5. Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (excerpt), 1994
6. Robert Smithson: Entropy
‘Art can become a resource that mediates between the ecologist
and the industrialist. Ecology and industry are not one-way streets,
rather they should be crossroads’
- Robert Smithson (Untitled 1971)
Robert Smithson Asphalt Rundown 1969
8. Cai Guo-Qiang The Century
with Mushroom Clouds:
Project for the Twentieth
Century (Salt Lake) 1996
Realised at Robert Smithson’s
Spiral Jetty on 15 February 1996
12. Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009
(London, 2009)
Earth: Art of a Changing World (Royal Academy)
Weather Report: Art and Climate Change (Boulder Museum of Contemporary
Art, Colorado 2007)
Burning Ice: Art and Climate Change (Natural History Museum, London 2006)
Heat: Art and Climate Change in Melbourne (RMIT Gallery, 2008)
Sensing Nature (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 2011)
David Buckland’s Cape Farewell Project started in 2001
27. • The divide between nature and culture has come to be seen as a false
dichotomy
• Humans are part of the natural world
• Understand of nature comes through cultural interpretation
• Environmental art has been made throughout history, but with different
concerns and interests depending on the era
• Social, political and scientific shifts in the 1960s and ‘70s changed the way
we view and understand the environment
• Artists working with the environment haven’t all been environmentalists
• Different approaches to the environment depending on the
interests and approach of the artist
• Though many artists have engaged with the environment to
express ecological and political concerns
Some Key Ideas from this lecture