in the Capitalocene
Performance’s historical contexts can help to clarify the changing distinctions of the art
form in relation to the debates of the Capitalocene. In the United States, the ritual of
performance has often served as a specific form of political advocacy, emulating the
activities of the 1960s civil rights coalitions and embodiments of social consciousness.
The performative vocabulary of activism can be traced to the 1960s when racial and
gendered divisions of industrial humanity were being challenged. The ontological
dimension of performance was expressed through bodily oriented practices that
reproduced the radical resistance of the period. At the center of this history is the
foundational message I AM A MAN emblazoned on signs carried and worn by the black
sanitation workers on strike in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968. Minister James Lawson had
exhorted the workers, “you are human beings” in response to the supposition that “at the
heart of racism is the idea that a man is not a man, that a person is not a person.”17 The
sanitation workers were compelled to perform their speech act in asserting their rights in
a society that treated them as less than human. Slavery had prohibited the African
American population from representation in both culture and industry, demeaning its
humanity. But the very premise of Marxist alienation is the estrangement of humans from
nature in capitalist life, and in the course of “life activity, estranged labour estranges the
species from man.”18 The importance of nature in this equation was explained by Marx as
the “life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that
man (like the animal) lives on inorganic nature . . . Just as plants, animals, stones, air,
light, etc.”19 Manifested by the Memphis sanitation worker in 1968, Marx foresaw those
who would be precluded from industrial humanity in between culture and nature.
A performative work that addresses this is Kara Walker’s 2014 installation reflecting the
legacy of the sugar plantation and the African female subject of slavery. At the Behest of
Creative Time Kara E. Walker Has Confected: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,
an Homage to the Unpaid and Overworked Artisans Who Have Refined Our Sweet Tastes
from the Cane Fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the Demolition
of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant mimics the 19th-century freak show (notably the
Hottentot Venus) in both the wording of the poster advertisements and the visual
spectacles that they promoted. Walker’s marvelous sugar baby is a seventy-five-and-a-half
by thirty-five-foot-tall female sphinx sculpted from thirty tons of sugar over a Styrofoam
core.20 From May to July in 2014, the enormous sculpture, along with thirteen little boy
statues cast from brown sugar (all dissolving confectionary objects), were installed in the
five-story space of the defunct Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn, built in the late 19th
century. The factory site emplaces and situates the body of viewer in the context of sugar
manufacturing and the center of the addictive commodity triangulating African slavery.
Not unlike being in the presence of an Egyptian sphinx, the viewer is engulfed by the
enormous white monument, not only from its sheer scale but also in the sense of
confectionary smell and the tactility of warm melting candy. Walker carved the statue A
Subtlety with bare breasts and a ten-foot vagina, and the entire performative engagement
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was meant to cause a visceral reaction from the viewer. In fact, Walker filmed the
audience’s reactions, which often revealed the pain and humiliation of black viewers and
the sexualized jeers of laughing male viewers. This highly charged staging of the black
female stereotype allowed Walker to see how “human behavior is so mucky and violent
and messed-up and inappropriate. And I think my work draws on that.”21 Walker’s
representation of the entire experience supports the argument expressed by African
American historians and critics such as Calvin Hernton and Hortense Spillers that
“slavery did not transform the black female into an embodiment of carnality at all . . . She
became instead the principal point of passage between the human and the non-human
world . . . the route by which the dominant male decided the distinction between
humanity and ‘other.’”22 Walker’s performative expression illustrates the development of
the Capitalocene in an historically affective way by visualizing the inextricable issues of
gender, race, and labor as they continue to be performed in the present.
From the perspective of the Capitalocene, A Subtlety elicits a distinct way of knowing that
is different from expressions of the feminist discourse that pertain to the class of women
in Haraway’s “industrial humanity”—a discourse that includes the debates over the
essentialism of ascribing woman to nature as well as the absence of the female subject in
orthodox Marxism. The acknowledgment of the black female figure can be reframed by
the foreboding extinction of the multispecies life that Marx initially theorized in his 1844
discussion of humans and nature. In Maria Mies’s study on capitalist patriarchy, the
issues of the Capitalocene are reiterated as an ideal: “A society in which nature, women
and other peoples are not colonized and exploited for the sake of others and the abstract
idea of progress, would have to be based on the recognition that our human world is
finite.”23 Walker’s monumental Sugar Baby illustrates Mies’s critique of the past, but
through the performative engagements with the viewer; A Subtlety reveals the continuing
effects of this history in the present.
Walker’s theatrical expression of the Capitalocene is presented as a visual-art experience

whereas performance projects encompass a diverse range of practices. For example,
playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle presents the subjects in the conventional theater setting.
Nagle engages her audiences in family stories about the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma
through narrative. Her 2018 play titled Sovereignty is a historical drama about the Trail
of Tears, the name of the exile of the tribe from the Southeast region. Nagle explains that
“it’s the story that was told to me from the time I was this big. I’ve carried it in me my
whole life.”24 In 2018, she also opened another play titled Manahatta at the Oregon
Shakespeare Festival, which reimagines the past and present of the Lenape members of
Delaware Nation. Traversing time through separate vignettes, Nagle connects the
deceptions of the Dutch West India Company during the 1600s to modern-day Wall Street
and Manahatta (the “island of many hills” in Lenape”). The playwright is also a lawyer
and according to critic Laura Collins-Hughes, Nagle’s day job is “devoted to the issues
that also consume her writing (tribal sovereignty, the environment, domestic violence,
and sexual assault).”25 Clearly, her activist practice is performed in the theaters of both
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art and the law as she deals with issues of indigeneity that are intertwined with
environmental and feminist issues.
The association between performance and ecology has been the subject of study among
various academic fields distinct from the discipline of the visual arts in which Walker’s
theatrical objects are included along with Mendieta’s form of performance-art expression.
As exemplified by the interdisciplinary conference Between Nature: Explorations in
Ecology and Performance held in 2000 at Lancaster University, the subject crosses from
“environmental theater” in performance/drama studies to the performance of
relationships between humans and nature in social science explorations, not to mention
the use of performance in geography studies.26 Lancaster University’s consortium was
the first major conference to bring the diverse studies together, illustrating the ways in
which both “ecology” and “performance” can refer to a myriad of general concepts and
broad contexts around those terms. There is, however, a distinction between visual artists
using conceptual performative practices (including film) and dramatic projects of
performance such as Nagle’s presented in a theater setting. Visual artists who physically
go to locations to perform their culture/nature subjects can express using the meaning of
the site in a way that is vastly different from the work of theater actors who are bound to
the stage.
Performance in the visual arts is reflected in works sited in environments as artists

explore both the ritual practices of indigenous expression and the aesthetic activism of
ecological restoration. While theatrical stage actors, social scientists, and geographers
may also adopt an activist stance in their use of performance, the different
implementation by “visual, performance, and conceptual artists” as defined by Guillermo
Gómez-Peña, is the ability to self-consciously stage the activist “self” in association with
the environment–the environment of the border, for example, was Gómez-Peña’s
“laboratory for social and aesthetic experimentation . . . Performance, political activism,
and community concerns are completely intertwined” in his aesthetic practice.27 Actors
on the stages of the 2018 Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which showcased several plays
on the Capitalocene, could also present their own bodies to express important issues.28
But what distinguishes the performance art of Kalisolaite ‘Uhila and James Luna is their
explorations of indigenous ontologies that are experienced in the actual place of nature
and locations that are important to their embodied expressions of a cultural self of
nature.
Performance as a Cultural Ritual in the

Capitalocene
Since the first decades of the 21st century, a change in perspective toward the ecological
imagination can be viewed through performances of the ritual function, connected to
epistemologies and ontological ways of being that emanate from cultures globally outside
or on the borders of industrial humanity. In his 2015 performance titled Tangai ‘one’one,
or Walking Against Greenwich Mean Time, the Tongan artist Kalisolaite ‘Uhila embarked
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on a three-day ritual walk around the island of Rarotonga in a counter-clockwise direction

as a part of the “Ocean is us” Epeli Hau’ofa, Sea-Change: Performing A Fluid Continent in
the 2015 Oceanic Biennial.29 The show’s organizer Dorita Hannah explains the
indigenous context for the event: “Before colonial Europe developed instrumentation to
negotiate the sublime sea, Pacific navigators have long steered their course via an
intimate understanding of the currents, swells, stars, sun, moon, clouds, colourations,
wave patterns, and movement of fishing birds.”30 Through performance, humans could
return to those models for navigating their course of existence.
To begin his ritual, ‘Uhila first pays respect by donning ceremonial dress consisting of
black tupenu clothing, ta’ovala woven wrap, and sandals—the island style of dress. The
artist commences on his walk while carrying a ten-kilo sack of sand on his back, which
empties from a hole at the bottom in order to leave a sand trail behind him. In his
marking of time, the sand in this hourglass is emptied as a process of his peripatetic
ritual. When the sack runs out of sand, ‘Uhila stops and asks local residents for their
permission to refill it with the sand in the area where he happens to stop. The people he
asks are befuddled by his request because sand comprises the ground of the island and is
not owned by anyone along his route. ‘Uhila conceptualizes the material of sand as
representative of property as well as his time spent on earth. But ultimately, he
acknowledges the intrusion of the visitor on the island as he re-creates the guest-host
relationship with the earth, the land of Rarotonga, as well as with everyone he meets
there in his recognition of self and nature.
Viewed in the larger context, the performance of walking is a time-honored ritual that
crosses all cultures, particularly as circumambulation has long been used as an act of
prayer. The movements in pilgrimage include the Buddhist path of enlightenment to the
2nd-century BCE stupa, the 7th-century tradition of the Hajj to Mecca, and the seasonal
Catholic ritual to the Gothic churches during the Middle Ages. In the context of
contemporary performance art, the peripatetic art form often emulated the religious trek
while also connecting to environmental advocacy. For his performance Pilgrim’s Way
(1971), Hamish Fulton walked the ancient route in England from Winchester to the
pilgrimage church in Canterbury. While this historical walk to the shrine of Thomas
Becket (who died in 1170) was a deeply held British tradition, the artist notes that his
“walking journeys” were influenced by “the culture of American Indians and the
mindfulness and meditation of Buddhist monks.”31 Fulton’s contemporary Richard Long’s
perambulation in 1967 (A Line Made By Walking) left the marks of his tread on the
landscape, which at the time was considered as a new form of artistic performance. In
hindsight, however, the innovation would have been confined to the trajectory of
European art history rather than taking as a whole the multiple meanings of
circumambulation among diverse cultural traditions. While Fulton and Long’s walking
shares affinity with ‘Uhila’s circumambulation of Rarotonga, they are distinguished from
his indigenous ritual paying deep respect to the island’s specific place and its people as
an ontology of nature inseparable from human life.
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In 1992, Barbara C. Matilsky published Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary Artists’

