Ecological art, or eco-art to use the abbreviated term, addresses both the heart and the mind. Ecological art work can help engender an intuitive appreciation of the environment, address core values, advocate political action, and broaden intellectual understanding.
Ecological art is much more than a traditional painting, photograph, or sculpture of the natural landscape. While such works may be visually pleasing, they are generally based on awe inspiring or picturesque, preconceived views of the natural world. Ecological art, in contrast, is grounded in an ethos that focuses on communities and inter-relationships. These relationships include not only physical and biological pathways but also the cultural, political and historical aspects of communities or ecological systems.
The focus of a work of art can range from elucidating the complex structure of an ecosystem, examining a particular issue, i.e. a type of relationship, interacting with a given locale, or engaging in a restorative or premeditative function. Eco-art may explore, re-envision, or attempt to heal aspects of the natural environment that have gone unnoticed or reflect human neglect. The work may challenge the viewer's preconceptions and/or encourage them to change their behavior. Metaphor is often a key element of ecological art. Metaphors help both to make apparent existing patterns of relationship and to envision new types of interaction.
Artwork created by artists concerned with the state of our environment worldwide, and with their local situation. Environmental artists often work in these ways:
• Artists interpret nature, creating artworks to inform us about nature and its processes, or about environmental problems we face
• Artists interact with environmental forces, creating artworks affected or powered by wind, water, lightning, even earthquakes
• Artists re-envision our relationship to nature, proposing through their work new ways for us to co-exist with our environment
Artists reclaim and remediate damaged environments, restoring nature in artistic and often aesthetic ways
A creative process that recognizes the historic dichotomy between nature and culture and works towards healing the human relationship to the natural world and its ecosystems. Eco-art is also fundamentally interdisciplinary. We cannot rely on the art world as the only point of engagement and interpretation and must utilize other perspectives. Furthermore, the artists involved in this practice cannot confine their learning or production to art. In this interdisciplinary model, artists expand their practice by moving outside their discipline and its institutionalized relationship to society. Eco-Art expands each of the combined perspectives, thus providing artists with a new path to social engagement. Inherent in this path is the responsibility for artists to educate themselves in multiple disciplines. In turn, the work needs to be received and evaluated for the totality of its intention and not by traditional artistic standards alone.
Objectives of Eco-Art
• Advocate compassionately for natural and human communities
• Address damages to diversity and dynamics of ecosystems
• Express value, with the intention of transformation
• Balance the technical with the biological and ecological
• Encourage interdisciplinary expert participation and knowledge
• Facilitate a supplementary response through discourse with citizens
• Create conceptually informed aesthetic experience of complex systems.
Vocabulary we must learn to understand ECO ART
• Earthwork - a type of contemporary art begun in the 1960s and '70s, which uses the landscape, or environment, as its medium
• Ecology - both the totality of interconnected relations amongst organisms and the environing world, and the science which studies this.
• EcoART - a broad field of interdisciplinary arts practice, distinguished from Land Art and Environmental Art by its specific focus on world sensitive ideologies and methodologies. EcoART practice seeks to Restore, Protect and Preserve the world for its own sake, and to mediate human/world relations to this end.
• EcoTECH - "earth-friendly" technologies; often utilized in or developed through EcoART practices.
• Environmental Art - a general term referring to art in and/or about the environment. Not necessarily world-sensitive or remedial practice.
• Land Art - similar to Earthwork, an art category denoting works on, or utilizing, the land.
Links to see images and get more information about Eco Art.
http://www.ghostnets.com/
http://ecoart.stores.yahoo.net/ecarttv.html
