#strikeart

Help that's so them TT

Here are some notes on On Flooded Streets and Breathing-in-Common: Climate Justice, Black Lives Matter, and the Arts of Decolonization. 

I liked this! It was very good! McKee provides a very necessary critique of environmental and activist art practices and their historic separation from race, class, and economy. There’s good context situating some contemporary interventions surrounding the climate crisis, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, etc. I guess the only thing I find lacking is more depth on interventions like #BlackOutTour and stuff in the Turbine Hall, which I could presumably find elsewhere. 

The reading I have didn’t have page numbers, so I will just list some key terms and ideas, because it’s probably not great to quote directly:

- Climate justice v. Anthropocene

- The romantic wilderness ideal embodied by folks like Thoreau and Ansel Adams ignores the cultural erasure of Native Americans.

- Natural disaster as a precursor to gentrification (eg. new buildings)

- So many ecological narratives are crafted without acknowledgement of the fact that people of color are and will be the first and hardest hit by climate change.

- There are different artistic approaches to climate change, some more deliberately palatable and optimistic than others.