Environmental Conservation Spring 2006: Environmental Art Project

Overview of the Assignment

This assignment is designed to be an introduction to the exciting and innovative world of environmental art.  The assignment has three parts.  Part I involves a visit to the Brauer Museum of Art or another museum (see below), Part II involves a visit to several online art galleries.  In Part III you’ll get to try your hand at creating your own environmental artwork.  The assignment is designed to be done during the first week of April when we will not be meeting for class.  However, you might find that this is a relaxing and fun activity that fits in with your spring break travel.  If your spring break plans involve lots of time sitting around at home bored to death, Part II and III might be an especially relaxing antidote.  (Though your relatives may think you are a bit crazy when they see your Christo-esque drapings of the bushes in the back yard.) You may do Part I or II in any order that is convenient for you.  If you are going out into nature during spring break you may want to use the place you visit as part of your art project.  Doing at least the web surfing component of Part II before you leave will provide some inspiration.  If your spring break travels involve going to an art museum during spring break, you might also choose to do Part I at another museum.  If you wish you may do a collaborative project for Part III with other members of the class, but you should all do it together (don’t divide up the work and go your separate ways) and you will need to do your own artist’s statement and describe your particular contributions in the statement. Feel free to involve family members, friends, neighbors, and even strangers in your art.

Introduction

Most of the semester has been focused on scientific, social, and ethical issues related to the environment.  However, the study of the environment is motivated not just by the clear need to preserve and conserve the environment, but also by an appreciation for nature’s beauty and at times by a clear love of place, or topophilia.  While science can help us to understand the environment in great detail, communicating the value of the environment, visualizing human modification of landscapes and our interconnection with natural systems, and providing inspiration for action to preserve or conserve the environment is often the domain of art.  Much of the time it is our emotional response to the environment that motivates care and stewardship. 

Environmental art is perhaps as old as art itself.  What has changed over time is how art represents the human relationship with nature.  For example, early forms of landscape painting in Italy used the technique of linear perspective to give the viewer a sense of ownership and mastery of the landscape.  Often these landscape paintings were commissioned by rich landowners seeking to represent their wealth through paintings of their verdant and bountiful estates.  The message was one of domination or control of the environment rather than interrelation. 

Today, views of the human relationship with nature are reflected in, and shaped by, a genre of art typically given the name “environmental art.”  While there is no one philosophy or attitude towards the environment that all environmental artists share, a concern with human/environment interrelationships often informs environmental art.  While some artists claim to have no particular environmental agenda, other artists are more directly involved in using artwork to further the environmental movement. Environmental may blur the boundaries between art and science by incorporating fully scientific or quasi-scientific experiments within the artwork.  Some artists seek to involve the viewing public in observation of the environment itself in order to help people understand how their own lives intersect with the natural spaces around them.  Sometimes the artist may involve the public in the process of creating environmental art.  In many cases the artwork itself is not only about nature, but is actually of nature.  Earthworks for example are works that reshape earth and vegetation into living sculptures.  Environmental artists might manipulate nature on a large scale, and may even require environmental impact studies to execute their projects.  Other times artists manipulate nature on a much smaller scale.  Often, like nature itself, environmental art is ephemeral (or temporary).  It is either displayed for a short time or is allowed to decay over time.  Sometimes it may even be staged in remote places where very few will have a chance to see it.  This often means that the only way to access the work is through photographs or video documentation.  In some cases written accounts are the only documentation possible or allowed by the artist. 

The following are specific instructions for this three part assignment.

Part I Visit an Art Museum

Take a notebook with you to the Brauer Muesuem of Art on campus (in the VUCA) and browse through the exhibits looking for paintings, photographs, and sculptures that have the environment as their theme or that have the human relationship with nature as their theme.  You will likely be looking at landscape paintings or photographs (rather than one of a flower in a vase or an isolated natural object, or a portrait).  Our museum has a significant collection of landscape paintings (The Sloan collection).

After you have browed for awhile, pick one particular painting, photo, or sculpture and sit or stand in front of it and take it all in.  What does the work depict (if anything)?  What emotions does it evoke? What is the mood of the painting?  What natural elements are present? What human elements are present?  What does the work suggest about the human relationship with nature?  Is the landscape depicted (if it is one) ordered?  Is it chaotic?  Is the environment nurturing?  Is agriculture or industry present?  Are human figures or workers present and if they are they busy at work or are they relaxing or are they viewing the scene?  Does the work suggest any sort of ownership of land?

Right there in the gallery, in your notebook write a short response (one or two pages) that describes the work of art (include the title and artist) and that reflects upon some of the above questions.  Please type up your response later before you hand it in.  Feel free to revise it as you do if new insights come to mind.

Part II Environmental Art Online

View the websites for the three artists listed below and the Green Museum site.  Be sure to browse a variety of their different works of art on each site and read the written descriptions that accompany the illustrations.  Write a response to each of the artists’ work in a short paragraph that addresses some of the questions below. Each of these three artists take a somewhat different approach to environmental art.  The Green Museum is fun to browse through in order to see the diversity of the environmental art being created.      

