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Paper short abstract:

This paper offers methodological reflections on how energy consumption as an analytical tool enables both the fruitful connections between energy history and ecological art history, and the museological engagement of environmental humanities with eco-critical issues through curatorial intervention.

Paper long abstract:

Making art demands energy. How to study the energy consumption of the production of art? How to curatorially demonstrate the ecological implications of the aesthetically pleasing, culturally valuable artifacts in public and private collections? Pushing the boundary between the histories of energy and art, this paper tackles the questions by means of methodological reflections and curatorial intervention. The methodological reflections in the paper are situated in a case study of the enormous energy consumption for porcelain production in Jingdezhen, China. In the early eighteenth century, some three thousand active porcelain kilns in Jingdezhen maintained a population of over one million people working in various sectors of the industry, providing more than 100 million pieces of luxurious and everyday porcelain for the European market, in addition to a larger amount for the Asian, North African, and Chinese domestic markets. Through the nineteenth century, however, the township had declined in multiple ways—irreversible deforestation for firewood and farmland, deteriorated soil and water systems, and exhausted reserves of clay and porcelain stone—an environmental crisis was looming large over the porcelain capital of China. Drawing from environmental and ceramic archaeology, historical anthropology, and histories of forest, farming, chemistry, and ceramic technology, the paper looks into the ways energy consumption embeds art history and energy history into an interdisciplinary network of environmental humanities, and into the integrated methodologies that translate the aesthetic and cultural meanings of museum exhibits into their ecological costs and relational meanings in a transcultural context.