Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T09:55:26.893Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Breathing Bricks

Nut Brother’s Dust Project and the Politics of Particulate Matter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2022

Alex Knapp
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

For 100 days in 2015, performance artist Nut Brother dragged a vacuum cleaner through Beijing and formed the collected smog particles into a solid brick. Dust Project brings into sharp relief the harm related to the necessary act of breathing and the effects of anthropogenic climate change. As air quality declines, breathing marks the everyday entanglement with particulate matter and its attendant violences as a performance of endurance.

Type
Student Essay Contest Winner
Information
TDR , Volume 66 , Issue 3 , September 2022 , pp. 149 - 165
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press for Tisch School of the Arts/NYU

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Alaimo, Stacy. 2008. “Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature.” In Material Feminisms, ed. Alaimo, Stacy and Hekman, Susan, 237–64. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Anderson, Laurie. 1982. “O Superman.” Track 6 on Big Science. Warner Records Inc. & Rhino Entertainment Company.Google Scholar
Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, 3:801–31. doi.org/10.1086/345321.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Baurick, Tristan, Younes, Lylla, and Meiners, Joan. 2019. “Welcome to ‘Cancer Alley,’ Where Toxic Air Is About to Get Worse.” ProPublica, 30 October. www.propublica.org/article/welcome-to-cancer-alley-where-toxic-air-is-about-to-get-worse.Google Scholar
Beam, Christopher. 2015. “Beyond Ai Weiwei: How China’s Artists Handle Politics (or Avoid Them).” The New Yorker, 27 March. www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ai-weiwei-problem-political-art-china.Google Scholar
Bettenhausen, Craig. 2020. “Tear Gas and Pepper Spray: What Protesters Need to Know.” Chemical & Engineering News (American Chemical Society), 18 June. https://cen.acs.org/policy/chemical-weapons/Tear-gas-and-pepper-spray-What-protesters-need-to-know/98/web/2020/06.Google Scholar
Buckley, Chris, and Wu, Adam. 2015. “Amid Smog Wave, an Artist Molds a Potent Symbol of Beijing’s Pollution.” New York Times, 1 December. www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/world/asia/beijing-smog-air-pollution-artist-brick.html.Google Scholar
Cao, Yaxue. 2012. “Drinking Tea with the State Security Police.” China Change, 1 March. https://chinachange.org/2012/03/01/drinking-tea-with-the-state-security-police-who-is-being-questioned/.Google Scholar
Chen, Mel Y. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Connor, Steven. 2010. The Matter of Air: Science and the Art of the Ethereal. London: Reaktion Books.Google Scholar
Crawford, Neta C. 2019. “Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War.” Providence, RI: Watson Institute, Brown University.Google Scholar
Creative Time. 2016. “Creative Time Summit DC | Enter the Anthropocene - Nut Brother.” YouTube, 9 November. Accessed 13 November 2020. www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWPyb6-LqDo.Google Scholar
Dillon, Lindsey, and Sze, Julie. 2016. “Police Power and Particulate Matters: Environmental Justice and the Spatialities of In/securities in US Cities.” English Language Notes 54, 2:13–23. doi.org/10.1215/00138282-54.2.13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donald, Dwayne Trevor. 2009. “Forts, Curriculum, and Indigenous Métissage: Imagining Decolonization of Aboriginal-Canadian Relations in Educational Contexts.” First Nations Perspectives 2, 1:1–24.Google Scholar
Dwyer, John (Damaged Bug). 2017. “The Cryptologist.” Track A3 on Bunker Funk. Castle Face Records, Vinyl.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. (1976) 1990. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Hurley, Robert. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Ghertner, D. Asher. 2020. “Airpocalypse: Distributions of Life amidst Delhi’s Polluted Airs.” Public Culture 32, 1:133–62. doi.org/10.1215/08992363-7816329.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 2015. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6, 1:159–65. doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615934.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Health Effects Institute (HEI). 2018. State of Global Air/2018: A Special Report on Global Exposure to Air Pollution and Its Disease Burden. Boston, MA: Health Effects Institute. www.stateofglobalair.org/sites/default/files/soga-2018-report.pdf.Google Scholar
Heise, Ursula K. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hussain, Murtaza. 2019. “War on the World: Industrialized Militaries Are a Bigger Part of the Climate Emergency Than You Know.” The Intercept, 15 September. https://theintercept.com/2019/09/15/climate-change-us-military-war/.Google Scholar
Lerner, Sharon. 2016. “Under Dupont Bridge: The Teflon Toxin Goes to China.” The Intercept, 15 September. https://theintercept.com/2016/09/15/the-teflon-toxin- goes-to-china/.Google Scholar
Lerner, Sharon. 2021. “Indoor Dust Contains PFAS and Other Toxic Chemicals.” The Intercept, 14 April. https://theintercept.com/2021/04/14/pfas-toxic-chemicals-indoor-dust/.Google Scholar
Lopez, Oscar, and Jacobs, Andrew. 2018. “In Town with Little Water, Coca-Cola Is Everywhere. So Is Diabetes.” New York Times, 14 July. www.nytimes.com/2018/07/14/world/americas/mexico-coca-cola-diabetes.html.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. (1867) 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Fowkes, Ben. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