Interpretations and Solutions to recognize the work of artists who were responding to
environmental issues. She found “many parallels between landscape painters of the
nineteenth century and artists today,” establishing the European lineage for the
environmental expression. But she later included an acknowledgment of indigenous
cultures, suggesting that the “relationship of first peoples to their environment offers
industrialized cultures important lessons” since “the systematic destruction of forests,
prairie, tundra, and other habitats also threatens the human inhabitants from whom we
have so much to learn.”32 The Capitalocene narrative is reiterated in Matilsky’s teleology
of European art history; by which, the 19th-century landscapes representing industrial
humanity coexist with the history of violence enacted upon both the landscape and
indigenous peoples. While the complicity of art history is clear upon review of the
environmental expression, the embodied representation of humans and places can
provide another way to understand the segregation of cultures in the Capitalocene era.
Indigenous artists such as James Luna have addressed the conditions of Native history
and industrial change in deeply affective ways. A member of the community of Luiseño
Indians of La Jolla, California, Luna’s performance titled Emendatio was presented at the
Fondazione Querini Stampalia during four consecutive days in June at the opening of the
2005 Venice Biennale. Emendatio consisted of three parts, of which, the performance
component was held outside in the garden of the former Palazzo of the Querini Stampalia
family while the two installations, Apparitions: Past and Present and Chapel for Pablo Tac,
were showcased inside of the palace originally built during the Renaissance. The
narrative focus of the exhibition was the spiritual, ghostly connections between the
present-day Indian community represented by Luna and the historical figure of Pablo Tac,
the Luiseño member who left California for Italy in 1834 to study for the priesthood in
Rome. In the space of the Querini chapel, Luna hosted an altar for Pablo Tac with
ceremonial objects of divergent faiths, symbolized by “an abalone shell, crucifix and eagle
feather, and a Luiseño basket. A chalice and paten were in a vitrine to the side.”33 Among
the relics were Tac’s handwritten manuscripts. According to Charlotte Townsend-Gault,
Tac had recorded the “only known Native account of the conversion of the Quechnajuis,
making it clear that the Catholicism practiced among his people interpreted doctrine
according to Quechnajuichom culture and ways of seeing.”34 Curators Truman T. Low and
Paul Chaat Smith explain that “Emendatio is a project that collapses the time between
1834 and 2005,” a concept embodied and visualized by Luna’s four-hour dance, initiated
by drawing and blessing a ritual circle using symbolic objects such as arrows and stones.
The circle also included “low-income food items, sugar packets, medical vials, and
syringes–references to the current health plight of many indigenous nations.”35 Never to
return to his homeland, Tac died from a virus similar to the diseases that would lead to
the death of entire indigenous communities in the United States. Throughout Luna’s
dance accompanied by a fusion of cultural music, the artist would change his ceremonial
robes, from loincloth and beaded breastplate to the Italian-style tuxedo with a horse rider
emblem on the back. In its entirety, Emendatio’s Luiseño symbols (including those
embodied by Luna, his ceremonial rattles, the altar weavings and objects) disrupted the
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European space of the Querini Stampalia in Venice. The curators assert that “Emendatio
claims Venice as part of Indian history, and in so doing demonstrates a belief held by
James Luna and many other Native people that every place is a Native place.”36 Marked
by the site of Venice itself, the place of Native/nature was inexorably changed during the
Renaissance era, which as Moore argues, was transformed by the Capitalocene’s
“industrial society, industrial civilization, industrial capitalism.”37 Luna’s return to
memorialize Tac’s Quechnaujuichom travel was a recognition of the “place” of the Native
in the industrial process.
Performance Ritual, Global Eco-Activism, and

the Way of Water
Since the 1980s, artists have also ritualized the work of restoring polluted waterways
and/or collaborated with scientists, civic administrators, and community organizers to
enact legislative initiatives. Artist Shai Zakai also adopted the walking approach to
complete her 1999–2002 work Concrete Creek considered one of the first eco-art projects
in Israel. Zakai’s walk through the ancient biblical region of the Ellah Valley revealed an
intermittent creek that emerged only with heavy rainfall. She also found it to be the
dumping ground for the nearby quarry where concrete-mixer drivers would empty their
trucks. The concrete would then harden, covering over the stream and its vegetation,
killing everything underneath. To clean up the stream, Zakai enlisted quarry workers,
cement mixer drivers, Palestinians, Bedouins, and moshav members to help clean up
Concrete Creek while also painting and artistically transforming the immovable concrete
remainders. In this way, many people performatively collaborated on the project to
restore the creek and create site-specific expressions on the concrete. Dominique
Mazeaud conducted a similar performance in the United States, The Great Cleansing of
the Rio Grande, which entailed the ritual of removing the garbage in the river over the
course of seven years from 1987 to 1994. “As I ‘walked’ the river (I began with the nearly
dry Santa Fe River, walking my way toward The Great River), I received many ‘gifts’
beyond the trash that I was collecting.”38 The ritual function of walking continues to be
the performative practice for Mazeaud, but she actually worked to clean the river during
her performance.
Informed by the ecofeminist movement as recognized by theorists such as Carolyn

