Seite 228 [228]
226 JUDIT FARKAS
Environmental art
In the academic literature, environmental art comprises all artworks concerned
with the environment, whether created or exhibited in- or outdoors; for ephemeral
works, this applies to the presentation of their documentation. Environmental art
can be displayed in galleries in the form of canvases, photographs, sculptures,
videos, films, and natural samples (e.g. driftwood, soil, leaves, mud, rocks), or
viewed outdoors in situ (Thornes 2008: 393). In Nicolas Bullot’s definition,
environmental art contains “all works of art that address environmental topics,
regardless of the medium, style, and position advocated by the artist” (Bullot 2014:
511). Nature, and more closely, its relationship with human beings, has always
been the subject of art. In the history of environmental art, this theme has been
specifically highlighted from the 1960s, from the turn started around that time,
but its much earlier antecedents are also reviewed, to some extent (Thornes 2008;
Hubbell — Ryan 2022).°
Researchers of the theme count among the antecedents such aboriginal creations as rock drawings,
cave paintings, wood carvings, totem poles (Hubbell — Ryan 2022: 149-150), Stonehenge, the
pyramids, Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli, or the English Lancelot “Capability” Brown's landscape gardens.
(https:/www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/capability-brown-landscape-design-england) (Lucie-Smith
2004). These creations are often endangered either because their significance is not recognized,
or for economic interests, when, for instance, some important natural resource is found in their
territory. The Sacred land project was founded to protect these sites -, see https://sacredland.org/
international-efforts-to-protect-sacred-places/. News came exactly during the writing of this
chapter (December 2022) that vandals had destroyed drawings estimated to be some 30,000 years
old in the limestone wall of the Koonalda cave on the Nullarbor plain of the coast of the Great
Australian Bight.