Environmental art
Encyclopedia
The term environmental art is used in two different contexts: it can be used generally to refer to art dealing with ecological issues and/or the natural, such as the formal, the political, the historical, or the social context.

Depending upon how you look at its definition, earlier examples of environmental art stem from landscape painting and representation. When artists painted onsite they developed a deep connection with the surrounding environment and its weather and brought these close observations into their canvases. John Constable’s
John Constable
John Constable was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home—now known as "Constable Country"—which he invested with an intensity of affection...

  sky paintings “most closely represent the sky in nature.” Monet’s London Series  also exemplifies the artist’s connection with the environment “For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life, the air and the light, which vary continually for me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere that gives subjects their true value."

It is possible to trace the growth of environmental art as a "movement", beginning in the late 1960s or the 1970s. In its early phases it was most associated with sculpture—especially Site-specific art
Site-specific art
Site-specific art is artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork...

, Land art
Land art
Land art, Earthworks , or Earth art is an art movement which emerged in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked...

 and Arte povera
Arte Povera
Arte Povera is a modern art movement. The term was introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture, and even questioning whether...

—having arisen out of mounting criticism of traditional sculptural forms and practices which were increasingly seen as outmoded and potentially out of harmony with the natural environment.

In October 1968 Robert Smithson organized an exhibition at Dwan Gallery in New York titled Simply “Earthworks”. All of the works posed an explicit challenge to conventional notions of exhibition and sales, in that they were either too large or too unwieldy to be collected; most were represented only by photographs, further emphasizing their resistance to acquisition. For these artists escaping the confines of the gallery and modernist theory was achieved by leaving the cities and going out into the desert.

”They were not depiciting the landscape, but engaging it; their art was not simply of the landscape, but in it as well.” This shift in the late 60’s and 70’s represents an avant garde notion about sculpture, the landscape and our relationship with it. The work challenged the conventional means to create sculpture, but also defied the high art modes of dissemination and exhibition of the work, such as the Dawn Gallery show mentioned earlier. This shift opened up a new space and in doing so expanded the ways in which work was documented and conceptualized.
While this earlier work was mostly done in the deserts of the American west, the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s saw works moving into the public landscape. Artists like Robert Morris began engaging county departments and public arts commissions to create works in public spaces such as an abandoned gravel pit. Herbert Bayer used a similar approach and was selected to create his Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks in 1982. The project served functions such as erosion control, a place to serve as a reservoir during high rain periods, and a 2.5 acre park during dry seasons.

The expanding term of environmental art also encompasses the scope of the urban landscape. Just as the earthworks in the deserts of the west grew out of notions of landscape painting, the growth of public art stimulated artists to engage the urban landscape as another environment and also as a platform to engage ideas and concepts about the environment to a larger audience. “Many environmental artists now desire not merely an audience for their work but a public, with whom they can correspond about the meaning and purpose of their art.”

Sustainable art
Sustainable art
The expression sustainable art has been promoted recently as an art term that can be distinguished from environmental art that is in harmony with the key principles of sustainability, which include ecology, social justice, non-violence and grassroots democracy....

 might be an alternative term to environmental or green art, in recognition of the challenges that sustainability
Sustainability
Sustainability is the capacity to endure. For humans, sustainability is the long-term maintenance of well being, which has environmental, economic, and social dimensions, and encompasses the concept of union, an interdependent relationship and mutual responsible position with all living and non...

 brings for contemporary art as a whole.

Environmentalism into Art

In identifying Environmental art a crucial distinction lies between environmental artists who do not consider the damage to the environment their artwork may incur, and those who intend to cause no harm to nature. Indeed, their work might involve restoring the immediate landscape to a natural state. For example, despite its aesthetic merits, the American artist Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson was an American artist famous for his land art.-Background and education:Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York....

