#assessmentone

Ines Seidel is a German conceptual artist known for her interventions and performances in public space tackling the environmentalist and ecological subjects. She documents her research in the shape of altered books, sculptures, photography and drawings. 

I have been inspired by two different exhibitions. ‘Altering News’ in 2018 and ‘Thankyou for the Plastic Bags’ in 2015. Images of both are below. 

‘Altering News’, Ines Seidel, 2018

“Altering News questions how we build a physical and emotional contact with newspaper, as material, as medium, as news. In the attic of the water tower, visitors were invited to explore the topic with their own hands”

‘Showdown, texture from Daily Telegraph Sept. 18 2017,” 2017

‘Future of Reading’, 2018

‘I wish it was true’, 2018

‘Thankyou for the Plastic Bags’, Ines Seidel, 2015

“From a material with a history that reaches back thousands of years, we have created shopping statements. This cannot be the end of the story. Plastic bags are a cultural misunderstanding.” 15 to 27 plastic bags. 

Andy Goldsworthy is a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist, widely known for his ephemeral land art. Much of his work is transient, reflecting earth’s fragility. 

“When I make something, in a field or street, it may vanish but it’s part of the history of those places.” 

All of his pieces are designed to disappear as nature takes its course: Ice melts, wind blows, and rain falls, factors that shape how viewers experience Goldsworthy's constructions over the course of their temporary lifespan. 

Poster:

As a communicative tool the poster allows people to express a certain idea, message or concept. 

Article: Environmental Propaganda Posters from 1980’s China (Rebecca Onion, 2015) 

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2014/04/11/chinese_propaganda_posters_environmentally_themed_posters_from_the_1980s.html

Sourced from the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. The images are from their collection of environmental posters of the 1970’s and 1980’s. 

In introducing the images, the curators of the sight point out that this group of posters, produced at a time when Chinese Authorities “became more aware of the impact of environmental problems on the countries economic performance,” don’t represent negative outcomes of industrialization (pollution, blight, acid rain). Instead, citizens are asked to attend to their immediate personal environments – to pick up litter and plant trees. 

Steven Zhang, who has researched environmental attitudes within society (specifically on those owning/working in factories that people espoused a vision of environmentalism that “focuses almost exclusively on the effects of Environmental damage to personal health” - Zhang found that instrumentalism—the preservation of environmental balance in the service of one or another human good—dominated discussions about environmental protection.

The posters below exemplify that approach, focusing on hygiene, regulation, and morality. 

“Social morality must be  maintained,” 1984

“Protect the Environment and Hygiene,” 1983

“Cherish Greening, Treasure Old and Famous Trees,” 1983

Rethinking the Human/Non-human relationship: (Institute of Social Justice)

https://isj.acu.edu.au/researching/human-nonhuman/

Currently, planetary ecological crisis challenge us to generate new modes of theory and practise that illuminate destructive driving dynamics, disclose new possibilities, and contribute to powerful ethical-political responses

• How might we re-conceptualise the human, the non-human and their myriad relationships? 

• What is revealed and concealed by the proliferating terminological debates over the characteristics of our time?

• What are the implications for our understandings of agency, ethical responsiveness, responsibility, and relationships amidst nonhuman beings, things, and complex dynamical systems?

• Nikolas Kompridis: is re-examining the ontological and ethical question of the human and the human/non-human relationship in relation to a critique of humanism and post-humanism, and to the complex temporalities of human and non-human time.

To the End of the Earth: Art and the Environment (Nicholas Alfrey, Stephen Daniels and Joy Sleeman, 2012)

https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/17/to-the-ends-of-the-earth-art-and-environment 

The group of articles devoted to the theme of art and environment in Tate Papers no.17 aims to explore new research frontiers between visual art and the material environment. The papers arise from a conference held at Tate Britain in June 2010 at which a range of practitioners and scholars – artists, writers, curators, theorists, historians and geographers – presented case studies of artworks addressing specific sites, spaces, places and landscapes in a variety of media, including film, photography, painting, sculpture and installation. The conference considered relations between artistic approaches to the environment and other forms of knowledge and practice, including scientific knowledge and social activism. The papers addressed cultural questions of weather and climate, ruin and waste, dwelling and movement, boundary and journey, and reflected on the way the environment is experienced and imagined and on the place of art in the material world.

In this environment, artistic interventions generate an awareness of the concurrent processes of ruination and productive activity.

Projects by contemporary practitioners were also presented at the conference. Lara Almarcegui and Heather and Ivan Morrison participated in the Barbican’s Radical Nature exhibition and, like the other artists in that show, their work is instrumental in character, designed to promote awareness of the relationship between nature and the urban environment and often involves community participation and affirmative action. Almarcegui has campaigned to preserve empty lots from development and improvement, resisting the strategies of planners in order to let ‘natural processes of decay, transition and entropy’ take their course. In designating empty spaces and wastelands as artworks her tactics are reminiscent of those of John Latham, but she works within an ecological agenda, seeking to bring about the greening of urban space:

“Wastelands are important as places of possibility, because one can only feel free in this type of land, forgotten by town planners. I imagine that, in a few years’ time, those wastelands that were protected by my projects will be the only empty spots within built areas”

Art and the Ecological: (Ben David,  2013)

https://miamirail.org/summer-2015/art-and-the-ecological/

Indeed, for European art, understanding its relationship to a changing sense of nature in the early modern period is key to grasping its dynamics. For the philosopher Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (1790), aesthetic experience primarily was the experience of nature; the beauty found in human art was merely a derivative subset -  the “Imitation of Beautiful Nature.”

Plays a key role in present-day ecological thought essentially, that humanity’s influence on the Earth has grown to be so significant that it justifies being conceptualized as an entirely new epoch. 

As for art’s relation to nature, it is no surprise, perhaps, that the same era also saw artists propose new strategies for relating to the environment, as well, attempting to escape the gallery and museum space via the various forms of Land art. Much like Church’s landscapes, this new artistic incursion into nature bore the stamp of the very urban realities it was trying to vision an alternative to; the monumental engineering of Land art, particularly in its more macho varieties, was (and is) heavily criticized for representing the human will to dominate nature rather than embodying a holistic celebration of it

Building on Klein’s point, my case is that, worthy as they are, the mainstream articulations of eco-art mentioned above implicitly participate in the logic of moderation. They are able either only to sound the alarm about incipient disaster, adding to the dystopian image gallery (the “alarmist” strain), or imagine small-scale solutions (the “remediationist” strain). This predicament is particularly significant in that, whereas artists are stereotyped as impractical lefty dreamers, it is currently the right that is pushing its agenda through big-picture reimaginings of society. 

Interactions Between Human Behaviour and Ecological Systems (E.J.Milner-Gulland, 2012)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3223800/

Relationships:

The way in which two or more people or things are connected and behave towards each other, the state of being connected. 

Synonyms: connection, relation, association, link, alliance, bond, interconnection

Humans:

A human being, member of the human race. 

Non-humans:

A creature that is not a human being, non-human material objects

Environment:

The surrounding or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates. The natural world, as a whole or in a particular geographical area, especially as affected by human activity

Synonyms: habitat, territory, domain, home, abode, surroundings

Ecology:

The branch of biology that deals with the relation of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings

Note: Class Discussion - Ecologies 

Culture is traditionally thought of as something done by humans for humans. This does not take into account the collaborative, parasitic, symbiotic relationships that are in all creative production and the ecologies in which we operate. Creative practice allows us to think outside the purely human and broaden our understanding of the ecologies in which we operate.

The branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings; The study of the interaction of people with their environment; The political movement that seeks to protect the environment, esp. from pollution.