Jeffrey Kastner
JEFFREY KASTNER is a New York-based writer and the senior editor of Cabinet magazine. A longtime contributor of criticism and journalism to publications such as Artforum and the New York Times, his monographic essays have appeared in exhibition publications for artists including Doug Aitken, David Altmejd, Jeremy Blake, Michaël Borremans, Tomás Saraceno, and Sarah Sze. His books include the edited volumes Land and Environmental Art (Phaidon, 1998) and Documents of Contemporary Art: Nature (MIT Press/Whitechapel, 2012).
An Art of “Why Not?”
By Jeffrey KastnerI’d like to try to frame the question that’s been posed here less as a consideration of how art might impact thinking about the environment and the various social effects of its continued degradation, and more as an inquiry into how certain styles of thinking might inform art making and shape its ability to effectively influence opinions and action on such issues.
![Eye agate fragment (Uruguay), from the collection of Roger Caillois (1913 – 1978). Caillois’s self-described “materialist mysticism” found perhaps its most vivid expression in his relationship to stones, and he amassed a large collection of cut and polished mineral specimens throughout his life. Their hidden structures and forms presented, Caillois believed, one of many important subjects for what he called “diagonal science,” a set of practices designed to “bridge the older disciplines and force them to engage in dialogue.” Such an approach would “[slice] obliquely through our common world [to] decipher latent complicities and reveal neglected correlations,” seeking to “further a form of knowledge that would first involve the workings of a bold imagination and be followed, then, by strict controls, all the more necessary insofar as such audacity tries to establish ever riskier transversal paths.”](https://brooklynrail-web.imgix.net/article_image/image/16128/CAILLOIS_ROGER1.jpg?w=200&q=80&fit=max)
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