’s celebrated sculpture Spiral Jetty
Spiral Jetty
The Spiral Jetty, considered to be the central work of American sculptor Robert Smithson, is an earthwork sculpture constructed in 1970.Built entirely of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks, earth, and water on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah, it forms a , ...

(1969) involved inflicting considerable permanent damage upon the landscape he worked with. Smithson using a bulldozer to scrape and cut the land, impinging upon the lake. This Environmental Art also raised awareness of the importance in recycling materials.

Alan Sonfist
Alan Sonfist
Alan Sonfist is a New York City based American artist most often associated with the Land or Earth Art movement.He is best known for his "Time Landscape" found on the corner of West Houston Street and LaGuardia Place in New York City's Greenwich Village. Proposed in 1965, "Time Landscape" the...

, with his first historical Time Landscape sculpture, proposed to New York City in 1965, visible to this day at the corner of Houston and LaGuardia in New York City’s Greenwich Village, introduced the key environmentalist idea of bringing nature back into the urban environment. Today Sonfist is joining forces with the broad enthusiasm for environmental and green issues among public authorities and private citizens to propose a network of such sites across the metropolitan area, which will raise consciousness of the key role that nature will play in the challenges of the 21st century.The sacredness of nature and the natural environment is often evident in the work of Environmental Artists.

Indeed, such criticism was raised against the European sculptor Christo when he temporarily wrapped the coastline at Little Bay, south of Sydney, Australia, in 1969. Conservationists' comments attracted international attention in environmental circles, and lead contemporary artists in the region to re-think the inclinations of Land art and Site-specific art. Chris Drury
Chris Drury (artist)
Chris Drury is a British environmental artist. His body of work includes ephemeral assemblies of natural materials, in the mode associated with Andy Goldsworthy, as well as more-permanent landscape art, works on paper, and indoor installations.Some of Drury's lasting works are "cloud chambers",...

 instituted a work entitled "Medicine Wheel
Medicine wheel
Medicine wheels, or sacred hoops, were constructed by laying stones in a particular pattern on the ground. Most medicine wheels follow the basic pattern of having a center of stone, and surrounding that is an outer ring of stones with "spokes", or lines of rocks radiating from the center...

" which was the fruit and result of a daily meditative walk, once a day, for a calendar year. The deliverable of this work was a mandala of mosaiced found objects: nature art as process art
Process art
Process art is an artistic movement as well as a creative sentiment and world view where the end product of art and craft, the objet d’art, is not the principal focus. The 'process' in process art refers to the process of the formation of art: the gathering, sorting, collating, associating, and...

.

In comparison, a committed Environmental artist such as the British sculptor Richard Long
Richard Long (artist)
Richard Long is an English sculptor, photographer and painter, one of the best known British land artists. Long is the only artist to be shortlisted for the Turner Prize four times, and he is reputed to have refused the prize in 1984...

 has for several decades made temporary outdoor sculptural work by rearranging natural materials found on the site, such as rocks, mud and branches, and which will therefore have no lingering detrimental affect. Crop art
Crop art
Crop art falls into several different categories, all of which employ land and/or what grows from it to create images.-Seed art:One version of Crop art is also called Seed art, a visual art created in mosaic-style. Mosaic is an ancient technique of making designs, often from bits of tile or...

ist Stan Herd shows similar connection with and respect for the land. While leading Environmental artists such as the Dutch sculptor Herman de Vries
Herman de vries
herman de vries is a Dutch artist. He writes his name in lower-case "to avoid hierarchy". de vries works and lives with his wife Susanne in Eschenau near Knetzgau, Germany....

