The Greening of Art

Shifting Positions Between Art and Nature Since 1965

Marga Bijvoet

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9783739201559
• eBook ISBN:
  9783741216244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte general

The Greening of Art describes the shifts in position between art and nature which took place during the past fifty years, to set out re-establishing a new relationship between art and the landscape-environment, and attempt in various ways to re-connect art with nature. From the 1960s onward, when artists went outdoors to explore the environment as extended space of the self, via land reclamation projects and collaborations with landscape architects in redesigning whole parks to the present day, with its recent development of urban gardening projects.

1

CULTIVATION OF NATURE

Changing Views

In the preface I used the word nature as if it were clearly defined and well circumscribed. Is it? Nature is in everybody’s mouth lately. What is this nature that we are discussing today? Is it the nature of the natural sciences? Is it the nature of the few remaining virgin, mountain, and tropical forests? Is it the nature of our childhood, reminding us of holidays on the farm, of country life in the fifties? Is it the nature of the lone wanderer who climbs mountains in solitude in order to have a distant view over hills and valleys beneath, such as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel books report?

The cultivation of nature has gone through many different phases, each of which affected the way in which nature and the landscape were viewed. It is an age-old process. For millions of years, this process was slow, only to accelerate with unknown speed during the twentieth century. By now, there is hardly a place left on earth that does not show traces of human intervention. The adaptation of the natural environment to the needs of an ever-growing population of human beings can therefore also be described as the alteration of nature to landscape.

Perceptually, the greatest and far-reaching recent transformation of nature has been caused by the building of railroads, already during the late nineteenth century, and the construction of roads. Four-lane highways bisect the landscape to connect large urban areas, so that one can drive from Cologne to Berlin within six to seven hours, where the horse-drawn carriage would have taken several days. The early trains pulled by steam locomotives moved through the landscape at a speed of twenty to thirty kilometers per hour, which may still have allowed for an erweitertes Naturbegriff (expanded view of nature). High-speed trains make us perceive the landscape as a blurred photograph in movement. This mobility allows us to cover distances with a velocity that would have astounded the ‘romantic’ traveller.

Tourist advertising tempts the potential customer with promises of him experiencing an unspoilt, true nature. The more adventuresome go trekking into the Himalayas, tour the Sahara desert on the back of a camel, or undertake an expedition into the last virgin tropical rain forests, thereby responding to some kind of innate longing to be surrounded by untrodden vegetation. On the whole, however, the cultivated landscape is virtually the only contact with nature most of us have. It is this urge to be constantly on the move, to be in haste, afraid to lose time, that forbids us to halt and look around. If we would only stop for a moment, take the time to admire things as simple as the blooming of a lily in spring, or the yellowing of a tree leaf in the fall, dwindling to the ground after the first winter-frosts.

In noisy cities where exhaust fumes hang like a light haze in the air, only a small percentage of the population is in the lucky possession of a balcony or a front lawn. The best one can do is turn this little balcony into one’s own Garden of Eden. Of course, we follow the latest trends in the numerous magazines on gardening. This garden culture has become our ‘nature,’ its seasonal changes perceived through the flowers bought at the garden center in spring.

Urbanization has had a crucial impact on this view, turning large areas into concrete surfaces, and thoroughly changing the surrounding landscape and its cultivation. In the eyes of the urban dweller, the farmer was living a natural life in touch with his environment, still. But agriculture has changed into agrobusiness, and the farmer has become a businessman. Since the 1970s, economic conditions have changed and have forced many a small farm out of business. Their living quarters were not seldom acquired as homes by people from the city who were looking for an atmosphere of rural quietness, moved by a kind of ‘romantic’ notion of country life.

Most people have no idea where their supermarket gets its products from. Fewer and fewer companies dominate the food market, and determine prices and the conditions under which these prodiuts are produced. Company mergers have become commonplace under the disguise that a so-called deregulated market will regulate supply and demand. Centralized deregulation, an apparent contradiction in terms, has made supervision very difficult. It is actually inconvenient, and not wanted. Globalization is the magic word. But where will it lead?

