Eco-art --What is it?

An introductory presentation by Deborah Thomas – in conjunction with Blue Planet, an eco-art exhibition examining and exploring the social, political and economic issues related to water –

organized by Pacific Region chapters of the Women’s Caucus for Art, June 2010

What do we mean by eco-art?

At its most basic:

Eco-art is artistic practice informed by an ecological perspective --

How is that different from environmental art?

It’s not so different – however, Sam Bower of greenmuseum.org likes to use “eco-art or “ecological art” to distinguish contemporary activist

approaches from earlier land and earth art movements. “Environmental art” is an older term that best serves as an umbrella term that

encompasses “ecological or eco-art,” “ecoventions,” “Land art,” “Earth art,” “earthworks,” “art in nature” and a few other less common terms.

The term “environmental art” often encompasses ecological concerns but is not specific to them.

Definitions: ecological or environmental?

Ecological = more specific to ecosystems and biological cycles; characterized by the interdependence of living organisms in an environment

Environmental = more general, meaning anything from “space” to “ecosystems;” its concerns could include recycled paper and energy policies, for example

Environmental artists can:

Inform and interpret nature and its processes, or educate us about environmental problems --

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

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

Reclaim and remediate damaged environments, restoring ecosystems in artistic and often aesthetic ways --

A few examples of environmental art --

Walter de Maria, The Lightning Field, Catron County, New Mexico, 1974.

This work, typically considered Earth art, directly engages environmental forces and materials – it consists of a field of metal rods that channel lightning during storms.

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1500’ long and 15’ wide, April 1970.

Smithson was interested in environmental change over time and the concept of entropy – as he once speculated, “the future is but the obsolete in reverse.”

Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan with New York Financial Center, 1982.

Denes re-imagined lower Manhattan by planting and harvesting a field of wheat on a landfill, juxtaposing the field’s natural cycles of growth with existing urban surroundings. Conceived in

discursive relation to 60s and 70s Earth art, Wheatfield additionally demonstrated ecological concerns.

Mel Chin with Dr. Rufus Chaney, Revival Field, Pigs Eye Landfill, Saint Paul, Minnesota, 1990-93.

In this project Chin used plants recognized as hyper-accumulators (plants that have evolved the capacity to absorb and contain large amounts of metal in their vascular structure) to absorb toxic materials from the soil. An early

example of work intended to heal a damaged environment.

What is eco-feminism?

Eco-feminism is generally regarded as a feminist approach to environmental ethics. Eco-feminists see the oppression of women and the domination of nature as interconnected; as a movement, eco-feminist theorists use a framework that confronts issues of gender, race, class, and nature.

Eco-feminists also consider women, children, low-income individuals, people of color, and residents of the Global South to be particularly vulnerable populations whose rights to a healthy and

sustainable future must be vigilantly respected and safeguarded. Women and the status of the environment are inextricably linked. In many cases, it is women, in the US and across the globe,

who primarily feel the effects of ecological change and the creation of toxic substances by humans.

The Feminist Majority Foundation

Lynne Hull, Twist, an osprey nesting platform, 30’ h, Green River greenbelt, Wyoming, 1993.

Lynne Hull has pioneered "trans-species" art, creating sculpture installations as wildlife habitat enhancement. She considers her work “eco-atonement” for damage caused by human impact. Her client list includes “hawks,

eagles, pine martin, osprey, owls, spider monkeys, salmon, butterflies, bees, frogs, toads, newts, bats, beaver, songbirds, otter, rock hyrax, small desert species, waterfowl and occasional humans.”

What is “art in nature”?

According to Sam Bower of greenmuseum.org, “art in nature” is a term used more often in Europe and refers more to work creating beautiful forms (usually outdoors)

with natural materials found on-site such as flower petals, mud, twigs and icicles, for example work by Andy Goldsworthy. Some similarities can be found with early

outdoor performance work by Ana Mendieta and others which documented a more personal and feminist engagement with the Earth. Works of “art in nature” do not

typically carry overtly political messages; their content is much more subtle and work tends to be personal in scale. Mandalas made from natural materials would also be considered "art in nature.” These often involve an overt spiritual dimension and are

seen by the artists as healing rituals for the earth. Traditional Tibetan and Navajo sand-paintings and other ephemeral artworks using seeds and flowers have much in

common with "art in nature" but obviously add their own rich symbolism and cultural traditions to the mix. There can be some overlap between “art in nature" and "eco-

art,” for example in work which might use mandalas and circular forms to call attention to logging clear cuts.

Ana Mendieta, (Untitled), two images from Silueta Series of 35mm color slides documenting performance, 1976, Oaxaca, Mexico.

Sand and red pigment. In her performance, Mendieta explored the relation of reciprocal touch between her body and the Earth, recreating this sensation visually for the spectator through the push and pull of colored water against the silueta of her body in

the sand.

Andy Goldsworthy, still from the documentary film Rivers and Tides, 2001.

“At its most successful, my ‘touch’ looks into the heart of nature; most days I don’t even get close. These things are all part of a transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient -- only in this way can the cycle remain

unbroken and the process be complete.”

