When modernism’s largely white and western paradigm started to crumble at the end of the Cold War, a subtle opening up and broadening of the very definition of art began to unfold. Today, a conjunction of global events and thought coming out of postmodernism has brought us to an exciting moment in time when art is not only off the traditional museum pedestal, both literally and figuratively, but also is engaged in the social fabric of human activity. Questioning the hierarchies inherent to existing economic systems, art works that were not marketable or that challenged commodification – installation art, performance, sound art, and other ephemeral forms – re-established a paradigm of art embedded in the living world’s puzzle, as opposed to being a supplier of aesthetic satisfaction in the market economy.
The steps developed briefly below reflect moments in the history of art related to environmental or ecological issues. It is neither a linear story, nor an exhaustive history, but historical moments to which most of the artists and curators working on environmental issues refer. This story deeply binds art and science, giving them each their respective roles, yet differing in history. We begin our story in the nineteenth century between an effort to document nature and scientific expeditions, and the idea of a renewed vision of the landscape, thanks to a few individuals, but also as part of a richer movement to change the view of nature. If representations of nature are at first mainly processed through landscape paintings, ecological representations on their side go hand in hand with the rise of a new symbolic meaning allocated to the various elements of nature: clouds for example become a symbol of pollution or radioactivity; the panda epitomizes the fragility of life; the polar bear, global warming and rising sea levels. Is this evolution towards the symbolic a true turning point? What does it mean? It is worth pointing out here that besides artistic practices strictly related to the environment, many art works that do not claim any commitment towards ecology appear to be nonetheless using natural elements as symbols associated with ecology.
Nature expeditions and documentation as art
Natural science and art are linked over centuries, especially thanks to artists’ contribution to the description of the natural world. Their role as recorders of foreign lands was reflective of their royal patrons who tried to expand their power. Numerous expeditions throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries propelled them all over the globe. Indeed, they were the artists documenting the colonial expansion, which exploited natural resources and wonders as well as indigenous cultures. Icons and images are at the forefront regarding the change and rise of new depictions of nature guided by the ideal of objectivity. ‘Art and science converged in intertwined judgments of truth and beauty. Eighteenth-century scientific atlas makers referred explicitly and repeatedly to coeval art genres and criticism’ (Daston and Galison, 2007, p. 79). The artists play with all kinds of technical constraints, such as the painting material or the geometric perspective, and describe elements of nature and the world around us through aesthetics norms. These representations value codes, visual standards that will not cease to evolve until the separation between art and science giving their autonomy to both but minoring their respective contribution to knowledge. The perspective vision will allow the viewer to be closer to a perceived optic reality, gradually objectified, and serve as a tool to represent landscape elements. The images then go from a representation of the natural anomalies to an objectification through photography, far from the temptations of artistry. In the age of science, mechanization trumped art. Conversely, historians of art call attention to the aesthetic context that shaped the making and seeing of photographs, even scientific and medical ones. This vision of a science that seeks to avoid the subjectivity of the artistic eye will sign the separation of Arts and Sciences, and the birth of aesthetics in 1750. After the eighteenth century, aesthetic becomes an independent discipline and art claims autonomy – art for art’s sake – and develops a critical and creative perspective. The disembeddedness of the fields of activity such as art and science towards a specialised productive activity and public will encounter thwarting attempts by the inventors of cross paths utopians (Saint-Simon, for example with his disciples), seeking to reconcile the human dimensions of rationality and emotion. The two examples below illustrate attempts to reconcile art and science.
An image of Earth’s life
Trying to link art and science, the naturalist Carl Gustav Carus attempted to substitute the term ‘art of the image of the life of the earth’ to the word ‘landscape painting’ with (Erdlebenbildkunst). This idea, which appears in his Letters on Landscape Painting (1815–35), shows a move away from the egotistical risk of subjectivity claimed by the landscape painters. According to Carus, if his practice of science itself must resource to the aesthetic sense, this last one may be a projection instance (landscape) that says nothing of the real (country). So he wants to be a close observer of the characteristics and dynamics of the natural world, particularly detectable in the history of rock formations and geographical specificities (see Plate 1). If his idea is still dominated by a theological and visionary geology, attention to changes in the nature converged with the work of Alexander von Humboldt, which he approaches in the 1820s and he quotes in his Letters on Landscape Painting.
Humboldt, naturalist and explorer of plant resources of Spanish America, is not only recognized for having laid the beginnings of modern plant ecology, before the term was invented but also he acknowledged a role for the imagination and art in his great work of synthesis, with the significant title, Cosmos: Essay on a Physical Description of the World (Humboldt, 2014). So, if we cannot deny the mystical and religious dimension of German Romanticism – the power of religion is transferred there to art in its capacity to link human beings or communities to the divine – its participation in debates on environmental ideas from its outset should be noted. The arts already contribute fully.
