Environment in Art and/or Art in Environment

How do artists view and incorporate environmental themes in their work. Does the environment simply provide the artist a palette of materials or setting to work with or is the artist’s work specifically about the natural world, its status and future?  A related issue is that one of the most pejorative terms in modern art criticism is the word, decorative. This ties into the ongoing dialectic in contemporary art between beauty and provocation. So much of what has been called environmental art is indeed, pretty.

Most art history surveys point out that after the Greek and Roman Classical Period, Western art focused exclusively on religious subjects until the Renaissance. It really wasn’t until the 16^th century that art subjects other than human received much attention. By this time natural scenes began to appear as background to human activities. Landscape painting didn’t really develop until the 17^th Century with practitioners such as Claude Lorrain. In this country the Hudson River School, exemplified by Frederic Church gained popularity in the mid 19^th Century about the time of Frederick Law Olmstead was inventing landscape architecture as a profession. My point is that the environment as a conscious subject for art is a comparatively recent topic.

Fast forwarding a bit, in the 60s, sculptors such as Robert Smithson and others began creating site specific pieces utilizing the landscape, a tradition carried on by diverse practioners including Christo, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy and Maya Lin, among others. One limitation of such site specific art is the need for land, and often large equipment to realize the work. It requires money and probably several types of approval. This is a far cry from the stereotype of the renegade artist in a small studio working on a controversial subject using paints, canvas, video or a computer.