Overview
What is environmental art and can it help us tackle the climate crisis?
The 1960s was an era of political and artistic revolution, and it was out of this fertile landscape that environmental art first emerged. The earliest instances of environmental art can be found in ‘land art,’ which saw artists leaving the studio behind for plains, fields and river beds, and swapping out their paints and pencils for water, rocks and vegetation.
Predominantly a Western phenomenon, the popularity of land art can be linked to the rise of the New Left, the birth of the anti-Vietnam and nuclear disarmament movements, and a growing discontent arising from an increasingly overpopulated and over-polluted urban environment. A psychoanalyst in Art in America in 1969 described environmental art as: ‘The manifestation of a desire to escape the city that is eating us alive, and perhaps a farewell to space and earth while there are still some left.’
Pieces like Robert Smithson’s ‘Spiral Jetty,’ a 1,500-foot long spiral crafted from mud, salt crystals and rock on Utah’s Great Salt Lake and Richard Long’s ‘A Line Made by Walking,’ a conceptual piece in which the artist walked back and forth along a stretch of grass in Wiltshire, England until he had left a mark in the earth, tell of a simultaneous fantastical flight away from the city and into the natural world, and also a rumination on the ephemerality of nature and a warning about it’s precarity.
In the following decades, important environmental works included ‘Wheatfield - A Confrontation,’ for which artist Agnes Denes planted and tended a two-acre wheatfield on a plot estimated to be worth $4.5 billion and shadowed by Wall Street and the Twin Towers - Manhattan’s greatest symbols of capitalism and commerce - constituting a protest against wealth inequality and the prioritisation of industry over the natural environment. Nils-Udo also cemented himself as one of the most important names in the movement with his human-sized nests, which highlight the seldom recognised symbiotic relationship between mankind and the environment: in this era of burgeoning ecological crisis, the existence of one is contingent on the other.
Olafur Elissaon is likely the best known contemporary environmental artist and this is mostly indebted to his 2003 piece, ‘The Weather Project,’ for which the artist constructed an artificial sun in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. A mirrored ceiling helped to create the illusion, but it also had the dual effect of reflecting museum-goer’s image back at them, who, in the pale yellow light and mist, became tiny black figures, indistinguishable from one another, part of a whole greater than its individual parts. Like other major environmental works, interconnectedness was integral to the artist’s message.
Other notable Western environmental artists include Andy Goldsworthy, Dennis Oppenheim, Shepard Fairey and Edward Burtynsky, amongst others. Antony Gormley has also engaged with the climate crisis in his work.
What about Indigenous environmental art?
The climate crisis affects different demographics in different ways, and artistic reactions from varying ethnic, religious, social and economic groups are as diverse as the people that make up those communities.
We’ve seen that Western environmental artists often work in deliberate tension with notions of capitalism and the overconsumption of natural resources in the pursuit of endless expansion. However, environmental art had existed outside of the Western canon long before the advent of capitalism, while links between environmentalism and Indigenous art are evident in works that are thousands of years old.
Although Indigenous communities are widely diverse, a shared commonality is a culture and lifestyle that is historically aligned with nature, rather than exploitative of it. The United Nations Environmental Program recognizes that the traditions and belief systems of Indigenous people often means that “they regard nature with deep respect, and they have a strong sense of place and belonging. This sustains knowledge and ways of life that match up well with modern notions of nature conservation and the sustainable use of natural resources.”
Aboriginal artists traditionally used ochres to paint on rocks, cave walls and bark, and incorporated feathers, stones and wood into their art. In the same vein, some contemporary artists from the continent have chosen to include the detritus of industry in their work as a commentary on the climate crisis, such as Karla Dickens of the Wiradjuri people. Her 2020 piece, ‘We are on fire (Not in a sexy way),’ consists of a vintage fire hose covered in stickers from Australian mining companies and rows of crosses symbolising deaths in acknowledgement of the Black Summer fires, one of the country's most intense and devastating fire seasons on record, and the toll that the mining industry has taken on the natural environment.