, the Australian sculptor John Davis
John Davis (sculptor)
John Davis was an Australian sculptor and pioneer of Environmental art.-Early life:He studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Caulfield institute of technology and Melbourne Teachers College before becoming a lecturer at Prahran College of Advanced Education.-Work:An Australian...

 and the British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy
Andy Goldsworthy
Andy Goldsworthy, OBE is a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist producing site-specific sculpture and land art situated in natural and urban settings. He lives and works in Scotland.-Life and career:The son of F...

 similarly leave the landscape they have worked with unharmed, and in some cases have in the process of making their work revegetated with appropriate indigenous flora land that had been damaged by human use. In this way the work of art arises out of a sensitivity towards habitat.
Perhaps the most celebrated instance of Environmental art in the late 20th century was 7000 Oaks
7000 Oaks
7000 Oaks - City Forestation instead of City Administration is a work of land art by the German artist Joseph Beuys. It was first publicly presented in 1982 at the documenta 7...

, an ecological action staged at Documenta during 1982 by Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social...

, in which the artist and his assistants highlighted the condition of the local environment by planting 7000 oak trees throughout and around the city of Kassel
Kassel
Kassel is a town located on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany. It is the administrative seat of the Kassel Regierungsbezirk and the Kreis of the same name and has approximately 195,000 inhabitants.- History :...

. In the last two decades significant environmentally-concerned work has also been made by Rosalie Gascoigne
Rosalie Gascoigne
Rosalie Gascoigne was a New Zealander-Australian sculptor. She showed at the Venice Biennale in 1982, becoming the first female artist to represent Australia there. In 1994 she was awarded the Order of Australia for her services to the arts.-Life:Gascoigne was born Rosalie Norah King Walker in...

, who fashioned her serene sculptures from rubbish and junk she found discarded in rural areas, Patrice Stellest
Patrice Stellest
Patrice Stellest is a contemporary painter and sculptor from Switzerland.- Early life :He spent most of his childhood in Switzerland, and left to the United States when he was sixteen....

, who created big installations with junk, but also pertinent items collected around the world and solar energy mechanisms, and John Wolseley, who hikes through remote regions, gathering visual and scientific data, then incorporates visual and other information into complex wall-scale works on paper. Environmental art or Green art by Washington, DC based glass sculptors Erwin Timmers and Alison Sigethy incorporate some of the least recycled building materials; structural glass.

In the 21st Century, the Energy Art Movement
Energy Art
The Energy Art Movement is an international contemporary multimedia art movement, with three primary values: quality, diversity, and artistic evolution – on the common ground of energetic depictions. The movement's values have been explicitly defined in its manifesto – the founding document – and...

 organized the Green Energy Project and a subsequent exhibition. The movement is likely to be the only art movement
Art movement
An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years...

 to have taken up the cause of sustainable energy. The exhibition was held in 2009 in Hamilton, Canada
Hamilton, Ontario
Hamilton is a port city in the Canadian province of Ontario. Conceived by George Hamilton when he purchased the Durand farm shortly after the War of 1812, Hamilton has become the centre of a densely populated and industrialized region at the west end of Lake Ontario known as the Golden Horseshoe...

 with a dozen international artists promoting clean energy sources for the preservation of the environment.

Renewable energy sculpture

Renewable energy sculpture
Renewable energy sculpture
A renewable energy sculpture is a sculpture that produces power from renewable sources, such as solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric or tidal....

 is another recent development in environmental art. Representing a response to the increasing urgency in the global climate change debates. Generally the practice is evolving in public sculpture and to an extent in experimental architecture. The response is make an explicit intervention at a functional level, merging aesthetical responses with the functional properties of energy generation or saving. Practitioners of this emerging area work to ecologically informed ethical and practical codes that conform to Ecodesign
Ecodesign
Ecodesign is an approach to design of a product with special consideration for the environmental impacts of the product during its whole lifecycle. In a life cycle assessment the life cycle of a product is usually divided into procurement, manufacture, use and disposal.Ecodesign is a growing...

 criteria.

As the definition of “”Environmental Art”” can be interpreted in different ways it may be useful to define some categories and examples of artists working in those ways.

