Embodied Ecologies: Performance Art and Environmentalism, 1970-1990

Abstract

This dissertation explores how U.S. artists used performance strategies in their work to critically examine human relations with the natural world in the 1970s and 1980s. It is structured around three case studies: Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939), and Maren Hassinger (b. 1947), each of whom worked at the intersection of performance and environmental art and has been neglected by histories of these movements. This dissertation contextualizes these artists’ work within the history of American environmental activism and contemporary environmental theory that refuses a binaristic divide between the human and nonhuman. During this period, the exclusive focus of mainstream environmental groups on conservation and wilderness protection was challenged and broadened to incorporate concerns about pollution, public health, and racial equity. Responding to this time of rapidly shifting conceptions of the natural environment and increasing awareness of the deleterious effects of toxic pollution on human bodies, these artists took on animallike personae, mimed the work of environmental laborers, and created movement in response to natural materials to scrutinize the relationship between their bodies and nature. Among the first to center women and women of color artists in environmental art history, this study challenges traditional narratives of postwar American art that position environmental and performance art as distinct fields. In bridging performance and environmental art, this dissertation renegotiates the boundaries of environmental discourse and how it circulated in advanced art of the period, moving beyond a narrow focus on Land art in the American West. The coda explores how this work has great relevance in the art of today, as artists respond to natural threats that again feel immediate and experienced differently across socioeconomic groups.