Environmental Art

What Lies Beyond the Darkness investigates how a creative sound and land-based art practice can position humans as an active part of any given ecological system; equal to ‘other’ natural and non-human co-habitants. This practice-based research aims to discover how to frame or heighten natural environments to facilitate a focused mode of listening and perceiving that can encourage audiences to emotionally respond to an environment. This will be achieved through the use of; existing natural environments such as nature reserves, public parks, and national parks; aesthetic interventions including outlined paths, mirrored partitions, sheer partitions, and contemplative signage; written guides; and audience surveying. This research contributes to a community of practice including sound and land artists that consider investigations into and creative work regarding environmental conservation and rehabilitation a major and timely concern.

“You [must] risk getting lost in the thickets, … that is the only way to make art.” --Robert Smithson.

Julian Charrière’s (*1987) work bridges the realms of environmental science and cultural history. Marshalling performance, sculpture and photography, his projects often stem from fieldwork in remote locations with acute geophysical identities. His latest work Second Suns investigates the post-nuclear landscapes and architecture of the Bikini Atoll (Marshall Islands) and Semipalatinsk (Kazakhstan). Visual content comprises four major photo series, sculptural and video works, and expedition documentation, featuring compelling images of ruined concrete bunkers, sunken battleships, apocalyptic sunsets and decaying infrastructure while contributions by leading thinkers provide historic, geographic and intellectual context. Second Suns offers readers access to notorious geographical zones shrouded in fantasy and tragedy and provides the most comprehensive visual engagement with each site published to date.

Author, poet and art historian John K. Grande is one of Canada's most widely published art critics. His essays have appeared in various art periodicals and gallery publications and are often concerned with postmodern attitudes toward nature, global health and well-being, and the environment. In Art Nature Dialogues Grande provides a forum for environmental artists from Europe and North America to discuss their work in a casual yet polemical style.

Since the beginning of its history, Environmental photography has been exploited for the sake of politics purpose in the United States. This “fair use” is part of the DNA of this photography, a genre that mixes landscape and nature aesthetics with environmental awareness. How can one deal with the aura of the words “environment” “nature”, which “green” the content of any publication or exhibition? This paper intends to explore a subtler greening made of the genuine intention of the spectator.‪

Depuis les prémices de son histoire, la photographie environnementale a été instrumentalisée à des fins politiciennes aux États-Unis. Cet « usage loyal » fait partie de l’ADN de cette photographie qui allie l’esthétique paysagère et naturaliste à une conscience environnementale. Comment gérer l’effet de mots-clefs comme « environnement » ou « nature », qui suscitent l’éco-blanchiment du contenu d’expositions ou de publications ? Cet article entend explorer un verdissement plus subtil, celui opéré par la bonne conscience du public.

The article discusses three photographic projects presenting transition and border areas: documentation of the course of the Warta entitled 808.2 km by Waldemar Śliwczyński, Jedynka (No. 1) by Maciej Rawluk and Urodzaj (The Harvest) by Michał Woroniak.
Each of the chosen case studies interprets differently the assumptions of "new topography" in photography – a trend interested in showing a man-altered landscape. Photographers' works relate to landscape studies, disputes over new theoretical proposals such as anthropocene and capitalocene, as well as to issue of periphery. Forgotten peripheries in the geography of Poland are Warta river, road No. 91, dominated by the A1 motorway become a symbol of the depleted, abandoned memory. In turn, Urodzaj presents the circumstances of the creation of an open-cast mine in the agricultural area and refers to both possible damage to the area and its social benefit for inhabitants.

In contrast to the spectacle of large-scale projections onto urban architecture, digital eco-art offers intimate experiences in reciprocity with the largeness of the sensorial realm of nature. Digital eco-artists position work in natural settings for the exhibition of interactive computer generative sound and visual installation works. In doing so, they push traditional boundaries of urban public art to be more socially interactive, immersive, and inclusive of place they offer a means for re-visioning urban natural

This paper applied an ecocritical perspective on street art to expand on the notion that street art can have an impact on how we relate to urban public space. In doing so, it argued that street art is particularly well positioned to affect the way we think and act with regard to the environment.

This chapter analyses Bonita Ely's studio research, using the artworks completed during her candidature as case studies.  Reference to Taoist concepts in the artworks are categorised as either derived from ‘direct’ knowledge of Taoist principles, that is, consciously studied or researched during doctoral studies or before undertaking doctoral studies, or an ‘indirect’ application of Taoist principles that are encoded in Western thought through rhizomic means since the West's first contact with China.