Landscape Manipulation

  • Walter De Maria
    Walter De Maria
    -Early life and career:De Maria was born in Albany, California on October 1, 1935. He studied history and art at the University of California, Berkeley from 1953 to 1959. Although trained as a painter, De Maria soon turned to sculpture and began using other media...


  • Robert Smithson
    Robert Smithson
    Robert Smithson was an American artist famous for his land art.-Background and education:Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York....


  • Andy Goldsworthy
    Andy Goldsworthy
    Andy Goldsworthy, OBE is a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist producing site-specific sculpture and land art situated in natural and urban settings. He lives and works in Scotland.-Life and career:The son of F...


  • James Turrell
    James Turrell
    James Turrell is an American artist primarily concerned with light and space. Turrell was a MacArthur Fellow in 1984. He is represented by The Pace Gallery in New York...


Intersection of Environment and Human Activity

  • Christo and Jeanne-Claude
    Christo and Jeanne-Claude
    Christo and Jeanne-Claude were a married couple who created environmental works of art...


  • Carl Andre
    Carl Andre
    Carl Andre is an American minimalist artist recognized for his ordered linear format and grid format sculptures. His sculptures range from large public artworks to more intimate tile patterns arranged on the floor of an exhibition space Carl Andre (born September 16, 1935) is an American...



  • Nancy Holt
    Nancy Holt
    Nancy Holt is an American artist famous for her public sculpture, installation art and land art. Throughout her career, Holt has also produced works in other mediums, including film, photography, and writing artist’s books.-Biography:...


  • Michael Heizer
    Michael Heizer
    Michael Heizer is a contemporary artist specializing primarily in large-scale sculptures and earth art .Heizer was born in Berkeley, California in 1944; and he attended the San Francisco Art Institute. Traveling to New York City in 1966, he began his career producing more conventional, small-scale...


Artist as Individual and Relationship to the Land

  • Ana Mendieta
    Ana Mendieta
    Ana Mendieta was a Cuban American performance artist, sculptor, painter and video artist who is known for her "earth-body" art work....


  • Richard Long
    Richard Long (artist)
    Richard Long is an English sculptor, photographer and painter, one of the best known British land artists. Long is the only artist to be shortlisted for the Turner Prize four times, and he is reputed to have refused the prize in 1984...


  • Hamish Fulton

Environment as Ecosystem and Socio-Political Realities

  • Peter Fend
    Peter Fend
    Peter Fend is an American Artist born in 1950. In 1980, he founded Offices and the Ocean Earth Construction and Development Corporation with Colen Fitzgibbon, Jenny Holzer, Peter Nadin, Richard Prince and Robin Winters, which was "a corporation invented for a group of artists"...


  • Hans Haacke
    Hans Haacke
    Hans Haacke is a German-American artist who lives and works in New York.- Early life :Haacke was born in Cologne, Germany. He studied at the Staatliche Werkakademie in Kassel, Germany, from 1956 to 1960. He was a student of Stanley William Hayter, a well-known and influential English printmaker,...


  • Jack Lembeck
    Jack Lembeck
    Jack Lembeck is an American painter and sculptor known for his Abstract Illusionism paintings and installation art....


  • Alan Sonfist
    Alan Sonfist
    Alan Sonfist is a New York City based American artist most often associated with the Land or Earth Art movement.He is best known for his "Time Landscape" found on the corner of West Houston Street and LaGuardia Place in New York City's Greenwich Village. Proposed in 1965, "Time Landscape" the...


  • Mierle Laderman Ukeles
    Mierle Laderman Ukeles
    Mierle Laderman Ukeles is a New York City-based artist known for her feminist and service oriented artwork. In 1969 she wrote a manifesto entitled Maintenance Art—Proposal for an Exhibition, challenging the domestic role of women and proclaiming herself a "maintenance artist"...


  • Jason deCaires Taylor
    Jason deCaires Taylor
    Jason deCaires Taylor is an English sculptor specialising in the creation of contemporary underwater sculptures which over time develop into artificial coral reefs....