Double practice
Following the example of Carus, the poets, artists and philosophers of Romanticism were sometimes also scientists. They are, for some, engaged in a double practice and intend to reconcile art and science. They are also often walkers, in contact with nature, aiming to collect materials for their thinking during their walks. Novalis tried to find the seeds of his art working with reality rather than representing the real. Geologist, mathematician, cartographer, poet and philosopher, Novalis deploys in his last poetic literary projects more a vision of diversity and its various combinatorial modes than giving a tale of unity and totality. His approach, showing the infinite heterogeneities, is based on a logic of diversity and multiplication of assumptions, a practice of individual seriation and accidental cases.
Rather than eliminating chance (according to a Hegelian or Mallarméen plan) and reaching the heart of pure necessity, or any substance or the improbable ‘thing in itself’, Novalis’ philosophical and poetic project was to multiply collisions, rattling the singularities and causing accidental encounters. Many contemporary artists could reclaim the open and largely non-doctrinal aspect of Novalis’ writings, which mixed philosophy, science and poetry, thought and sensitivity, understanding of the environment as part of a game, more than a necessity at work in nature.
Novalis considered an enlarged human sensitivity. The reduction of the optical perception is particularly challenged by the use of the concept of Stimmung, frequently translated as ‘atmosphere’. Referring by its etymology to the idea of a musical chord (‘gestimmt’, originating from ‘Stimmung’, also positions sound against an optical conception of the atmosphere.), the term comes precisely at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to designate a form of unstable resonance between the self and the world, different from the harmony of the Ancients. The Stimmung questions the hegemonic position of man as the master and owner of nature for the benefit of the interrelationship and instability. The work on the interaction of the senses, or synesthesia, is also tested in ‘multimedia’ experiments, exceeding the purely optical input of a world ruled only by easel painting. This trend continues in the following centuries where the use of sound and the idea of ‘soundscape’ continue to question the boundaries between art and reality. Today, many artists such as Michael Brewster (1946–2016), Miloš Voytěchovský and Paul Panhuysen offer facilities or sound recordings to bring a global experience of the environment.
Novalis also considered Goethe as both a poet and a scientist:
Goethe is a completely practical poet … His observations on light, on the transformation of plants and insects are at once confirmations, and the most convincing proofs that the perfect didactic essay also belongs to the realm of the artist. One would also be justified in maintaining in a certain sense that Goethe is the first physicist of his age – indeed that his work is epoch-making in the history of physics.
(Novalis, 1997, p. 111)
With Novalis, we move from a formative theory (Bildungslehre) to a study of force fields. This brings him closer to Schelling, who founded a new philosophy of nature from his observations of physical phenomena such as magnetism and electricity. Thus, romantic inventiveness frequently turns into an almost hypnotic capture of the senses, which replaces the real rather than opens the individual to the real and its hazards. The perceptive individual is expected to become an amazed spectator of his or her own internal and autonomous psychophysiology. But is it different from some contemporary artists? Overstating the phenomenon of human perception, James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson, for example, seem to leave intact the gap between the individual and the environment.
Landscape paintings
On the other hand, far from a scientific perspective, in Europe and in the United States depictions of nature have been mainly related to the history of landscape painting, and not necessarily as a way of seeing nature per se. Suffice it to say that landscape painting was not always linked to a representation of nature. If we put aside the important beginnings of the artistic invention of landscape during the Renaissance or even before, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the birth of an artistic interest in nature other than as a decorum for human actions. The new concept of landscape implied an aesthetic ordering of nature. While mankind is seen as the crowning glory of creation, romanticism seemed to question this anthropocentric view, valuing the significance of natural elements. Romanticism’s legacy to modern landscape painting consists precisely in this convergence of interest in nature and the desire for a specific kind of representation. In the nineteenth century, the main symptom of this trend was the gradual demise of the principle of historia, and subsequently of the human figure itself, a process that cleared the way for formal experimentation.
Julie Ramos writes:
In Germany, Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810) and Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) were tending to subvert, rather than break with, the old rules. The former proposed a subtle role reversal in which human attributes were transferred to landscape. While his work was not pure landscape, he saw his conception of Landschafterey as paving the way for a style of painting that did not include the human figure, and his Times of Day cycle, combining symbolic compositions and painted settings marks a departure from the classicist approach to landscape. The latter, by making landscape the subject of an altar piece, gave the genre historical status. The focus was no longer on the direct representation of the human figure, whose role was to dignify the surrounding landscape, but on a perception of landscape that now gave it a symbolic dimension.
(Ramos, 2000)
On the American side, the more penetrating of these examinations into the changing landscape emerged during the 1850s and 1860s in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau during the early era of the American Renaissance, which was influenced in part by British Romanticism. Nature was once again a subject for American art and letters, but the perceptions of it had shifted to reflect the new American concern with the changes in the landscape. Rather than presenting nature as an obstacle to the establishment of a civilization, American authors and painters alike upheld nature as the source of the ani...
