Whale Time: Cetaceans as Art, Media, and Archive

Session will present: In-Person

Whales have long been icons of environmental thought: from Jonah to Greenpeace, cetaceans have mediated our understandings of human and nonhuman lifeworlds. A cohort of contemporary artists and scholars is creating a new chapter in the art history of whale-human relations. Whales and the histories of whaling are the subjects through which artists are reckoning with time: with the radical alterity of whale temporality, with abundant loss occasioned by ongoing environmental destruction, and with the competing temporalities of Indigenous sovereignty and imperial control. Meanwhile, the emerging fields of ecomedia, the blue humanities, and ecocritical art history are driving scholars to new approaches with oceanic objects and practices.

The papers in this session stage encounters between nineteenth-century U.S. whaling and the art, methods, and theories of the 21st century. First, Maggie Cao examines whale ivory’s uses for white whalemen and Indigenous Fijians to understand Western and Indigenous ideas of time––as well as animal rhythms––to argue that scrimshaw registered tensions between multiple, conflicting temporalities. Marina Wells uses whaling art by Daniel Ranalli, Courtney Leonard, and Duke Riley to conceptualize how contemporary artists' media reckons with the trans-temporality of oceanic destruction. Finally, Jamie Jones looks at Wu Tsang’s 2022 digital installation, “Of Whales”––a panoramic experience of a whale’s underwater perspective––to understand the affordances of moving pictures as they render the imperial and extractive violence of whaling. Together, these papers present new ecocritical approaches that demonstrate how whale art, media, and archives highlight the urgencies of an increasingly uninhabitable world.


Field(s) of Study:
Topics: Environmental Art
Topics: Visual Culture
Geographic Area: Oceania/Australia
Time Period: Nineteenth Century
Topics: Science and Art


Chair:
Marina Wells, Boston University

Discussant:
Maura A. Coughlin, Northeastern University

Scrimshaw as Archive
Maggie M. Cao
Whale Time in Moving Pictures: Wu Tsang’s 'Of Whales'
Jamie Jones, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Abstract Submissions Closed