In the Americas, Native artists such as Teri Greeves of the Kiowa people are also repurposing traditional techniques like pottery and beading to engage with the climate crisis. Greeves’ ‘21st Century Beaded Tipi’ incorporates scenes from contemporary Indigenous family life alongside the more classic mythological imagery of a sun, moon and snake. For the artist, the tipi is the perfect symbol of Native peoples' co-habitation with the environment. “I’ve seen tipis hold their own in 50-mile gusts,” she says, “For Native people, this world is us, and you can’t just use it up [...] You can call it environmentalism, or whatever you want. It is how we have always viewed the world.”
Because of this close alignment with nature, Native people are also on the front-line of the climate crisis. Indigenous communities in the South Pacific islands are being threatened by rising sea levels, while Inuit people in Canada, Greenland and Alaska face dwindling food sources, and the rapid melting of permafrost and dramatic coastal erosion which, if not stopped, will eventually destroy their homes. Native Americans have seen their land plundered for oil and tribal people in the Amazon have seen forest fires on an unprecedented level in recent years, as well as rapid deforestation by major corporations.
For this reason, environmental art and ‘artivism’ (a portmanteau of art and activism) are difficult to divorce when considering Indigenous peoples’ artistic contribution. Because the climate crisis threatens to destroy the lives and lifestyles of Native communities the world over, works speaking to that truth are in many ways, inherently political.
What about Black and Latinx environmental art?
Historically, commodification of the natural environment has also happened in tandem with the subjugation of the colonial body by Anglo-Europeans. From the plantations of the Caribbean to the chain gangs of the American South, Black enslaved people were figured as materials from which value could be extracted, just as the natural environment was mined by the white colonists who ‘discovered’ it. The transatlantic slave trade irrevocably altered the natural environment, laying waste to fragile ecosystems, clearing forests to plant crops and fuel steamships and introducing devastating invasive species.
For many activists, the climate crisis is intrinsically linked to environmental racism, and justice for one cannot be accomplished without justice for the other. In the modern day, prejudice, disenfranchisement and wealth disparity mean that Black and also Latinx communities are far more likely to be affected by the crisis, and therefore, are far more concerned about and more likely to take climate action than their white counterparts. This political inclination is evident in much Black and Latinx environmental art. Acclaimed artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah’s video installation work ‘Arcadia’ (2024) is his latest in a series of pieces that have examined the dual histories of colonialism and the climate crisis. It reflects on ‘The Columbian Exchange:’ ’the widespread transfer of commodities, populations, technology, diseases and ideas between the Americas, Afro-Eurasia and Europe that resulted in an 80-95% reduction in American Indigenous populations. In Akomfrah’s film, sublime landscapes are ‘interrupted’ by images of cargo, symbols of trade, ageing boat hulks and footage of microbes and cells, combining to evoke ideas concerning colonial encounters, migration, growth and decay.
The integration of waste materials into artworks has also been popularised by artists from the African continent. El Anatsui is likely the most prolific artist working within this medium, famed for his monumental ‘bottle-top installations,’ which are crafted from aluminium sourced from recycling sites and sewn together with copper wire. Anatsui’s destruction and subsequent reconstitution of material has been interpreted as a “metaphor for life and the changes Africa faced under colonialism and since independence.” These works put the artist in dialogue with an ethics of environmental sustainability while also exploring links between the exploitation of the natural environment and the history of colonialism.
Afro-futurism, a genre which has its roots in 1970’s African-American science-fiction, considers the past of African diasporic people in the context of a techno-utopian version of the future. Increasingly, Afro-futurism has been reconceptualised by contemporary Black artists to explore the climate crisis, as any wonderings about the future necessarily throw into question how that future’s environment might look. Wilfred Ukpong is one such artist. His 2019 film ‘FUTURE-WORLD-EXV’ is set in a speculative future, through which the audience follows an oilman who becomes torn between pursuing his industrial duties and haunting visions of the escalating climate crisis.
Argentine artist and trained architect Tomás Saraceno also has his sights set upon the future. Over the past decade, he has been working with international art collective, Aerocene (2015 - present), towards the shared utopian vision of aerial travel, free of borders and without fossil fuels or emissions. Through this collective, Saraceno has created floating, solar-powered museums made entirely of recycled plastic bags (Museo Aero Solar, 2007), and in 2015, the group broke a world record for the first and longest fully solar-powered flight.