Merchant and Gloria Feman Orenstein, the term
ecofeminisme was coined by the French writer Francoise d’Eaubonne in 1974 to

represent women’s potential for bringing about an ecological revolution to ensure
human survival on the planet . . . Radical ecofeminism analyzes environmental
problems from within its critique of patriarchy and offers alternatives that could
liberate both women and nature.39
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To fulfill such a “liberation,” the human to human relationship was important to

performance artists such as Mazeaud and Zakai who staged themselves (their own
bodies) in the role of both the subject and object of art in addition to the role of nature
and the river. In the 21st century, however, contributions to the ecofeminist discourse
shifted toward acknowledgment of conditions on the margins of industrial capitalism as
they are implicated by the politics of globalization. Aneel Salman articulates the
argument within Pakistan:
In the South, feminist critics of the ‘steam roller’ effect of technological

modernisation and global capitalism drew attention to the threat to both women
and environment from so-called ‘development’. They showed how women were
experiencing particular hardship, as commercial farming, logging and mining
invaded their traditional way of life as they were drawn into highly exploitative
and health threatening forms of production.40
As explained by Moore, the role of women in the Capitalocene was always considered less
than human, even if they are constituents of industrial humanity. Outside of this
constituency, the subaltern status that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak established for
postcolonial theory is even more pronounced.41
Since the 1990s, the artist Wu Mali has used performative means to express the
narratives of women laborers such as her Stories of Women from Hsin-Chuang (1997),
representing their experiences a generation prior in Taiwan’s textile factories. Wu
explains that “Taiwan in the 1970s was dominated by strong nativist sentiment. It was
caused by the despair people experienced in the industrialization process, when
traditional values were quickly vanishing.”42 Using layered sound, images, and text, Wu’s
installation encloses the viewer with the voices of the women who had left their farming
villages in the 1970s to support their families during the economic boom of Taiwan’s
factory districts. The artist elicits the sense perception of the viewer using the different
elements of video and installation to perform the expression of labor. By the 1990s, most
of the multinational industries moved to even cheaper labor and cheaper nature. The
industrial boom relocated to the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong, China, also known as
the “World’s Factory” in the 21st century. Wu tracked the devastating impact of the
earlier economic cycle in Taiwan, and since 2006, her performances, such as By the River,
On the River, Of the River, worked to interactively immerse viewers in the precarity of the
environment after industrialization left the rivers and streams polluted. The artist
brought viewers, scientists, and activists to the mouth of the Danshui River by boat so
they could experience their embodied selves as part of the water system. Her intention
was to place humans in a relationship with the river and the environment, eliminating the
divide between culture and nature. In 2011, Wu initiated her long-term project Trekking
the Plum-Tree-Stream, an activist performance enlisting community members and
government agencies to address wastewater contamination and industrial pollution
resulting from Taiwan’s factory boom. The project’s main goal was to inspire the
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community to conduct the actual restitution of the streams and to restore biodiversity
with the help of specialists.
Artists in China have addressed industrial pollution overtly through performative actions,
and an important example of the global reach of this artistic practice is the well-known
1995 performance Washing the River by artist Yin Xiuzhen. Washing the River brought
residences of Chengdu, Sichuan, to the banks of the Funan River where the artist had
stacked blocks of ice into a monumental structure consisting of ten cubic meters of the
frozen contaminated stream. She then invited viewers to partake in a cleansing ritual
consisting of “washing” the polluted structure with brushes, mops, and clean water. The
artistic intervention was clearly effective as Yin re-staged Washing the River in the
decades to follow at many other riverbanks, including the Upper Georges River in Sydney,
Australia, in 2010; the Derwent River in Hobart, Tasmania, in 2014, and the
Pesanggrahan River in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 2017. Yin’s performative act is a ritual
expression for the 21st century, and there is no greater example of the growth of global
industrial capitalism than its rapid development in China.
The work of Los Angeles artist Patty Chang reveals the continuing usefulness of
performance’s ritual function for questioning the division between humans and nature as
it relates to 21st-century forms of industrialization in the Capitalocene. Chang’s 2017
video performance Configurations is another peripatetic quest; but this time it is on
behalf of the artist’s mission to track the three new aqueducts redistributing the waters
of the Yangtze, the Huai, the Huang (Yellow), and the Hai rivers in the South-to-North
Water Diversion (nanshui beidiao) from Danjiangkou Reservoir to Beijing. Since the
1990s, more than half of the fifty-thousand once-flourishing rivers in China have
vanished, and 70 percent of the freshwater lakes and streams are now polluted.43
Inaugurated in 2014, the massive South-to-North Diversion project had transferred ten
billion cubic meters of water to China’s draught-prone territories in the north by 2017.
Seventy percent of Beijing’s water supply is now from Danjiangkou, which serves eleven
million residents. For Configurations, Chang traveled to Xiangyang airport to begin her
trek to Dianjiangkou reservoir, moving north by car on her week-and-a-half-long trip
accompanied by her companion Liu, enlisted to guide her travels through China.
Recorded in her video, the performance entails marking the different sightings of the
aqueduct, conducted through the ritual of collecting her bodily fluids from urination. This
ritual act commemorates the diverted flow of water and the change to the course of
nature as Chang visualizes the human process as one that is no different from the process
of nature. The simple recognition of the fluid management of bodily processes is a
reminder that rivers and streams and human bodies are all-inclusive biological entities.
Chang also replicates the industrial element of the diversion by staging the prosthetic
procedure for the bodily act. She uses a device that allows her to remain standing while
urinating in her personal and re-gendered emulation of the technological change to the
flow of water. The depiction of the technological disruption acknowledges the un-natural,
awkward flow of the diversion of fluids in the alteration of nature’s design.
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The reported impact of the South to North project is the displacement of hundreds of
thousands of rural villagers due either to the construction of the aqueducts or the drying
up of rural agricultural farmlands after the transfer of local waters to the aqueducts. But
Liu provides another perspective by explaining that the diversion
was just a good reason—like any other reason–to move farmers . . . China was
following the model of the U.S. industrialization of farming, consolidating farms so
that they might eventually be turned into industrial farms. It took seventy years in
the U.S. China has just started.44
Seeing firsthand the dislocation of the population, Chang happens upon the yiming, one
of the locations where entire populaces were moved to make way for the expansion of the
reservoir. The naming of the Diversion plan as “the four horizontals and three
verticals” (siheng, sanzong) by state water officials echoes the metaphorical expression of
the division of land and people in the rituals of Chinese thought. Four horizontals/three
verticals provide a graphic description of the western, central, and eastern routes that
intersect with the four arteries of the Yangtze, the Huai, the Yellow, and the Hai rivers.
The gridlike charting method has long been used in Chinese philosophical expressions of
the well-field system (jingtian 井田 zhi ), visualized by the Chinese characters themselves.
The philosopher Mencius (372–289 BCE) had used the well-field system to illustrate the
indigenous concept of shared humanity through the division of land and labor. Dividing a
parcel of farm land into nine plots for eight families, the ninth plot would serve as the
public field to be cultivated by all eight families for the local “tax.” The representation of
nature and culture was integral to Mencius’s philosophical ideals, correlating the sharing
of land and labor to the Confucian moral community and humanity. As observed by the
intellectual Liang Qichao in 1899, “China’s ancient jingtian system stands on the same
plane as modern socialism.”45 The well-field economic theory of farm “collectivity” was
also adopted by the Marxist critic Ernest Mandel.46 Others, however, have argued that
the well-field system was ultimately enacted by the feudal lords of the dynastic past, the
reason for the triumph of Mao Zedong’s Communism in 1949. The question remains as to
what “the four horizontals and three verticals” signify if indeed water diversion serves
the model of US industrialization and ultimately eliminates the small farm economy that
had existed for millennia in China.
Performing Chemistry: The Ontology of Nature

