What we should learn from ecological art

To anyone not familiar with ecological art of the kind that one encounters in nature, the very notion may seem incongruous. Isn’t art what one finds at art galleries and museums? And even if one grants that art found in galleries may also be in the broadest sense of the concept ‘ecological art’ in so far as it addresses different themes regarding nature (traditional western art such as Turner and Constable’s romantic landscapes also implicates nature, after all), what is the sense of making or creating artworks out in the open — not merely the ‘open’ of town squares or city parks, but ‘really’ out in nature?

The short answer to this question is that such art (a gradually or rapidly disintegrating ‘sculpture’ made out of ice, on a rock next to a river, for example) may be understood as an attempt to model an appropriately ‘ethical’ relationship between humans and nature. But why ethical? Is art not all about aesthetic qualities such as beauty and form? The artist Othello Anderson (in Suzi Gablik’s book, The Re-enchantment of Art) provides a startling justification for ecological art, and one that does not strike one as being aesthetic, but precisely as ethical:

‘Carbon and other pollutants are emitted into the air in such massive quantities that large areas of forest landscapes are dying from the effects of acid rain. Millions of tons of toxic waste are being poured into our lakes, rivers and oceans, contaminating drinking water and killing off aquatic life. Slash-and-burn forest clearing and forest fires are depleting the forests worldwide. Recognising this crisis, as an artist I can no longer consider making art that is void of moral consciousness, art that carries no responsibility, art without spiritual content, or art that ignores the state of the world in which it exists.’

Anderson’s words not only powerfully foreground the inescapable responsibility that human beings bear for the well-being of the planet we all call home (except, of course, when it suits one’s pocket to turn a blind eye to the ruinous effects of human economic practices on natural ecosystems), but draws attention to something else: the indissoluble interconnectedness of things, which has been under scrutiny since the second half of the 20th century in various disciplines, especially the biological ones.

This growing awareness of interconnectedness finds expression in the by now familiar, so-called ‘butterfly effect’ of chaos theory, and also implicates the Gaia hypothesis, which proposes that we think about the planet, not as a neutral surface on which organisms live in various ecosystems, but as itself a gigantic organism.

If one remembers that anything which goes wrong in any ‘part’ of a complex organism, affects every other part of it (think of the way a broken toe affects one’s entire being, not merely one’s entire body) then it should be obvious that damage inflicted on any part of natural environments on the planet will unavoidably eventually affect every other part of nature on the planet. This, I would suggest, is the other aspect of what ecological art foregrounds in various ways, the first being what I mentioned earlier, namely its embodiment of an ‘ethical’ relationship with nature.

What, then, is ‘ecological’ art compared to previous conceptions of art as a distinctive human cultural practice? The work of someone whom I consider to be the paradigmatic ecological artist, namely Andy Goldsworthy, illustrates clearly what is distinctive about it. In Goldsworthy’s work, which (like much traditional art) involves nature and ‘natural’ materials, the ‘creative’ moment traditionally associated with art is retained, even if sometimes (for instance in the case of pebbles, arranged in a certain conspicuous pattern) such creativity may seem ‘minimal’ and only goes as far as selecting and ordering or organizing them in a certain sequence of the artist’s choice.

The reason for this seems to be that his art is predicated on minimal disturbance of, or interference with, nature. For that reason, most of his ecological creations do not involve any manufacturing or processing machine tools of any kind (although there are some instances of ‘permanent sculptures’, such as his Three Cairns, where such tools have been used by him). Because they are mostly the result of the artist simply rearranging materials and/or objects found in nature in a specific way, it means that they interfere minimally with the environment where the artwork is situated or placed.

It therefore comes as no surprise that many of his works — such as those comprising arrangements or ‘sculptures’ of twigs, stone, thorns, flowers, leaves, mud or snow — are fleeting or ephemeral, and his photographs of these fleeting ‘works’ capture them at what he considers to be the ‘peak’ of the cycle or process of growth and decay of which they form a part. In fact, although Goldsworthy considers these ephemeral works to be his true artworks, his photographs of them may be seen as traditional photographic art, with the difference that they are photographs (artworks) of his own (nature) artworks, and not of the usual subject matter found in photography.

From these remarks about Goldsworthy’s work one may gather that a crucial difference between ecological art and traditional modern (western) art is that, while the latter is conceived of in fundamentally ‘aesthetic’ terms, ecological art is not. Not that ecological art does not display ‘aesthetic’ features, if by that is meant that such works are beautiful, pleasing, and so on, but it differs decisively from traditional art in so far as it does not present itself ‘framed’ by some conventional, aestheticizing device to indicate its ontological distinctiveness and ‘uselessness’ compared to ordinary, pragmatic objects of use.

What is presented ‘in’ the traditional frame is to be understood as ‘aesthetic’, as belonging to a space of its own; hence the presence of such works in museums. (This does not preclude such works from having ethical value, of course, but such ethical value, where it exists, is established very differently in traditional art, compared to ecological art.) Artists like Goldsworthy, by contrast to traditional artists, situate their artworks in nature, as if to intimate that these works embody a human, that is cultural, ‘presence’ in nature as a ‘guest’, an equal, and not as a ‘master’ intent on using nature’s materials in a manner that inserts a wedge of alienation between humanity and nature.

The important thing to note here is that, in his artistic practice, Goldsworthy does not approach nature as an ‘object’ to be represented or depicted, but as Heidegger would say, in a manner that ‘lets’ her natural processes of growth and decay, warming and freezing, ‘be’ without harnessing them to ends that would alienate them from themselves as they are in nature. He enters into a relationship with nature as a partner or collaborator. Accordingly, one of the books (by himself) with striking reproductions of (his and others’) photographs of some of these ephemeral ‘works’ — for instance sculptures consisting of twigs, icicles, or of packed snow — is aptly titled: Andy Goldsworthy — A collaboration with nature (1990).

This, I would suggest, seems to comprise the distinctive difference between traditional art, conceived as artworks or ‘art objects’ created by independent, autonomous individuals, and ecological art. Instead of imposing aesthetic forms on nature in the shape of different kinds of materials, ecological art witnesses to a participatory relationship between artist and nature (or society — there are ecological artists who work in social environments) considered as ecological totalities (of which the artist therefore forms a part). In Heideggerian terms one might say that ecological art truly lets nature, society or the world be a world. And this is a profoundly ethical thing to do.

(Anyone interested in a more elaborate treatment of the issues raised here, could read my article: ‘Ecological art and the transformation of society’, in South African Journal of Art History, Vol. 22 [1] 2007, pp.24-34.)