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228 JUDIT FARKAS
question is examined by Nathalie Blanc and Barbara L. Benish, who firmly state
that environmental art is capable of profoundly transforming our relationship with
nature and our environment (Blanc — Benish 2017: 204).
The inquiries into the function and effect of environmental art suggest that this
kind of approach calls for going beyond the aesthetic value and representativity.
Within a genre, differentiation is most understandable when works are ranged into
representative and non-representative/performative/participatory categories. This
distinction is clarified by the academic literature (summarized by Thornes 2008)
with the help of the concepts of landscape and the environment. In this interpretive
framework, the subject of representative art is the landscape, “a cultural image,
pictorial rendering or symbolization of the environment” (Cosgrove — Daniels 1988:
1; cited Thornes 2009: 393), the best known artists of which are Constable and
Turner in the 19% century. We only “look at” a landscape — states Tim Ingold, in
whose opinion this glance separates culture and nature (Ingold 2000: 191).
Researchers claim that it is exactly the term environment that eradicates this
separation. Therefore, they suggest using the term environment - instead of landscape
— in describing artworks concerned with the environment (Thornes 2008: 392).
Malcolm Andrews, who proposes seeing landscape as a curtain which keeps out
of sight the life and struggles of those living in it, traces this change of attitude from
the ecological and social phenomena of our age and from the reactions to them:
“The stance of the outsider is not challenged by science but by the environmental
movement [...] We are now all ‘insiders. The landscape as a distant glance is
incompatible with the enhanced emotion of our relationship with nature as a living
(or dying) environment’ (Andrews 1999: 22).
This is not to say that landscape disappears from art. It remains as a channel for
expressing the irreversible problems of wars, industrialization, globalization and
the fear and anxiety elicited by them, on the one hand, and the longed-for
timelessness and harmony, on the other (Langdon 1996). Environmental artists
do not discard representation lock, stock and barrel. Several works trespass the
boundaries between representative and non-representative art, see Olafur Eliasson:
The Weather Project, 2003; Anthony Gormley: Blind Light; Yann Arthus-Bertrand:
Earth from Above, 2005 (Thornes 2008: 406).’
That said, in recent decades there has been a massive trend away from
representation toward performative art in environmental artistic efforts: land art
(short for landscape art), process art, eco-art, earth-art, earthworks, and total art have
all walked this path since the 1960s.'°
The first major exhibition of environmental art registered by art history was the
Earthworks outdoors show in New York in October 1968, with the participation of
14 artists who put on display works that could not be confined to collections. They
https://olafureliasson.net/artwork/the-weather-project-2003/ https://www.antonygormley.com/
works/making/blind-light
https://www.yannarthusbertrandphoto.com/categorie-produit/from-above/
Special literature registers the following artists among the founders of land art: Michael Heizer,
Walter De Maria, Richard Serra, Robert Morris, Carl Andr’e, Nancy Holt, and Robert Smithson
(Kastner - Wallis 1998: 12).