Environmental aesthetics, largely because of its focus on 'natural' rather than artifactual environments, has ignored postindustrial sites. This article argues that this shortcoming stems from the nature-culture divide and that such sites ought to be considered by environmental aestheticians. Three forms of artistic engagement with postindustrial sites are explicated by looking at the work of Serra, Smithson, and others. It is argued that postindustrial art leads to a successively richer ability to see and thus think about such sites. Finally, a (...) new category is proposed, the interesting, in order to capture the aesthetic experience of postindustrial landscape art that eludes current terminology. (shrink)

Emily Brady asks us to reconsider what kinds of environmental artworks constitute ‘aesthetic affronts to nature’, and concludes that many of these works may in fact show aesthetic regard for nature...

Nonfictional field recording is a genre of music which offers a glimpse of art beyond our late-capitalist age. The ongoing ecocide which we, in a state of abject detachment, are witnessing and abetting calls out for artists to reconnect and reengage with the nonhuman world that has been deemed valueless by our civilization. Countering the disenchantment of nature wrought by scientism, human-centrism, and above all capitalism necessitates a dissolving of the barriers we set up between ourselves and our environment, a (...) task which can be only accomplished via religion or art: an art—like field recording—which affords reconnecting its audience with the enchantment of the ignored world surrounding them. In this article, Toshiya Tsunoda’s exemplary Somashikiba —recorded in locations forgotten by civilization—will be examined via interpretive tools adapted from Ueda Shizuteru’s Kyoto School aesthetics and Takahashi Mutsuo’s poetics. Ueda’s philosophy offers a way of understanding perception which eliminates the subject-object division. Takahashi’s project of recovering the spirituality of place through poetry is a model of historically and politically engaged art. Looking, as these contemporary Japanese thinkers have done, to the precapitalist, pre-formalist past to rediscover art’s function as a medium which reconfigures the listener’s perception of reality, I argue for the urgency of sound art such as Tsunoda’s which aids in the re-enchantment of the world to a future beyond capitalist, humanist “civilization.”. (shrink)