“Environmental art” means the historical depiction of nature in art; on the other hand, it means the ecological and political workflow in the contemporary art world.
The connection between humans and nature has changed for thousands of years. In the era of gatherers and hunters and the revolutionary period of the Neolithic Age, people were largely controlled by natural factors, climate, and atmospheric conditions in the process of settling down. In the past few centuries, the weight has changed. Not only are people more and more able to understand and explain most of nature, but they are also able to follow nature and get rid of its unpredictability.
Artists began to experiment with new art forms, leaving traditional media and their restrictions behind, along with cultural customs, established museums and galleries. They often favored performance and conceptual art, with the intention of achieving unity between politics and action and not just creating more consumer goods.
In the past, it was rather one’s own discoveries that were interpreted and presented, the advocacy of the environment has now increasingly emerged, the interests of which were determined and defended. It was described as “utilitarian practices”, which are used by the artists to expose and combat the prevailing grievances. For “Land Art” artists in the early days, the fact that their work involved enormous interventions in nature and resulted in extensive residues hardly played a role, whereas current environmental artists prefer to avoid such effects and leave as few traces as possible. – or they operate deliberately with such traces in order to evoke awareness of the destructive imprint of man in nature.
The development of environmental art means increasing internationalization, as artists from all over the world enter the scene. They dedicate their efforts and work to topics that often appear in their personal environment and identify the moral and ecological issues and legal imbalances that originated there. They use art as a form of activism to show the global connection between culture and lifestyle and the possibility of change.
It is not just now that many artists develop their own solutions to urgent problems by setting up their own programs, organizations and even companies. In this way, artists expand the arsenals of cultural technologies to include collaborative, multicultural, and collectively organized political activities. If we look at the diversity and wealth of contemporary artistic approaches to the environment and society, we can rightly claim that individual willingness to play and ambiguity are sources of inspiration for their creative work.
