A Rough Guide To Environmental Art

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A Rough Guide to Environmental Art
Article in Annual Review of Environment and Resources December 2008

Impact Factor: 5.89 DOI: 10.1146/annurev.energy.31.042605.134920
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Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour. 2008. 33:391411 Key Words

First published online as a Review in Advance on climate change, environmental aesthetics, landscape art, land art,
July 29, 2008
representational and nonrepresentational/performative art
The Annual Review of Environment and Resources
is online at environ.annualreviews.org Abstract
This articles doi: To appreciate the beauty or the fragility of our environment and our cul-
10.1146/annurev.environ.31.042605.134920
tural responses to it, we need to understand how artists have portrayed
Copyright c 2008 by Annual Reviews. the environment in the past and how they are continuing to portray it
All rights reserved
in the present. Environmental art is presented in this paper as a new
1543-5938/08/1121-0391$20.00 genre to describe works of art that are not only directly representational
of the environment (e.g., Constables Cloud Series or Monets London
Series) but also works of art that are clearly nonrepresentational and per-
formative, such as Longs A Line Made by Walking or Turrells Skyspaces.
The need for an overarching new genre to describe nonrepresentational
performative environmental art is more obvious because there has been
a host of labels given to this type of art since the late 1960s, such as land
art, earthworks, site-specic art, destination art, ecological art, eco-art,
and environmental sculpture. The review is also concerned with the
potential of environmental art for communicating climate change.
391
To learn to appreciate each moment in time,

Contents as we live our frantic daily lives in a fragile global
environment, is a worthy goal to improve hu-
1. INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 392
man well-being. To learn to care for and to look
1.1. Landscape Is Dead: Long Live
after the environment, as well as to understand
the Environment? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 394
shifts in attitudes and environmental concern,
1.2. The End of Traditional
we need to appreciate its aesthetic qualities.
Landscape Art? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395
The academic literature on arts and the envi-
2. REPRESENTATIONAL
ronment encompasses analysis of how the envi-
ENVIRONMENTAL ART . . . . . . . . 395
ronment is represented in ction, lm, photog-
3. NONREPRESENTATIONAL/
raphy, and art, and this article focuses only on
PERFORMATIVE
the last two categoriesthose of photography
and art in the form of photographs, paintings,

4. CLIMATE CHANGE AND
sculpture, and landscape.
The study of environmental aesthetics has
5. CONCLUSIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407
grown rapidly this century as witnessed by a
number of books including Aesthetics and the

Environment (2); Environment and the Arts
1. INTRODUCTION
(3); Aesthetics of the Natural Environment
The relationship between the environment and (4); Nature, Aesthetics and Environmentalism (5),
the arts is in a constant state of ux not least and many others. None of these books, how-
because what we mean by the environment ever, has addressed the development of envi-
and the arts is forever changing. The arts, ronmental art, which has dramatically evolved
encompassing traditional forms such as paint- away from traditional landscape art in recent
ing, photography, lm, television, sculpture, ar- years. This review attempts to redress that bal-
chitecture, literature, music, dance, and theater ance and highlight the development of environ-
are constantly expanding as new media such mental art at a crucial timewhen our environ-
as the Internet and virtual reality provide new ment is under threat from climate change. The
platforms for exploration. The environment, study of environmental aesthetics has ignored
environmental change, and especially climate the atmosphere at the same time as environ-
change are at the forefront of political, eco- mental artists are starting to communicate the
nomic, and scientic concern and debate. The perils of climate change and are engaging their
links between aesthetics and the environment audiences in a new interactive appreciation of
impact upon our feelings and are part of our the natural world.
everyday experience of the world, particularly Environmental art is presented in this ar-
the atmospheric environment, which we all too ticle as a new genre to describe works of art
often take for granted. Thoreau, the famous that are not only directly representational of
early American environmentalist and philoso- the environment (e.g., Constables Cloud Series,
pher wrote, as long ago as 1854, in his book Monets London Series, or Cezannes Mont Sainte
Walden (1, p. 61): Victoire Series) but also works of art that are
clearly nonrepresentational and performative
It is something to be able to paint a particular in terms of much less direct interpretation but
picture, or to carve a statue and so to make a more active engagement of the audience such
few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious as Longs A Line Made by Walking or Turrells
to carve and paint the very atmosphere and Skyspaces. Other works of environmental art like
medium through which we look . . . To affect Eliassons The Weather Project can be described
the quality of the day, that is the highest of as both representational, in terms of nostalgi-
arts. cally representing nineteenth century London
392 Thornes
fog and nonrepresentational and performative paddling the course of a stream, all these with
in terms of the audience participation. Environ- acute attention to the sounds, the smells, the
mental art is therefore a very useful overarching feel of wind and sun, and the nuances of color,
term that encompasses works of art that have shape and pattern.
been composed or displayed, in or out of doors,
and concerned with the environment. Environ- The traditional denition of landscape is as
mental art can be brought into the gallery in a way of seeing, for example, by Cosgrove &
the form of canvases, photographs, sculptures, Daniels (6, p. 1) who state: A landscape is a
videos, lms, and natural samples (e.g., drift- cultural image, a pictorial way of representing
wood, soil, leaves, mud, rocks) or viewed out- or symbolising surroundings. This denition
doors in situ. is rejected by Ingold (7, p. 191) who states:
The need for an overarching new genre to
describe nonrepresentational performative en- I do not share this view. To the contrary, I
vironmental art is perhaps more obvious be- reject the division between inner and outer
cause there has been a host of labels given to worldsrespectively of mind and matter,
this type of art since the late 1960s, such as
meaning and substanceupon which such

land art, earthworks, site-specic art, destina- distinction rests. The landscape, I hold, is not
tion art, ecological art, eco-art, total art, and a picture in the imagination, surveyed by the
environmental sculpture. Representational en- minds eye; nor however is it an alien and form-
vironmental art has normally just been classed less substrate awaiting the imposition of hu-
as a form of landscape art in the past, but this man order.
article argues that the use of the term land-
scape is misleading. It implies a static mate- Wylie (8, p. 154) explains that the denition
rial approach, whereas artists like Constable and of landscape as a way of seeing or as a cul-
Turner, from the beginning of the nineteenth tural image reinforces the misleading distinc-
century, painted representations of their total tion between ideas of culture and the matter of
physical and built environment (land, air, water, nature, which exists throughout much of social
light, plants, trees, animals, people, buildings). and cultural theory. Ingold (7, p. 189) writes:
During the past 40 years or so, there has The conceptualisation of landscape has per-
been a dramatic turn away from representa- sistently been bedevilled by a sterile opposition
tional environmental art toward nonrepresen- between the naturalistic view of landscape as a
tational/performative environmental art. This neutral, external backdrop to human activities,
has recently been mirrored in the social sci- and the culturalistic view that every landscape
ences by a turn toward appreciating and valuing is a particular cognitive or symbolic ordering of
our environment on the basis of landscape phe- space.
nomenology, i.e., from the perspective of indi- This phenomenological viewpoint is built
vidual consciousness and feelings. Whereas tra- upon the work of Merleau-Ponty (9) and
ditional landscape art attempted to capture or Heidegger (10) and is part of a turn toward land-
represent our gaze over distant external objects, scape phenomenology and performance (8, 11,
which we recognize to have an aesthetic value, 12). Landscape phenomenology is not without
environmental art and environmental aesthet- its critics. Indeed, as Wylie (8, p. 180) observes
ics involve all our senses and feelings. Berleant in his book on Landscape that Castree (13) in his
(3, p. 10) states: book entitled Nature in the series Key Ideas in
Geography does not mention the considerable
Environmental appreciation is not just look- phenomenological writings on nature/culture
ing approvingly at lovely country scenery. It relations. In simple terms, the critical, radical,
occurs in activities like driving down a winding marxist, and feminist approach is more power
country road, tramping along a hiking trail, and society based, for example, generalizing
www.annualreviews.org A Rough Guide to Environmental Art 393

across categories of class and gender. It tends of weather not as a scenic panorama but as an
to ignore the more individually based phe- experience. The visual perception of weather is
nomenological approach. Also, phenomenol- a neglected eld but obviously inuences en-
ogy has been criticized for being too roman- vironmental artists of all shades. Ingold (20,
tic and nostalgic and being concerned with past p. 100) asks the question:
cultures and societies and therefore not suf-
ciently relevant today. However, the straight- Is weather a part of the landscape or is it
forward appeal of phenomenology to individ- not? If it is not, does it swirl around above
uals and its lack of complicated theory are the landscape, or does it actually encompass
obvious strengths in these postmodern times. the landscape, as the earth is encompassed by
Nonrepresentational theory is also referred the great sphere of sky? If the weather is not
to as the performative turn, which implies the part of the landscape, is the landscape, then,
inclusion of our heightened personal expe- part of the weather?