Current perspectives on the eco-art movement

How artists describe the practice of eco-art:

Eco-artists “are involved in a re-engagement with nature that goes beyond representation to an active participation with the living cycles of nature. Connected

to but revolutionizing the landscape tradition these are works without a horizon, that are not concerned with viewing nature from afar but rather of engaging with it directly. These works embody a broader concept of art in its relationship to nature,

one that is informed but not limited by science, history and critical discourse.”Amy Lipton

How artists describe the practice of eco-art:

“Ecological art, or eco-art, addresses the heart and the mind. Ecological art work can help engender an intuitive appreciation of the environment, address core

values, advocate political action, and broaden intellectual understanding.”

Ruth Wallen

How artists describe the practice of eco-art:

“Ecological art is an art practice, often in collaboration with scientists, city planners, architects and others, that results in direct intervention in environmental

degradation. Often, the artist is the lead agent in that practice.”

Aviva Rahmani

How artists describe the practice of eco-art:

“Ecological art is grounded in an ethos that focuses on communities and inter-relationships. These relationships include not only physical and biological pathways

but also the cultural, political and historical aspects of communities or ecological systems.”

Ruth Wallen

How artists describe the practice of eco-art:

“The eco-revolution doesn’t just redefine what art is, or where it’s seen, but who makes it. The hard part of eco-art is that it doesn’t scream of art, but it’s about

creative thinking. . . . Some feel that it’s not really art at all.”

Robert Bingham

Contemporary activist approaches – examples:

Henrik Håkansson, Fallen Forest, 2006

a recreated 16-meter square patch of rainforest flipped on its side from the exhibition “Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet, 1969-2009,” at the Barbican Gallery, London, 2009

Tue Greenfort, Condensation, for “Frieze Projects,” London, 2008.

A sound installation demonstrated the cycle of water at the art fair in a chamber installation. While unsuspecting visitors visited a darkened room filled with the sound of breaking waves, dehumidification equipment imperceptibly

extracted moisture that they gave off. The condensate body water was used to refill used PET bottles of water that had been sold during the art fair. The refilled bottles were exhibited in a showcase next to the sound chamber

entrance. The installation became both a space to relax and - literally - a distillation of the essence of visitors to the fair.

Ed Burtynsky, Oxford Tire Pile #8, Westley, California, 1999

“Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil,

transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and

refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.”

Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, Full Farm, 1972, recreated at “Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet, 1969-2009” at the Barbican Gallery, London, 2009.

Growing food within a gallery might be the result of the artists’ desire to make works that benefit the eco-system: will we all have to start growing food indoors to feed an increasingly urbanized world?

Robert Adams, Clatsop County, Oregon, gelatin-silver print.

Part of Adams’ 1999-2003 series on deforestation in the Pacific northwest.

Aviva Rahmani, Signage, installation detail from Through the Glass Darkly for Imaging the River, 2003-04 at the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York.

Richard Misrach, Hazardous Waste Containment Site, Dow Chemical Corporation, Mississippi River, Plaquemine, Louisiana, 1998.

Kim Abeles, Ronald Reagan, 1991, from Presidential Commemorative Smog Plates series

Portraits of U.S. Presidents from McKinley to Bush (41) were created from particulate matter in the polluted air. The dinner plates, covered with stencils, were placed on a rooftop for varying lengths of time, depending on the extent of a President's violation or apathy toward the distressed environment. Upon removal of the stencil, the

President's visage in smog is revealed, accompanied by his historical quotes about the environment and business.

Simon Starling, Autoxylopyrocycloboros, 2006. From a film of the 2006 performance where Starling and a colleague fed the frame of a wooden boat to its steam boiler engine until the structure capsized.

The work speaks poetically with an element of slapstick to the “cannibalistic machine that is everyday life” in the industrialized world –feeding itself and driving itself into extinction in the same cycle of action.

Mark Dion, Neukom Vivanum, 2004-06.

This mixed media greenhouse installationfeatures a decomposing 60-foot nurse log that is meant to engender a new ecosystem of local fauna and insect

life enclosed within a specially designed greenhouse. This tree was re-sited from its original forest location as one of a collection of works of monumental sculpture at Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park.

Katie Holten, Tree Museum, a public art project, Grand Concourse, Bronx, 2009-10. Below: a 7- inch Tree Museum marker

The Bronx Grand Concourse, a wide, tree-lined boulevard modeled after Paris’s Champs Elysées, recently turned 100 years old. For its birthday it got 100 stories about 100 of its most beloved trees.

100 trees give voice to 100 perspectives – click here to watch theTREE MUSEUM VIDEO

Remarks eco-artists make about their work:

““We have a test ahead of us in terms of our relationship to the natural world. If we pass the test we get to keep the planet, but I don’t really see us doing a very good

job of that right now.”

Mark Dion

Remarks eco-artists make about their work:

“It’s not a simple right or wrong, it needs a whole new way of thinking.”

Ed Burtynsky

Remarks eco-artists make about their work:

“How does one envision a sustainable relationship to the natural environment? Can artists point to the changes in human behavior necessary to create such a future?

Can we help create communities that foster a sense of well-being implied by the word ‘abundance’? . . . How can artistic practice be informed by an ecological

perspective, a perspective that begins to address questions raised by discussion of the concept of abundance?”

Ruth Wallen