Land as Metaphor or Signifier

  • Ian Hamilton Finlay
    Ian Hamilton Finlay
    Ian Hamilton Finlay, CBE, was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener.-Biography:Finlay was born in Nassau, Bahamas of Scottish parents. He was educated in Scotland at Dollar Academy. At the age of 13, with the outbreak of World War II, he was evacuated to family in the countryside...


  • John Baldessari
    John Baldessari
    John Anthony Baldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California...


  • Jan Dibbets
    Jan Dibbets
    Jan Dibbets , is a Dutch conceptual artist.In 1994, he was commissioned by the Arago Association to create a memorial to the French astronomer François Arago, known as Hommage à Arago...


  • Mark Dion
    Mark Dion
    Mark Dion is an American fine artist best known for his use of scientific presentations in his installations. Dion has exhibited his art works internationally including at the Tate Gallery, Museum of Modern Art, and the PBS series art:21...


See also

  • Arte povera
    Arte Povera
    Arte Povera is a modern art movement. The term was introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture, and even questioning whether...

  • crop art
    Crop art
    Crop art falls into several different categories, all of which employ land and/or what grows from it to create images.-Seed art:One version of Crop art is also called Seed art, a visual art created in mosaic-style. Mosaic is an ancient technique of making designs, often from bits of tile or...

  • Environmental movement
    Environmental movement
    The environmental movement, a term that includes the conservation and green politics, is a diverse scientific, social, and political movement for addressing environmental issues....

  • Environmental sculpture
    Environmental sculpture
    The term environmental sculpture is variously defined. A development of the art of the 20th century, environmental sculpture usually creates or alters the environment for the viewer, as opposed to presenting itself figurally or monumentally before the viewer...

  • Environmentalism
    Environmentalism
    Environmentalism is a broad philosophy, ideology and social movement regarding concerns for environmental conservation and improvement of the health of the environment, particularly as the measure for this health seeks to incorporate the concerns of non-human elements...

  • Greenmuseum.org
    Greenmuseum.org
    Greenmuseum.org is a nonprofit online museum of environmental art. Since its launch in 2001, greenmuseum.org has become a source for information about this global art movement, which includes eco-art , land art, art in nature and related terms.As an online museum it is free to visit and open 24...

  • Land art
    Land art
    Land art, Earthworks , or Earth art is an art movement which emerged in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked...

  • Land Arts of the American West
    Land Arts of the American West
    Land Arts of the American West is a studio-based field program that seeks to construct an expanded definition of land art through direct experience connecting the full range of human interventions in the landscape—from pre-contact indigenous to contemporary practice...

  • Natural World Museum
    Natural World Museum
    The Natural World Museum was a mobile and global cultural institution based in San Francisco that presented art as a catalyst to inspire and engage people in environmental awareness and action....

  • Site-specific art
    Site-specific art
    Site-specific art is artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork...

  • Sustainable art
    Sustainable art
    The expression sustainable art has been promoted recently as an art term that can be distinguished from environmental art that is in harmony with the key principles of sustainability, which include ecology, social justice, non-violence and grassroots democracy....

  • Teaneck Creek Conservancy
    Teaneck Creek Conservancy
    The Teaneck Creek Conservancy is an eco-art park located in Bergen County, New Jersey. It is part of the Bergen County Park system managed independently managed by the member-supported, non-profit incorporation of the Teaneck Creek Conservancy. The park contains 1.4 miles of groomed trails and...

  • Waterfire
    WaterFire
    WaterFire is the award-winning sculpture by Barnaby Evans presented on the rivers of downtown Providence, RI.First created by Evans in 1994 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of First Night Providence, WaterFire has grown to become an annual public art phenomenon.WaterFire is simultaneously a free...


Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists
| publisher =
| date = 2004
| location = New York
| pages =
| isbn = 0-7914-6194-7 }}

External links



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