riences, actions, understanding, and feelings.
There has been a signicant phenomenologi- Obviously, when we consider the environ-
cal shift within cultural geography and mate- ment rather than the landscape, then these
rial cultural studies (1419). This performative questions disappear. The weather is an inte-
turn,which began about the year 2000, is ex- gral part of the environment, and the environ-
plained by Wiley (8, p. 163): . . . there has been ment is an integral part of the weather. This
both a rhetorical and substantive shift, from also ts in neatly with the famous statement by
the studies of representations of landscape, na- Merleau-Ponty (21, p. 214): As I contemplate
ture, identity, space, place, the body, and so on, the blue of the sky, I am not set over against
to studies instead investigating various perfor- it as an acosmic subject . . . I am the sky itself
mances and performativities of these tropes. as it is drawn together and unied, and as it
The use of the term environment rather than begins to exist for itself; my consciousness is
the term landscape makes sense in that environ- saturated with this limitless blue. Indeed, we
ment implies the duality of nature and culture are the skyfrom the moment we take our rst
at a local level. The term environmental phe- breath when we are born we are the sky. We
nomenology would be tautological as the word breathe the sky because the sky is just a light
environment implies inbuilt phenomenology. show created by the atmosphereit is one and
Although landscapes existed before life evolved the same thing. It is blue during the daylight
on the planet, by denition an environment hours and invisible at night unless obscured by
belongs to a living thing or things. Ingold (7, clouds or pollution. We breathe about 15 liters
p. 19) states: A properly ecological ap- of atmosphere/sky per minute, and our lungs
proach . . . is one that would take, as its are constantly converting oxygen into carbon
point of departure, the whole-organism-in-its- dioxide and water vaporthe two most impor-
environment. In other words, organism plus tant greenhouse gases. This is a performance
environment should denote not a compound that is largely invisible to us, but as a conse-
of two things but one indivisible totality. quence, we are all insiders to climate change
and enhanced global warming.
However, Ingold (22) suggests that all is not
1.1. Landscape Is Dead: Long Live so simple. He discusses Gibsons book The Eco-
the Environment? logical Approach to Visual Perception (23) in which
To comprehend the value of the use of the term the distinction is made between the physi-
environment rather than landscape let us take cal world and the environment. The earth
the example of weather. Ingold (20) in his paper and the atmospherethe physical worldwere
The Eye of the Storm: Visual Perception and in existence long before life evolved on the
the Weather attempts to explain our awareness planet. He argues that an environment can only
394 Thornes
exist in relation to a form of life that inhabits Landscape becomes a reality as the land ac-
it. In other words, the environment is a per- quires value and becomes a commodity from
ception of the beings who make a living there, the outsiders point of view. Also, landscape
rather than a physical reality. However, the at- can be seen as a curtain that masks the strug-
mosphere was changed dramatically after life gles and lives of the inhabitants. Andrews (24,
evolved on Earth, and therefore, it can be ar- p. 22) tellingly states that the major challenge
gued that the atmosphere is an intimate part to the outsiders perspective is not coming
of the environment for all life on the planet. If from an intellectual standpoint, but from the
life had not evolved on Earth, our atmosphere environment:
would be similar to that of Venus today with
up to 98% carbon dioxide! The distinction be- The more pervasive and profound challenge
tween landscape and environment is clear. The to the outsiders perspective has come not from
landscape relates to the static physical world, the academies but from the environmental
whereas the environment encompasses life and movement . . . .we are all insiders now. Land-
process. Environmental art is normally at a lo- scape as a way of seeing from a distance is in-
cal scale, but the environment can be at a variety
compatible with this heightened sense of our

of scales from local to regional to global, con- relationship to Nature as living (or dying) en-
cerning individuals, nations, and the whole of vironment. As a phase in the cultural life of
society. the West, landscape may already be over.
1.2. The End of Traditional 2. REPRESENTATIONAL

Landscape Art? ENVIRONMENTAL ART
Before we examine contemporary performative Of all the weather painters, John Constable
environmental art, it is useful to look at how far (17761837) is arguably the greatest in that the
the traditional analysis of landscape art takes us skies of his nished works, principally those
to ascertain the additional richness that envi- painted after his skying period of 1820
ronmental art might give us. Andrews, an art 1822, most closely represent the sky in nature
historian, in his book Landscape and Western (Figure 1). He painted more than 100 skies
Art (24, p. 22) traces the development and sig- on Hampstead Heath with differing times of
nicance of landscape painting through time day, wind speed, wind direction, angle of view,
and warns of the recent decline of landscape: and cloud type. Many of them contained de-
Looked at from one point of view, landscape tailed weather observations on the reverse (26,
art in the West, over the last 500 years, can be p. 60) for example: Sepr. 12. 1821. Noon.
read as the elegiac record of humanitys sense Wind fresh at West. Sun very Hot. Look-
of alienation from its original habitat in an ir- ing southward exceedingly bright vivid and
recoverable, precapitalist world. Glowing, very heavy showers in the After-
Cosgrove (25, p. 19) distinguishes between noon but a ne evening. High wind in the
insiders and outsiders with respect to land: night.
It was a combination of artistic experimen-
For the insider there is no clear separation of tation and maturity, together with a scientic
self from scene, subject from object. There desire to understand dynamic meteorological
is, rather, a fused, unsophisticated and social processes, that led to the remarkable verac-
meaning embodied in the milieu. The insider ity and ecstasy of his skies both in his cloud
does not enjoy the privilege of being able studies and in nished works such as The Hay-
to walk away from the scene as we can walk wain. Indeed, Constables skies have been called
away from a framed picture or from a tourist The romantic conjunction of science and ec-
viewpoint. stasy (27, p. 275). These skies were more than

representations of the weather and climate on well as comparing Turners truth to nature with
Hampstead Heath. Thornes (26) has compared the Old Masters. The purpose (29, p. xlixlii) is
contemporary weather observations with the to insist on the necessity, as well as the dignity,
sky studies and found an almost perfect agree- of an earnest, faithful, loving study of nature as
ment. Hence, Constables skies represent a pic- she is.
torial weather diary of meteorological observa- Constable (30) had already been a model stu-
tions for Hampstead Heath. dent, although Ruskin was not aware to what
The rst half of the nineteenth century extent. We see nothing truly till we under-
might be seen as the golden era for natural skies, stand it (30, p. 350). In Constables third lec-
when the atmosphere was the last part of nature ture on the history of landscape painting at the
as yet uncontrollable and unspoilt by culture. As Royal Institution in 1836, he compares two of
Werner (28, p. 8) suggests: Ruisdaels paintings: Winter Landscape and The
Jewish Cemetery. First he (30, p. 350) discusses