Although the matter is complex, one can discern a few general characteristics that have determined this direction. Since the Middle Ages, Western (read European) culture has seen a step-by-step conquest of the earth’s space. Starting with Nicolaus Copernicus’ thesis that the earth circles around the sun, the planet moved from the center of the solar system to its margins. Each expansion ran parallel with a new scientific and technical development, causing deep changes in daily living experience and perception of the environment. Today, NASA’s missions to Mars, Jupiter and distant stars, millions of light years away, hope to find proof of the existence of life similar to ours. The medieval pilgrim who travelled the European roads to Rome or Santiago de Compostela as a penitential exercise was followed by the explorer and learned traveller in search of new, unknown continents in order to fill in the white spots on the globe, travels made possible by new measuring instruments, for instance, such as the clock and the astrolabe. With the mechanization of the means of transportation in modern times – train, motorcar, airplane – travelling became not only faster but also more comfortable. It is the accompanying mobility that has allowed more and more people to move from one place to another. The wandering God-fearing pilgrim has become the curious worldly tourist on a completely mapped planet. Of fundamental importance is the fact that this expanded experience of space has ultimately changed the position of man toward nature. Medieval women and men felt an obedient dependence toward the natural environment that supported her or his family. The Renaissance perspective already shows a gradual distancing from this stance: the uomo universale studies the liberal arts, such as geometry, poetry, philosophy, and the art and architecture of Greek and Roman antiquity. In painting, the first independent landscapes and portraits are depicted. The new consciousness of the world creates a new type of human being, a person who is becoming aware of her or his position in history. It is man’s growing consciousness of the self in our culture, his or her continuing individualization, connected with the notion of (personal) freedom since the French Revolution, that is one of the main characteristics of Western culture.

By the end of the eighteenth century, people no longer merely travelled to explore far-away and unknown territories. Now they undertook a journey as a means of study and pleasure. The so-called Grand Tour through France and Italy became fashionable, and constituted an absolutely necessary part of many a young (mostly male) artist’s and writer’s education.¹ “In the culture of the Enlightenment, people sought to move for the sake of physical stimulation and mental clarification. These hopes derived from science, extended into the design of the environment, the reform of the economy, even into the formation of poetic sensibility.”²

It was the economist Adam Smith who proposed the early idea of a free market in terms of surplus production, division of labor, and specialization in the production of crops, or any product. Critics have interpreted Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) as the beginning of capitalism. At the time of publication, however, it was “his sense of the economic individual as a social being, rather than as aloof and greedy,” connecting the “scientific and the humane,” that made him enlightened.

The world view which interprets the powers of nature as something to be conquered and enslaved, whereby nature and culture as it were function as opposites, in certain respects lasts until today. Even if the philosophy which sets man outside of nature has become obsolete, economic forces hailing globalization still place the human factor above all. Not many social scientists have analyzed the consequences of changes of the past fifty years (or starting earlier, even?) Ulrich Beck among others perceived that “das Ende der Gegenüberstellung von Natur und Gesellschaft,” or “die Vergesellschaftung von Natur”, meaning the consequences of ‘nature having become society’ are “die Vergesellschaftung der Naturzerstörungen und -Gefährdungen, ihre Verwandlung in ökonomische, soziale und politische Widersprüche und Konflikte: Verletzungen der natürlichen Bedingungen des Lebens schlagen in globale medizinische soziale und ökonomische Gefährdungen für Menschen um – mit völlig neuartigen Herausforderungen an die sozialen und politischen.”³ The considerable havoc wreaked on the environment and the destruction of natural resources by the industrial countries during the past fifty years are unique in the history of the earth and mankind. The list of related problem areas is long – the logging of the rain forests, the overfishing of the world’s oceans, the threatening shortage of drinking water, the disappearance of the biodiversity of flora and fauna, to which may be added the gradual rising of average global temperatures, the growing number of floods and hurricanes, the melting of the polar ice, and the bleaching of coral reefs in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. There is no doubt that the industrial nations have a social and political responsibility as well as an ethical obligation to change course into a path that will lead to a sustainable exploration of the remaining natural resources. This means that the road which the Western world – actually one might say the whole world by now – chose to follow for the past centuries, and its philosophy of nature, has to be a dead end street.

But the twenty-first century is already being hailed as the century of the information society, its culture governed by communication technologies. Any attempt to combat this expansion seems fruitless at this point, considering the enormous economic and political powers behind it. Its potential dangers lie in the prospect that they might soon influence every facet of our daily lives, in such a way that we lose sight of the real landscape around us. “Caught in the growth of the Internet, we seem to have lost the discernment that the health of the earth is getting worse. It would be a mistake to take the vibrations of the virtual world for the real world,” thus Lester Brown in the year 2000 Report of the Worldwatch Institute.

