Eco-Performance, Art, and Spatial Justice in The Us by Courtney B. Ryan (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Eco-Performance, Art, and Spatial Justice in The Us by Courtney B. Ryan
• Jonah Winn-Lenetsky

ECO-PERFORMANCE, ART, AND SPATIAL JUSTICE IN THE US. By Courtney B. Ryan. Routledge Environmental Humanities Series. New York: Routledge, 2023; pp. 182.

How can we use small instances of material performance to address the global crises of climate change and environmental degradation? This question is at the center of Courtney B. Ryan’s Eco-Performance, Art, and Spatial Justice in the US. Ryan argues, “Just as small performances can highlight the micro-management of vegetal life and marginalized people, they can also expose the joint domestication of aquatic and human subjects” (4). Where scholarship has begun to address large-scale environmental performances and protests from Standing Rock to interventionist instances of theatre and performance such as Chantal Bilodeau’s Sila (2015) and Colleen Murphy’s The Breathing Hole (2020), most treatments of eco-performance focus on the grand and dramatic while missing the minute and quotidian. Ryan’s biggest contribution is to examine how performances of the mundane, including jogging with a cactus and abiding by the HOA covenants of a suburban Arizona housing development, are examples of spatial-ecological performance. Through these examples of mundane spatial interventions and forms of spatial violence, Ryan demonstrates how climate violence often operates through small instances of everyday urban development that separate people from the natural environment and plant life and that in particular deprives communities of color from access to plant life, clean water, air, and other natural resources. Another key intervention Ryan makes is in articulating how mundane instances of spatial-environmental discrimination that perform clear acts of violence and control against what Ryan calls “vegetal” life are also subtle mechanisms that discriminate against communities of color and migrant communities in urban centers. The final and most overt intervention of Ryan’s is to focus specifically on spatial-ecological violence both in the immediate and in the unknowable future fallout from current ecological events.

Ryan focuses on several sites of rupture, or intervention by performance artists into the slow violence of urban development. She begins with performance interventions by Meghan “Moe” Beitiks and Vaughn Bell, who use plants to disrupt the normative othering of nonhuman organisms within urban and developed spaces. This is an important and unique intervention into the bureaucratically controlled cityscape. Additionally, as Ryan argues, “While plants are receiving a lot of attention in various fields lately, they continue to be underexplored in theater and performance” (24). Where Bell uses plants to disrupt otherwise human and urban spaces, Beitiks employs theatrical stagings to show how plants are othered within artistic work. This is particularly relevant for Ryan because there is a dearth of direct engagements with plants in theatrical settings that comment directly on the work of other artists, such as The Plant Is Present (2011), performed at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and directly referencing Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present (2010). Both artists employ humor, but in subtly different ways: “where Bell deploys irony, Beitiks deploys goofy playfulness” (39). Ryan moves on to focus on artists whose work intervenes in the racial marginalization and violence that is often coded within vegetal violence and urban development. This is an important insight and is well-articulated through compelling examples: “I consider how Black artists, faced with stereotypes and limitations placed on spatial mobility and access to green spaces, find creative ways to explore their complex relationships with the environment”(55). Ryan explores this issue primarily through the work of two artists, one of whom is Naima Green, whose photo-series Jewels from the Hinterland (2013-) features photos of Black and Brown people in city parks. As Ryan contends, “Green’s work refutes the marginalization of both Black urbanites and vegetal [End Page 260] life by revealing complex, multidimensional Black experiences of plants” (55). Ryan’s argument that the marginalization and spatial containment of plant life (particularly in urban environments) are tied to the marginalization and control of people of color is a strong and important one.

In the chapter “Plant Some Shit,” Ryan foregrounds guerrilla gardening as a subversive spatial intervention. Guerrilla gardeners perform urban spatial...