The importance of the sky-studies of the early Winter Landscape:
nineteenth century is the new freedom of ex-
pression, a freedom which was based on a more

This picture represents an approaching thaw.
or less total knowledge of the subject-matter.
The ground is covered with snow, and the trees
Study and almost scientic observation of the
are still white; but there are two windmills near
physical phenomena of motion and light re-
the center; the one has the sails furled, and is
sult in a deep understanding of atmospheric
in the position from which the wind blew when
phenomena. With this knowledge and under-
the mill left off work; the other has the canvas
standing the artist is in a position to create
on the poles, and is turned another way, which
more freely, to summarize and to extract. La
indicates a change in the wind; the clouds are
verite, the truthfulness, is not related to the
opening in that direction, which appears by
object any more but to the motivating powers.
the glow in the sky to be the south, (the suns
As a result of this the spectator might remark:
winter habitation in our hemisphere,) and this
How absolutely true to type, how well I know
change will produce a thaw before morning.
this kind of troubled skya replica of which
The occurrence of these circumstances shows
in nature he has never seen at all.
that Ruysdael understood what he was paint-
ing. He has here told a story . . . .
This link to process and a knowledge of how
the environment works raises interesting ques-
tions about the role of science in the work- Constable had spent a year of his life, be-
ings of representational environmental art. At fore he became a painter, working as a miller at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, the his fathers windmill in Suffolk. His knowledge
promotion of open-air painting and a new un- of changing weather and its impact on the op-
derstanding of the environment through the erations of a windmill was therefore extensive
Linnaean classication of plants, soils, trees, an- (26). Constable (30, p. 350) then compared this
imals, rocks, and clouds led on to a thirst for winter scene with what he called an allegorical
an understanding of process. Goethe, Carus, landscape The Jewish Cemetery:
and Ruskin (29, p. xxxviii) argued that land-
scape artists should understand the environ- In a picture which was known, while he was
ment around them: Every class of rock, earth living, to be called An Allegory of the Life of
and cloud, must be known by the painter, with Man (and it may therefore be supposed he so
geologic and meteorologic accuracy. intended it)there are ruins to indicate old
The ve volumes of Ruskins Modern Painters age, a stream to signify the course of life, and
were intended to educate the landscape artist at rocks and precipices to shadow forth its dan-
great length about the workings of nature as gers; but how are we to discover all this?
396 Thornes
Constable is arguing for a change of direc- Andrews (24, p. 188) describes time and change
tion in landscape art away from contrived sym- in Turners Frosty Morning:
bolic imaging that only the educated might
interpret, toward a natural image that an un- In the foreground in the cold dawn light, an
educated miller or farm worker or sailor might old man and a child watch some men at work.
more easily understand. The interpretation and A coach, with its lamps still lit at the end of
understanding of the natural environment is not the night ride, approaches from the left back-
necessarily easier to todays urban population, ground . . . It depicts the passage from night to
but in Constables day an astute basic under- dawn, and the warming of the earth as the sun
standing of the workings of the weather was as thaws the ground frost.
normal as talking about the weather!
Constable was not alone in these ideas. In order to capture the differing moods of
Goethe also encouraged the landscape painter nature, artists often painted out of doors, keep-
to acquire scientic knowledge as well as to ing a set of sketches and studies of the same
observe the natural environment astutely (31, viewpoint in differing weather and light con-
p. 562): ditions. Constable, as already mentioned, made
more than 100 sky studies, de Valenciennes (32,

A landscape painter should possess various p. 409) was of the same mind: It is good to paint
sorts of knowledge. It is not enough for him the same view at different times of day, to ob-
to understand perspective, architecture, and serve the differences that light produces on the
the anatomy of men and animals; he must also forms. The changes are so palpable that one has
have some insight into botany and mineralogy, trouble recognizing the same objects.
that he may know how to express properly the Corot noted the importance of what
characteristics of trees, plants, and the char- Andrews (24, p. 191) calls active passivity:
acter of the different sorts of mountains. It is We must never forget to envelope reality in the
not, indeed, necessary that he should be an atmosphere it had when it burst upon our view.
accomplished mineralogist, since he has to do Whatever the site, whatever the object, the
chiey with lime, slate and sandstone moun- artist should submit his rst impression. The
tains, and only needs to know in what forms impressionists championed instantaneity, es-
they lie, how they are acted upon by the atmo- pecially Monet in his series paintings. Monet
sphere, and what sort of trees thrive, and are was obsessed with the weather and its changing
stunted upon them. moods.
According to House (33) during the 1890s,
Every picture tells a story and the argument Monet was preoccupied by what he called the
of the picture shifted from an imaginary cul- instantaneity of landscapesespecially how the
tural story in an imaginary landscape (e.g., The atmosphere (lenveloppe) was more important
Jewish Cemetery) to a real human impact story in to him than the physical background objects.
a natural environment (e.g., Winter Landscape). Monet said: For me, a landscape does not exist
Of course, the natural environment changes in its own right, since its appearance changes
continuously, whereas the imaginary landscape at every moment; but the surrounding atmo-
was static and distant. The Winter Landscape in- sphere brings it to life, the air and the light,
volves process and infers the weather before and which vary continually for me, it is only the sur-
after the time of the image. This is a crucial rounding atmosphere that gives subjects their
difference between landscape, which implies true value (33, p. 221).
permanence or changes over seasons or years, Later Monet commented To me the motif
and environment, which suggests changes from itself is an insignicant factor; what I want to re-
second to second. Time becomes an impor- produce is what lies between the motif and me.
tant ingredient in paintings of the environment. House (34) also believes that color was central

