ABSTRACT
This chapter is focused upon recent research and artwork that deals with environmental change and landscape in the UK and the USA. A decade or more of work has resulted in research groups with depth and breadth. There are networks of artists organized in the EU (Cultura21), the UK (Land2, Landscape and Arts Network and eco/art/scot/land) and the USA (Ecoarts Network and the Women Environmental Artists Directory), although there is no robust academic network clarifying issues and direction. Leonardo Journal has initiated a project called ‘Lovely Weather’ dealing with art and climate change. Otherwise no journal or journals have emerged as a site for focused discourse. There is one museum in the USA that explicates research-related work specific to the field. In general the curatorial efforts to date are often iterations on themes, rather than a contribution to knowledge. It is important to note that until recently artists primarily made things, while critics, curators and historians wrote papers and books that evaluated, validated and identified artwork of import. This is changing; doctoral research in art theory and practice is a contributing factor. The contemporary state of research in environmental art can be interrogated by a review
of sustained research interests, projects and exhibitions. Although the overlap between academics in research posts and the artists, critics and curators developing work is often minimal. This contradiction is particularly true in the UK, somewhat less so in the USA, Europe, and the rest of the world. I will focus on the USA and the UK, the areas where I have spent the most time. However, I must at least mention the terrific work being done by colleagues in the EU such as Nathalie Blanc, Director of Research CNRS, University of Paris, and Sacha Kagan, a Research Associate at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany. Similarly, I should mention colleagues in Asia, including Wu Mali, at the National Normal University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and Yutaka Kobayashi at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, Japan. The story of contemporary art/environment and landscape research begins with formal/
sculptural investigations in land art that emerged from the minimalist art movement over fifty years ago. Some of the original practitioners include Herbert Bayer, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Mary Miss, Richard Serra and Robert Smithson. The impetus for the work flowed from the artistic, social, political and theoretical context of that time; and in many
cases responded to post-industrial conditions, or embraced industrial tools as a means of making marks and forms on the earth. The artists and the artwork have been widely discussed and described in terms of emergent landscape tradition and evolution of form in John Beardsley’s (1984) Earthworks and Beyond. Lucy Lippard’s (1983) Overlay took a broader approach linking the work to prehistoric earth/sky forms, feminism, ritual, homes and graves, with an extensive overview of both material and performative approaches referencing hundreds of artists and artworks. The book has long been considered a key text for practitioners interested in this area of work as its breadth and depth of scholarship and speculation about pre-history incites the imagination. Many of us working in the field have found that Suzaan Boettger’s (2002) book Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties provides significant new material about the earthartists and the context, intentions, processes and methods that informed their work. More recently Amanda Boetzkes has written The Ethics of Earth Art (Boetzkes 2010). She treats the artworks as the focal point of the Earth’s ‘elemental’ agency. This is an interesting idea supported by some very good research and analysis, although the ethical position of the artwork as a medium where the earth manifests its own ‘irreducible otherness’ (Boetzkes 2010: 21) is not fully resolved in that text. Moving forward, Jeffery Kastner and Brian Wallis published Land and Environmental Art
(Kastner and Wallis 1998). The text provides earth/land art as the foundation and then provides frameworks to understand the evolution of environmental art away from formal artworld concerns, worked out with earth as a sculptural material, towards a deeper relationship to systems, processes and phenomena in relationship to social concerns. The book provides an in-depth overview of international artists and artworks, followed by an impressive collection of articles by artists and critics over a period of thirty years. Read together with Barbara Matilsky’s (1992) Fragile Ecologies the historic precedents for this work become more obvious, as do the development of integrated social and ecological approaches, as an ethical, restorative stance emerges. Some of the original voices in the area include Joseph Beuys, Agnes Denes, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hamish Fulton, Andy Goldsworthy, Hans Haacke, Helen and Newton Harrison, Ichi Ikeda, Herman Prigann, Alan Sonfist and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Many of them remain active and continue to develop new work, though most are quite senior now. Beuys and Prigann have both died. One might argue that the move from land art to environmental art tracks an evolution of
human subjectivity and ideas about human interrelationships to environment, landscape and living things. Suzaan Boettger concludes her text on Earthworks with these words: ‘Earthworks embodied ambivalent responses to the anti-institutional position of so much of late-sixties culture and fused them with conflicted behaviour toward the natural environment’ (Boettger 2002: 245). In a deeply committed engagement with artists dealing with habitat creation and recycling of waste, Barbara Matilsky points to artistic engagement as part of a process of ‘solving’ the world’s environmental problems. She differentiates ecological from environmental art through a moral and ethical relationship. ‘Art is defined through the process of creation, and ecological art consummately expresses this by enhancing the foundations of life’ (Matilsky 1992: 115). Writing eight years later, Brian Wallis takes this one step further. He identifies a ‘post-modern resistance’ that has ‘changed radically in the past thirty years’. He claims that there is a ‘need to remain suspicious of the ideological freight and the constructedness of the concept of nature and calls for its preservation: and to continue to call attention to the fragility of our environment and organized threats to it’ (Wallis 1998: 41). The project of environmental art has moved from a material engagement with landscape, through ethical relationships with natural systems and then to a sense of suspicion about how we relate and interrelate to the natural environment. As the world becomes increasingly aware of the significance of human impact and
the limitations of our conception of nature one question to consider is: what can we do today that makes a difference? I will begin by describing the academic infrastructure in the UK and identify key researchers
