A Rough Guide to Environmental Art

To appreciate the beauty or the fragility of our environment and our cultural responses to it, we need to understand how artists have portrayed the environment in the past and how they are continuing to portray it in the present. Environmental art is presented in this paper as a new genre to describe works of art that are not only directly representational of the environment (e.g., Constable's Cloud Series or Monet's London Series) but also works of art that are clearly nonrepresentational and performative, such as Long's A Line Made by Walking or Turrell's Skyspaces. The need for an overarching new genre to describe nonrepresentational performative environmental art is more obvious because there has been a host of labels given to this type of art since the late 1960s, such as land art, earthworks, site-specific art, destination art, ecological art, eco-art, and environmental sculpture. The review is also concerned with the potential of environmental art for communicating climate change.