to Monets vision of London. Monet told an in- or point of view, nor grasp how pressing is the
terviewer in 1901: The fog in London assumes transition of deep space on to the at plane of
all sorts of colours; there are black, brown, yel- the canvas.
low, green and purple fogs, and the interest in
painting is to get the objects as seen through The topographical pictorial naturalism
all these fogs (34, p. 32). It is clear there- achieved by a photograph cannot contend with
fore that Monet wanted to paint the environ- the environmental tension and sense of place
ment, the fog: orientated toward the sun to op- achieved by Cezanne. Even a series of pho-
timize these effects. Baker & Thornes (35) have tographs or a video struggles to capture the
shown, using solar geometry, that Monet very lifetime of feelings and sensations that Cezanne
accurately depicted the position of the sun in and Monet put into their canvasses. Neverthe-
the sky as it set over the Houses of Parliament less, photography has a very important role to
in the London Series. This conrms the veracity play within performative environmental art as
of his representations of the London climate described below.
(36, 37).
Andrews (24, p. 192) summarizes what is
involved: 3. NONREPRESENTATIONAL/
PERFORMATIVE
It often involved a process of sustained di-
ENVIRONMENTAL ART
rect contact with the chosen site, famously, for The origins of environmental art, which grew
example, in the case of Cezannes Mont out of the more representational environmen-
Sainte-Victoire landscape, or Monets series tal art of the nineteenth and early twentieth
paintings of the 1890s; and it meant bit by century, can be traced back to the growth
bit, in the face of the site, sloughing off the of open-air painting, with the artist getting
conventional picturing habits. It meant satu- out of the studio and into the environment.
rating oneself in the site so that it ceases to be However, their works were still often nished
just a visual eld, ceases perhaps to be a land- off in the studio and then hung in galleries
scape, but becomes a complex of sensations, of and on patrons walls. Although the artists
light, color, smell, sounds, tactile experience. might have been actively passive, they did not
It becomes an environment. seek to change the environment they were de-
picting in any way. Obviously, other types of
Can a photograph of a landscape capture landscape artists, such as landscape gardeners
the environment in the same way as a canvas? and landscape architects, have always been in
Machotka (38) set out to photograph Mont the business of altering the natural and built
Sainte-Victoire at the same time of day and sea- environment.
son as Cezannes series of 10 images that he During the rst half of the twentieth cen-
painted between the construction of his studio tury, after Cezanne, modern art retreated to the
at Les Lauves in 1902 and his death in 1906. studio and the art gallery. Landscape art had
Machotka (38, p. 115) concludes that the in- had an amazing run of popularity for almost
stantaneous photographs cannot compete: a century from Turner and Constable through
to Van Gogh, Gauguin, Monet, and Cezanne.
What photographs seem particularly inade- Langdon (39, p. 720) summarizes:
quate to document is this complex experience.
They do convey rather precise information Although in the twentieth century the major
within their frame and moment in time, but artistic movements were no longer dominated
until one has seen the motif itself, extended in by landscape, it remained an important sub-
depth and breadth, one will not feel its attrac- ject or element as painters responded to the
tion, nor sense the effect of change of season successive fears of the centuryworld wars,
398 Thornes
increasing industrialisation and materialism, there had been a reality there that had not had
the threat of global destruction and of ir- any expression in art. The experience on the
reparable damage to the ecologywith land- road was something mapped out but not so-
scapes that express a longing for a spirituality cially recognised. I thought to myself, it ought
and timelessness found in nature. to be clear thats the end of art. Most paintings
look pretty pictorial after that. There is no way
Performative environmental art emerged you can frame it, you just have to experience
in the 1960s (40), using such terms as land it.
art, process art, ecological art, eco-art, earth
art, earthworks, and total art, as we have al- This story sets the scene for the expedi-
ready mentioned. Land art is just an abbre- tions that the founders of land art, Michael
viation for landscape art and derives from Heizer, Walter De Maria, Richard Serra,
the title of a television documentary lm Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Nancy Holt, and
Land Art broadcast on German television on Robert Smithson, made into the deserts of the
April 15, 1969 (41). Lucie-Smith (42) suggests, American West. Tiberghien (40, p. 40) states:
however, that the origins of nonrepresenta- not so much to enjoy the beauty of the coun-
tional/performative environmental art go far tryside but rather to better test the limits of art.
back into history and could include works like The road is an expression or a marking or an
Stonehenge, the Pyramids, Hadrians villa at etching of society onto the landonto the en-
Tivoli, and the landscape gardens of Capabil- vironment itself. This mark may be permanent
ity Brown. In relation to the pedigree of per- as expressed in earthworks such as Smithsons
formative environmental art, it is also worth Spiral Jetty (1970) or ephemeralblown away
taking some account of the medieval view of by the wind but captured in a photograph such
God as the rst artist/designer on account of as Sky Line by Hans Haacke (1967).
his creation of the heavens and the earth, with Kastner & Wallis (44, p. 12) attempt to out-
particular reference to the Garden of Eden. line the range of land and environmental art
The origins of performative environmen- in their book of the same title, although they
tal art/land art in the 1960s are traced by recognize the slippery nature of this task:
Tiberghien (40) as a release from the theoretical
arguments concerning abstract expressionism, The range of Land and Environmental Art en-
minimalism, and theatricality. The minimalist compasses a wide variety of postwar artmak-
artist Smith (43), in a well known passage pub- ing. It includes site-specic sculptural projects
lished in Artforum in December 1966, described that utilize the materials of the environment
a drive he had made on a New Jersey highway: to create new forms or to adjust our impres-
sions of the panorama; programmes that im-
It was a dark night and there were no lights, port new, unnatural objects into the natural
or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or any- setting with similar goals; time-sensitive in-
thing at all except the dark pavement mov- dividual activities in the landscape; collabora-
ing through the landscape of the ats, rimmed tive, socially aware interventions.
by hills in the distance, but punctuated by
stacks, towers, fumes and colored lights. This It is no coincidence that modern nonrep-
drive was a revealing experience. The road and resentational/performative environmental art
much of the landscape was articial, and yet it was spawned in the 1960s when environmental-
couldnt be called a work of art. On the other ism was also born. Rachel Carsons (45) Silent
hand, it did something for me that art had Spring was the rst book to challenge the use
never done. At rst, I didnt know what it was, of chemicals such as DDT in the environ-
but its effect was to liberate me from many of ment, which ultimately led to the banning of
the views I had had about art. It seemed that DDT in the United States in 1972. Pepper

(46, p. 220) suggests that in the sixties there As Kastner and Wallis [(44)] relate, one of
was the development of an ecocentric cate- the initial aims of the Land Art movement
chism: antimaterialism; love and respect for the was to liberate landscape art from galleries
land; the land as one organism; the extension and museums, and from conned and con-
of natural rights from humans to the rest of trolled settings in general, and so to take artis-
nature; the need for an ecological conscience tic practice outdoorsinto natural or rela-
rather than mere agronomic management; the tively untouched spaces in one sense, but also
plea to return to an outdoor holistic science of into marginal or neglected areas such as free-
natural history. ways, industrial riversides and despoiled and
In October 1968, the rst major land/ polluted sites. This movement outdoors sig-
environmental art exhibition entitled Earth- naled both a conscious rejection of the com-
works was organized by Smithson. Fourteen mercialism of the mainstream art world and a
artists displayed large outdoor exhibits that dawning awareness of environmental stresses
were deliberately uncollectible or represented and vulnerabilities. And these beliefs and val-
by photographs. This was in direct opposi- ues further chimed with the emerging radical
tion to the recent commodication of the art
world views of sixties counter-culture.