The first ever ecological and ethical assessment of animal gelatin in analogue photographic film, calculating the environmental impact of film and the moral quandary that arises from using a product so tied to the structural violence of industrial animal agriculture - ultimately asking, is art a legitimate reason to exploit nonhumans and devastate our natural environment?

Archaeology plays a unique role in the rediscovery and restoration of lost moments of cultural memory. It also bears a responsibility beyond the narrow confines of academia, and can and should play a role in the public perception of the past. Understanding the material basis of a shared past is now more important than ever, as humankind is engaged in perhaps the most challenging endeavor in its history – learning how to manage the constant expansion, articulation, and integration of our global material culture. However, academic archaeology is an inherently self-referential field, and often fails to engage the public on these larger issues. This article examines an attempt to bridge that communication gap through the development of an innovative, radically cross-disciplinary curriculum.

The Helicopter String Quartet (1993) by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) is one of the most notorious works of classical music of the past decades.  The work is scored for a traditional string quartet, four helicopters each with a pilot and a sound technician, audio and video communications equipment, a sound engineer (or ‘sound projectionist’) and a moderator (optional). Lasting half an hour, the work features the four musicians playing the music each in their own helicopter, in the air.

The present article discusses the work from the ‘conceptual music’ perspective. Our approach is based above all on a musicological translation of the theory of conceptual art developed in visual arts scholarship, i.e. the application of that theory to art consisting of sound. Our analysis is based on the score of the work including its written instructions, the composer’s other commentaries on the work, the recording made by the Arditti Quartet and the documentary directed by Scheffer. The article is a discussion of the ways in which the Helicopter String Quartet challenges our thinking about music and the world.

We first discuss the concept of conceptual music and then a feature characteristic of conceptual music in general and this work of Stockhausen’s in particular that we call a manifestation of a concept. This means presenting ideas using concrete symbols. In the work at hand, the key concepts being manifested are the concepts of air, sound direction, the world, the cosmos and light. Also, the transgressive approach of the work to the string quartet tradition prompts reflection on the relationship of the work to (chamber) music and to music as a metaphor for the miraculous and the ineffable. Finally, we discuss the Helicopter String Quartet as music that presents as a metaphor of itself and explore conceptuality as a feature of this music.

Working in 1970s Italy, a group of artists—namely Ugo La Pietra, Maurizio Nannucci, Francesco Somaini, Mauro Staccioli, Franco Summa, and Franco Vaccari—sought new spaces to create and exhibit art. Looking beyond the gallery, they generated sculptural, conceptual, and participatory interventions, called Arte Ambientale (Environmental Art), situated in the city streets. Their experiments emerged at a time of cultural crisis when fierce domestic terrorism aggravated an already fragile political situation. To confront the malaise, these artists embraced a position of artistic autonomy and social critique, democratically connecting the city's inhabitants through direct art practices.

That talk is never disinterested complicates the relationship between the environment and the claims people make about it. Talk about place, and one's self in it, is particularly complex when the environment poses risk or is otherwise problematized. This study, a secondary analysis of interview data, seeks to extend discursive work on place-identity by examining the ways in which 14 residents of a small English village talk about themselves and their locale. The locale accommodates an active quarry, and many residents had lodged complaints to the quarry about dust, noise and vibrations from blasting. Attention to the interactional context of the interviews illustrates the ways in which (simply) interviewing people about their locale can threaten self- and place-identity. When asked about life in the village, interviewees oriented to two main dilemmas in protecting self- and place-identity: (1) how to justify continued residence in a challenging environment and (2) how to complain about the locale whilst maintaining positive place-identity. Discursive responses to these dilemmas drew upon typical identity processes, such as self- and place distinctiveness and the formulation of out-groups, as well as upon constructions of localized power-sharing and morally obligated tolerance of risk. We suggest that research on problematical places, and of environmental risk, needs to be sensitized to how it may constitute a threat to self- and place-identity, and how this may mediate formulations self and place, as well as of environmental risk.

