ABSTRACT
Although environmental art is still to be recognised by a wide audience, exhibitions,1 events and books on this topic have been numerous in recent years, since the pioneering exhibition ‘Fragile Ecologies’ organized by Barbara Matilsky in the New York-based Queens Museum of Art opened the way in 1992. From the late 1990s onwards, curators and writers started mobilising: Hildegard Kurt discussed the aesthetics of sustainability in Germany (Kurt, 2004), Shelly Sacks pursued Beuys’ work on social sculpture in the UK; Maja and Reuben Fowkes focused on the environmental art history and aesthetics of East European art from the art production of the socialist era to contemporary art in Hungary (Fowkes and Fowkes, 2006); and Stephanie Smith from the United States developed her work around art and sustainability (Kagan, 2011, p. 345). In 2005, the ‘Groundworks’ exhibition2 presented works that had been generated through collaborative or participatory approaches, which saw inhabitants of specific sites actively involved in processes of physical and creative transformations. This aspect was reflected by one of the pioneer books in the field, Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies by Sue Spaid (2002). As opposed to other conventional categories (land-art, earthworks, environmental art, ecological art defined below), the author comes up with the notion of ecovention (ecology + invention), which she uses to refer to any project initiated by artists who would employ inventive strategies to physically transform specific local ecologies. Going in the same direction, the book Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook, distributed at the first of this lecture series in 2006 at the London School of Economics, reflected a renewed environmentalism, primarily focused on creativity and not only on the risks, constraints and limitations very often brought forward together with environmental concerns. A UNESCO report published the same year also confirmed this trend (Brown, 2006).