market. The title Earthworks was chosen af-
ter a science-ction novel by Brian Aldiss (47) Although some of the early works of envi-
about the future in America, where even the ronmental art were minimalist and ephemeral,
soil had become a precious commodity. The for example, De Marias Desert Cross (Destroyed )
exhibition was revolutionary for its time and white chalk lines on the El Mirage Dry Lake
dislocated the concept of what is a work of art oor in California, generally the size of the
(44, p. 24): sculptural earthwork grew bigger. The most
famous early monumental work is Spiral Jetty
conceived and built by Smithson in 1970. It in-
This dislocation was only amplied by the
volved the movement of 6783 tonnes of rock,
bizarre nature of many of the projects shown: a
earth, and salt crystals using two dump trunks,
room full with earth and mile-long drawings in
a tractor, and a large front loader. It is esti-
the desert by Walter De Maria; rings cut into
mated that it took 625 man hours and 292 truck
a wheat eld by Denis Oppenheim; a line of
hours to build a spiral out into the Great Salt
wood blocks placed in a forest by Carl Andre;
Lake in Utah. The created spiral runs off the
and various trenches gouged through forests
land as a 500 m counterclockwise coil. Today,
and mud ats by Michael Heizer. Oldenburg
Spiral Jetty is mostly underwater, but periodi-
showed what was perhaps the most unusual
cally, it emerges as the lake level changes nat-
work: a hole in Central Park that he had hired
urally. Smithson bought a 20-year lease on the
professional gravediggers to dig and then ll
land without initially knowing what shape he
in. (The work was represented in the exhibi-
was going to construct. Smithson (quoted in 44,
tion by photographs and a plastic bag full of
pp. 215216) reports a phenomenological hal-
dirt).
lucinatory experience:
The relationship between sculpture and en- As I looked at the site, it reverberated out
vironmental art became almost indistinguish- to the horizons only to suggest an immobile
able, and the modeling of the land became a cyclone while ickering light made the en-
vital ingredient whether it was brought into a tire landscape appear to quake. A dormant
gallery or displayed in the landscape or just pho- earthquake spread into the uttering stillness,
tographed. into a spinning sensation without movement.
Wylie (8, p. 141) summarizes the early aims This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in
of land/environmental art: an immense roundness. From that gyrating
400 Thornes
space emerged the possibility of the Spiral land indoors, to the nonsite, which is an ab-
Jetty . . . The shore of the lake became the edge stract container.
of the sun, a boiling curve, an explosion ris-
ing into a ery prominence. Matter collapsing In 1968, Smithson visited the slate quarries
into the lake mirrored in the shape of a spiral. at Bangor-Pen Angyl, Pennsylvania, and col-
lected pieces of slate, which he then exhibited
This powerful description of the evolution in an art gallery and entitled the work as Non-
of Spiral Jetty reminds us that the work is a po- Site. This title immediately gets the spectator
tent combination of the natural physical envi- to think about the site from where the slate was
ronment and the imagination of the artist and collected, creating a back and forth rhythm
ultimately the spectator. The environment con- that goes between indoors and outdoors.
trols the emersion and the emergence of the Even before Spiral Jetty became a reality, the
piece, and it is forever changing in form and sculptor Heizer created in 1969 a 240,000-ton
color. Smithson (48) reinforces this symbiotic displacement in rhyolite and sandstone in the
relationship: Nevada desert entitled Double Negative. It con-
sists of two deep cuts 50 feet into the desert oor
The earths surface and the gments of the so that the spectator is confronted with a sculp-
mind have a way of disintegrating into dis- tured articial subterranean landscape with a
crete regions of art. Various agents, both c- vista that is almost the opposite of traditional
tional and real, somehow trade places with landscape art. Heizer also created in 1969 Dis-
each otherone cannot avoid muddy thinking placed/Replaced Mass at Silver Springs, Nevada.
when it comes to earth projects . . . Ones mind Three large oblong holes were dug in the clay
and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, oor of the Nevada desert, which were then
mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain lined with concrete. Three enormous granite
waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas de- blocks were dynamited from 3000 m up in the
compose into stones of unknowing. Sierra mountains and placed in the holes to rep-
resent the granite that had previously occupied
Smithson was concerned with the concept the site millions of years ago. This focus on dig-
of entropy and the constant erosion of the en- ging down into the earth, and into the past, is
vironment by natural processes. Smithson (49, the antithesis of landscape art, which tends to
p. 160) also developed the concepts of sites focus on representing the current surface of the
and non-sites, which oscillate nicely as a phys- earth.
ical equivalent of the cultural concepts of in- These large monumental works of environ-
sider and outsider discussed above: mental art provoked strong criticism from tra-
ditional art critics and other more minimal-
I was sort of interested in the dialogue between ist environmental artists. Gussow [quoted in
the indoor and the outdoor and . . . I developed (24)] in his book A Sense of Place: Artists and the
a method or a dialectic that involved what I American Land attacked the earthworks artists
call site and nonsite. The site, in a sense, is the who cut and gouge the land like Army engi-
physical, raw realitythe earth or the ground neers. Mother Earth was being violated, and
that we are really not aware of when we are in the environmentalists were quick to point out
an interior room or studio or something like that the environment was becoming increas-
thatand so I decided that I would set lim- ingly fragile and needed protecting, not vio-
its in terms of this dialogue (its a back and lating. Smithson (50) fought back, comparing
forth rhythm that goes between indoors and his work with that of Frederick Law Olmsted,
outdoors), and as a result I went and instead Americas rst earthwork artist who designed
of putting something on the landscape I de- Central Park in New York in 1863. Andrews
cided it would be interesting to transfer the (24, p. 213) puts this debate into context:

The clash between Gussow and Smithson The site was deliberately installed in an area
epitomizes the conicts at the heart of land- that has a high instance of thunderstorms, al-
scape art in the last third of this century. though the average is only three storms per
Gussows sense of the delicacy and sacrosanc- month. Such a huge array of lightning conduc-
tity of the natural world makes him recoil from tors is still miniscule in relation to the power
the Earth Artists tearing at the fabric of na- of the natural environment. Nevertheless, the
ture. Nature, especially in the American ex- work is a startling example of culture, through
perience, used to be that robust other, there art, attempting to communicate with the en-
to be tamed and cultivated. It was the fruit- vironment. Viewing of the remote site of the
ful provider, it was Mother Earth on whose Lightning Field is controlled by the artist and
strength and fertility the human community the sponsoring organization Dia. Visitors are
depended. Now it is a fragile, anorexic depen- dropped off at the site and allowed to stay in a
dant, to be protected and managed. small cabin for 24 hours. The isolation of such
works is part of their mystique. Alloway states
Time has shown that such monumental per- (52, p. 49):
manent earthworks were not repeated, and
Spiral Jetty and Displaced/Replaced Mass have Solitude characterises the Spiral Jetty and the
become monuments in themselves, represent- Double Negative and Las Vegas Piece. Although
ing a brief but spectacular show. Just as ex- the works are big, they are in no sense social.
traordinary in scale, but temporary in nature, They are best experienced singly by specta-
were the installations by Christo and Jeanne- tors; only in that way can there be a proper ac-
Claude, such as Valley Curtain (19701972), knowledgment of the sense of being alone that
Running Fence (19721976), and Surrounded these works induce. The remoteness of the
Islands (19801983), in which vast expanses sites as well as the scale of the landscape con-
of fabric were used to cloak the landscape. tribute to this effect. Earthworks communi-
Surrounded Islands used 60 ha of pink cate a cisatlantic sense of the resonantly empty.
polypropylene fabric, encircling and extending
out 200 feet from 11 man-made islands in Bis- At the same time that Smithson, Heizer, and
cayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida. De Maria were nding remote rural locations
De Marias Las Vegas Piece (1969) comprised for their huge earthworks, the English environ-
four cuts in the oor of Tula Desert near Las mental artist Richard Long was pioneering a
Vegas with the blade of a bulldozer. Two of the different type of solitude through the simplic-
cuts were a mile long and the other two were ity of walking. Long has always distanced him-
half a mile long. The lines of the cuts are now self from the pioneering American earth artists
almost gone with knee-high scrub hiding the di- (53, p. 44):
rection. Lightning Field (1977), his best known
work, is also huge and survives intact today, My interest was in a more thoughtful view of
located in New Mexico (51): art and nature, making art both visible and
invisible, using ideas, walking, stones, tracks,
The work consists of 400 highly polished, water, time, etc, in a exible way . . . It was the
precision-engineered, stainless steel poles, set antithesis of so-called American Land Art,
in concrete foundations 3 feet deep with where an artist needed money to be an artist,
pointed tips arranged in a grid measuring to buy real estate to claim possession of the
one mile by one kilometer. The poles are set land, and to wield machinery. True capitalist
67 meters apart and are between 458 and 815 art.
centimeters high; installed so that the tips
form a level plane that would evenly support Long met Smithson in 1969 when they both
an imaginary sheet of glass. exhibited in Earth Art at the Andrew Dickson
402 Thornes
White Museum at Cornell University. They need for a simple and desirable harmony be-
were friends despite their obvious differences tween nature and culture, between the environ-
in methods. Long is best known for his walks ment and society.
and the temporary and minimalist impressions Another notable English artist who
that these walks leave on the landscape brought ts this mold in working with nature is
into galleries through photographs, natural ma- Andy Goldsworthy (Figure 3). Tufnell (56,
terials like driftwood and river mud, footprints, p. 78) lists Goldsworthy with a number of
handprints, or text (54, p. 90): other European environmental artists:
Like art itself, walking is like a focus. It gets rid Since the 1970s, an approach to making art
of a lot of things and you can actually concen- in the landscape that we might characterize
trate. So getting myself into these solitary days as working with nature has developed.
of repetitive walking or in empty landscapes is European artists such as Goldsworthy,

just a certain way of emptying out or simpli- Drury, Prigann, Nils-Udo, Sjoerd Buisman,
fying my life, just for a few days or weeks, into David Nash and Herman de Vries (and
a fairly simple but concentrated activity . . . so
American and Canadian artists including