and Keywords Since the late 20th century, performance has played a vital role in environmental activism, and the practice is often related to concepts of eco-art, eco-feminist art, land art, theatricality, and "performing landscapes." With the advent of the Capitalocene discourse in the 21st century, performance has been useful for acknowledging indigenous forms of cultural knowledge and for focusing on the need to reintegrate nature and culture in addressing ecological crisis. The Capitalocene was distinguished from the Anthropocene by Donna Haraway who questions the figuration of the Anthropos as reflexive of a fossil-fuel-burning ethos that does not represent the whole of industrial humanity in the circuit of global capital. Jason W. Moore's analysis for the Capitalocene illustrates the division between nature and society that is affirmed by the tenets of the Anthropocene. Scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer had dated the Anthropocene age to the industrial acceleration of the late-18th/mid-19th century but Moore points to the rise of capitalism in the 15th century when European colonization reduced indigenous peoples to naturales in their modernist definition of nature that became distinct from the new society. As material property, women were also precluded from this segment of industrial humanity. By the 20th century, the Euro-American system for progressive modernism in the arts was supported by the inscription of cultures that represented un-modern "primitivist" nature. The tribal and the modern became a postcolonial debate in art historical discourse. In the context of the Capitalocene, a different historiography of eco-art, eco-feminist art, and environmental performances can be conceived by acknowledging the work of artists such as Ana Mendieta and Kara Walker who have illustrated the segregation of people according to the nature/society divide. Informed by Judith Butler's phenomenological analyses of performative acts, the aesthetic use of bodily-oriented expression (with its effects on the viewer's body) provides a vocabulary for artists engaging in the subjects of the Capitalocene. In the development of performances in the global context, artists such as Wu Mali, Yin Xiuzhen, and Ursula Biemann have emphasized the relationship between bodies of humans and bodies of water through interactive works for the public, sited at the rivers and the shores of streams. They show how humans are not separate from

The award winning Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature critically explores the relationships among human beings, their environments, and the religious dimensions of life. Further information and sample entries can be found at the urls provided here or via Bron Taylor's website at www.brontaylor.com.

Considering as a point of reference the exhibition on the Environmental Art The Space of Image, held in 1967, the article explores the Art photo-documentation published on the Italian Art Periodicals during the Sixties. Thanks to the database www.capti.it, this study proposes a new reading of the photo of Environment and Installation, also based on a statistical approach. The origin of this photographic genre shows some unexpected relations with other photographic practices: the reportage, the photo of architecture and the Art galleries advertising. The documentation status of Photography is thus contaminated with different editing practices.

Up to now historical studies have thoroughly not investigated the cultural background and the early professional biography of the five painters Achille Bonito Oliva has includeded in the Transavant-garde (Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola  de Maria and Mimmo Paladino) yet. The main obstacles to these studies go back to the birth of Transavant-garde. From one side, the documents concerning the past of the artists -those that would not justify the belated rehabilitation of the "traditional media"- were suddenly not taken into account; and, from the other side, it emerged a clear and schematic contrast between the Transavant-garde and the preceding experience of the Arte Povera and Conceptual Art through which the militant criticism interpreted this shift.
The essay focuses on the story of the two transavant-gardists, Paladino and de Maria, with the aim of reconstructing how they join from the end of the sixties up to 1977, the "Environment-Painting" (a form of expanded and wall painting, here cosidered as a preliminary step to the Transavant-garde). The historical investigation has taken up again this corpus of documents intentionally ignored, and it has focused on the experimental beginnings of the two artists -beginnings related to the envirnoment, the performance, and particularly the photograph.
Therefore, the essay tries to give a more complex interpretation of this corpus by comparing with the contrast suggested by the militant criticism and by founding out the continuity elements of painting, or the pictorial iconography, already present in the Italian neo-avant-garde (Arte Povera, Conceptual, etc...).

Lead essay within book authored by Edward Burtynsky with Jennifer Baichwal and Nick de Pencier.

Discussion of Edward Burtynsky's photographs on the subject of the Anthropocene in relation to climate change, political and social response to it, predecessor photographers and painters, and affective impact.

Public art, unlike works of art created for galleries and museums, is often cast by well-meaning artists and curators into situations that make it vulnerable to the vicissitudes and vagaries of urban planners and civic administrators. Without clearly documented roles of ownership and responsibility, public artworks are unshielded from inevitable changes in taste, personnel and municipal priorities. Public art commissioned by biennales is especially prone to neglect, as its artist and curator "parents" unsurprisingly move on to make way for the next biennale's exhibition team. The Joseph Beuys tree commissioned for the 1984 Biennale of Sydney is a case in point.

This dissertation is about the fragility of sculptural practices today that often relies heavily on sensibility, gesture and intuition in conjunction with materiality in order to exist in the physical world. It explores the energy that materials have and the way these point to things that already exist in the world but we may not notice or give much thought in our ordinary lives. These sculptures use inexpensive materials and often become ‘sculptural installations’. Chapters focus on Humbleness, Fragility and Embodiment.

