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Book Cover for: Divining Chaos: The Autobiography of an Idea, Aviva Rahmani

Divining Chaos: The Autobiography of an Idea

Aviva Rahmani

A spirited memoir by artist Aviva Rahmani, offering a relatable narrative to discuss trigger point theory and the importance of eco-art activism.

Divining Chaos is an intimate personal memoir of unparalleled transparency into the moments in Rahmani's life that shaped her as an artist and activist. Detailing the history that led her to two seminal projects--Ghost Nets, restoring a coastal town dump to flourishing wetlands, and The Blued Trees Symphony, which applied her premises to challenge natural gas pipelines with a novel legal theory about land use--Rahmani shares the decisions that shaped her life's work and thinking. Her discussions about trigger point theory argue for how to predict, confront, and determine outcomes to the ecological challenges we face today.

Book Details

  • Publisher: New Village Press
  • Publish Date: Jun 28th, 2022
  • Pages: 352
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 0.75in - 1.23lb
  • EAN: 9781613321676
  • Categories: Art & PoliticsAestheticsEnvironmental Conservation & Protection - General

About the Author

Rahmani, Aviva: - Aviva Rahmani is an internationally exhibited and published ecoartist, who has received numerous grants, residencies, and fellowships. A pioneering ecofeminist, founder of the Ecoart Listserv, and an affiliate with the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, she earned her PhD from the University of Plymouth, UK.
Lippard, Lucy R.: - Lucy R. Lippard is a contemporary art historian, curator, writer, and activist. As a critic, Lippard is best known for her study of conceptual art in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 and for her writing on feminist art and politically engaged art. She has published more than twenty books, organized some fifty exhibitions, authored numerous articles, and co-founded Heresies: A Journal of Art and Politics, as well as the artist's-book center, Printed Matter. She has helped form numerous political and cultural groups, including the Ad Hoc Women's Art Committee and the Art Workers Coalition. She played a key role in the development of Conceptual Art in New York in the 1960s and 1970s and in the Feminist Art movement. In more recent years she has focused her work on the landscape, culture, and art of the American Southwest, where she moved in the 1990s. Her many honors include the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award.

Praise for this book

"Rahmani brings us to the place where her art (which speaks of the urgency of action and the lack of time to make change) is refracted through her reflections of her life--moments in time as a process through time."--Hilary Robinson, Professor of Feminism, Art, and Theory, Loughborough University, UK; editor of Feminism Art Theory: An Anthology 1968-2014
"In Divining Chaos Aviva Rahmani nails her own heart to the Earth's gallery wall and invites us to examine it, a daunting experience of critical life-moments revealing the complex dialectic of violation. Yet, to fight ecocide and regain the symphony of life, we must 'read' and 'listen' to her beautiful, beating heart, an avatar of harmonia mundi."--Glenn Albrecht, environmental philosopher; author of Earth Emotions and Solastalgia
"In Divining Chaos she nails her own heart to the Earth's gallery wall and invites us to examine it, a daunting experience of critical life-moments revealing the complex dialectic of violation."--Glenn Albrecht, environmental philosopher; author of Earth Emotions and Solastalgia
"Aviva Rahmani offers a memoir of anti-capitalist, anti-ecocidal storytelling imbued with a deep and abiding faith that people and art can interrupt and reinvent the status quo. In twinning deep scientific and theoretical knowledge with her art, she manages a near-impossible task of rendering the world as it is--precarious, violent, dangerous, beautiful."--Laura Raicovich, author of Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest and former director of the Queens Museum of Art
"Aviva Rahmani's remarkable Divining Chaos is part bildungsroman, part eco-action guidebook, part pandemic diary, and part portrait of a turbulent time in American art and history. With searing honesty, Rahmani presents her complex multidisciplinary thinking as it has evolved through the twists and turns of a tumultuous life."--Eleanor Heartney, art critic and curator; author of Art & Today and Doomsday Dreams
"Divining Chaos is a compelling and courageous memoir of historical importance, written by a central figure in the emergence of ecofeminist art. Aviva Rahmani makes clear that the same entrenched systems of power enable the abuse of women and the abuse of nature."--Julie Reiss, PhD, editor of Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene