Although some eco artworks promote sensory and emotive engagements, the clear functionality of much eco art introduces a particularly disputed form of innovation.
Eco art tampers with the popular assumption that art can only engage the human spirit because it frequently seems indistinguishable from engineering, gardening, farming, etc.
How can eco artists defend themselves against the accusation that pragmatic practices do not belong within the realm of ‘art’?
The last century has witnessed a faceoff between two contrasting food-production schemes. One favored large scale industrial farming; its goal was to maximize yields and its methods depended on powerful mechanical technologies and applications of chemical herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers. The other pursued the gardener’s intimate and nurturing interactions with plants and animals by emulating non-human strategies of growth and propagation. The farm straddles these opposing world views.
Industry, farm, and garden are society’s dominant forms of biological productivity. Because entire social, political, spiritual, environmental, and ethical philosophies are imbedded in each approach, gardening offers artists a powerful tool for waging subversive actions. Critical Art Ensemble provides one compelling example. Nicole Fournier provides another.
Evidence abounds of the health dangers associated with large scale agricultural production. I discovered the fallacy of assuming that artists who garden necessarily object to industrial agricultural production. In the early years of the 20th century, Karel Teige (1900 – 1951), a Czech artist, championed the ethical, technological, and aesthetic innovations that characterize modern industrial societies, and applied them to all human activities.
While discovering new and ingenious eco artists is a daily occurrence, these artists are typically young entrants into this burgeoning arena of cultural expression.
Today, however, my discovery turned my attention backwards by forty years. The artist’s name was Liz Christy (1950 -1985). She is credited with initiating this collective enterprise in the 1970s. Christy was an artist and graphic designer, not a gardener. Nonetheless, she rallied friends and neighbors to participate in her gardening projects. Her loyal band of rebel gardeners became known as the Green Guerillas. Their radical gardening procedures included ‘bombing’ barren urban lots with ‘seed grenades’ they fabricated from balloons filled with seeds and fertilizer.
Although some eco artworks promote sensory and emotive engagements, the overt functionality of much eco art introduces a particularly disputed form of innovation.
Because it frequently seems indistinguishable from engineering, gardening, farming, researching, educating, etc., eco art tampers with the popular assumption that art only engages
the human spirit. How can eco artists defend themselves against the accusation that pragmatic practices do not belong within the realm of ‘art’?
My previous blog exploring humanity’s preference for savannas, the landscape where humans first evolved into a distinctive species, has stimulated some further reflections.
Compare golf courses and savannas – which both offer park-like settings with short grass and scattered large trees. This is an intriguing comparison since the aesthetics of these settings are similar, but their growing patterns are different. One relies upon humans imposing chemical fertilizers/mowing/weeding/watering to provide divertisment for wealthy folks with leisure time. The other is created by, and thrives because of, the maintenance and reproduction regimens that animals perform to perpetuate their species. Does our evolutionary advantage include recognizing the artificiality of one and the natural vitality of the other?
What kind of biome is your favorite?
Do you prefer a rain forest? deciduous forest? desert? tundra?
If you are like the majority of humans worldwide, you would prefer “a parklike setting with short grass and scattered large trees.” According to an experiment conducted by J.D. Balling and J. H. Falk, this landscape preference prevails worldwide. Humans everywhere possess a strong preference for the savanna. Even Nigerian subjects who have never travelled beyond the rain forest prefer savannas to their native biomes.
How can this be explained?
Eco Visualization: Aesthetics for Sustainability is the title of an
April, 2013 article by Juliet Helmke exploring eco visualization, a genre of art that aims to educate and influence consumer behavior by presenting ecological data in a manner that can be ‘observed’ instead of ‘read’. The underlying assumption is that interpreting data through color and form, making it kinetic, or giving it physicality can greatly enhance its affecting power. Helmke mentions four artists featured in TO LIFE!: Joseph Beuys, Michael Mandiberg, HeHe, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles.
Visualization is an age-old component of fine art. In the past, artists have visualized the glory of the gods, the brutality of war, the wholesome life of the peasant, the corruption of politics, etc. It is the prefix ‘eco’ which defines the contemporary ‘focus’.
In order to construct an image of sustainability and implement the means to attain it, eco artists are boldly revamping the themes, mediums, aesthetics, processes, skills, and even the role of art in society. In the process, aspects of art that have been cherished for hundreds of years are being discarded as irrelevant.
How is the practice of art-criticism and art-history affected when it addresses art that explores the urgent environmental predicaments that define the contemporary era?
It seems inevitable that eco art critics and eco art historians must be scrambling to accommodate the radical transformations in the creative production of art introduced by eco artists.
Eco art critics are 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, eco art historians are confronting the challenge of contextualizing and conceptualizing a form of art that exists without precedent.
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.
Energy generation is the focus of ambitious art projects by Amy Franceschini, HeHe, and SUPEFLEX, among others. Trends in actual energy production are confirming their innovative approaches are slowly inching away from ‘alternative’ into the ‘mainstream.
An article published today on Washington Blog announced that “Nuclear Power I Being Abandoned Worldwide”.
In addition, the nuclear decline correlates with renewable energy growth. The U.S. Energy Information Adminsitration announced, “In 2011, renewable sources of energy accounted for about 9.3% of total U.S. energy consumption and 12.7% of electricity generation. This is the largest share of energy consumption since 1950, and the largest share of electricity generation since 1984.”
Art critics evaluate merit and assign cultural/historical contexts to art. They have based their analyses upon multiple forms of judgment, focusing on material, aesthetic, thematic, expressive, biographical, historic, theoretical, and/or ethical criteria.
Eco art critics add a second basis of evaluation. While acknowledging art theories and aesthetics, eco art criticism also reflects the ecological principles associated with protecting the planet’s life-sustaining conditions. Managing two disciplines simultaneously more than doubles the complexity of their task.
The ‘eco’ part of their mandate expands the concerns of the art critic to include the actuality of peoples’ lives, corporate policies, technical science, and government regulations. Such considerations unsettle the long-held determinants of artistic “success,” “excellence,” “integrity,” “originality,” and “significance”.
Constructing an alternative system requires creative problem-solving. Like eco artists, eco art critics strive to resolve planet-wide infirmities and vulnerabilities and search for meaningful forms of innovation.