In a 2021 Zoom conference titled The Garden and the Dump: Across More-than-Human Entanglements, climate philosopher Timothy Morton (they/them) gave a performative rant on the abomination of the American lawn. Their talk exemplified what they call "playful seriousness" in their new book All Art Is Ecological. This approach to climate crisis, in an age of doomscrolling and grief aesthetics, is on the surface as refreshing as it is unsettling. Instead of taking an academic stance, Morton's book reads more like a chain of chatty riffs on phenomenology, ecological attunement, and art's hypnotic power. The book is divided into two long essays. It opens with a call to embrace the subjunctive, titled "And You May Find Yourself Living in an Age of Mass Extinction," with reference to the Talking Heads' song "Once in a Lifetime" as an antidote to the "indicative age" of data-based certainty. Wishing instead for strangeness, beauty, and hesitation, Morton revisits their well-known notion of the "hyperobject" (Morton, 2013), arguing that art can open humans to a sense of ambiguity and wonder, to help us face a climate crisis that can seem too huge to comprehend.

By adopting posthuman ecology as its methodological framework, the author of this paper examines how British environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy's conceptualization of nature can radically undermine the nature/culture dichotomy. To do this, the author will survey the first and the second waves of environmental art movement, also known as Representational and Performative Environmental Art, in order to situate Goldsworthy's small-scale works within the latter. Then, by embracing Tim Ingold's idea of "thinking through making" within materialist ecology, the author puts forward that Goldsworthy's environmental art can resist the old-age hylomorphic model by using intuitiveness and improvisation as its strategy. In doing so, Goldsworthy eschews from turning nature into a representation that is to be manipulated by human subjectivity from afar, precisely by thinking from natural materials rather than about them, thus inviting us to conceive all human and nonhuman organisms as an intricate conglomerate of "leaky things" in an endless flux of ecological becoming.

This essay represents an interdisciplinary collaboration between  Anna Tsing and Elaine Gan of Matsutake Worlds Research Group. The essay experiments with three concepts—coordination, assemblage, diagram—to articulate a forest in Japan as a gathering of vegetal, fungal, and human temporalities. The essay argues that coordination is key to understanding how differences live together without centralized, human-centered planning.

The Extinct Birds Project started in 2015 after I saw a drawer full of extinct
birds at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History. On the clean white paper were the bodies of seven extinct birds and around a dozen other threatened species. A tremendous veil of sadness laced every one of the specimens and countless questions immediately ran through my mind: How did the institution get these extinct birds? Why did they go extinct? Should they have been collected if they were in danger or going extinct? Where were these birds collected? Have the bodies been gutted and filled with cotton? How is that done? Who collected these and how was this done? What were the collectors’ lives like?

This book, with its accompanying exhibition and website extinctbirdsproject.com, tries to answer these questions and several others about seventeen extinct birds species. The publication examines at least one individual specimen and the ornithologist who collected it from each of these species. The essays and illustrations present complicated global environmental and societal issues in an accessible and intriguing manner.

For more information on this project, go to:
https://www.extinctbirdsproject.com.

For more information on Alberto's other projects, go to: www.albertorey.com

The practice-led art research project 'Gathering Shadows' investigates the ‘tragic’ visual poetics of a speculative ‘ecological gaze’ at a time of ecological crisis. The work replaces the distancing objectification of lens-based capture with a unique indexical methodology focussed upon the cameraless outdoor nocturnal photography of live invertebrates and human artifacts. The work presents a symbolic order of dark and intimate x-ray like shadows in which insect umwelten operates as an index of nonhuman selfhood and place and insect abjection alludes to the multiple ‘tragedies’ of the human and non-human ecological predicament. The subjects of these works are drawn from two sites. The first, semi-arid Lake Tyrrell in the Victorian Mallee once informed a sacred reciprocity of sky with country in indigenous culture. The loss of this reciprocity is memorialized by using starlight falling on the lakebed to contact print films with the imagery of insects gathered from the lakeshore, imaging one species en masse on paper and digitally reiterating another. The second site, sub-alpine Mount Buffalo in the Australian Alps is a region already in decline due to climate change. Here, cameraless images of the keystone species Bogong Moth (Agrotis infusa) were gathered from a summit cave and digitally reiterated as detailed inkjet enlargements. A summary piece comprising cameraless imagery from both locations links the two sites. The project confirms the auratic power of the site-specific indexical analogic methods, establishes the unique revelatory potential of digital reiteration of cameraless imagery and contributes to the biosemiotic reimagining and anti-anthropocentric repositioning of invertebrates and ‘landscape’ within photography in ways that aim to legitimize the tragic form as an appropriate aesthetic frame through which to apprehend our ecological predicament.

Stare into the Caffenol to Reveal your Future is a blueprint for an ecological future for photography, inspired by London Alt Photo Collective's sustainable darkroom residencies. Featuring interviews from analogue photographers, the paper proposes an alternative vision for photography to be tried and tested worldwide.