Environmental Art Symposium

Unframing the Landscape; Uncontaining Nature

-  John K. Grande 

Cultural identity is as necessary to humanity as the sun is to nature, for it guides us to identify who we are, where we have come from and where we are going. The impulse to create reflects an implicit desire to improve the world around us. Art can no longer be purely object based. The limits imposed on us by nature are guiding us to establish a new global ethic that involves the mutual respect between living things. Art draws upon that flow of energies that is part of the process of life, the procreative core of our need to transform, enrich and express ourselves.

How does art relates to the land, to ecological and social issues, and indeed new technologies. Where is the connect between the human soul and arts production?  The divergence between the natural and the manufactured in the language of arts production of our era is further accentuated by new media, digital and data-based information systems. If we live in a global village it has two forms, one the physical world and the other the synthetic data-based world. Artist's engagement with the land, and the natural world is provides important links to a  broader cultural discourse on globalization and ecology. Regional initiatives involving art actions that involve nature where process take precedence over the object as a sculpture medium. The intertwining of ecology and art presents an important portal where art becomes part of our origins within nature's systems, but equally represents a future continuity of art that is part of the evolution of human culture. Does ethics play a role in arts production? What are the levers that influence the language of art produced using new technologies? 

For most urban audiences, Land Art remains something distant, far away and unseen. It is precisely this distance, and the aspect of natural beauty attached as environment to the art initiative that makes it unusual. There is no gallery. There is no museum. There is no urban map to locate the work. Instead the work exists in a continuum. Land art embodies certain principles that view nature as the material, whether the artist’s message is conceptual or spiritual. Land art is dislocated art or relocated art. Land Art emphasizes the materialist vision of nature. It is manipulable, mere material, and what you see as effect is largely more important than nature’s role in sustaining human culture. This issue is often overlooked by the contemporary curators and historians and is particularly important when considering Robert Smithson’s arts production in the land involved scale as a medium and could be manipulated to great effect, but what of the land itself? What of the ethics of the land? It seems that impact was more important than nature to Land artists in the 1960s. Land Art is now logoized,  a “brand” of art as historicized as Romanticism or Realism. 

John K Grande will present examples that explain the evolution of environmental art from Land Art to Social Ecology to Earth Art to Bio-Art. No longer necessarily large scale, and sensitive to local biology and geology, more transparent and transient in the way they perceive and create, new generations of artists have surpassed Robert Smithson’s neo-archaeological approach to art in the land. Nature is now seen as a volatile and powerful force that is part of our lives and affects us enormously. Ecology plays a role in all economies. Art in our era requires a reinvention of ways of interpreting and understanding structures that integrates fluid natural systems within its vocabulary. Herein are some of the dilemmas and issues John K. Grande will discuss these crucial and challenging ideas always with a view to the natural world – the world around us. Nature is the art of which we are a part!