Landscaping Nature

The history of the garden appears to reveal a similar pattern. Medieval cloisters and monasteries maintained gardens within their walls, not only as a means to self-support the community of monks, but also as a mode of reference to the Garden of Eden, the earthly paradise from which Adam and Eve were expelled to go into the “sinful world.” The labor in the walled and guarded cloister gardens of St. Gall and Clairvaux, for instance, served the monks as a “restorative act,” as well as “spiritual discipline.”⁴ Thus, medieval religious art generally depicted the garden as a hortus conclusus, refuge and sanctuary at the same time.

The English garden several centuries later was one of open space, a landscape that appeared to be without boundaries, lacking an obvious beginning or end. It was a public park where the wanderer strolled along winding paths, and where around each corner she or he was surprised by open vistas intersected by groups of trees, a lake, a ruin or a temple of classical remembrance. Having the appearance of complete naturalness and of being without design, it answered to the idea of the picturesque according to the taste of the time. Yet, the ‘English garden’ was just as cultivated as the ‘French garden’ of which the gardens of Versailles are the prime example, with its linear paths, and geometric patterns of shaped trees and flowerbeds. But whereas the French garden was said to be still representative of the absolutist power of the Enlightenment during the reigns of kings Louis XIV and XV, the English garden was supposed to be symbolic of the new democratic ideas conceived by John Locke or Adam Smith.

Since the Renaissance, the painting of nature had gradually become a separate genre. From its function as a vista behind religious scenes and backdrop of portraits, it developed into a realistic depiction of a worldly landscape. The renown Dutch landscape paintings of the seventeenth century are representative of this direction. By that time painting had split into different genres: historical painting, religious works, mythological stories, still life, genre, portrait, and landscape painting. However, this specialization could also be interpreted as an expansion in the perception of nature, comparable to the change in world-view as a consequence of the discoveries in science, or the expeditions of the world’s explorers like Christopher Columbus or James Cook.

In Caspar David Friedrich’s Mönch am Meer (c.1809-10), a small lonely figure stands (with his back to the spectator) before the wide and majestic ocean as if in deep contemplation. As typically ‘romantic,’ Friedrich’s landscapes (the human figure is often absent) were supposed to express the loneliness of the human being (or the artist) in this world, who can experience God only in nature and thus bear the sufferings of life. In the early nineteenth century, a genre of landscape painting took the leading role in trying to depict a unifying relationship between man (the artist) and a still sacred nature; it became an aesthetic symbol for a transcendental and mystical bond with nature and God. In the history of art and literature it is defined as the Romantic Movement.

After the middle of the nineteenth century, a wave of new industries revolutionized Western society and culture. It was the time of the mechanization of production methods in factories, of the means of transportation, and of technical inventions like photography, the X-ray, electricity and the light bulb. The Industrial Revolution subsequently caused a rush from the countryside into the towns, again causing new problems of rapidly growing slums and ghettoization. A kind of social revolution followed in its wake. Hence the earliest concerns about the natural environment were expressed in England. The two main theoretical protagonists of this movement were John Ruskin and William Morris, who were also the first social critics of culture as we understand it today. However, wages had long been set for the continuing technologization and scientification of the twentieth century.

Around the 1890s, the depiction of nature culminated once more in the ‘realistic’ impressionist works of Claude Monet, Camille Pisarro and Alfred Sisley, among others. They were the first and the last group of artists to paint a landscape outdoors, using the new and unmixed colors and the technique that gave this movement its name. The Impressionists were fascinated by the moment instead of the infinite. During the 1890s, Monet painted twenty-six views of the cathedral of Rouen at different times of the day and under various weather conditions in order to capture the instantaneous changes in its perceptual appearance by focusing on the qualities of the light. Any point of view, any subject was equally interesting, whether it was the traffic on a Parisian boulevard, a fisherman’s boat at Givenchy, or a train leaving the station. After three centuries, the outstanding position that nature had enjoyed in painting began to crumble. The mechanics of photography took over as a faithful representation of reality. With it, landscape painting as the realistic representation of nature lost terrain. Although Expressionists, Fauvists, Symbolists, and Cubists still painted landscapes, they were no longer concerned with illusionist representation.

It was probably no coincidence that the movement away from the impressionistic surface ran parallel with the rise of a new psychology which se...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Cultivation of Nature
• 2. Notes on Science and Nature
• 3. Natural Elements
• 4. Earthworks – Desertworks
• 5. Robert Smithson: Art as Entropic Phenomenon
• 6. Between Landscape and Architecture
• 7. Toward a New ‘Art in Public Places’
• 8. Art into Landscape Design
• 9. Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison: The Ecological Argument
• 10. Another Nature of Reality
• 11. Joseph Beuys
• 12. The Art-Garden
• Bibliography
• Copyright