Art and ecology now; contribution to the growing list of books on art and the environment. Presenting the work of over 70 ecologically oriented artists and artist collectives working around the world, Andrew Brown presents an accessible, engaging, and well-illustrated compendium that is useful as an introduction to the topic but will also be of interest to more knowledgeable readers. The introductory chapter begins with the acknowledgement that the places where contemporary art is experienced – museums, galleries, web, and print media – are presenting ecologically oriented art at a level that suggests that Eco-art is more that just a passing fad in the art world. Brown provides a fast-paced flyover of the history of western art, from the prehistoric era to the present day, in an attempt to provide historical context for the work presented in the following chapters . This is especially important for the lay reader who might otherwise wonder where the “art” i...
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"One of Britain’s leading contemporary artists, Whiteread uses industrial materials such as plaster, concrete, resin, rubber and metal to cast everyday objects and architectural space. Her evocative sculptures range from the intimate to the monumental. Born in London in 1963, Whiteread was the first woman to win the Turner Prize in 1993 . The same year she made House 1993–1994, a life-sized cast of the interior of a condemned terraced house in London’s East End, which existed for a few months before it was controversially demolished. This momentous show tracks Whiteread’s career and brings together well-known works such as Untitled (100 Spaces) 1995 and Untitled (Staircase) 2001 alongside new pieces that have never been previously exhibited" (taken from Tate Britiain) The exhibition showing works from Whitereads expansive career as an artist was truely memorable. As an artist interested in the process of casting objects and th...
Gustave Courbet - social and ethical concerns - Gustave Courbet was central to the emergence of Realism in the mid-nineteenth century. Rejecting the classical and theatrical styles of the French Academy , his art insisted on the physical reality of the objects he observed - even if that reality was plain and blemished. Courbet's Realism can be understood as part of the wider inquiry into the physical world that occupied science in the nineteenth century. But in his own realm of art, he was most inspired by his distaste for strictures of the French Academy. He rejected Classical or Romantic treatments and instead took humble scenes of country life - subjects usually considered the stuff of minor genre painting - and made them material for great history painting. For this he gained huge notoriety. During the Paris Commune of 1871, Courbet briefly abandoned painting for a role in government. This was characteristic of his left-wing commitments. His art was not...
The statistics that redefine our environmental destruction are shocking and undermined by the governments static action. This action (or lack of) is in the interest of corporate economic statistics and 'advancement'. My static wall sculpture/intervention using found objects and materials echoes a grid, often used in statistical mapping and recording. The wash of film redefines this grid to realise the reality of human interaction within the environment and appreciation. An interaction undefinable through statistics and easily lost through static of action and public mobilisation. The films unruled chronology is a further mark of this unpredictable landscape of reality masked in statistics. Re-emergence of human form within the landscapes reiterates the disconnection suffered in present day. The aim of this film was to distract myself from the overwhelming pressures that research brings to this course, i felt myself getting lost within my research and what i was trying to conv...
"Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on the one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity. To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing. If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out. T.S. Eliot, in his essay on "Tradition and Individual Talent", writes: "The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material." Millions of artists create; only a fe...
The Preface presents Marxist analyses of the construction of society and of the place of art in a capitalist society; and explains the socio-economic conditions to extrapolate future developments of capitalism, which, ultimately, result in the exploitation of the proletariat, and produce the social conditions that would abolish capitalism. Benjamin reviews the development of the means of the mechanical reproduction of art — an artist manually copying the work of a master artist; the industrial arts of the foundry and the stamp mill in Ancient Greece; woodcut relief-printing, etching, engraving, lithography, and photography — to establish that artistic reproduction is not a modern human activity, and that the modern means of artistic reproduction permit greater accuracy throughout the process of mass production. Benjamin discusses the concept of authenticity, of being in accordance with fact, noting that “even the...
German Fluxus, happening, and performance artist as well as a sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist, and pedagogue. His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social sculpture as a gesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics. His career was characterised by open public debates on a very wide range of subjects including political, environmental, social and long term cultural trends. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th century. As one of the more influential artists of the 20th century. His was a strong belief in the power of art to transform society. He believed that art had an important social, cultural and political function and was confident in the power of art to bring about revolutionary change. “Only art is capable ...
A pioneer of environmental art and a representative of the European development of Land Art or Art in Nature, Alio Bonanno is a site-specific, outdoor installation artist who has been creating large-scale sculptures within selected, natural environments for the past 35 years. The symbiosis between art, nature and ecology is an important aspect of his work, as is his role as artist, consultant and lecturer. In 1985 his Sound Year Installation at the Mir Museum in Barcelona, Spain, a collaboration with Danish composer Gunner Muller Pedersen, was seen as a breakthrough in environmental art. Mir Museum produced a film of the Sound Year Project. It was on his initiative and with him as chairman that TICKON, Tranekar International Centre for Art and Nature was created on the Danish Island of Langeland in 1990. In 2004 he created Himmelh j, a sculpture landscape containing four major site specific works. In 2000 Lars R. Jensen and Torben K. Madsen with support from the Danish Film Institute a...
"Recycled plastic in a certain quality of flow. In society plastic generally implies a way of thinking in which all things are disposable yet it features in the majority of our highly priced possessions." Petermans work is an expression of the way in which he confronts problems in our post-industrial society, focusing on the issues of consumerism, affluence, ecological pollution and homelessness. He creates seemingly interventionist works in which he provokes debate on "art in public spaces". His wok also functions as a social meeting place, raising questions about the social function of art. The interests transcends the depredation of the environment and is concerned with social consequences of intervention in the eco-system and relationships to financial and symbolic values. La plage (plastic bones) Plastic bones are the basic elements of this exhibition. Each one is similar to the next, but subtly varied in form and color. Each one is palm-sized, smooth, ...