my art is a simplication. Patrick Dougherty, Rob Staab and Michael
Singer) work with their hands, with natural
Longs most famous work A Line Made by Walk- materials, and employ traditional skills
ing (1967) marks one of the most important pi- including basket-weaving, wood-working,
oneering beginnings of performative environ- dry-stone walling and plant husbandry. Post-
mental art (Figure 2). He did not use a bull- modern in that it offers an implicit critique
dozer or a spade or any implementhe simply of modern sculptural practices and materials,
walked up and down along a line across a eld such work is as much a part of the expanded
until a visible footpath emerged. He then took a eld of postwar sculpture as earthworks or
black and white photograph of the scene, which Conceptualism.
is all that remains of the work. This opened up
the realization that the artist can create art in
the environment without any special skills or Goldsworthy has been criticized for pre-
tools or canvas (55, p. 44): senting a kind of populist decorativeness and
a dewy-eyed sentimentalisation of nature but
The fact that it used the real earth, without
Tufnell (56) points out that Goldsworthy is just
adding or subtracting other materials, hardly
as much concerned with decay and disintegra-
disturbing the ground that was walked on,
tion as was Smithson. Many of his natural sculp-
opened up an enormous new range of con-
tures only last for a few days or a few seconds,
tent. In principal a walk could traverse differ-
and this destruction is concerned with the con-
ent landscapes, at different times of day and
cept of entropy, which the environment always
night, in different conditions of weather and
seeks to maximize (56, p. 81).
through different states of mind on the part
of the walkerand thereby making all these Nature is intensely beautiful and at the same
aspects of the real world part of the sculpture. time very unnerving, and at times deeply
frightening. You feel it as soon as you go out to
Long has had a long and inuential career, in- the land, where everywhere you go things are
cluding natural sculptures of rock circles and dead, decaying, fallen down, growing, alive.
lines of rocks, which are also ephemeral and Theres this incredible vigour and energy and
minimalist. His gallery pieces are responses to life. And its sometimes very difcult to deal
space and locality and put together with mini- with. I would hope that I dont have a kind of
mum impact. His works draw attention to the romantic view of nature. I do feel the beauty of

it, for sure. But its a beauty thats underwritten New York adjacent to skyscrapers close to the
by extreme feelings. World Trade Center and Wall Street, where
the global food prices were determined. Denes
Goldsworthys delicate battles with the environ- wrote [quoted in (41, p. 40)] that the Wheat-
ment and his phenomenological approach both eld: . . . represented food, energy, commerce,
inspire and mediate his art (57, p. 161): world trade, economics . . . (and) referred to
mismanagement and world hunger. It was an in-
Im not an artist born full of things I want to trusion into the citadel, a confrontation of High
express. Im empty, hungry, wanting to know Civilisation. Then again it was also Shangri-la,
more. Thats my true self; and my art is a way of a small paradise, ones childhood, a hot summer
learning, in which instincts guide best. It is also afternoon in the country, peace.
very physicalI need the shock of touch, the Third, the period from the early 1990s up to
resistance of place, materials and weather, the the present day has seen a more direct engage-
earth as my source. It is collaboration, a meet- ment with environmental issues and a reexam-
ing point between my own and earths nature. ination of the relationships between art, soci-
ety, and the environment. Ecological art is an
The denition of nonrepresentational/ important part of recent performative environ-

performative environmental art is a difcult mental art. Tufnell (56, p. 94) identies three
task as there is no common agreement as creative approaches to this third phase: rstly
to its scope and history. Broadly, the divid- as a commentary upon environmental issues
ing line between representational landscape/ and creative solutions to the problems per-
environmental art and nonrepresentational/ ceived there; secondly to offer symbolic warn-
performative environmental art began to de- ings and poetic meditations on the present state
velop in the 1960s when artists adopted a more of affairs and thirdly that of simply bearing
physical, sensual, performative, and sculptural witness.
approach to landscape away from the gallery. Malpass (58, p. 33) summarizes the mature
Pop art and minimalism, which immediately state of representational environmental art to-
preceded performative environmental art, were day and the favored structures, approaches, and
both still rooted in gallery space and the art motifs of individual artists:
market.
To summarize, Tufnell (56) identies three Richard Longs stone circles and rows; David
distinct phases in the development of Environ- Nashs gurative wooded structures; Andy
mental (Land) Art. First, he identies the period Goldsworthys serpents, arches, snowballs,
19671977 from Longs A Line Made by Walking cairns and holes; and Chris Drurys shel-
to De Marias The Lightning Field as a period ters, medicine wheels and baskets. In the
of extraordinary innovation . . . as well as the re- US they include: Robert Smithson with
assessment of long established ways of thinking his giant spiral earthworks; Michael Heizer
about landscape, nature and art, and the open- carvings in the Nevada desert; Dennis Oppen-
ing up of a whole new eld of activity for art heims conceptual borderlands and concen-
(56, p. 122). tric circles; Walter de Marias lightning elds;
Second, a period from the late 1970s to the Nancy Holts celestial observatories; the Ro-
end of the 1980s was represented by works den Crater and skyspaces of James Turrell;
such as Robert Morriss untitled earthwork and Alice Aycocks underground labyrinths
in 1979 for the King County Symposium on of nightmares and childhood memories; and
Land Reclamation as Sculpture, Agnes Deness Christo, with his vast wrapped structures.
1982 Wheateld: A Confrontation, and Beuyss
1982 7000 Oaks in Kassel, Germany. Deness There have been a number of recent en-
Wheateld was planted on a landll site in vironmental inuences that have spawned a
404 Thornes
variety of approaches including the Art in The political message of environmentalism

Nature movement in Italy, Germany, and has moved center stage in the twenty-rst cen-
Scandanavia, which has revived indigenous folk tury owing to the realities of climate change.
traditions, arts, and crafts. Drury works with Lippard (60, p. 14) states in the introduction to
traditional medicinal plants, baskets, cairns, Land Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook:
maps, and shelters. He recently constructed,
in 2005, a major earthwork Heart of Reeds in From the 1960s through most of the 1990s,
Lewes, Sussex, which compares the ow pat- the Left considered environmentalism to
terns in the human heart to processes in nature. be soft politics. While the bold actions
David Nashs project (19772008 and beyond) of Greenpeace and the extremes of eco-
Ash Dome is a form of growing art that has be- terrorism had to be acknowledged, for the
come more relevant with time as the 22 ash trees most part those who supposedly cared more
have grown with traditional husbandry into a for the earth and its creatures/creations than
sculptural meditative dome (59, p. 3): for peoples revolutions were perceived as
acting from a kind of political surburbia.
Todaysparked by indisputable proof of hu-