 

Christo and Jeanne-Claude http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/

Robert Smithson http://www.robertsmithson.com/index_.htm

Ruth Wallen http://communication.ucsd.edu/rwallen/

Green Museum  http://www.greenmuseum.org/

 

1. What do you think of Christo and Jean Claude’s work?  Is it art?  Is there any work that you particularly like or dislike? Does their art have a specific meaning or does it communicate a particular message to you? What kind of relationship between humans and the environment does it communicate if any?  Choose one work of theirs and analyze what you think it might mean.  Be sure that you take some time to read a little bit about the process they go through to create their works and be sure that you take a look at a variety of their work—the later projects. Running Fence, The Umbrellas, Valley Curtain, and Surrounded Islands are particularly stunning. Of course at the moment their most famous work is The Gates in New York's Central Park.

2.  What is your overall response to Robert Smithson’s work?  What were Robert Smithson’s materials?  Read the essay on the controversy over Spiral Jetty “Salt of the Earth” by Melissa Sanford http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/sanford.htm.  Should this work have been left to decay or should it have been restored? 

3.  What is your overall response to Ruth Wallen’s art?  How does her work blend science and art? (See especially The Sea as Sculptress) How does she involve the viewer and the public as participants in her art? (See Arroyo Secco and San Bernadino Children’s Forest Interpretive Trail)  What critiques and calls to action does her art provide?

4.  At the Green Museum site, choose one artist and write a brief reflection on their work. 

Part III Do your own environmental Art

Now that you’ve had some inspiration, it is time to try your own hand at creating some environmental art.  I’m leaving this one wide open for you, but observe the limitations and requirements listed below.  You will not be graded on the quality of your work, but rather upon the creativity you employ and the quality of the ideas that you express or evoke in and through your work.  The important thing is to give it a try.

Limitations (just in case)

First of all, do not do anything illegal or that causes environmental degradation or harm.  (In other words, no earthwork sculptures unless it is in a sandbox, your own back yard with your parent’s or the homeowner’s permission, or on the beach where it will be naturally destroyed.)  Ideally your art should improve the environment but it does not have to.  Also please follow the slogan “Take only photographs. Leave only footprints,” and do not remove plants, animals, or other natural objects from protected parklands or other wild areas. 

Requirements for Part III

You must either hand in your artwork or hand in photographic, illustrated, or written documentation (or a combination).  I hope to open a small gallery of some of your work somewhere on campus.

In addition you should hand in an artist’s statement that describes your thinking behind the work and a little bit about how you created it (materials used, how it was executed, when and where).    

Suggestions

Do not be limited by these suggestions.  Use the works that you have viewed in parts I and II as inspiration.

• Do a landscape painting, drawing, or take a photograph depicting a particular environment.   You may want to simply evoke nature’s beauty.  Perhaps you might depict how humans have modified the landscape.  Or perhaps your work might show how humans and nature are interconnected. 
• Do a drawing or sketch of a favorite place. 
• Start a nature journal. Sketch or draw plants, animals, and places that you visit. Record time, date, weather conditions etc. Identify plants that you draw using plant identification books. Track changes in the seasons and in the landscape. Use your nature journal to learn something about the place where you live.
• Make an “art film” or video on some environmental theme.  (Employ badly written voice over dialog to make your film come alive! Perhaps the best view of the Thames….)
• Make a sculpture out of salt dough or clay.  Or do a wood carving. 
• Scan a natural object or series of objects into a computer (leaves work well for this)—manipulate the image in Photoshop or another graphics program.  Add text or poetry. 
• Take a photograph or a series of photographs that seek to frame nature in an unconventional way.  Leave the photos as they are, or scan them into a computer and manipulate them further.
• Enhance understanding of a particular natural environment by temporarily installing interpretive signs, viewing devices, or poems in appropriate places.  Document your project through photography. Uninstall everything when you are done.  (for example see Ruth Wallen’s Arroyo Seco or Viewpoint at Tijuana Estuary).
• Clean up the trash in a small area and create a sculpture or collage with what you find. (Particuarly smelly works of art will be handed back to you immediately--so don't get too gross.)
• Build a sand sculpture on the beach that evokes an environmental theme ( See for example Robert Smithson’s work). 
• Document the way that a particular place changes over time with a series of photographs or drawings. 
• Create some art that helps the viewer better visualize some environmental problem or scientific principle that we have discussed this semester.
• Create a website that communicates environmental themes in an artistic and interactive way. (See for example Ruth Wallen’s If Frogs Sicken and Die or some of her other online pieces.)
• Make an artistic map depicting some environmental issue or problem.
• Decorate everyday objects from your home in ways that communicate their origins in nature. 
• Buy several disposable cameras (or use a digital camera), give them to the neighborhood kids, take them around the neighborhood and show them something about the environment that you have learned in this class.  Let them loose to take pictures of the nature that can be found in the neighborhood.  Use their pictures in a collage that you create together.  Perhaps you might compare their pictures with ones that you take.  (Be sure that you get double prints so that they get to keep a copy.) A variation on this might be to do the same with your family members or friends either at home or on vacation. 
• Make a birdhouse, a rain gauge, or wind vane.
• Do an artistic “installation” in your family’s living room...   OK that might be going a bit off the deep end, but you get the idea.  Above all have fun with this. 

 

Checklist of items to hand in

1.  Art Museum Response

2.  Brief responses to online galleries

3.  Artwork (or documentation)

4. Your artist’s statement