Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, “Environmental Art,” translated from Italian by Madeline Robinson, originally published as “L'arte ambientale,” in Europa/America, L’astrazione determinata 1960/1976 (Bologna: Galleria d’Arte Moderna, 1976), 155–159 (excerpt)

Between 1973 and 1977 Panza commissioned permanent environments from California Light & Space artists for his eighteenth-century villa in Varese. In this essay, he identifies major developments in the creativity of the Light & Space movement, which he considers in relation to the broader history of art. Industrial development and the desire for more consumer goods focused the attention on science and technology to the detriment of artistic culture. A new factor in the evolution of the concept of Environmental art was Minimal sculpture. The elaborate illusional effects used for certain pavilions in Disneyland have certainly provided these artists with some ideas. Michael Asher makes work of a situational character, which cannot easily be planned theoretically, because he interprets the situation of an existing, empty space; now and again, with minor changes, the work gives a sense of the presence of the artist’s interpretative intervention, highlighting certain characteristics of the existing environment.