What about Asian environmental art?
Artists from the Asian continent have also engaged with the climate crisis in their works. Perhaps one of the most overtly political artists of his generation, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has never shied away from engaging with inflammatory social issues. His immense cast iron sculptures of endangered Brazilian tree roots (2019) see him set his critical gaze on the climate crisis. The trunks are hollow, leafless and coated in rust - icons of decay that serve as stark warnings against continued deforestation. Organic structures seemingly frozen in time, they also carry a strange ghostliness, a haunting feeling that a time may soon come when only these replications will remain of the fifty-five million years old Amazon rainforest.
Cai Guo-Qiang famously interrogated the climate crisis with his reimagined Noah’s ark in 2014: a dilapidated Chinese fishing boat laden with sickly-looking (fabricated) animals that sailed down the Huangpu river in Shanghai for his exhibition ‘The Ninth Wave.’ Another important work that welcomes environmental interpretation is his 2006 piece ‘Head On,’ a massive installation work in which 99 lifesize fake wolves form a wave that hurls itself against a glass wall. The artist gives new meaning to the idiom ‘banging your head against a wall,’ but here the wall is glass, indicating that the issue of the climate crisis is transparent, yet still the wolves return to the back of the line to repeat the same mistake, failing to recognise the error of their ways, just as mankind continues to repeat the practice of unfettered environmental exploitation.
For Chinese-born artist Zhang Huan’s simple yet evocative performance piece, ‘To Raise the Water Level in a Fish Pond’ (1997), he persuaded a group of rural day labourers to stand in a shallow pond in Beijing park. The action was a refutation of a Chinese saying to the effect that one person cannot make a difference in a larger environment: despite the water level only rising incrementally to accommodate each person, as more people enter the pond, the effect is compounded. Initially, the message seems bleak: even small actions can be destructive. Take the seemingly benign action of driving your car to work; when these actions are repeated each day by millions of people the world over, the blanket effect can be devastating. However, the reverse is also proved true by Zhang’s work. Climate activism can be disenchanting when it feels like only a small drop in an ocean, when it feels as though you are pushing against a great tide, but fortunately, the greater the scale of the action, the larger the ripple effect. Small actions can be mighty.
Can art help us tackle the climate crisis?
The answer to the question as to whether art can help us to tackle the climate crisis is not easily answered. Artist’s reactions are as multifarious as their mediums, styles, themes and inspirations. Different histories, politics, and cultural heritages variously inform environmental works, resulting in a multitude of artistic reactions that carry a multitude of possibilities to engage different audiences.
This heterogeneity is not only symptomatic of the climate crisis, which is complex, involves many factors, and is massively distributed across space and time, existing both on the microscopic level in the tiniest drop of acid rain and in huge global weather systems that span the entire globe, but it is also a necessary part of our collective coming to terms with the crisis, so that as many people as is possible are engaged with taking action against it.
Environmental artist Otobong Nkanga suggests that “to care is a form of resistance,” and she seeks to encourage an ethics of care within her artwork. Fostering empathy for those on the frontline of the climate crisis, whether or not we are experiencing the same level of climate destruction ourselves, and for future generations whom we will not live to see but who will inherit the world we leave behind, whatever state it is in, are radical acts that encourage climate action. In a world that is becoming increasingly individualistic, care is one of the strongest tools in our arsenal.
Art, with its singular ability to connect with people on an emotional level, is a potent instrument for making the otherwise complex and alarming notion of the climate crisis more accessible and relatable. It can encourage an individual to feel inspired at the prospect of collective action and excited about the creative challenges posed by the crisis, rather than fearful of it. The climate crisis forces us to think about our future, and this also offers the opportunity for a utopian reimagining of our world that is not only free of the climate crisis, but that also has enough food, water, shelter and equal access to education for all people. Art is a powerful vessel for this kind of creative thinking.
Whether art can help us tackle the climate crisis depends on each individual’s sensibilities and their readiness to be emotionally impacted by the form. For other people, a scientific report or involvement in political action may be what triggers climate action. We will need to use each and every tool available to us, art included, if we stand any chance of overcoming the immense challenge that we are faced with.