When I rst planted a ring of twenty-two ash
man agency in climate changethe environ-
trees for the Ash Dome in 1977, the Cold
ment is in the center foreground. It has be-
War was still a threat. There was serious eco-
come the radical edge.
nomic gloomvery high unemployment in
our countryand nuclear war was a real pos-
sibility. We were killing the planet, which we
4. CLIMATE CHANGE AND
still are because of greed.
ENVIRONMENTAL ART
The issue of climate change and enhanced
Today trees are recognized as vital in their global warming has focused considerable atten-
role to x carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. tion on the representation and nonrepresenta-
Green issues and their direct political connection of sky, atmosphere, weather, climate, and
tions can be controversial. In 2000, one of climate change in art (37). The role of environ-
Goldsworthys Midsummer Snowballs was posi- mental artists in communicating the fragility of
tioned close to the London headquarters of BP. our atmospheric environment is still being re-
Unbeknown to the artist, Greenpeace issued solved. There has been a recent surge of interest
a press release that suggested that the work in the visual culture of skies (26, 3537, 6168).
was specically a protest against BPs role in There are a number of papers that have directly
creating enhanced global warming. Goldswor- attempted to use representational landscape art
thy was angered by this and believes that his as a form of proxy data for climate change
work is narrowed and suffers through such di- (37, 6971).
rect association. Speaking before this incident T. Ingold in his, as yet unpublished, essay
Goldsworthy stated [quoted in (56, p. 93)]: Footprints Through the Weather World: Walking,
Breathing, Knowing reminds us that although
Its not the intention of my work, but it does our feet are on the ground much of the time,
prime people towards environmental issues. the rest of our body is in the atmosphere. Our
I dont know how it does that, or why, but footprints are our connection with the earth.
it does. Im happy for that to happen. But if Ingold suggests that tracks/lines come in two
that became the intention of the work then types: traces and threads. Traces are formed
the work would be weakened. If the message on surfaces; threads are strung through the air
my work was putting out was that people felt (p. 19). A tracker not only is aware that a crea-
they needed to take up the cause, the work ture or person has left a trace on the ground but
would wither. also that they must have breathed the air and left

a thread (of scent and carbon dioxide). Ingold take them for granted. The Double Sunset in
(p. 17) points out that natural tracks are nearly Utrecht in 1999 staged a second setting sun
always winding and hardly ever straight. This in an urban landscape. The Weather Project was
highlights the performative nature of Line Made staged by Eliasson at Tate Modern in 2003/04.
by Walking by Long. Ingold (p. 30) also discusses The weather is nature in the city and is one
the importance of the wind and states that of the central aspects in creating its look and
our bodies are enwinded. Similarly Macauley life (74). The exhibition catalog also contained
states (72, p. 307): With our heads immersed chapters by leading social scientists (7577) that
in the thickness of the atmosphere or our lungs examined how the weather and climate are me-
and limbs engaged with the surrounding winds diated by the city. The exhibition was not only a
we breathe, think and dream in the regions of success in creating the nostalgic, outsiders view
the air. of London smog, exactly 100 years after Monet
Of all the aspects of the environment that exhibited his London Series in Paris in 1904, but
have been neglected in the past, the sky is also because it encouraged unprecedented au-
the prime example. One of the few perfo- dience participation and performance in the ex-
mative environmental artists to have focused hibition hall itself. Eliassons installation in the
on the sky is James Turrell. His Skyspaces are vast turbine hall consisted of a huge articial
works created by an opening in the ceiling of sun and levels of articial fog, which came and
a chamber so that the sky appears as a solid went during the day. The sun was created with
object (Figure 4). His major work, which he articial lights in the shape of a semicircle and
has been working on for over 30 years, is the was reected into a full circle by a huge mir-
Roden Crateran extinct volcano in Arizona ror covering the ceiling. By lying on the oor,
(73, p. 120): visitors could see their reection through the
mist and fog, and the bright articial sunlight
Along with manipulating light, Roden Crater cast an eerie glow on the proceedings. This
will manipulate space. One of the most impor- work is mixture of the representational envi-
tant instances of its power to alter the quality ronmental art of Constable and Monet and of
of spatial perception will occur in the bowl of the performative environmental art of Long or
the crater. When we come up into the skys- Goldsworthy.
pace chamber at the end of the Tunnel, the The British gurative artist Antony
sky will seem to be stretched across its open- Gormley is best known for his sculptures of
ing. It will look like a surface, but it will have his own body, but he uses the environment in a
a ponderance, a kind of three-dimensionality, variety of settings for his gures such as Another
as if the sky had come right down to the edge Place in 2005 on the beach at Crosby, Liverpool,
of the space. As we make our way up out of and for his minimalist concrete rooms like
the chamber by means of a staircase, the up- A Room for the Great Australian Desert 1989.
per margin of the crater will suddenly appear. Gormley met De Maria early in his career
When this happens, our sense of a blue sur- and visited Lightning Field, which had a great
face immediately above our heads will change impression on him (56, p. 133): . . . many of
radically. The sky will expand outward and Gormleys landscape pieces are characterised by
upward, changing from a small ceiling into a open, permeable structures. Like the Lightning
huge vault of space seeming to rest on the rim Field they also punctuate the landscape and the
of the crater. sky with their repetitive verticality, a process
that Gormley describes as a form of acupunc-
Olafur Eliasson questions the relationships ture. This suggests the healing experience
between society and nature with open instal- that society can serve on the sky and reverse
lations that awaken the audience to see them- the perils of climate change! Gormleys cloud
selves seeing everyday parts of nature and not chamber Blind Light installation can be seen as a
406 Thornes
representation of a real cloud as well as a per- Interestingly their motivation is phenomeno-

formative structure that tests the viewers logical rather than scientic. The catalog (67)
powers of perception, and their fears of the closes with a poem that implies that the ighty
environment when they lose their orientation. cloud will survive for a few more million years
Gormley joined the Cape Farewell expedition yet!
with 40 artists, scientists, educators and lm
crew on the 2004 voyage to the Arctic. He
constructed among other ice sculptures a snow 5. CONCLUSIONS
cave [quoted in (68, p. 38)]: As we have seen, the performative turn be-
gan much earlier in environmental art than in
Being in the snow cave, for me, is so pow-
the rest of the social sciences. Representative
erful because of the relationship between the
environmental art began at the beginning of
made human world and the inherited Earth

the nineteenth century when artists like Con-
the Earth out there in that blue light that goes
stable and Turner painted the real environ-
on forever. For me it has been a very precious
ment rather than an imagined landscape. What
may be called nonrepresentation or performa-
reinforcement of something I feel deeply of

how we are a gnat on a nose of a totally indif-
tive environmental art began in the late 1960s
ferent universe.
with works like Longs A Line Made By Walking
in 1967. Today, environmental artists are still
actively engaged in performative works. Envi-
Gruffudd (78) suggests that after the Sec- ronmental artists, such as Long, Goldsworthy,
ond World War, the English sky lost its in- and Turrell are as popular as ever with contem-
nocence, and that aircraft and contrails now porary and retrospective exhibitions (Richard
dominate the symbolism of skies. This is inad- Long: Walking and Marking (81); Andy Goldswor-
vertent performative environmental art that can thy At Yorkshire Sculpture Park (82); and James
have a signicant negative impact on our local Turrell: A Life in Light (83). That is not to
and global climate despite its ephemeral nature say that environmental artists have totally ne-
(79). glected representation [e.g., Peter Doig (84)
A major art exhibition Wolkenbilder (the dis- and Ned Kahn (85)], and there are many works
covery of skies) in Hamburg and Berlin in 2004 that cross the boundaries between representa-
looked at the discovery of skies and clouds in tional and nonrepresentational environmental
landscape art at the beginning of the nineteenth art, e.g., works of Eliasson (The Weather Project)
century (80). Following on from this exhibi- and Gormley (Blind Light) as discussed above.
tion was Wolkenbilder (the invention of skies), Yann Arthus-Bertrands amazing photographs
in the Aagau Art Gallery in Munich, which of the planet in his Earth from Above series
concentrated on twentieth-century cloud pic- are undoubtably representational environmen-
tures. The authors of the exhibition catalog (67) tal art (86).
are fully aware of the new found popularity of Finally, it must be stated that environmen-
skies: tal artists have a host of differing approaches,
methods, and beliefs. Generally, however, they
Anybody who is interested in clouds nowa- are actively involved in a mix of raising aware-
days, will soon come to realize that the subject ness about the fragility of the environment,
is very topical and en vogue. The new leaning using green methods and natural materials to
towards anything vague, unclear and unbind- create their works, and investigating how the
ing seems to have popularised the subject. So environment works.
it is noteworthy that just as around 1800 and The ongoing Cape Farewell project created
1900, the fascination with clouds is now again by the artist David Buckland has the last word
particularly acute. (87): We intend to communicate through

