A fundamentally new view of environmental art that traces a cultural
shift toward the unruly complexities of global ecologies.
As the American environmental movement emerged in the 1960s and 1970s,
ecological perspectives also emerged in art. But ecological artworks
were not limited to conventional understandings of environmental art as
something that had to be located outdoors or made of organic materials.
Created in a range of media, they reflected a widespread
reconceptualization of the material world and a sense of the
interconnectedness of all things. In this book, James Nisbet
investigates the many levels of intersection between ecology and art in
the 1960s and 1970s, examining a series of works that served as sensory
interfaces to ecological concepts and reflected the shifting notions of
ecology during the period.
Nisbet first examines practices of land art that sought to revise the
relationship of art to the biological world. He explores the
all-but-forgotten genre of Environments, founded by Allan Kaprow, which
produced both closed environments bounded by the gallery's walls and
psychedelic multimedia environments; and he examines the transition
between minimalism and land art, considering the "planetary visions"
that cast singular objects within holistic ecosystems--a sensibility
that infused such canonical earthworks as Michael Heizer's Double
Negative and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. Nisbet then turns to
work informed by the language of energy and the ecological notion that
all matter is in process, including Robert Barry's radio wave
installations and Simone Forti's performances. Finally, he considers
Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field, finding in it a reflection of
the conflicts within ecological thinking of the 1970s. Offering a
radically new view of environmental art, Nisbet traces a cultural turn
from an art that addresses artificially confined environments and
simplified allegories of the planet to one that increasingly takes on
the "unruly complexities" of global ecologies.
