Land, art : a cultural ecology handbook

Max Andrews, 2006, London : RSA (Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce) in partnership with Arts Council England

Land, Art: a Cultural Ecology Handbook presents a compendium of texts, dialogues and collaborations by and among ecologists, economists, cultural theorists, activists and art writers that extend from the notions of land, cultural production and the emergencies of 21st century.
Reproductions of existing artworks by and original contributions from international practitioners – as well as artists on-the-page `studio visits’, for example – explore art’s varied modes of response – from detached crisis commentaries to engaged activist solutions.

The publication exists within the time frame of a fragmentary genealogy of `land’ (and what has been understood by `the environment’) since the 1960s, when the term was evoked in culture through the activities of so-called `Land Artists’ and those working in novel ways within natural contexts. At this time too a new, popular environmental consciousness began to emerge (an axis marked by the publication of Rachel Carson’s incendiary Silent Spring (1962), through the first photograph of Earth from space (1968) to the first Earth Day in 1970).

Today’s interdisciplinary understandings of ecology, however comprehend a complex set of relations that go way beyond environmentalism and, for instance, its historical fixation with wilderness conservation. Likewise, art has radically diversified and globalised from an inherited notion of landscape, becoming concerned with, for example, areas as varied as corporate capital, politics, technology, utopian communities, industrial agriculture, tourism, ethnic and social justice in the process.

LAND, ART … proposes and tests if and how our current conception of art and artists is relevant to the urgent territory of accountability and sustainability, and where, how and why art might operate – at the `grass roots’, at a tangent, as propaganda, as resistance, etc.

207 p.