Abstract

With the inclusion of three essays by Florian Sprenger, Elena Vogman, and Chris Williams-Wynn in the current issue, we continue a debate initiated in Grey Room 77 under the heading “A Proposal: Must We Ecologize?” There we began to consider the artistic and art-historical implications of the ecological paradigm shift wherein an expanded and denaturalized notion of ecology has been used to characterize and analyze an increasingly wide range of material and intellectual domains. And we did so in light of the broader context of the emergence and consolidation of a neoliberal form of governmentality, first remarked by Michel Foucault in the late 1970s, that can be termed Environmentality and that, as Thomas Lemke notes, operates “ecologically” by governing “the ‘environment’ of human and nonhuman entities rather than operating directly on ‘subjects’ and ‘objects.’” In short, Environmentality designates a new postwar formation of biopower that regulates the relational milieus of life and supplements, but does not supersede, prior forms of disciplinary technique that target the behavior of individual bodies or the norms of an entire population. After the renunciation of the frame and the pedestal but also, and more significantly, after the renunciation of art’s transcendental bracketing from the world (which so troubled late-formalist critics such as Michael Fried), the expanded and debordered artwork is understood to exist within, and thus be subject to, real space and real time. This, in itself, is not a new observation. But in terms of the broader shift toward a governmental system of Environmentality, the question of how to conceptualize the relationships of determination and codetermination between art and its “surround” takes on a new urgency.