Reviewed by:

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

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...

 审阅者：

• 
  美国的生态绩效、艺术和空间正义 作者：Courtney B. Ryan
•  乔纳·温·莱涅茨基

我们如何利用材料性能的小实例来解决气候变化和环境退化的全球危机？这个问题是考特尼·B·瑞安（Courtney B. Ryan）的《美国的生态绩效、艺术和空间正义》的核心问题。瑞安认为，“正如小型表演可以突出植物生命和边缘人群的微观管理一样，它们也可以揭示水生动物和人类对象的共同驯化”(4)。学术界已经开始关注大规模的环境表演和抗议活动，从《立岩》到戏剧和表演的干预主义实例，如尚塔尔·比洛多的《西拉》（2015 年）和科琳·墨菲的《呼吸孔》（2020 年），大多数对生态表演的处理都集中在宏伟而戏剧性，同时又错过了每一分钟和日常生活。瑞安最大的贡献是研究了平凡的表现，包括拿着仙人掌慢跑和遵守亚利桑那州郊区住房开发的 HOA 契约，如何成为空间生态表现的例子。通过这些平凡的空间干预和空间暴力形式的例子，瑞安展示了气候暴力如何经常通过日常城市发展的小实例来运作，这些实例将人们与自然环境和植物生命分开，特别是剥夺了有色人种社区接触植物生命的机会、清洁的水、空气和其他自然资源。瑞安所做的另一项关键干预是阐明，空间环境歧视的平凡实例如何对瑞安所说的“植物”生命进行明显的暴力行为和控制，同时也是歧视城市中心有色人种社区和移民社区的微妙机制。 瑞安最后也是最公开的干预措施是特别关注当前生态事件在当前和不可知的未来影响中的空间生态暴力。

瑞安重点关注了几个断裂点，或者说表演艺术家对城市发展缓慢暴力的干预。她从 Meghan “Moe” Beitiks 和 Vaughn Bell 的表演干预开始，他们利用植物来破坏城市和发达空间内非人类有机体的规范他者关系。这是对官僚控制的城市景观的一次重要而独特的干预。此外，正如瑞安所说，“虽然植物最近在各个领域受到了很多关注，但它们在戏剧和表演中仍然没有得到充分的探索”(24)。贝尔利用植物来扰乱人类和城市空间，而 Beitiks 则利用戏剧舞台来展示植物如何在艺术作品中融入其他元素。这对瑞安来说尤其重要，因为在戏剧环境中缺乏与植物的直接接触，直接评论其他艺术家的作品，例如在芝加哥艺术学院表演的《植物在场》（The Plant Is Present，2011）和直接引用玛丽娜·阿布拉莫维奇的《艺术家在场》（2010）。两位艺术家都运用幽默，但方式略有不同：“贝尔运用讽刺，而贝蒂克斯则运用愚蠢的俏皮”（39）。瑞安继续关注那些作品介入种族边缘化和暴力的艺术家，这些问题通常被编码在植物暴力和城市发展中。这是一个重要的见解，并通过令人信服的例子得到了很好的阐述：“我考虑黑人艺术家如何面对空间流动性和进入绿色空间的刻板印象和限制，找到创造性的方式来探索他们与环境的复杂关系”(55 ）。 瑞安主要通过两位艺术家的作品来探讨这个问题，其中一位是奈玛·格林（Naima Green），他的摄影系列《来自内地的珠宝》（2013 年至今）以城市公园中黑人和棕色人种的照片为特色。正如瑞安所说，“格林的作品通过揭示复杂、多维的黑人对植物的体验，反驳了黑人城市居民和植物[结束第 260 页]生活的边缘化”（55）。瑞安的论点是，植物生命的边缘化和空间限制（特别是在城市环境中）与有色人种的边缘化和控制有关，这是一个强有力且重要的论点。

在“种植一些狗屎”一章中，瑞安将游击式园艺视为一种颠覆性的空间干预。游击园丁表演城市空间...