Eco Art Criticism. Eco Art History
The arts are making increasingly important contributions to envisioning sustainability and implementing the means to attain it. In order to fulfill this challenging environmental mandate, these artists are boldly revamping art’s traditional themes, mediums, aesthetics, processes, roles, and skills. In the process, aspects of art that have been cherished for hundreds of years are being discarded as irrelevant and replaced with unprecedented alternatives.
Eco artists may, for example, disrupt conventions in art by rejecting rarity, craftsmanship, authenticity, stylistic consistency, and aesthetic appeal in order to defer to natural forces. They may adopt nature’s manner of recycling materials by selecting mediums that are materially unstable, or they may disregard or reject the intention to produce an enduring art work in order to harmonize with such dynamic conditions as growth and decay, weather, and geological cycles. Furthermore, eco artists may replace static arrangements of discrete objects in space to envision the vibrant interconnectedness of all living beings. Ultimately, eco artists’ concern for the welfare of Earth systems and their diverse populations subsumed the age-old association of the artist with self expression.
Eco art critics and eco art historians must be scrambling to accommodate the radical transformations in the creative production of art that are currently being introduced by eco artists. Eco art critics must be figuring out how to integrate into their analysis the seismic shifts in social meanings and ethical values that reflect environmental concerns. At the same time, art historians are confronting the challenge of contextualizing and conceptualizing a form of artistic expression that is in the process of redefining its forms and functions. The chapters representing the early years of the 21st century in future art history texts are not yet written. They will likely be formulated through the creative rewiring of professional protocols that differentiate art critics from eco art critics and art historians from eco art historians.
While most art historians analyze art’s external manifestations, eco art historians confront the added challenge of investigating the processes that determine output, the mediums that convey the works’ themes, the strategies employed to fulfill the artists’ intentions. Thus, instead of analyzing artworks as post-operative artifacts that are isolated from life occurrences, the works of art that eco art historians explore remain within the dynamics of operating ecosystems.
Likewise, art that is being created to accommodate the planet’s infirmities and vulnerabilities carries a mandate for eco art critics. They must construct a new set of criteria that considers two disciplines simultaneously – ecology and art. The ‘art’ part of their task involves evaluating the merit of works of art based upon aesthetic, thematic, stylistic, biographical, historic, and/or theoretical criteria. The ‘eco’ part of their job involves evaluating the art work according to ecological principles associated with protecting the planet’s life-sustaining conditions. Straddling these disciplines is complicated by the fact that the ‘eco’ part of their mandate expands the conventional concerns of art to include such issues as the actuality of ecosystem functions, human interactions with the material environment, corporate policies regarding resource use and disposal, the environmental impact of technological innovations, and government regulations regarding environmental protections. Such encompassing considerations unsettle the long-held determinants of artistic “success,” “excellence,” “integrity,” “originality,” and “significance”. Developing these criteria requires an explorer’s zeal and an inventor’s initiative.