京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(医学) / 甲第23074号 / 医博第4701号 / 新制||医||1049(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院医学研究科医学専攻 / (主査)教授 妹尾 浩, 教授 増永 慎一郎, 教授 川口 義弥 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Medical Science / Kyoto University / DGAM

The thesis identifies a methodology for practice-led Fine Art research that emphasises day-to-day processes, which tend to be overlooked, and a practice, which becomes invisible to the mainstream art world. Attending to day-to-day habitual process is found to open up possibilities for embodied becoming through thinking and re-membering. Negotiating boundaries in face-to-face encounter is discovered to encourage inter-subjective becoming and is explored in terms of ethical interaction. The reflexive methodology considers questions arising from the possibility of exchange instead of gift, art as process rather than commodity, and an attitude of dissensus relating to artists as nonconformists. Tension and interaction in community leads to a pacific process of immanent invisibility, which functions as quiet activism and gentle politics provided by readymade situations. Mierle Laderman Ukeles s Touch Sanitation (1984), Allan Kaprow s Trading Dirt (1983) and selected works of Heath Bunting (2002-2010) are amongst the artworks cited in a discussion of artists who engage with materials or processes that are often overlooked including waste disposal, soil, and institutional structure. Emmanuel Levinas s approach to alterity (Levinas, 1988, 172) and Julia Kristeva s suggestion that connection cannot occur without severance (Kristeva, 1987, 254) have helped define an ethical practice of inter-subjective becoming. Victor Turner s notion of communitas (Turner, 1969) has affirmed a choice to avoid hierarchical structure and engage in processes that result in immanent invisibility. My contribution to practice-led, Fine Art research has involved testing a method rather than proving a hypothesis. I have developed a methodology that values art becoming invisible during the process of emphasising the overlooked in day-to-day life. Anecdotal passages throughout the text together with links in the text to my website and web log demonstrate an integration of practice with theory, which has been arrived at through a process of reflexive speculation. Two discs accompany the printed thesis that allow for digital reading.

The point of departure for this study is the hypothesis that the American genre of nature writing has reached an important crossroads in the way it describes the human-nature relationship. My study argues that the awareness of the large-scale environmental changes that are signaled in terms such as the Anthropocene has changed the way nature writers approach their genre. Where traditional nature writing would tend to posit a separation between pristine and humanized environments, the nature writing of the Anthropocene emerges from the awareness that environmental impacts have reached a scope where no such distinction can be made. The traditional narrative of retreat to pristine nature or the wilderness from civilization has thus been replaced in Anthropocenic nature writing with the narrative of confrontation with a natural environment impacted by humans. This is a dystopian tendency in the genre, in which descriptions of nature are increasingly characterized by the writer’s concerns over what is happening to the landscape in question, and what the future might hold in a world where industrial humanity is affecting all ecological processes. Such literature increasingly foregrounds the best available environmental science, and the texts mark a shift from the traditional focus on spiritual connections with the environment, towards more material and functional understandings of the role of humanity in the complex organic and inorganic dynamics that maintain the world’s ecosystems. This dissertation analyzes the emergence of Anthropocenic awareness in selected texts of contemporary American nature writing with reference to its five main features: scientific interest in the function of ecosystems, interest in the agency of matter rendered through what is referred to as material nature writing, the dignification of the overlooked, the environmental landscape of fear, and a turn in the genre towards matters of environmental justice. Even though what I refer to as Anthropocenic nature writing may seem dystopian, this dissertation foregrounds the various ways in which the narrative of confrontation with the human also invites activism and engagement in the hope of stimulating change and environmental justice.