Art & Ecology

Bierstadt, A storm in the rocky mountains

Calanin, NEVER FORGETT Valley of Wyoming

Turner, The Thames above Waterloo Bridge

Heath, Thames Water

van Valckenborch, View of Antwerp with Frozen Schelde

Nara, Our Changing Coastline

Shirage, Challenging Mud

Long, A Ten Mile Walk England

VAGA, IJsblokkenactie

Geys, Kolen in een auto

Holt, Buried Poems

Heizer, Double Negative 1960s

Haacke, 10 turtles set free 1970s

van Snick, Autoband 1970s

Harissons, Portable Orchard (Survival Piece #5) 1970s

Earth Arts Exhibition 1970s

• land art exhibition → site-specific, natural materials

• not invasive, destructive

Chicago, Women and Smoke 1970s

Mendieta, Imagen de Yagul 1970s

• decay x cirle of life x fertility

• female power of creating & nurtering life

• burial as transformation

Sonfist, Time Landscape 1960s-1970s

• commemorate & recreate pre-industrial landscape

• research on native plants

• commemorated

• paradox

Hassinger, Twelve Trees, 1970s

• 2× 12

• highways

• industrialized world x loss of nature

• actual forests & plants are lost → humanity is left with a manufactured version of the environment

Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance 1970s-1980s

• maintenance art → domestic workers → invisible task

• trash collecters → consumption (we forget about out trash)

• sanitation workers as essential environmental caretakers

Buchanan, Marsh Ruins, 1980s

• references to one of the biggest mass suicides of enslaved people

• show the landscape

• created stones: tabi = a type of cement created with oyster shells

• flooded 2 a day → dissapears

Johanson, Fair Park Lagoon, 1980s

• 100 year anniversery of Texas

• created earlier to prevent floods

  • water polluted → crew of Delas Museum of Art decided to commission this work to make it better

  • institution playing an activist role in shaping the city & responding to environmental issues

  • walkways around the lagoon: spending time outside, observing animals & plants

Denes, Wheatfield - A Confrontation, 1980s

• horizontal field vs. vertical city

• 158 dollars worth of the cereal grain on land valued at 4.5 billion dollars

• a leisurely wheatfield vs. an island of achievement-craze culture & decadence

• a city of competence, sophistication & crime vs. an open field & unspoiled farmlands

• everlasting vs. forever changing

• recently: work contributes to the system it critisises → agriculture + colonisation

Beuys, 7000 oaks, 1980s

• oaks → donation money → many still there

• In response to the extensive urbanization of the setting the work was a long-term and large-scale artistic and ecological intervention with the goal of enduringly altering the living space of the city.

Goldsworthy, Ice Star

• at night → picture → melt

• belongs to no-one

• dissapear back to the earth

Sekula, Fish Story, 1980s-1990s

• 7 year photographic work

• world is developing at sea

• cinematic american movie posters at the other side of the world, chooses the perspective of the workers, traditional fishing village that is doomed to dissapear

• fish story

• critical realism

Chin, Revival Field, 1990s-.

• extract contaminated soils of polluted landfills → extracts them by using platns, tested in labs

• it is art: argicultural methods to shape the artwork

Superflex, Supergas, 1990s

• first made in Tanzania, lack of energy resources

• could use the poo of animals & humans to generate energy

• is merging ecological activism with NGO’s

• questionting politics that are preventing energy for these communities

Norman, Geocruiser, 2001-4

• a green bus

• library: communicate ideas of utopian ecological worlds

• lens to see other ways of living

Banerjee, Oil and the Caribou, 2002

• white “empty” space → drill for oil & minerals

• images are striking & explain what you can see

• animals migrating & footsteps are in the snow

• counters the idea that the artic is empty

• was able to amplify activist voices

• destroying the herd directly threatens the physical, cultural, and spiritual survival of Indigenous communities who have relied on them for thousands of years.

Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003

• lot of conversations are about the weather

• articial sun & mirrors & fog

• succes

• a massive multinational consumer goods corporation

• it turned a looming climate catastrophe into a cozy, indoor tourist attraction

Marakatt-Labba, Historja, 2003-7

• colonised by Sweden

• rare metals in EU → important for ‘green’ cars

• community was replaced somewhere else

• culture showed in work → the snow, stories etc.

• history lost due to colonisation

Lu, Ancient Springtime Fey, 2006

• converted garbage piles → inspired by old landscape painting

• economic growth in China → great but very bad for the climate

Forensic Architecture, Ecocide in Indonesia, 2017

• documented environmental crimes

• gather as much information as possible

• fire → huge part lost

• indonesion government was stealing land from indonesian people → got dry, mass graves of orangutan (died & killed)

  • now it is a crime

Grandville, Les Fleurs animées

• flowers x women

• right: sensitive so she is dressed up as a plant that closes when she’s anxious

• women as passive & needing a caregiver

Van Spiegel, Illustration from De furmato foetu

• belief that plants were female

• they didn’t understand how plants reproduce

• fertility of nature x fertility of women

Barrias, La Nature se dévoilant

• mother nature disrobing before the scientists, presented in a way of exposion herself

Blechen, The interior of the Palm House on the Pfauninsel Near Potsdam

• collection of palm trees → exotic plant

• built building for these palm trees

• commissioned these paintings to show the palm treees

• women are also exoticized: visually pleasing → their position is also objectified just as the palm trees

Attacks on the orchid houses and the tea pavilion by suffragettes

• they also attacked botanical gardens

• attacking those kind of arts that compare them to nature

Francseca Woodman, Untitled

• using her own body in the landscape

Vargas-Periera

• using her own body in the landscape

Aguilar, Nature Self-Portrait

• different body-types in the landscape

• brown, queer body → doesn’t align with the beauty standard

Chipko Movement

• women who decided to protect the trees from logging

Greenham Commons Women’s Peace Camp

• protest against American Nuclear weapons being stored in the UK
  peaceful encampment around the nuclear storage

• activist example of how the ideas of eco-feminist writers were put in practice

Harfleet, The Pansy Project

·       Mostly active in the UK but also in USA, Belgium, France…

·       Plants pansies in the places were homophobic attacks took place

·       To turn those places in more positive thing

Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors

·       2 ambassadors visiting the English court

·       Symbolizing the new powers: Christianity & capitalism

·       Instrument of the 7 liberal arts

·       Distorted skull > foreshadowing of wat is coming with the colonial period

·       Entangled violence: relation between European expansion, invasion, settlement & domination and the development of large-scale agriculture represents an entangled violence

·       Colonialism converted “almost all non-human life into objects for capitalist accumulation, transforming pre-existing human animal relation, and altering food production and consumption – Wadiwel

Gast, American Progress

·       The claim of new land x the erasure of a indigenous people

Igarashi, Kuarupu

·       Show what is happening with settler colonialism

·       They destroy the rainforest to be able to instal agricultural ambitions

o   Local people & animals die

o   Story ends: shifts to a different location > in the hamburger we see local indigenous people, animals, plants > attention to the agricultural animals that die & local indigenous for agricultural profits

Karrabing Film Collective, Just because you can't see it..., 2018

T.J. Cuthand, Reclamation, 2018

Groundswell in the Strait of Dover : Claiming Nature’s Right to Be Reborn, Hilde Van Gelder

Evans, Threads from the Refugee Crisis

De Myle, Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat, 16th century

Ping, Theater of the world, 20th century

Coutts, The Inheritors, 20th century

Chalmers, Electric Chair, 20th century

Anderson, Winnie the Pooh, 2011

Dion, Survial of the cutest (who gets on the ark?), 20th century

Custafsonn & Haapoja, The Museum of the History of Cattle, 2013

Staal, Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes, 2021

Cardoso, Flea Circus, 20th century

Shimabuku, Sculptures for Octopuses: Exploring their favorite colors, 2010

DEGAS, A COTTON OFFICE IN NEW ORLEANS, 19th century

CORREGIO & MILLAIS

Brueghel the Elder, Big Bouquet in a Wooden Vessel, 17th century