Environmental Sculpture - Sculpture As Environment

Sculpture As Environment

Britannica Online defines environmental sculpture in this vein:

"20th-century art form intended to involve or encompass the spectators rather than merely to face them; the form developed as part of a larger artistic current that sought to break down the historical dichotomy between life and art."

Julia M. Bush, writing in "A Decade of Sculpture: the New Media in the 1960s" (1974), emphasizes the nonfigurative aspect of such works: ""Environmental sculpture is never made to work at exactly human scale, but is sufficiently larger or smaller than scale to avoid confusion with the human image in the eyes of the viewer." (Busch, p. 27). Most sources, including author Laurie Wilson cite Ukrainian-born American sculptor Louise Nevelson as the pioneer of environmental sculpture in this sense. Busch (p. 27) also places the sculptures of Jane Frank, as well as some works by Tony Smith and David Smith, in this category. Some environmental sculpture so encompasses the observer that it verges on architecture. For example, the Wikipedia article on Saunders Schultz refers to his "pioneering work in architectural/environmental sculpture."

Britannica names George Segal, Duane Hanson, Edward Kienholz, Robert Smithson, Christo, and Michael Heizer as practitioners of the genre. The inclusion of Segal and Hanson clearly contradicts Busch's suggestion that environmental sculpture is never figural. Indeed, many figurative works of George Segal, for example, do qualify as environmental, in that - instead of being displayed on a pedestal as presentations to be gazed upon - they occupy and perturb the setting in which they are placed. A well known instance of this is the pair of Segal figures that sit on and stand next to one of the public benches in New York City's Sheridan Square; anyone can sit right down amongst them and be included in their mysterious, silent encounter.

A less known but more appropriate example is Athena Tacha's 2-acre (8,100 m2) park Connections in downtown Philadelphia (between 18th St. and 19th St. two blocks north of Vine St.), created as a landscape art environment after her winning a competition in 1980 (where Segal was actually one of the finalists). It was the first park designed entirely by an artist "sculpting the land" with planted terraces, rock clusters and paths (completed in 1992).