ABSTRACT
Environmental art therefore raises the question of the status of representation: it is no longer paint nor representing the flesh of reality, but intervening in the same such sequence. Life, therefore, is not unlike a painting to be offered for the admiration of a helpless public, but exemplifies the power to act. Environmental art becomes a demonstration of a power to act when the artist creates a garden, or cultivates potato varieties, or designs a totally ecological bus. It is also called upon to act, while tracing the ways in which such a transformation can operate. Finally, it also maintains a link to action, in that it provides a representation of the latter. Most troubling, in these transformations at the heart of the history of art in recent years, is the will of the artist to confuse the process of artistic creation with biological processes. Life itself could produce art.
