On the grand scale of humanity, our modern industrial world has only just begun. Our obsession with technology and advancement is only a few centuries old at most. But tens of thousands of years ago, we did not have the luxury, or the capacity, to worry about the environment and our impact on it. Ancient humans were hunter-gatherers and nomads who as they wandered the vast wilderness left behind marks of their existence on the surfaces of stone. Most of their simple yet evocative paintings were ashed away by time, but some persisted, preserved in caves as memorials to their unnamed creators. They represent the physicality of humans, of our place in the physical world. They used pigments made of natural materials, and the physical locations they painted on were used for shelter and protection from wild animals. They celebrated nature, lived in nature, and relied on nature to signify our creativity and conscience thought.
But as the centuries went on, humanity grew stronger. We adapted, we innovated, and we conquered nature despite it being an integral part of our self. Our art changed too. Placing humans within nature was less important than humanity itself. The tending of nature outpaced itself, as progress for the sake of progress became the dominant worldview. Nature was still revered, of course. Romanticism and the rise of conversationalist sentimentality continued the tradition of cherishing the natural world. But humanity was separated, distant. Materials were still taken from the earth itself, as all things are, but any sort of appreciation was directed towards the composition of art pieces. Not what specific elements were used to make them.
And now, in the modern day, as climate science improves and the gravity of what we have done to our poor earth is wholly evident, a call to return to the old ways of seeing art has emerged. Sculptors use the earth’s surface itself to tell a story, and the ways humanity has altered the environment have taken center stage. However, interestingly enough, there are also many examples where this mentality, this desire to inspire us and make us think of the planet, have very little to do with the planet at all. Abstract constructs made from cold concrete and portraits made out of grass seeds are novel and fascinating to look at, but they don’t offer anything that has not already been presented by hundreds of years of artful experimentation. As such, the question must be raised: what is art for environment’s sake? Is modern ecological art done so as a celebration of the unity between man and nature, or does it merely continue the romantic ideals of the industrial era? Hailing back to this era of art is not necessarily a bad thing, but if this is the case, why is there still a distinction? But if there is a proper recognition of humanity’s cultural connection to the environment, how best do we display it? Such questions are being explored in modern art and sculpture. But the beauty of art is not its ability to answer such questions, but to explore every avenue, and display every step in the process, in ways that can be both strange and incredibly fascinating.
Brown, Andrew. “At the Radical Edge of Life.” Art and Ecology, 2014, pp. 6-15.
