ABSTRACT
We might consider visual art history as corrupted at this point in time, having been subsumed into the capitalist market economy, void of checks and balances, and certainly transparency. As playwright-president Vaclav Havel wrote: ‘In the world of today – enveloped by a global, essentially materialistic and widely selfjeopardizing civilization – one of the ways of combatting all the escalating dangers consists in the systematic creation of a universal civil society’.1 The art world now consists of gallerists turned museum-directors and collectors buying art as investment. So while there are a few organisations working internationally to support artists and keep the ‘separation of powers’ (California Lawyers for the Arts, for example), traditional creative arts have little legal recompense; and rarely the finances to afford help. Therefore, it is no coincidence that many artists who are engaged in environmental art are simultaneously working with communities and building strong civil organisations to facilitate their projects, with an end goal of eventually effecting policy (such as Annie Leonard’s Story of Stuff organization, 5 Gyres Institute, or Plastic Pollution Coalition). The two go hand in hand. One goal is not just enabling the other. The connection of the two allows a symbiotic relationship of civil society to the health of the planet, the two being mutually beneficial. This is not only true in purely ecological terms, but in terms of the jurisdiction, contemplation and activity needed by any local or global group to actually create change inherent in non-governmental groups that participate both within and outside of the central government of any nation. These mobilisations involving civil society and artists have various shapes, depending on the society at the heart of which they grow, and their creation mode. Whether it is a response to a totalitarian system or a struggle against capitalism and its impacts, or even an aid to movements of resistance to urban development, artists and civil society invent a representation of events, which leads to an answer. Environmentalist artists suggest alternatives in terms of environmental micro-utopias. Sometimes, rather than simply responding to a series of environmental problems, artists in a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach, not only invent works of art but life forms that call for unprecedented aesthetic modalities and new representations. The first paragraphs will be devoted to contemporary examples while at the end of the chapter we highlight the artists’ contribution to the late 20th century Czechoslovak struggle against the totalitarian regime.
