Between City and Landscape: Environmental Art, Land Art, and “Collective Actions”
Abstract
This article analyzes the turn to the natural environment in art from the second half of the twentieth century. It covers various art forms such as land art, environmental art, and ecoart in the US and Europe, as well as unofficial art in socialist Slovakia and the USSR. Western art practices, as exemplified by Robert Smithson, Richard Long, Alan Sonfist, Agnes Denes, and others, reject gallery art and instead incorporate the environment. This includes the natural environment in the case of land art, and the urban and global environment in the case of environmental art and eco-art. In the art of socialist countries, there was also a tendency to engage with the natural environment. This was present in the unofficial art from the late 1960s to the 1980s in the form of theoretical concepts, installations, and actions in nature. Exhibitions in Bratislava in 2007 and in Moscow in 2009–2010 showed that the natural environment was considered ideologically neutral by unofficial socialist artists, in contrast to the official regime. However, environmental concerns were included in the creative discussions of Slovak artists such as Rudolf Sikora. A special case is “Trips out of Town” organized by the Moscow art group “Collective Actions” (CA). Although they took place in nature, their aesthetic meaning and origin are closely related to the urban environment, which is the focus of the theoretical works of Andrey Monastyrsky, one of the founders of CA. The blurring of boundaries between art and the environment, observed in Soviet artists and in other artistic practices in the West (such as “anarchitecture” and conceptual photography), prompts a reevaluation of established trends in art history, including minimalism, conceptualism, and contemporary art. It highlights the crucial role of understanding the natural and urban environment, as well as the boundaries between them, in shaping the diverse range of modern artistic movements and trends.
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References
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