Materialist narratives of art history between cultural studies and energy humanities.

Abstract

This article explores the redefinition of the materialist narratives of art history, focusing on two specific historical moments. On the one hand, the impact of the emergence of cultural studies, which, around figures such as E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, redefined the approaches of social history and cultural history beyond the economistic versions of Marxism. In addition to analysing the contributions and limits of the contributions that this first generation of cultural studies made to the relations between history, culture and ecology, as well as their repercussions in the field of art history, it assesses their evolution from the 1980s to the present day. From this perspective, the article criticises the predominance of constructivist theories in the new cultural history, which tend to consider nature as an ideological signifier rather than a relatively autonomous material reality. In contrast to this tendency, recent contributions from the ecological humanities are highlighted, which attempt to weave a more productive relationship between the natural sciences´ diagnoses of the seriousness of the ecological emergency and knowledge from the social sciences and humanities. Within the field of ecological humanities, the article focuses on the so-called energy humanities, which study how the artistic-cultural imaginaries of industrial modernity have promoted or questioned the productivist perception of the cosmos as an immense reservoir of material resources, and calls for the creation of new narratives that allow us to confront the challenges of the energy and ecological transition from the perspective of art history.