Adventures in the Anthropocene: art and the environment 1960-present

Overview

How has the term ‘environment’ been defined and redefined over the course of the twentieth century? This module aims to problematise our understanding of the concept of ‘environment’ through its interrelation with the visual arts. It will involve weekly presentations and discussions of set texts examining a number of significant case studies. Each week we will explore how changing definitions of ‘environment’ have been mobilised at key historical junctures for example in response to the need for regeneration in the aftermath of the Second Word War and the rise of an environmental conscience in the 1970s. In turn, we will ask how the emergence of terms such as 'political ecology' and 'ecological activism' have shaped the visual arts and critical thought of recent years.

In this context we will look at the different ways in which artists have engendered environments as an expanded category of sculptural production and the extent to which artistic practice has been able to reflect on the significance of mankind's relation to its surroundings in the face of growing concerns over environmental destruction. From early phases of land art through to contemporary ecological art practices, we will consider a range of artists from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including: Richard Buckminster Fuller, Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke, Nancy Holt, Robert Smithson, Bruno Munari, Piero Gilardi, Pino Pascali, Ugo La Pietra, Superstudio, Olafur Elliason, Newton Harrison and Helen Mayer Harrison.

Aims

By the end of the module, students should have acquired:

• a critical understanding of the concept of ‘environment’ and its significance in art and culture since the 1960s.
• knowledge of some of the main theoretical and historical approaches to the subject
• familiarity with a range of art works and the way in which the meanings of such works have been contested.
• the ability to look critically at a range of works made in a number of different media in relation to the themes discussed each week.

Preliminary reading

• Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution (New York: Ballantine, 1978).
• Rachel Carson (1962), Silent Spring (London: Penguin, 2000)
• T.J Demos, ‘Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology: An Introduction’, ThirdText, 2013, Vol.27(1), 1–9
• Diedrich Diederichsen, Anselm Franke, The whole earth: California and the disappearance of the outside (Berlin: Sternberg Press, c2013)
• Félix Guattari (1989), The Three Ecologies (London and New Brunswick: The Athlone Press, 2000)
• Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds (London: Reaktion,  2005)
• Francesco Manacorda and Ariella Yedgar, eds., Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet, 1969–2009 (London: Koening and Barbican Art Gallery, 2009)
• Linda Weintraub, To Life!  Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (California: University of California Press, 2012)