A proposal that artists are the anthropologists of our new era or
ecological crisis.
"Today, the ecological catastrophe challenges us to rethink the space
our societies have assigned to art. Creativity, critical thinking,
exchange, transcendence, the relationship to the Other and to History
are values intrinsic to artistic practice that will soon be of vital
importance for the future of mankind. We need art to give a meaning to
our lives, and the banks will not supply that. By attempting to unfold a
few of the aesthetic figures floating in the global imaginary, this book
intends to describe what is at stake in artistic activity in the age of
the Capitalocene and to argue for it as a vital need."
The current ecological crisis has brought about a new relational
landscape: an unprecedented collapse of distances is creating
interspecies promiscuities and a crisis of the human scale. With
Inclusions, Nicolas Bourriaud proposes that artists are the
anthropologists of this new era. Artists acknowledge the fading of the
division between nature and culture, which has been the matrix of
segregation for millenia. Capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, social
segregation, the exploitation of land, subsoil, and animals--all are
based on status distinctions between subject and object. Against the
commodification of natural elements, Bourriaud sees a new generation of
artists calling for a molecular anthropology that studies the human
effects on the universe and the interaction between humans and
nonhumans. Contemporary art reconnects to archaic magic, the witches,
sorcerers, and shamans of precapitalist societies. Against the
devitalization of the world, art has managed to preserve certain aspects
of the social function and spiritualist practices of these societies.
Inclusions explores art history as a network of underground galleries,
and sutures sundered connections.
