Image courtesy of Mronline.org
By Siona Ahuja ’24
Staff Writer
The environmental art movement serves as an umbrella movement to various facets of nature. It is a call to worship it, be inspired by it, conserve it and resist those who cause irreparable damage to it. These creations call for humans to recognize their inseparable bond from nature and regard it as the very force that sustains them.
Environmental art has been present since the earliest art forms, evoking sentiments of environmental interconnectedness among people with its longtime existence. Reflection of nature around humans has dated back to the paleolithic cave paintings that depict wildlife as well as hunting and gathering. Claude Monet revolutionized art and created the impressionist movement by using nature as his muse.
“For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life — the light and the air which vary continually,” Monet said. “For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.”
The environmental art movement includes several submovements such as romanticism, eco-realism, arte povera and sustainable art.
Romanticism was a reactionary artistic movement that resisted the scientific rationalization of nature during the Enlightenment Era in the 18th century. The rise of capitalism regarded elements of nature such as water and wind as commodities rather than a source of appreciation. Poets, artists and intellectuals responded by utilizing art forms that celebrated nature in its purest form. For example, John Constable, an 18th century British painter, revolutionized the environmental art movement through his naturalistic, richly colored landscape paintings.
In the late 1960s, environmental art manifested in the political sphere. The detrimental human impacts on the Earth were becoming visible in this period, and art became crucial to transforming human consciousness worldwide. Some concerns included oil spills and carbon emissions causing smog. The population explosion of the 1970s in particular led to a panic of overpopulation and its accompanying environmental pressures like pollution, starvation and resource depletion, which were depicted by artists at the time.
Land art, art made directly into the landscape using natural materials like twigs and leaves, transformed into protest art. Creating outside traditional spaces questioned the commodification of art and its placement in studios and galleries. A major land art figure is Anya Gallaccio, a British artist who creates site-specific minimalist installations and often works with organic, decaying material. Her practice of using unconventional materials like ice, sugar cubes, flowers and fruit depicts her anti-consumerist stance and prompts the viewers to think about unnecessary human intervention in nature. Her works flow well with the general transitory theme of land art that suggests impermanence in the natural world. This movement is also notable for reintroducing nature to urban landscapes, as seen with Alan Sonfist’s prominent “Time Landscape” (1965-1978), a land installation in New York City.
Arte povera, or “impoverished art,” was an avant-garde Italian movement of the 1960s that incorporated reused, commonplace and literally “poor” materials like rope, soil, rocks, paper, clothing and the like. This was a reaction to the minimalist and modernist abstract painting realm that had dominated Europe in the mid-1960s. Arte povera pieces were mainly sculptural and challenged the notion of art as a valuable, exclusive commodity. Marisa Merz was the sole female member of the initial movement and worked with unconventional items like boots, blankets and bowls of salt.
Sustainable art is an art form that is in harmony with the principles of sustainability such as social justice, ecology, grassroots democracy and nonviolence. The pieces are considered sustainable if they are made of recycled materials or by objects that do not exert any pressure on the Earth. Artists seek to highlight environmental degradation and the harsh reality of climate change through a creative medium. Camille Thibert is a French artist who creates what she calls “earthworks.” Her pieces incorporate reclaimed wood that is uniquely crafted through a drilling technique that creates shadows and textures in the portraits painted on them. By using nature as a medium, Thibert seeks to start a discussion on the vulnerability of nature and highlight how we should engage in a more conscious lifestyle.
The work of Mount Holyoke Guest Artist in Art Amanda Maciuba is concerned with the current environment and human agency within the landscape. “Artists respond to this [environmental] threat in a variety of ways, from making work that mourns ecosystems lost, or creating overtly political work that shares or exposes issues in the environmental policy world,” Maciuba said. “The work can stem from more traditional drawings and paintings that respond to or illustrate these issues, to artists that directly intervene in the environment and their communities with site-specific installations and performances.”
As an artist whose primary discipline is print media and book arts, a majority of Maciuba’s work is paper-based. Her research practice, which is to explore the environments and communities where she lives to help her draw inspiration for her work, is extensive. “I consider going out and physically exploring the environment a vitally important part of my practice,” Maciuba said.
“I also spend time investigating the people that live in a space and how they have impacted their environment,” Maciuba added. “My hope is that my work encourages viewers to reconsider their impact on their immediate communities.”
Maciuba doubts that this art movement is going away any time soon. She said that as climate disasters continue to grow more extreme, people are beginning to see how these threats impact their immediate livelihood. In line with this thought process, she announced that “the art studio department [at the College] is actually creating a new class that will specifically think about the art and ecology movement.”
“I think one of our jobs as artists is to document and critically engage with what is going on in our lives, as well as the world right now,” she added.