Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists

INTRODUCTION: True to Nature

xv INTRODUCTION True to Nature The artists whose works I have selected for inclusion in this book come from a variety of countries in Europe and North America. Each has a particular way of working with nature, of expressing their art in tandem with nature. Each brings their own specific experience to bear on this new paradigm. I discovered them one by one. And each brought a new awareness of the incredible versatility and variety of responses artists can have to place. Indeed many of the ideas initiated by these artists are seized on by professionals in others fields— landscapers, designers, architects, horticulturists, educators, and craftspeople. This gives a sense of how relevant an art that deals with the experience of nature really can be, even more so in a world where new technological innovations are increasingly pulling us away from direct experience—the tactile world—into a parallel experience indulged on, and produced by, the microscreen technology. As Marshall McLuhan has stated: “What may emerge as the most important insight of the twenty-first century is that man was not designed to live at the speed of light. Without the countervailing balance of natural and physical laws, the new video-related media will make man implode upon himself. As he sits in the informational control room, whether at home or at work, receiving data at enormous speeds—imagistic, sound, or tactile—from all areas of the world, the results could be dangerously inflating and schizophrenic. His body will remain in one place but his mind will float out into the electronic void, being everywhere at once on the data bank.”1 Less is more. And if we recognize the incredible variety of forms, materials , and combinations of matter that exist in nature, we can only say that we learn from nature. A walk in the woods or in a park produces innumerable stimuli, and our senses capture all of this, whether consciously or unconsciously . The variation in the real world has not yet been equaled in the world of technology. Over half a century ago, the writer and novelist E. B. White, in his essay “Removal,” wrote that our future technologies, “Will insist that we forget the primary in favour of the secondary and remote . . . digesting ideas, Introduction xvi sounds, images—distant and concocted, seen in a panel of light—these will emerge as the real and the true; and when we bang the door of our own cell or look into another’s face, the impression will be of mere artifice.” In the future, a time would come “when all is reversed and we shall be like the insane to whom the antics of the sane seem (like) the crazy twistings of a grig.”2 And more recently art critic Robert Hughes, writing in Time magazine, addressed the high-tech revolution’s promised new territory for art: “All Human Knowledge Will Be There. With a roll and click of the mouse we will summon Titian’s Assumption from the Friari in Venice onto our home screen, faithful in every respect—except that it isn’t, being much smaller, with different (electronic) colour, no texture, no surface and no physical reality, and in no way superior (except for the opportunity to zoom in on detail) to an ink reproduction in a book . . . but how many people will realize the only way to know Titian is to study the actual, unedited physical works of his hands, in real space, not cyberspace?”3 These opinions are not rare or exclusive. They reflect a growing awareness that the legacy of modernism and postmodernism in art is one of environmental deprivation and segregation of arts activity from nature. Economic progress generally leads to a quantitative approach to art. Materialist history presents the evolution of art as a successive layering of movements and avantgardisms . This ideological approach deifies individualism and promotes “egosystems of expression” that nurture an exploitative view of culture and history. Often, an ideological approach seems almost a required attitude to be considered active in the field of contemporary artmaking. But the public in general seems far ahead of the art world. They have seized the significance of nature in the contemporary debate on the future of our planet, its resources, and their progeny. I am not speaking of nature in the romantic sense, as a sublime spiritual source, or as an embodiment of a Judeo-Christian worldview, but more pragmatically as a real-life presence...