as Culture
Water is the great connective element for re-positioning the perspective from the fossil-
fuel geopolitics of the Anthropocene toward the expansive view of the Capitalocene with
its planetary focus on humans as nature. The artist Ursula Biemann focuses her lens on
the “extreme hydrography” of Egypt’s dependence on the Nile River. Questioning “what
kind of bio-political-chemical compositions are currently in formation and what effects
will [they] have on future constellations of biological, chemical, and political life,”
Biemann looks intently at the engineering of water in her 2012 project Egyptian
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Chemistry.47 The video installation records the performative action of water sampling,
conducted by locals as they fill plastic water bottles to complete their fieldwork along the
banks of the river. Biemann documents locals doing the sampling but their human
interaction with the river is the engagement connects it to the performances of Wu Mali,
Patty Chang, and Yin Xiuzhen, emphasizing the relationship between bodies of humans
and bodies of water. Overall, Biemann’s video integrates complex visual narratives of dam
and irrigation hydraulics in the management of the Nile’s flooding waters. In one scene,
the water ends up in the beakers of the scientist in his laboratory that represents the
connecting operation between humans and the river in the entanglement of industrial
life.
Biemann’s exploration of the impact and need of water constitutes the same fixation for
artist Bright Ugochukwu Eke whose experiments with Acid Rain (2005) represents an
artistic chemistry project for the environment of Nigeria. Eke mixes water and
ammonium chloride from used dry cell batteries and wraps the liquid in polyurethane in
order to simulate the large raindrops that are known to be toxic to the living ecology of
the Niger River Delta.48 Eke’s 2005–2006 project Shield literally provides cover for acid
rain as he devised a raincoat and umbrella from “pure water sachets” to question how to
discern the clean or unclean waters in Nigeria—the water that should be protected is the
source of the toxic rain to be protected from. Worn as performances in their exhibition,
the raincoats are literally armors made of water packets. Overall, the performative
vocabulary of chemistry, from Biemann’s water sampling to Eke’s re-creation of acid rain,
expresses a sense of action and advocacy on behalf of rivers and rain; however, they also
show the problematic relationships among humans, nature, and science. Viewed from the
water, nature itself becomes an ontological entity on the level of humans, with a subject
position, illustrating the Capitalocene argument for eliminating the ideological divide
between culture and nature.
Performance functions in multiple artistic forms representing environmental advocacy in

the context of the Capitalocene. There are of course countless artistic actions and events
beyond those in this brief survey. The most poignant are works by indigenous artists. For
example, the multimedia project Auto Immune Response (AIR) by Will Wilson who is a
Diné (Navajo) artist encapsulates the Capitalocene thesis. Through photographic
collages, Wilson narrates the journey of a Diné man who travels the poisoned landscape
of the Southwestern United States in the aftermath of nuclear experiments and
dynamited mining in some 2,500 mines in the region.49 The extent to which performance
is inherent in the ritual processes of Native and non-industrial communities can be
measured by its continuing radical function. While contemporary Inuit artists such as
Tanya Lukin Linklater, Tanya Tagaq, and Beatrice Deer are expressing through dance and
music in the convention of performative media, the very idea of the performative
continues to function as resistance–usually against the assumptions for art in the legacy
of industrial humanity. The work of Algonquin artist Nadia Myre, for instance, adopts the
ritual of beading as an indigenous process: “Beading is political, whether it’s simply the
personal contribution to an age-old continuum or consciously reworking loaded imagery. I
really do see beading as an act of silent resistance.”50 Rather than the finished work, the
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performative act of beading is the most significant expression; it is an ontological act of

Native tradition. Performance has played a pivotal role in changing what Zoe Todd
describes as the “exploitative patterns from the past. The Anthropocene, like any
theoretical category at play in Euro-Western contexts, is not innocent of such violence.”51
Even the most conventional performances have showcased the medium’s use in staging
resistances against structural entities, including the institutions and spaces of the
mainstream art world. In this way, performance’s contribution to the human/nature/
culture debates has grown tremendously, not only to expose the continuing violence of
exploitations of nature in the global context of the Capitalocene but most crucially to
reflect the self of nature that humans are in the act of destroying.
Discussion of the Literature

