James Benning's Environments

Nikolaj Lubecker is Professor of French and Film Studies at St John s College, University of Oxford. Daniele Rugo is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Arts & Humanities at Brunel University London.

James Benning's film and video works are not just powerful and entrancing interventions in contemporary art. They are in most instances complex statements about the nature of the world, questions about how we know it, and challenges to the political responsibilities we have for both the world and our ways of knowing. Nikolaj Lübecker & Daniele Rugo have curated some of the best contemporary art theorists, ecocritics, film philosophers and Benning specialists to create a startling and provocative account of a body of work of immense importance to how we interpret and act in the Anthropocene.

• Introduction, Nikolaj Lübecker & Daniele Rugo 　Intellectual EnvironmentsSurveying James Benning, Scott MacDonaldUtah and the Times: Governing Temporality in Deseret, John BeckViolence and Landscape in the Films of James Benning, Nikolaj LübeckerMaterial EnvironmentsConstructing the Transversal Time-Image: Ecosophy, Immanence and Corporate ‘Land’ in James Benning’s Four Corners and California Trilogy, Colin GardnerMen in Huts in Woods: Independence, Transcendentalism and Technology in James Benning’s Thoreau and Kaczynski Documentaries and Exhibition, Silke PanseThe Earth as Material Film: Benning’s light glance making a material-image, Felicity ColmanPerceptual EnvironmentsA Lake-Event, Tom ConleyDefacing the Close-up, Kriss Ravetto-BiagioliThe Adventure of Patience, Daniele RugoIndex