Nature and Art by Maja Fowkes

A well-known eco-psychologist, Theodore Rozsak, says that people are conscious of ecological problems, as well as the need for change. We are conscious that we are caught in the trap of a system which is ecologically unhealthy. Rozsak thinks that as long as we live out of balance with our environment, we will not be able to maintain good personal or interpersonal relationships.

Other psychologists stress that although psychology as a discipline that deals with the human soul has been functioning for 100 years, the situation in which humanity finds itself has never been worse. And as long as our rivers are dirty and nature around us polluted, there is no foundation for curing our souls.

The reasons for the crisis in which we find ourselves are most often sought in industrialisation. Industrialisation started in the era of the Enlightenment, in which Reason and Experiment were celebrated. The thinking of people started to structure itself according to economical criteria. Economy became an imperative. The capitalist principle of growth is based upon turning nature, which is in its essence a subject, into something which is only an object, something to trade, or a raw material. Nature is transformed from an independent subject into a pure object. The ideology of industrial modernisation, either in its capitalistic or communist form, is based on human domination over nature.

The whole of western civilisation is based upon the belief that domination over nature is the secret of our security and power. Fully-committed to that goal, we’re gradually ceasing to feel compassion for the other biological communities with which we share the planet. Also, our upbringing, which teaches us about the division between body and soul, about the need to overcome and hide our emotions, and the power of reason, led to the alienation, egotism and exclusion that characterises our interpersonal relationships. We are not only estranged from nature, plants and animals, but also from ourselves.

Richard Mabey, author of the famous book Food for Free, in which he invites people to go the woods and collect the food that nature offers us, says:
‘Yet the overriding relationship we have with is through our emotions. It is through feelings and imagination that we experience kinship and connectedness, the pain of separation and extinction, the renewal of spring and birth, not trough the detachment of scientific accounts. And it is through myth, storytelling, art, metaphor and play that we make overall sense of our place in the world. Given that language and imagination are what define our species, it is through these that we make our most truly human, and therefore most authentically ecological engagements with the world.’

Cult green art theoretician Suzy Gablik, states that the new historical and evolutionary stage of consciousness is one in which success in life is measured by our ability to care and to feel compassion. And only the ability to feel compassion, that means care for others and attunement to nature, is going to make possible recovery and give a meaning to society as well as to art.

As a result of a general feeling that we’re in the midst of a global ecological crisis, there is a demand for a shift in relationship to nature, in all spheres of human knowledge and activities, including Fine Arts.

In the same way that our society is indifferent towards nature, so it is towards art. Today the dominant understanding is that art is static objects separated from everyday life and laid out in museums and galleries. The art world reflects the values characteristic of culture in general, and is focussed on production, competition between artists, and making art for arts sake.

We are brought up to look at artists on the one hand as losers on the edge of society, on the other hand we celebrate them as superhuman geniuses. Both stereotypes divide art and artists from everyday life. Modern art itself reciprocates by promoting so called High Art, which has meaning only in relation to other art works and stresses formal qualities while neglecting content. Equally, we are regularly faced with the view that the artist has unlimited freedom of creation and expression and shouldn’t allow interference from society in his work. So any kind of engagement of artists in questions of political and social responsibility is frowned upon and is apparently bad for art. We identify art and freedom. These are modernistic myths which seem to be as unbreakable as the principal of the free market.

Today there are many artists who in their work are trying to break from the imposed division between art and life, reason and body. And who have moved on further from the stress of culture on external achievements, money, position, by trying to regain spiritual balance. Numerous artistic projects led by artists today take place not in galleries and museums but in communities, of for example children, young people, or specific social groups for which the project is intended.

So there are a number of actions of artists which are directly involved with the protection of the environment. The previously mentioned Suzy Gablik thinks that the going of artists into nature and curing, for example, rivers from dirt, is a shift in the art of the 21 century equal to that when Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal in an art gallery and determined the course of art in the 20 century. So, if the exhibiting of a urinal in a gallery signified the art of the 20 century, then the ritual cleaning of a river by an artist marks a shift in the art of the 21 century.

The relationship of artists to nature in the modern era is based on the categories of landscape paintings, as well as the sculptural model, which extracts abstract shapes from their natural context. Already from the Renaissance starts the viewing of nature through the so called emperical or disembodied eye. In the landscapes of 19 century romanticism nature is idealised and shown either as sublime or a pictureesque scene. Modern art of the 20 century abstracted pure forms from nature but maintained distance and alienation. Also, the Land Art of the 1960s and 70s in some way belongs to the culture of dominators, because it treated nature as a huge canvas, on which the artist left their traces. Today’s artists distinguish themselves from earlier ones, because they are trying to cure nature of human traces and understand it as soemthing that is not outside of us but part of us.

On the website of the recently founded greenmuseum www.greenmuseum.org a definition of eco art can be found:
• Interprets nature, creating artworks that inform us about nature and its processes, or about environmental problems we face
• Is concerned with environmental forces and materials, creating artworks affected or powered by wind, water, lightning, even earthquakes
• Re-envisions our relationship to nature, proposing through their work new ways for us to co-exist with our environment
• Reclaims and remediates damaged environments, restoring ecosystems in artistic and often aesthetic ways

Just for example, we could mention the young Split artist Ivan Bura, in his performance last autumn, an installation under the title Silicone Valley, he appears dressed in the black attire of a medieval dancer of death, with a sythe he cuts grass before spreading genetically modified crops. He also exhibits pots planted with wheat, an old Croatian national custom at Christmas time, related to securing the wealth and well-being for the coming year. Bura plants here genetically modified wheat. It is clear that he’s commenting on the present moment, and dancing with the sythe, the dance of death, he is warning us: are we ready, because of silicone valley, to turn away from our traditions and nature?

Budapest artist Császár Péter, left his studio which he considers a dead place, and went to the wood. He builds houses on trees from collected planks and other materials, and lives in them, sometimes also in city parks. There are a number of similar examples from contemporary art.

Nonetheless, at the end it is important to remind ourselves that as we exclude art from everyday life, so we ignore creativity in ourselves. According to the opinion of leading anthropologists, art is a kind of biologically-based behaviour, which is conditioned by the universal human need to make things special.

Starting from that idea, that we all have a born need for creativity and that art is something that people create, not just consume, we have decided on the occasion of Earth Day to invite our citizens to exhibit their photographs on the theme of the Power and Vunerability of Nature. In that way, we tried to awaken the artist in ourselves, and at the same time make us sensitive towards nature. Also, by inviting groups related to nature in our town, we wanted to get to know each other, get closer, and hoping slowly to take a place in the everyday space of our thoughts.
Under the notion of human creativity we understand connectedness, social responsibilty and ecological attunement. We have given our views about art and nature, and our wish is on the round table to find out more about other fields of activity. We can express our creativity in order to awaken a better connectedness between ourselves, higher responsibilty, and ecological sensibility, in other words, how to live in harmony with nature.