Environmentalism and performance in the visual arts circulate within a range of
discursive and theoretical contexts, from the Capitalocene/Anthropocene distinctions for
humans, nature, and petrocapitalism to eco-feminist performances acknowledging gender
and sexuality in environmental activism. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin’s 2015
volume Art in the Anthropocene defines the age of “climate change, mass extinction and
resources” as one that generally includes the Anthropocene’s “cynical view of human
action and organization.”52 The Capitalocene supports an alternative perspective,
envisioned by Donna Haraway’s “naturecultures” as the relinquishing of the division
between nature and culture through indigenous and feminist approaches to the
“Anthropos,” defined as a “fossil-fuel-burning humanity” that “doesn’t even speak to all of
industrial humanity.”53 Contributors to the Anthropocene/Capitalocene debate include
Andreas Malm, T. J. Demos, and Jason W. Moore who extend the discussion on the nature/
culture divide. The debate is relevant for the art historical classification of the indigenous
and the so-called civilized, which has been historically represented by the primitive and
the modern in art, as well as the non-Western and Western. James Clifford’s 1988 book
The Predicament of Culture articulated the modern history of the “tribal and the modern”
in an influential way. Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges” also contributes to the
ecofeminist debate, developed during the late 20th century by theorists such as Carolyn
Merchant and Gloria Feman Orenstein. This development ran parallel to feminist
performance debates led by Amelia Jones and Judith Butler in both artistic and
philosophical terms. Haraway explains that
feminists of our time have been leaders in unraveling the supposed natural
necessity of ties between sex and gender, race and sex, race and nation, class and
race, gender and morphology, sex and reproduction, and reproduction and
composing persons . . . If there is to be multispecies ecojustice, which can also
embrace diverse human people, it is high time that feminists exercise leadership
in imagination, theory, and action to unravel the ties of both genealogy and kin,
and kin and species.54
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Ecofeminism in art discourse contributes to the complexity of the “primitive, native,

woman” concepts, left outside of the mainstream scholarship of the visual arts study on
performance. Environmentalism and performance came into prominence in the 1960s and
1970s with exhibitions of public actions (notably the work of Helen and Newton Harrison,
Mierle Lademan Ukeles, and Jo Hanson) alongside land art and minimalism (exemplified
by the large-scale projects of Nancy Holt, Robert Smithson, and Walter de Maria),
representatives of the canonical works. The mainstream debates in regard to the latter
were centered on the theatricality of art objects, articulated by the criticism of Michael
Fried in his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood.” The analysis of performativity and
engagement with objects and sites was discussed further in writings by Lucy Lippard,
Rosalind Krauss, and Miwon Kwon.
Links to Digital Materials

Center for Creative Ecologies. Arts-led interdisciplinary research tools to examine how
cultural practitioners—filmmakers, new media strategists, photojournalists, architects,
writers, activists, and interdisciplinary theorists—critically address and creatively
negotiate environmental concerns in the local, regional, and global field.
EcoCentrix: Indigenous Arts, Sustainable Acts. Alive to the power of performance,

contemporary indigenous artists merge the familiar with the unexpected, the traditional
with the experimental, creating new forms and objects along the way. They provoke
dialogues about resources, social justice, and stereotypes; and they show the triumphs
and failures of our times.
Curating Cities. A database of eco public art. A resource for researchers, academics,
artists, curators, educators, commissioning agencies, and sponsors working in the field as
well as those interested in promoting sustainability via public art.
Environmental Justice Eco-Art. Site provides links to environmental justice eco-art

that takes on issues of race, class, gender, and eco-colonialism in the unequal distribution
of environmental problems and benefits within the United States and around the globe.
Fluid States: Performances of Unknowing, psi #21/2015. A decentralized

performance studies international conference with activities across Africa, Asia,
Australia, Europe, Americas, and the Pacific throughout 2015.
Indigenous Environmental Network. An alliance of indigenous peoples whose shared

mission is to protect the sacredness of earth mother from contamination and exploitation
by respecting and adhering to indigenous knowledge and natural law.
MORUS Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space. Capitalism Nature Socialism’s Special

Issue Release Party for “Power, Peace and Protest: Ecofeminist Action, Vision and
Alternatives” April 28, 2018.
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Re.Act.Feminism A Performing Archive. A mobile archive and workstation with a

growing collection of videos, photographs, and other documents of feminist, gender-
critical, and queer performance art. This transnational and cross-generational project
featured works by over 180 artists and artist collectives from the 1960s to the beginning
of the 1980s, as well as contemporary positions. The research focus was on Eastern and
Western Europe, the Mediterranean and Middle East, the United States, and Latin
America.
WEAD: Women Eco Artists Dialog.
Further Reading
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010.
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology

and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 519–531.
Crutzen, Paul J. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415 (January 2002).
Jones, Amelia. Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1998.
Davis, Heather, and Etienne Turpin. Art in the Anthropocene. London, U.K.: Open
Humanities Press, 2015.
Demos, T. J. Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today. Berlin,
Germany, and New York, NY: Sternberg Press, 2017.
Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967): 12–23.
Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making

Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159–165.
Horton, Jessica, and Janet Catherine Berlo. “Beyond the Mirror: Indigenous Ecologies and
‘New Materialisms’ in Contemporary Art.” Third Text 27, no. 1 (2013): 17–28.
Krauss, Rosalind. Sculpture in the Expanded Field. Spring, 30–44, October 8, 1979.
Kwon, Miwon. One Thing After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
Lippard, Lucy R. Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the
Changing West. New York, NY: New Press, 2014.
Malm, Andreas. “The Origins of Fossil Capital: From Water to Steam in the British Cotton
Industry.” Historical Materialism 21, no. 1 (2013): 15–68.
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Merchant, Carolyn. “Ecofeminism and Feminist Theory.” In Reweaving the World: the
Emergence of Ecofeminism. Edited by Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, 100–
105. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1990.
Moore, Jason W., ed. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of
Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016.
Strathern, Marylin. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with
Society in Melanesia. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1990.
Notes:
(1.) See Annette Arlander, Performing Landscape: Notes on Site-Specific Work and
Artistic Research (Texts 2000–2011) (Helsinki, Finland: Theatre Academy Helsinki, 2012).
(2.) Nancy Holt’s eighty-six-foot Sun Tunnels (1973–1976), for instance, dramatically
“performs” the changing light and shadows of the desert floor where the cylinders reflect
the stars of the constellation from their location in Utah’s Great Basin Desert. The
Minimalism and theatricality debates were articulated in Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,”
Complete Writings (Halifax: Nova Scotia College, 1975); and Michael Fried, “Art and
Objecthood” Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1998).
(3.) Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality:
Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London, U.K. and New York, NY: Verso, 2000), 29.
Butler was addressing the norms of social constructions of identity.
(4.) As defined by artist Shai Zakai, “Ecological art investigates and responds to
ecological issues through various media and the power and beauty of it . . . Whereas,
environmental art uses the environment as a background.” Karin Kloosterman, “Nature’s
Social Worker, Ecological Artist Shai Zakai,” Green Prophet: Sustainable News for the
Middle East (March 7, 2009).
(5.) Donna Haraway and Martha Kenney, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhocene,” in

Art in the Anthropocene, ed. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (London, U.K.: Open
Humanities Press, 2015), 259.
(6.) Haraway and Kenney, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhocene,” 259.
(7.) Jessica L. Horton, “Indigenous Artists Against the Anthropocene,” Art Journal 76, no.
2 (2017): 49.
(8.) See Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(New York, NY: Random House, 1937).
(9.) Jane Blocker, Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 19. I am indebted to eco-feminist artist Mariah Connor
for her discussion on Tree of Life.
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(10.) See Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
(11.) Joe Sheridan and Roronhiakewen “He Clears the Sky” Dan Longboat, “The
Haudenosaunee Imagination and the Ecology of the Sacred,” Space and Culture 9, no. 4
(November 2006), 367
(12.) See Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, IGBP Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18; and
Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415 (January 3, 2002): 23.
(13.) Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen, and John McNeill, “The
Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions:
Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369, no. 1938 (March 13, 2011): 842.
(14.) T. J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today
(Berlin, Germany, and New York, NY: Sternberg Press, 2017), 49.
(15.) Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis
of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016), 84–85.
(16.) Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? 88.
(17.) Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther
King’s Last Campaign (New York, NY: Norton, 2007), 211.
(18.) Honey, Going Down Jericho Road, 211.
(19.) Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow, Russia:
Progress Publishers, 1974), 67.
(20.) See Glenda R. Carpio, “On the Whiteness of Kara Walker’s Marvelous Sugar Baby,”
ASAP/Journal 2, no. 3 (September 2017): 551–578; Amber Jamilla Musser, “Queering
Sugar: Kara Walker’s Sugar Sphinx and the Intractability of Black Female Sexuality,”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42, no. 1 (2016): 153–173.
(21.) Kara Walker, Carolina A. Miranda, and Ava DuVernay, “Kara Walker on the Bit of
Sugar Sphinx She Saved, Video She’s Making,” Los Angeles Times (October 13, 2014).
(22.) Hortense J. Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” in Pleasure and Danger:
Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (London, U.K.: Routledge, 1984), 76.
(23.) Maria Mies, Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale (London, U.K.: Zed Books,
1986), 4.
(24.) Laura Collins-Hughes, “Fighting for Native Americans, in Court and Onstage,” New
York Times (January 17, 2018), AR7.
(25.) Collins-Hughes, “Fighting for Native Americans, in Court and Onstage.”
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(26.) Bronislaw Szerzynski, Wallace Heim, and Claire Waterton, eds., Nature Performed:
Environment, Culture and Performance (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003); and Gabriella
Giannachi and Nigel Stewart, eds., Performing Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the
Arts (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2005) were the outcome of papers presented at the
Between Nature: Explorations in Ecology and Performance conference, held at Lancaster
University in July 2000. The first book is a social science book while the second is a
performance studies book. The authors Richard D. Besel and Jnan A. Blau of the edited
volume, Performance on Behalf of the Environment (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2014) are
communications studies researchers in a field that is distinguished from the visual arts
and performance.
(27.) Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “Multiple Journeys: A Performance Chronology,” in Perform,

Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, ed. Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (Bristol, U.K.:
Intellect, 2012), 318.
(28.) Besides Manahatta, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival presented many plays in 2018
on the subjects of the Capitalocene, and these include Idris Goodwin’s The Way the
Mountain Moved and Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s Snow in Midsummer.
(29.) Exhibition announcement for Oceanic Performance Biennial 2015, Rarotonga.
(30.) Dorita Hannah, “Fluid States Pasifika: Spacing Events Through an Entangled
Oceanic Dramaturgy,” Global Performance Studies 1. no. 1 (Summer, 2017). See also
Margaret Werry, “Sea-Change: Performing a Fluid Continent,” Performance Research: A
Journal of the Performing Arts 21, no. 2 (2016): 90–95.
(31.) Press Release, “Hamish Fulton: Walk,” Turner Contemporary, December 16, 2011.
(32.) Barbara C. Matilsky, Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary Artists’ Interpretations and

