James Nisbet: Visiting Art History Scholar

Immersive Waters, or Notes Towards a Genealogy of Water Art

James Nisbet, University of California, Irvine

As a long-standing and vital element in the production of visual art, water had been employed variously—as subject, liquid base for pigments, and fundamental to the cleaning and maintenance of tools—from time immemorial through the mid twentieth century. Today, the use of water as an artistic material in the production of different forms of sculpture, performance, and installation art is so common that it would be all but impossible to systemically track its use. In the interim—that is, during the latter half of the twentieth century, coincident with dramatic ecological changes at a planetary level—the element of water began to be employed in the work of the postwar neo-avant-garde, and, increasingly, throughout subsequent experimental movements of the twentieth century. Taking select contemporary practices as a point of departure, this paper will consider the range and genealogy of these activities—focused primarily on North America and Western Europe—in the hope of distilling the disparate instances in which water appears during the period of 1945–2000 into a more closely connected series of conversations among artists and orientations of practice.

James Nisbet is Professor in the Department of Art History and PhD Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He has published widely on the history and theory of modern and contemporary art, with special interests in ecocritical visual art and the history of photography. Nisbet’s research has been supported by institutions including Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities, Georgia O'Keeffe Research Center, Dumbarton Oaks, and Getty Research Institute. His book projects include Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s (MIT Press, 2014), Second Site (Princeton University Press, 2021), and as editor with Lyle Massey, The Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land, and the Politics of Environment (University of California Press, 2021).