What is Environmental Art?

"We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we've lost our connection to ourselves"

Andy Goldsworthy

SUMMARY OF ENVIRONMENTAL ART

Since primitive man first illustrated streaks of rain and lightning on the interior walls of their cave homes, artists have been entranced with depicting our natural environment. Yet, for centuries, the landscape's appearance in art was meant to construe either awe for our natural world, or as a background subject for the documentation of human narratives. In the 20th century, alongside rising global concerns surrounding the state of the environment's health, and our impact as humans upon it, many artists started creating works in collaboration with the physical world to draw attention to ecological issues as well our relationship and contribution to them. As a more defined concept, Environmental art has gained more traction since the 1990s when artists began to think about their surroundings not just in terms of lived or built space, but as a cohesive system in which humans have a central part to play.

KEY IDEAS

Environmental artists seek to investigate our human relationship with the environment through embedding their artistic practice within it. This changes the way we think about the site of artistic production; as opposed to using the artist's studio as the sole location in which to create, Environmental artists engage the natural world in a much more active and immediate way either by working in new ways outside, or by bringing natural materials into new settings.

Environmental artists aim to work in harmony with the natural environment rather than disrupt it. This means they deeply consider the impact that they as individuals have on nature and do not sacrifice its health or well being in order to create work. Moreover, by working in collaboration with organic landscapes, Environmental artists fall subject to the uncontrollable cycles of the seasons with their processes of flowering, erosion, molding, and decay.

Environmental artists often use natural materials such as leaves, flowers, branches, ice, soil, sand, stone, and water as the very basis of their artwork. Moreover, in choosing to situate their work in specific places, Environment art often seeks to both transform the way that the site is viewed, whilst also revealing what was already there. This demands that viewers and audiences rethink how they "see" the world around them and pay more direct attention to the minute and distinct parts that make up what we may overlook as a cohesive environment.

Evolving from Land Art, Environmental art also rethinks the importance of the exhibition space and seeks other places where art can happen and where art can exist. This form of Institutional Critique seeks to question the authority and power of museums and galleries that have historically controlled the production, sale, and viewing of art works. By looking for new and sometimes unique and surprising locations, artists not only remove the power from high-powered art-dealers, buyers, and from the art-market in general, but also question the need for an audience (and art buyers) at all. Instead, artists emphasise the birth of the idea and the process of creation, without insisting that the work needs to be seen by many people, or indeed by anyone at all.

Some environmental art:

• Informs and interprets nature and its processes, or educates us about environmental problems

• Is concerned with environmental forces and materials, creating artworks affected or powered by wind, water, lightning, even earthquakes

• Re-envisions our relationship to nature, proposing new ways for us to co-exist with our environment

• Reclaims and remediates damaged environments, restoring ecosystems in artistic and often aesthetic ways

Use the information above to answer the questions on the handout. Absent? You can write the questions below on a piece of paper and answer them!

1. What caused artists in the 20th century to begin creating Environmental Art?

2. What do Environmental artists deeply consider when creating their work?

3. What types of materials do Environmental artists work with?

4. What does Environmental art often demand of the viewers?

5. Do Environmental artists usually work in art galleries?

6. What is Institutional Critique?

Vocabulary

Choose 3 words you don’t know from what you’ve just read. Write them below, and find write a definition for each one. Make sure to write the definition in your own words.