in the process. Although many programmes have opened and closed through the years, the longest running programme with a somewhat tangential relationship to this area was established in the 1980s. ‘Sculpture and Environmental Art’ (SEA) at Glasgow School of Art is a four-year undergraduate programme (with input into an MFA and an MLitt). The group also supports two PhD students. SEA is focused upon public, social and political forms of artmaking. The methodologies embedded in that course are socially activist and are often identified with David Harding who ran it until 2002. It is more environment and society than environment and landscape. Key researchers include: Susan Brind working on the body and its external influence and internal references; Justin Carter working on issues of appropriate technology and sustainability; and Shauna McMullan who is focused on communities of discourse engaged with issues of mapping, landscape and place. Thomas Joshua Cooper is an external complement to this group, with an extensive body of landscape-based fieldwork in photography that interrogates the meaning of edges between land and water and their related histories. Shelly Sacks launched the ‘Social Sculpture Research Unit’ (SSRU) in the late 1990s at
Oxford Brookes University. She was a student of Joseph Beuys and is considered a secondgeneration leader in the social-sculpture tradition. With a decade of effort and an illustrious roster of internationally recognized academics and professionals in the field, the SSRU has a rising profile. Sacks runs a robust MA programme while supervising seven PhD students. ‘Land2’ is a research network established at the University of West of England by Ian Biggs in the first years of the new millennium. It is a national network of artists, lecturers and research students with a general interest in landscape and place-oriented art practice. Biggs’s specific research interests in recent years have focused upon mapping and psycho-geography. At about the same time Alan Johnston and Eelco Hooftman established the MA in Art, Space
and Nature at Edinburgh College of Art. The two-year course and its methods were inspired by the work of Patrick Geddes; it is now informed by a broader range of contemporary ecophilosophy. It continues to be led by artists and landscape architects and provides a framework of advanced field studies to develop practical and academic interest in the visual arts, architectural and environmental practice. The group currently supports one PhD student. The staff teaching on the course are also members of Creative Research into the Environment (CORE), with an international network that rivals the SSRU. Key researchers include: Donald Urquhart, recognized for his work in public art and health care; Ross McLean, focused on scenario planning and socio-ecological resilience in landscape architecture; Lisa Mackenzie focused upon the application of ecological principles in design and master planning. Landscape architects Catherine Ward Thompson, working on access to public space, and John Stuart Murray working on ecology and sustainability, provide an external complement to this group. David Haley is a senior researcher and the lead on the MA in Art as Environment at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is primarily allied with Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, two original practitioners who inform his approach to whole systems ecology and critical futures. Haley embraces the quantitative and the qualitative to inform poetic dialogue. He develops creative interventions that intend to enable a community of inquiry that informs the development of ecocentric culture. Daro Montag directs research in Art, Nature and Environment (RANE). It was established at
University College Falmouth as an MA course that examines the relationship between the visual arts and ecological thinking. The programme includes an international lecture series and a bi-yearly conference on art and environment. Montag supervises three PhD students. There are other key researchers in the UK operating with less infrastructure and supporting coursework.
The list includes Simon Read at the University of Middlesex, and Mathew Dalziel and Louise Scullion at Duncan and Jordanstone College of Art, University of Dundee. Likewise there are key people working on environmental and landscape issues from a digital point of view in the UK including Lise Autogena at the University of Newcastle, Jennifer Gabrys at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Tom Corby at the University of Westminster. Corby led the recent Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded Digital Ecologies workshops. While much of this work across the UK is pedagogically strong, when considered as research we are looking for work that must be ‘effectively shared’ (HEFCE 2011, REF: 48) and have explicit ‘questions, context and methods’ (AHRC 2011: 59-60). Without specific texts that explicate and interrogate these matters, the value of what may or may not be research remains difficult to ascertain. With few exceptions, these artists and landscape architects have been largely ignored as a
confluence of UK funding has supported exhibitions, catalogues and texts that seek to address cultural approaches to environmental change, and climate impact, with landscape as the overarching topic of enquiry. The Royal Society for the Arts (RSA) Arts and Ecology programme ran from 2005 to 2010 as did the AHRC Landscape and Environment programme. The former is closed, while work on the latter is still in a concluding phase with final work being done to establish new research networks that focus upon living with environmental change (see further reading). While the RSA Art and Ecology programme did a lot of good work, it largely ignored the need for investment in practice-based research in the UK. Where the AHRC Landscape and Environment programme did engage artists, it was still a minimum investment. The largest project engaging an artist ‘The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image’ was organized around the work of the noted filmmaker, Patrick Keiller. The research project would ‘identify, understand and document aspects of the current global predicament in the UK’s landscape, and explore its histories and possible futures’ (Massey 2010). This is a breathtaking scope of work. The work was presented at a seminar with Patrick, Doreen Massey and Patrick Wright presenting at Nottingham University in 2009. The panel proved to be wildly exploratory providing little clarity on the work as a research initiative, but some sense of the depth of exchange between artists and authors. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival and was then shown at the New York Film Festival. The work is indeed unique, significant and it is rigorous in Keiller’s inimitable style. Massey interrogates the work in an in-depth article ‘Landscape/Space/Politics: an essay’ (Massey 2010) which provides significant insight into the critical ideas and process, the discourse exchanged over the work. Despite Massey’s claim that the work, ‘is more demanding politically than the more usual critiques’, the fact remains that the most imaginative critical analysis of what is, doesn’t take us much closer to a ‘possible future’. Of the smaller research grants, Craig Richardson ran ‘Landscape as Conceptual Art’. It planned to validate various shale hills in the Mid-Lothian area of Scotland as Earth Art, as so declared by the British Conceptual artist John Latham. Given even the brief history of the field described herein, both of these projects can only be described as idiosyncratic; an investment in a unique variation on a known critique in the former case and a contemporary validation of what has been done in the latter case. The investment is in significant art and an experimental curatorial practice. The contribution to the discourse in the field remains open to question. But let us consider one of the longest-standing arts and environment projects in the UK.
