Whale Time: Cetaceans as Art, Media, and Archive
Session will present: In-PersonThe 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