McKittrick, Katherine, ed. 2015. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Mitman, Gregg. 2019. “Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing.” Edge Effects 18 June. https://edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/.Google Scholar
Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso Books.Google Scholar
Mukherjee, Rahul. 2020. Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Nguyen, Victoria. 2020. “Breathless in Beijing: Aerial Attunements and China’s New Respiratory Publics.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6:439–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pelley, Janet. 2017. “Tracing the chemistry of household dust.” Chemical and Engineering News 95, 7:18–21. https://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i7/Tracing-chemistry-household-dust.html.Google Scholar
Peplow, Mark. 2014. “Beijing smog contains witches’ brew of microbes.” Nature. doi.org/10.1038/nature.2014.14640.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Potter, Pitman B. 2017. “Law and Art in China: Domination and Resistance.” Les Cahiers de droit 58, 1–2: 137–61. doi.org/10.7202/1039835ar.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rivers, Matt. 2015. “Chinese Artist Uses ‘Vacuum Cleaner’ to Turn Smog into Brick.” CNN, 8 December. www.cnn.com/2015/12/08/asia/china-pollution-artist/index.html.Google Scholar
Rohde, Robert A., and Muller, Richard A.. 2015. “Air Pollution in China: Mapping of Concentrations and Source.” PloS ONE 10, 8. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0135749.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ryan, Olivia Mitchell, and Mou, Zoe. 2018. “With 9,000 Bottles of Dirty ‘Spring Water,’ a Chinese Artist Gets Results.” New York Times, 13 July. www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/world/asia/china-water-pollution-brother-nut.html.Google Scholar
Shalson, Lara. 2018. Performing Endurance: Art and Politics since 1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shi, Zongbo, Jingsha Xu, Roy Harrison, William Bloss, James Allen, Benjamin Barratt, Hugh Coe, Ruth Doherty, Fu Pingqing, Guan, Dabo, et al. 2021. “Atmospheric pollution and human health in a Chinese megacity (APHH-Beijing) programme, Final report.” Birmingham: University of Birmingham. doi.org/10.25500/epapers.bham.00003381.Google Scholar
Sumitra. 2015. “Chinese Artist Vacuums Beijing’s Polluted Air, Creates Solid Brick from It.” Oddity Central -Collecting Oddities, 3 December. www.odditycentral.com/art/chinese-artist-vacuums-beijings-polluted-air-creates-solid-brick-from-it.html.Google Scholar
UN Environment. 2019. A Review of 20 Years’ Air Pollution Control in Beijing. Nairobi, Kenya: United Nations Environment Programme. https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/27645/airPolCh_EN.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.Google Scholar
Vision Times Staff. 2015. “Chinese Artist Creates Unique Symbol for China’s Pollution Issues.” Vision Times, 12 February. Accessed 21 November 2020. https://visiontimes.com/2015/12/02/chinese-artist-creates-unique-symbol-for-chinas-pollution-issues.html.Google Scholar
Vohra, Karn, Alina Vodonos, Joel Schwartz, Marais, Eloise A., Sulprizio, Melissa P., and Mickley, Loretta J.. 2021. “Global mortality from outdoor fine particle pollution generated by fossil fuel combustion: Results from GEOS-Chem.” Environmental Research 195, 110754. doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2021.110754.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ward, Frazer. 2012. No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
World Health Organization (WHO). 2022. “Air Pollution.” Accessed 13 March 2022. https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1.Google Scholar
Yin, Peng, Michael Brauer, Aaron J. Cohen, Haidong Wang, Jie Li, Richard T. Burnett, Jeffrey D. Stanaway, Kate Causey, Samantha Larson, William Godwin, Joseph Frostad, Ashley Marks, Lijun Wang, Maigeng Zhou, Murray, Christopher J.L.. 2020. “The effect of air pollution on deaths, disease burden, and life expectancy across China and its provinces, 1990–2017: an analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017.” Lancet Planet Health 4, 9:e386–e398. doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(20)30161-3.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Yu, Xiao. 2020. “Brother Nut, the Artist, Taking Vow of Silence to Protest China’s Censorship.” Voice of America, 5 August. www.voanews.com/a/east-asia-pacific_voa-news-china_brother-nut-artist-taking-vow-silence-protest-chinas-censorship/6193922.html.Google Scholar
Zhang, Phoebe. 2019. “Three Billboards Outside Nanjing, Jiangsu: Chinese Artist Takes Aim at Gay ‘Conversion Therapy.’” South China Morning Post, 19 January. www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2182838/three-billboards-outside-nanjing-jiangsu-chinese-artist-takes-aim.Google Scholar
Zhang, Phoebe. 2021. “Artist Brother Nut Uses Toy Fish in Chinese River to Create ‘Hotpot’ Artwork to Raise Awareness about Environmental.” South China Morning Post, 2 April. www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/article/3128113/artist-brother-nut-uses-toy-fish-chinese-river.Google Scholar

TDReading

Cervenak, Sarah Jane. 2018. “‘Black Night Is Falling’: The ‘Airy Poetics’ of Some Performance.” TDR 62, 1 (T237):166–69. doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00727.CrossRefGoogle Scholar