Observe, Submerge, Speculate: Contemporary Art and the Ocean Beyond the Visible

This thesis explores the political, conceptual, and epistemological stakes of visibility in contemporary artistic mediations of the ocean. Drawing upon Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison’s Survival Piece III: Portable Fish Farm (1971), Allan Sekula’s Fish Story (1989-95), Betty Beaumont’s Ocean Landmark (1978-80), and Ursula Biemann’s Acoustic Ocean (2018), a trajectory is traced from the importance of observation in ecological and political systems to the potential of speculation for making connections with oceanic sites beyond visual access. These artistic practices provide a framework of relationality to interrogate connections with the ocean, which is conceived as a site of unseen exploitation in the fishing and shipping industries, a wasteland for industrial pollution, and a means of exploring the sensorial limits of relationality. Adopting a conceptual framework indebted to the blue humanities, posthumanism, materialist feminism, and ecopolitical theory, it oscillates between the scrutiny of global capitalist systems and the desire to find more ethical ways of conceiving relationships between human and oceanic worlds. Through the artistic operations of observation, submergence, and speculation, it demonstrates the political and epistemological consequences of a lack of visibility to challenge assumptions of total sensorial and epistemic access and highlight the limitations of anthropocentric positions. The ocean provides a methodology, or a productive set of metaphors, not only for rethinking subjectivity in the wake of the ecological crisis, and for caring about that which is beyond physical and ontological proximity, but for practising an ecological art history that seeks to outline how art can reconceptualise human relationships to the natural world.