Environmental art
[4] Over the past ten years environmental art has become a focal point of exhibitions around the world as the social and cultural aspects of climate change come to the forefront.
The work challenged the conventional means to create sculpture, but also defied more elite modes of art dissemination and exhibition, such as the Dwan Gallery show mentioned earlier.
[14] In 1965, Alan Sonfist introduced a key environmentalist idea of bringing nature back into the urban environment with his first historical Time Landscape sculpture, proposed to New York City in 1965 and revealed to the public in 1978 in a mature, grown state.
The work resulted in a "slowly developing forest that represents the Manhattan landscape inhabited by Native Americans and encountered by Dutch settlers in the early 17th century.
Pioneering environmental artist, Mary Miss began creating art in the urban environment with her 1969 installation, Ropes/Shore, and continues to develop projects involving extended communities through City as a Living Laboratory.
[18] Agnes Denes created a work in downtown Manhattan Wheatfield - A Confrontation (1982) in which she planted a field of wheat on the two-acre site of a landfill covered with urban detritus and rubble.
[23][24] In general use, the term 'Eco-art' or 'Environmental art' refers loosely to a range of artistic practices and works "that explore and respond to issues related to the environment, climate change, and ecological sustainability.
"[26] In more technical and academic contexts, however, Ecological art, also known as ecoart, tends to refer more precisely to an artistic practice or discipline proposing paradigms sustainable with the life forms and resources of our planet.
"[30] There are numerous approaches to ecoart including but not limited to: representational artworks that address the environment through images and objects; remediation projects that restore polluted environments;[31] activist projects that engage others and activate change of behaviors and/or public policy;[32] time-based social sculptures that involve communities in monitoring their landscapes and taking a participatory role in sustainable practices; ecopoetic projects that initiate a re-envisioning and re-enchantment with the natural world, inspiring healing and co-existence with other species; direct-encounter artworks that involve natural phenomena such as water, weather, sunlight, or plants;[33] pedagogical artworks that share information about environmental injustice and ecological problems such as water and soil pollution and health hazards; relational aesthetics that involve sustainable, off-the-grid, permaculture existences.
"[34] The global community ArtTech NatureCulture, which convenes over 400 creative practitioners engaged in ecological art forms across disciplines, states: "In precarious times, how can we build new ways forward that challenge and transform the many inequalities of the status quo?
Our ways of addressing this are as diverse as our backgrounds, but we are united by a shared interest in using creative practices across disciplines (from arts, design, culture and hacking to science, technology and activism) to explore alternative futures that rethink, rebuild and heal.
[38] The work of ecofeminist writers inspired early male and female practitioners to address their concerns about a more horizontal relationship to environmental issues in their own practices.
[citation needed] Sustainable art is produced with consideration for the wider impact of the work and its reception in relationship to its environments (social, economic, biophysical, historical, and cultural).
[2] British sculptor Richard Long has for several decades made temporary outdoor sculptural work by rearranging natural materials found on site, such as rocks, mud and branches, which will therefore have no lingering detrimental effect.
[citation needed] Chris Drury instituted a work entitled "Medicine Wheel" which was the fruit and result of a daily meditative walk, once a day, for a calendar year.
[40] In considering how society might be inspired, via its artworks, to respond positively to eco-crisis and change itself accordingly, some eco-artists reflect on our human engagement with the natural world, and create ecologically informed art that focuses on (or helps us to visualise) eco-friendly transformation or reclamation.
For instance, eco-art writer and theoretician Linda Weintraub (who coined the term "cycle-logical" to describe the correlation between recycling and psychology) reminds us that the 21st-century notion of artists' mindful engagement with their materials harkens back to paleolithic midden piles of discarded pottery and metals from ancient civilizations.
Brigitte Hitschler's Energy field, for instance, drew power for 400 red diodes from the to-be-reclaimed potash slag heap upon which they were installed, using art and science to reveal hidden material culture.
[46] Sculptor and installation artist Erika Wanenmacher was inspired by Tony Price in her development of works addressing creativity, mythology, and New Mexico's nuclear presence.
[49] Ralf Sander's public sculpture, the World Saving Machine, used solar energy to create snow and ice outside the Seoul Museum of Art in the hot Korean summer.
