David Hockney is undoubtedly one of the most important of contemporary artists; all the more so because, like that other contemporary great, Gerhardt Richter, he hasn’t been seduced into the ever increasingly ridiculous nonsense that goes under the rubric of contemporary ‘conceptual art’.  His latest exhibit at the Royal Academy in London is focused on one of the most traditional of subjects – the landscape.

Since its origins in Rome in the 17th century, landscape painting has both reflected and influenced Man’s relationship with the land. Since the romantic period, not much has changed in landscape painting. The landscape is romanticized and presented as a fetish object to be held in awe – a perspective that later paralleled the rise of the conversion of natural landscape to consumer product through the creation of national parks. Turner was possibly the only landscape painter to provide a different perspective – the landscape as atmosphere rather than object.

The romantic view of the landscape as fetish object continues to be carried through in contemporary nature photography of the type that populates the National Geographic magazine and other similar outlets. John Stezaker’s work comments on this view of nature.

In these days of concern with our environment and the preservation of natural spaces, a fair amount of contemporary art portrays Man as the invader and destroyer of a nature that would remain as this romantically beautiful object if only we would leave it alone.

It is in this context – and the context of landscape painting nowadays being largely seen as a spent art form – that Hockney’s work needs to be judged. And it emerges victorious.

After four centuries of landscape painting, one would have thought that there remains little to say. Yet Hockney manages to give us a totally different feel for the landscape in these images. Here the landscape is presented as a joyful motif. The bright colours (a kind of return to Fauvism – though not quite), the almost naif approach to some of the work, the general atmosphere that is created – all of these generate a sensation of fun and joy. Hockney draws no difference between so-called unspoilt landscape – or wilderness – and agricultural countryside. Both are to be celebrated. Hockney moves away from the trend to excluding any form of human influence from landscape representation – a trend that continues to perpetuate the fiction of a wilderness to be preserved untouched.

In these works the landscape is no longer that remote object to be fetishized and held in awe. Unlike so much of contemporary environmental art, guilt at being human and living our lives is no longer the emotion we are expected to feel when looking at the Hockney landscape. With these images we feel uplifted with sheer delight, enjoyment and a sense of fun – all Hockney trademarks represented with particular exuberance in this body of work. All of this creates a different and more positive human relationship with the landscape – one built on joie de vivre and which may lend itself better to building interest and support for addressing environmental questions.

One final point about this body of work. Some of the ‘paintings’ (including the two shown here) were created on an iPad – rapidly becoming one of Hockney’s favourite tools. In doing so, Hockney combines modern technology with his celebration of nature and the landscape – again a refreshing change from the dichotomous battle between nature and modern progress that is all too often set up by the environmental community.

Slide show of images of the exhibit

One review of the exhibit.

But, of course, not everyone likes this work.

Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei has mounted 1200 bicycles in a magnificent floor to ceiling installation as part of a solo exhibition in Taipei.

The artist likely has no environmental statement to make with this installation, but these days it is hard to look at so many bicycles without being put in mind of the energy and transport questions that so many people are working to resolve. Can we really build a successful energy policy on a huge installation of renewables just like this huge installation of bicycles? Or is the mountain to high to climb and talk about moving to a solely renewable energy policy simply the pipe dream of impractical idealists?

Ai Weiwei has gained global fame for his dissident attitude to Chinese authorities. This has earned him persecution by the authorities, destruction of his studios, charges of owing multimillion dollars to the Chinese tax authorities and recurrent arrests and periods of disappearance. The bicycle installation led me to look for any of the artist’s works that addressed environmental issues directly.

An installation entitled “Trees” & “Rocks” (image below) has been interpreted by some to be an allusion to the environmental damage being caused by China’s rapid rate of development. Others, have interpreted the work as the simple recreation of a meditative space.

In his winning entry for this year’s Turner Prize, Martin Boyce brings an autumnal park indoors and re-interprets it in classical modernist/constructivist terms.

A large room, re-designed in every detail. White columns from which flows a designed ceiling of white shapes – “trees” with “leaves” and branches. The centrepiece is a table covered in graffiti and with a hanging mobile gently swaying.  All in stark geometric shapes yet oozing a certain romanticism. On the floor lie brown leaves made out of cut paper. The ‘park’ is complete with garbage cans re-designed into unusual modernist shapes.

This installation has its supporters and its critics. It is a space that is clearly inspired by “Nature” yet re-interpreted in classical modernist language. Boyce’s skill is in taking the brutish language of constructivist art and creating something that, through angular shapes created in synthetic, man-made materials, still manages to reproduce the softness and emotional engagement that is felt when we are in contact with ‘real nature’ (whatever that might be).