artworks our understanding of the changing lives can have meaning in what is a global
climate on a human scale, so that our individual problem.
SUMMARY POINTS
1. To appreciate the beauty and fragility of our environment it is instructive to try to un-
derstand how artists relate to the environment in their works.
2. There is a large literature on environmental aesthetics but much less on environmental
art.
3. Representational environmental art is typied by Constables Cloud Studies or Monets
London Series.
4. Nonrepresentational/performative environmental art is typied by Longs A Line Made

by walking or Turrells Skyspaces.
5. Landscape art as a genre has been replaced by environmental art.
6. Can environmental art help to communicate climate change?
FUTURE ISSUES
1. The roles of atmosphere, weather, climate, and climate change within environmental art
need to be examined in more detail.
2. The relationship between representational landscape art and representational environ-
mental art needs to be further claried.
3. How useful is nonrepresentational theory and the performative turn in understanding
modern environmental art?
4. What are the links between environmental science, environmental management, and
environmental art?
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The author is not aware of any biases that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this
review.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful for useful comments from Paul Spencer-Longhurst the Senior Curator of the Barber
Institute of Fine Arts and Senior Lecturer in the History of Art.
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81. Natl. Galleries Scotl. 2007. Richard Long: Walking and Marking, Exhib. Cat.
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83. Louise T Blouin Inst. 2006. James Turrell: A Life in Light, Exhib. Cat.
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RELATED RESOURCES
Online images of selected environmental artists:
John Constable. http://images.google.co.uk/images?um=1&hl=en&q=John+Constable&
btnG=Search+Images
Paul Cezanne. http://images.google.co.uk/images?um=1&hl=en&q=Cezanne&btnG=
Search+Images
Andy Goldsworthy. http://images.google.co.uk/images?um=1&hl=en&q=Andy+
Goldsworthy&btnG=Search+Images
Anthony Gormley. http://www.antonygormley.com/ and http://images.google.co.uk/images?
um=1&hl=en&q=Anthony+Gormley&btnG=Search+Images
Richard Long. http://www.richardlong.org/ and http://images.google.co.uk/images?um=

1&hl=en&q=Richard+Long&btnG=Search+Images
Claude Monet. http://images.google.co.uk/images?um=1&hl=en&q=Monet&btnG=
Search+Images
James Turrell. http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&q=James+Turrell&um=1&ie=
UTF

Figure 1
John Constable: Cloud Study, 1822, Tate Britain, (NO6065). Inscribed: 27 augt 11, o clock Noon/looking
Eastward/large Silvery (clouds?) wind Gentle at S West.
www.annualreviews.org A Rough Guide to Environmental Art C-1

C-2
2
Thornes
Figure 2
Richard Long: A Line Made By Walking, 1967, Tate Britain, (Po7149).
Figure 3
Andy Goldsworthy: Hanging Trees. Oxley Bank, Yorkshire Sculpture Park. 2006 (Detail). Photo; Jonty
Wilde.
www.annualreviews.org A Rough Guide to Environmental Art C-3

Figure 4
James Turrell: Deer Shelter, an Art Fund Commission, A Skyspace, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2006,
concrete, stone, brick. Photo; Jonty Wilde.
C-4 Thornes
AR357-FM ARI 22 September 2008 22:50
Annual Review of
Environment
and Resources
Contents Volume 33, 2008

Preface p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p pv
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I. Earths Life Support Systems
Climate Modeling
Leo J. Donner and William G. Large p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 1
Global Carbon Emissions in the Coming Decades: The Case of China
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Restoration Ecology: Interventionist Approaches for Restoring and
Maintaining Ecosystem Function in the Face of Rapid
Environmental Change
Richard J. Hobbs and Viki A. Cramer p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p39
II. Human Use of Environment and Resources

Advanced Passenger Transport Technologies
Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p63
Droughts
Giorgos Kallis p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p85
Sanitation for Unserved Populations: Technologies, Implementation
Challenges, and Opportunities
Kara L. Nelson and Ashley Murray p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 119
Forage Fish: From Ecosystems to Markets
Jacqueline Alder, Brooke Campbell, Vasiliki Karpouzi, Kristin Kaschner,
and Daniel Pauly p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 153
Urban Environments: Issues on the Peri-Urban Fringe
David Simon p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 167
Certication Schemes and the Impacts on Forests and Forestry
Graeme Auld, Lars H. Gulbrandsen, and Constance L. McDermott p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 187
vii
AR357-FM ARI 22 September 2008 22:50
III. Management, Guidance, and Governance of Resources and Environment

Decentralization of Natural Resource Governance Regimes
Anne M. Larson and Fernanda Soto p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 213
Enabling Sustainable Production-Consumption Systems
Louis Lebel and Sylvia Lorek p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 241
Global Environmental Governance: Taking Stock, Moving Forward
Frank Biermann and Philipp Pattberg p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 277
Land-Change Science and Political Ecology: Similarities, Differences,
and Implications for Sustainability Science

B.L. Turner II and Paul Robbins p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 295
Environmental Cost-Benet Analysis
Giles Atkinson and Susana Mourato p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 317

A New Look at Global Forest Histories of Land Clearing
Michael Williams p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 345
Terrestrial Vegetation in the Coupled Human-Earth System:
Contributions of Remote Sensing
Ruth DeFries p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 369
A Rough Guide to Environmental Art
John E. Thornes p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 391
The New Corporate Social Responsibility
Graeme Auld, Steven Bernstein, and Benjamin Cashore p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 413
IV. Integrative Themes

Environmental Issues in Russia
Laura A. Henry and Vladimir Douhovnikoff p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 437
The Environmental Reach of Asia
James N. Galloway, Frank J. Dentener, Elina Marmer, Zucong Cai,
Yash P. Abrol, V.K. Dadhwal, and A. Vel Murugan p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 461
Indexes
Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 2433 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 483

Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 2433 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 487
Errata
An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Environment and Resources articles may
be found at http://environ.annualreviews.org
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Top cited articles

Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour. 2008. 33:391411 Key Words

To learn to appreciate each moment in time,

and art in the form of photographs, paintings,

number of books including Aesthetics and the

meaning and substanceupon which such

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inclusion of our heightened personal expe- part of the weather?

compatible with this heightened sense of our

1.2. The End of Traditional 2. REPRESENTATIONAL

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Jewish Cemetery. First he (30, p. 350) discusses

pression, a freedom which was based on a more

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world views of sixties counter-culture.

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of repetitive walking or in empty landscapes is European artists such as Goldsworthy,

American and Canadian artists including

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The denition of nonrepresentational/ important part of recent performative environ-

variety of approaches including the Art in The political message of environmentalism

Todaysparked by indisputable proof of hu-

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representation of a real cloud as well as a per- Interestingly their motivation is phenomeno-

made human world and the inherited Earth

reinforcement of something I feel deeply of

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4. Nonrepresentational/performative environmental art is typied by Longs A Line Made

6. Can environmental art help to communicate climate change?

www.annualreviews.org A Rough Guide to Environmental Art 409

46. Pepper D. 1996. Modern Environmentalism. London: Routledge

ester Univ. Press

Richard Long. http://www.richardlong.org/ and http://images.google.co.uk/images?um=

www.annualreviews.org A Rough Guide to Environmental Art 411

www.annualreviews.org A Rough Guide to Environmental Art C-1

www.annualreviews.org A Rough Guide to Environmental Art C-3

Contents Volume 33, 2008

Who Should Read This Series? p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p pvi

II. Human Use of Environment and Resources

III. Management, Guidance, and Governance of Resources and Environment

and Implications for Sustainability Science

Giles Atkinson and Susana Mourato p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 317

IV. Integrative Themes

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 2433 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 483

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