Environmental Art

The term environmental art is used in two different contexts: it can be used generally to refer to art dealing with ecological issues and/or the natural, such as the formal, the political, the historical, or the social context.

Depending upon how you look at its definition, earlier examples of environmental art stem from landscape painting and representation. When artists painted onsite they developed a deep connection with the surrounding environment and its weather and brought these close observations into their canvases. John Constable’s sky paintings “most closely represent the sky in nature.” Monet’s London Series also exemplifies the artist’s connection with the environment “For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life, the air and the light, which vary continually for me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere that gives subjects their true value."

It is possible to trace the growth of environmental art as a "movement", beginning in the late 1960s or the 1970s. In its early phases it was most associated with sculpture—especially Site-specific art, Land art and Arte povera—having arisen out of mounting criticism of traditional sculptural forms and practices which were increasingly seen as outmoded and potentially out of harmony with the natural environment.

In October 1968 Robert Smithson organized an exhibition at Dwan Gallery in New York titled Simply “Earthworks”. All of the works posed an explicit challenge to conventional notions of exhibition and sales, in that they were either too large or too unwieldy to be collected; most were represented only by photographs, further emphasizing their resistance to acquisition. For these artists escaping the confines of the gallery and modernist theory was achieved by leaving the cities and going out into the desert.

”They were not depiciting the landscape, but engaging it; their art was not simply of the landscape, but in it as well.” This shift in the late 60’s and 70’s represents an avant garde notion about sculpture, the landscape and our relationship with it. The work challenged the conventional means to create sculpture, but also defied the high art modes of dissemination and exhibition of the work, such as the Dawn Gallery show mentioned earlier. This shift opened up a new space and in doing so expanded the ways in which work was documented and conceptualized. While this earlier work was mostly done in the deserts of the American west, the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s saw works moving into the public landscape. Artists like Robert Morris began engaging county departments and public arts commissions to create works in public spaces such as an abandoned gravel pit. Herbert Bayer used a similar approach and was selected to create his Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks in 1982. The project served functions such as erosion control, a place to serve as a reservoir during high rain periods, and a 2.5 acre park during dry seasons.

The expanding term of environmental art also encompasses the scope of the urban landscape. Just as the earthworks in the deserts of the west grew out of notions of landscape painting, the growth of public art stimulated artists to engage the urban landscape as another environment and also as a platform to engage ideas and concepts about the environment to a larger audience. “Many environmental artists now desire not merely an audience for their work but a public, with whom they can correspond about the meaning and purpose of their art.”

Sustainable art might be an alternative term to environmental or green art, in recognition of the challenges that sustainability brings for contemporary art as a whole.