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9. NATURE VISION: Nils-Udo
- State University of New York Press
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95 9 NATURE VISION Nils-Udo Active in the field of environmental art since the 1960s, Nils-Udo builds structures, elaborates on the landscape in a scale that fits, montaging natural materials on site. Thus links are established between horticulture and art, but with a basic sensitivity to the history of the landscape and land. Nils-Udo’s approach is tactile and often extemporaneous, creates a visual counterpoint between the various organic and inorganic elements. Site specific and with an integrative approach Nils-Udo’s plantings were a major breakthrough in the field of contemporary art. The trees, plants, and materials he has used in works such as To Gustav Mahler (1973), Birch Tree Planting (1975), and Spruce Tree Planting (1976) embroider on nature using living natural elements in situ. Structures—both hidden and visible—likewise play a role. Romantic Landscape (1992) a permanent installation on the grounds of Ludwig Forum for International Art in Aachen, Germany, an entire “natural landscape,” is raised onto an artificial platform, and is used by children who frequent the grounds. In New Delhi, India, Nils-Udo presented garlands of marigold flowers that flow in long lines like curtains to cover an ancient arch structure evoking a sense of the sacred. The Blue Flower: Landscape for Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1993–1996), a craterlike earth mound near Munich has a closed gate that contains a pond and plantings of about ten thousand blue wildflowers in a newly generated ecosystem. Thus Nils-Udo’s interest in plantings merges with a built-up earth structure. In 1994 at the Chateau de Làas near Pau in France, he created a living spiral comprising various corn species to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the introduction of corn to Europe from the Americas . In the center, an octagonal tower was built, with original nonhydrid species of Mayan corn growing on top. At the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, France, he recently created a fairy tale-like piece that merges his interest in earth structures and planted elements, and near Mont Tremblant in Quebec, a major boulder and cave work titled Pre-Cambrian Sanctuary (2003). Nature’s process of endless reproduction and recreation usually goes unrecognized by most of us as we go about our daily lives. Nils-Udo breaks Nature Vision 96 through this dream state of contemporary culture to make explicit the many ways we perceive, define, and reflect on reality. Nils-Udo: Art in Nature was recently published by Flammarion (2002), as well as a book on Nils-Udo’s Nests by Editions Cercle d’art in France (2003). JG You have worked in environmental art since the 1960s. Were others working in the field at the time? N-U I did not know any artist whose subject was living nature in such a comprehensive, fundamental sense—including all the natural phenomena humans are receptive to. Nor did the minimalist work of Richard Long have this approach. Even less so, the works by American land artists who were often fairly indifferent to the vitality inherent in nature. JG You live in Europe, where peoples’ perspectives on nature and the environment are quite different from those in North America, or Asia for that matter. How did your art evolve into environmental in the early years? Can you remember a specific point when you said, I want to make environmental art? Was the original impulse a romantic one, ideological, ecological, or did it evolve out of an interest in the aesthetic of the landscape itself? N-U The works I created in Paris in the 1960s using living plants and natural materials marked my first step toward moving away from panel painting and studio work. Moving from Paris to rural Bavaria, perceiving the endangerment of nature, its growing destruction, I lived through a profound change of awareness . Being a part of nature, being embedded in it and living on it, it appeared to me that acting in compliance with the laws of nature was something selfevident and necessary for survival. To preserve the original character of nature , its unscathed condition, because like preserving the air I breathed, the basis of my existence. Any human interference could bring about nothing but destruction and extinction. Every newly detected piece of destroyed nature brought me to the verge of despair. Since the very beginning of my work with and in nature in 1972, plantings have been my central focus. I started out by leasing land from...