ARTH3434: Art and the Environment

Western art has a long tradition of depicting and directly engaging with the environment—from ancient earthworks such as Stonehenge and Avebury Stone Circle, to 18th and 19th century landscape paintings and 20th century photographs, to land and earth art of the 1960s and ‘70s, and what is now called environmental or eco art. Such art has had a prominent place in art’s history, but do we really need art to save the environment? Studies repeatedly show that the arts are crucial to understanding and forestalling environmental disaster because, it turns out, human attitudes are shaped by the stories we tell, by our ability to imagine the unimaginable, to accept the inanimate as potentially coming to life, to picture things on a vast scale. In this course students learn the historical development of artistic movements from 1968, when the first exhibition of such art, called “Earthworks,” took place at the Dwan Gallery in New York, up to the present day. The course tracks the changing aesthetic, political, and climatic forces that influenced such art, from the anti-institutionalism and participatory approaches of the 1960s to the more activist artistic engagement with environmentalism today. The class takes up two primary concerns: understanding the historical and scientific conditions that have given rise to such art and learning the ways in which artists have sought to intervene in and affect a changing environment. Students put historical knowledge, environmental research, and visual analysis skills to work in a culminating group project creating art that responds to a contemporary environmental problem.

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