Solutions (New York, NY: Rizzoli, 1992), 5.
(33.) Charlene Townsend-Gault, “Rebecca Belmore and James Luna on Location at Venice:
The Allegorical Indian Redux,” Art History 29, no. 4 (September 2006): 747.
(34.) Townsend-Gault, “Rebecca Belmore and James Luna on Location at Venice: The
Allegorical Indian Redux.”
(35.) Exhibition materials, James Luna, Emendatio, June 6 to November 6, 2005,

Fondazione Querini Stampalia.
(36.) Exhibition materials, James Luna, Emendatio.
(37.) Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? 94.
(38.) Dominique Mazeaud, “Material is Matter . . . is Mother,” Dark Matter no. 4 (October
2016).
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(39.) Carolyn Merchant, “Ecofeminism and Feminist Theory,” in Reweaving the World: the
Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (San
Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1990), 100.
(40.) Aneel Salman and Nuzhat Iqbal, “Ecofeminist Movements: From North to the
South,” The Pakistan Development Review 46, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 857.
(41.) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse/Post-
Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 1994).
(42.) Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 161.
(43.) See Jonathan Kalman, “China’s Water Diversion Project Starts to Flow to Beijing,”
The Guardian, December 12, 2014.
(44.) Patty Chang, The Wandering Lake (New York, NY: Dancing Foxes Press, 2017), 67.
(45.) Quoted in Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1965), 3, 26.
(46.) Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory (London, U.K.: Merlin Press, 1968), 35.
(47.) Ursula Biemann, “Metachemistry,” Social Text, March 8, 2015.
(48.) See Tobenna Okwuosa, “Environmental Challenges as Creative Muse: The

Installation and Performance Art of Bright Ugochukwu Eke,” Academic Journal of
Interdisciplinary Studies 2, no. 3 (November 2013): 63–70.
(49.) See Horton, “Indigenous Artists Against the Anthropocene,” 66.
(50.) Sherry Farrell Racette, “Tuft Life: Stitching Sovereignty in Contemporary

Indigenous Art,” Art Journal (Summer 2017): 115.
(51.) Zoe Todd, “Indigenizing the Anthropocene,” in Art in the Anthropocene, ed. Heather
Davis and Etienne Turpin (London, U.K.: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 251.
(52.) Davis and Turpin, Art in the Anthropocene, 10.
(53.) Haraway and Kenney, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhocene,” 259.
(54.) Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene:

Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 161.
Jane Chin Davidson
California State University, San Bernardino
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Performance Art, Performativity, and Environmentalism in the Capitalocene

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature

Summary and Keywords

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 11 March 2019

Keywords: performance art, performativity, eco-art, eco-feminism, Capitalocene, Anthropocene, indigeneity

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 11 March 2019

connected to “nature,” and as updated by Jessica L. Horton, “the contemporary world

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The Anthropocene/Capitalocene discourse emerges from the discipline of science;

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Bodily Oriented Advocacy and the Diversity of

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Walker’s theatrical expression of the Capitalocene is presented as a visual-art experience

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Performance in the visual arts is reflected in works sited in environments as artists

Performance as a Cultural Ritual in the

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on a three-day ritual walk around the island of Rarotonga in a counter-clockwise direction

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 11 March 2019

In 1992, Barbara C. Matilsky published Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary Artists’

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 11 March 2019

Performance Ritual, Global Eco-Activism, and

Informed by the ecofeminist movement as recognized by theorists such as Carolyn

ecofeminisme was coined by the French writer Francoise d’Eaubonne in 1974 to

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To fulfill such a “liberation,” the human to human relationship was important to

In the South, feminist critics of the ‘steam roller’ effect of technological

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Performing Chemistry: The Ontology of Nature

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Performance functions in multiple artistic forms representing environmental advocacy in

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performative act of beading is the most significant expression; it is an ontological act of

Discussion of the Literature

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Ecofeminism in art discourse contributes to the complexity of the “primitive, native,

Links to Digital Materials

EcoCentrix: Indigenous Arts, Sustainable Acts. Alive to the power of performance,

Environmental Justice Eco-Art. Site provides links to environmental justice eco-art

Fluid States: Performances of Unknowing, psi #21/2015. A decentralized

Indigenous Environmental Network. An alliance of indigenous peoples whose shared

MORUS Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space. Capitalism Nature Socialism’s Special

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Re.Act.Feminism A Performing Archive. A mobile archive and workstation with a

WEAD: Women Eco Artists Dialog.

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology

Crutzen, Paul J. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415 (January 2002).

Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 11 March 2019

(5.) Donna Haraway and Martha Kenney, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhocene,” in

(6.) Haraway and Kenney, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhocene,” 259.

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 11 March 2019

(16.) Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? 88.

(18.) Honey, Going Down Jericho Road, 211.

(25.) Collins-Hughes, “Fighting for Native Americans, in Court and Onstage.”

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 11 March 2019

(27.) Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “Multiple Journeys: A Performance Chronology,” in Perform,

(29.) Exhibition announcement for Oceanic Performance Biennial 2015, Rarotonga.

(32.) Barbara C. Matilsky, Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary Artists’ Interpretations and

(35.) Exhibition materials, James Luna, Emendatio, June 6 to November 6, 2005,

(36.) Exhibition materials, James Luna, Emendatio.

(37.) Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? 94.