Cape Farewell was initiated by David Buckland and it is documented in the exhibition and accompanying text ‘U-n-f-o-l-d’ (Buckland and Wainwright 2010). Operating for ten years now, it is an environmental change based programme foregrounding artwork. The question is how does this programme of expeditions with artists and scientists contribute to knowledge within the field? Cape Farewell, sailing from the UK, develops art/science expeditions and
produces travelling exhibitions, catalogues and lectures. This ambitious project places art, music and literature at the centre of the climate-change debate. This is a programme of applied art and design where artistic expertise in material, performative and literary methods is exchanged for a ride on a boat to a cold place, where scientists explain why everything around the boat is melting. I would suggest that this is a classic cultural assignment with roots in the traditions of British Empire, where artists and scientists go forth and record images and capture data at the edges of civilization (see Chapter 16). Nevertheless, Cape Farewell is a high profile, wellfunded, ongoing programme of Arts Council England. Its director David Buckland and the exhibitions he organizes have international standing, and the work is a cultural symbol of the commitment that Britain has made to highlighting the issue of climate change, particularly through participation in touring exhibitions organized by the British Embassies in Moscow and Rome, as well as programmes sponsored by the British Council in Germany, Canada and Japan. The expeditions include a Who’s Who of international art, literature and music. Artists
travel to the polar regions with scientists. According to Buckland it is the scientists who, ‘have allowed the artists to gain a full understanding of the implications of human activity on the fragile environment that is our planet’ (Buckland and Wainwright 2010: 8). But this raises two questions: first, is science the single definitive path to understand climate change? Second, can any of us actually secure a ‘full understanding’ of anything in twenty days? It is quite possible that the expeditions have a deep impact upon all that participate. Cape Farewell always has a world-class roster of artists, musicians, writers and poets on board, but does the work that follows expand the ‘climate imaginary’, and/or does it push the ideas and practices of art in new directions? Much of the visual work is essentially pictorial, distanced and appropriative, although there are exceptions. The literature that attends Cape Farewell suggests a limited interest in the historical record of environmental art practice, and little or no sense of the theory or external literature that might inform its subject matter. The artists on board the expeditions represent or document a phenomenon, and record gestures and actions in the open arctic landscape. With some exceptions the work is largely devoid of a critical relationship to ideas of nature, power, politics or embodied values. Final forms are typically images, drawings or a mix of image and sound. Artwork presented in ‘U-n-f-o-l-d’ includes Buckland’s now familiar projections of text on ice, presented as photographs, 8mm films by Leslie Frost, geo-glacial archetypal photographs by Nathan Gallagher, video with jungle sounds by Brendan McGuire and coloured flash pictures of ice by Chris Wainwright. This is a, ‘landscape way of seeing, a gaze projected out onto the land, a vision of authority and ownership, the mind’s eye of certain knowledge systems, vested interests and desires’ (Wylie 2007: 93). In other words, I went, I saw, I understood things on specific terms. The implication is that the Cape Farewell artists (informed by the science team) have captured the ‘true meaning’ of climate change, embodied in their images and experience of the last of the ice … for all to see. Admittedly the expeditions have resulted in some important artwork. The project has reset the parameters for consideration of the real publicity value of art and design on a topic of national interest. It has enabled the production of works that function in a rhetorical fashion, giving emphasis and possibly adding depth to extant ideas about climate. It is useful to compare similar research and projects underway in the USA. I want to start by
considering what may be significant cultural differences; ideas about the role of visual arts in society in the USA (Lippard) and the UK (Bunting).
