Aesthetic Ecologies

What would an intellectual history of the environment look like when told from the perspective of art history writing? The geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who first began using the term "Umwelt" ("environment") in a systematic way, claimed that, up to the end of the 19th century, the idea of environment had been primarily discussed not in scientific contexts but rather in aesthetic ones, by "artistically predisposed thinkers." In this course, we will take Ratzel's claim seriously and aim to recuperate the aesthetic side of theories of environment across diverse areas such as: notions of landscape ("the picturesque"); aesthetic and biological theories of milieu (Haeckel's "ecology," Taine's "milieu," Uexküll's "Umweltlehre"); Warburg's cultural history; the "sculpture of environment" (Rodin and Rilke); the "space-body" in modern dance (Laban). This course is about artworks that continue beyond their material confines into the space environing them. It focuses on evocations of air as the material space surrounding an artwork in texts that thematize the continuity between artwork as image and material object. Materials include: Aby Warburg, Rudolf Laban, Siegfried Ebeling, Camillo Sitte, Otto Wagner, Alois Riegl, R.M. Rilke, Wassily Kandinsky, Martin Heidegger, and others. MAPH and undergraduate students welcome.