Boyce is quick to point out that his work is not political but largely driven by his emotion (see video below) but I wonder where this sort of work can take us in terms of thinking about the relationship between nature and the modern world. If Boyce can reproduce the gentleness and serenity of nature in an indoor installation made out of angular, modern materials, is the conflict between nature and the modern world real or is it something that we have created in our minds? Do we have to keep presenting nature and our modern development as enemies or can work like that of Martin Boyce inspire us to break out of our entrenched positions and see more complementarity? Are we even able to consider thinking differently?

I recently visited an exhibition of the work of Sanna Kannisto and bought the recently published book about her work. The work of this young Finnish artist is fascinating. It questions how, in order to understand and describe, science has to simplify and can never hope to capture the true complexity of life.

The body of work that Sanna has accumulated reproduces the methods of field scientists. She takes items – birds, plants, other animals – out of where they normally live and uses a makeshift field studio to photograph them. Her photographs are designed to emphasize the fact that these creatures have been isolated, their existence simplified, so that we can observe and study them – and attempt to understand something about them.

In Sanna’s images, the artificiality of the setting in which these animals and plants are “studied” is striking.  It serves to highlight the artificiality that we construct when studying nature. Even as science pretends that it is transmitting some form of reality, these images highlight that science, like all else we do, is a human-constructed, cultural framework that simply represents one way of seeing the world.

Simple additions like a ruler or some other human method of observation and measurement serve to highlight the objectification of these creatures as objects of scientific study.

The images avoid, in many cases, any attempt to be aesthetically pleasing – they are supposed to be “scientific” examinations not romantic imagery. Many of the images are then simply labeled with the scientific names of the animal or plant that is photographed – a statement that seems to stamp the supposed scientific authority of “truth” and “knowledge” on to the image. It is as though, in clearly labeling a natural object with a scientific name, someone is saying, with the force of an authority that cannot be challenged, “this is what this is – we understand it and know everything about it”.

Images of her field studio further highlight the artifice of the method of “study”.

Contrasting these images of simplified (and maybe simplistic) artifice, are some images (below) that attempt to show the impenetrable complexity of the tropical rain forest. The messy, confusing, incomprehensible nature of the “immense disorder” of whole forest is juxtaposed with the clinical, artificial simplification of the individual studied objects.

Steve Baker in his essay introducing the monograph of Kannisto’s work summarizes the project as being intended  “..to represent – and, simultaneously, to acknowledge the impossibility of representing in any conventional manner – the baffling complexity of the tropical rainforest”.

It is clear from this work, that it is not only science which has to simplify in an attempt to comprehend. We end up much more drawn to clean simplicity of the images of the isolated bird or plant than the chaotic image of the unadulterated forest. Imagery – and all the arts – also simplify in an attempt to allow us to comprehend. The complexity of nature that is all around us is impossible for us humans to understand. We need to chop it up, simplify it and create limited, artificial models and languages of description in an attempt to gain some sort of comprehension. We create limited, though useful, ways of seeing.  The danger comes when the scientist, the artist, the economist, the anthropologist, the historian or anyone else starts to believe that his particular way of seeing represents the unassailable “truth”. Sanna Kannisto’s work gives the lie to any such self-delusion.

Let’s face it. The above image of Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen wearing a dress made out of water is more likely to draw attention to the vital importance of water to our lives than yet another picture of a polluted river or another attempt at heart rending with a child in Africa standing by a dry water pump.

Gisele Bundchen has taken environmental issues to heart. In 2009 she was appointed UN Goodwill Ambassador for the Environment.

For the last few years, advertising campaigns for her own Ipanema line of sandals have been associated with images and actions in support of environmental issues and initiatives.  The above campaign was the first – and the best. The impact of this imaginative and creative use of water, the glamorous image and the metaphorical use of the idea that our body is water all combine to create a highly impactful and emotive image. The campaign was in aid of a campaign to stop damage to the Xingu river.

Later campaigns (below) supported the work of SOS Mata Atlantica in support of the Atlantic forests while the latest campaign is focused on supporting efforts to combat climate change.

These campaigns have what it takes to have an impact in today’s world: artistic imagination, eye-catching imagery, celebrity culture and, above all a positive feel rather than more doom and gloom telling us all what bad people we are.

For the first time ever, 20 foot trees from the Royal Estate were, at the request of the Royal couple, brought inside Westminster Abbey to line the ceremonial passage – particularly appropriate in this International Year of the Forests. The importance of Nature also made it into the Bishop’s address.

There is maybe nothing that expresses the culture constructed by humanity as much as the pageantry of a British royal wedding. It is heartening that, on this occasion and, maybe, in line with the thoughts and feelings of a new generation, Nature has, for the first time, become an invited guest.

The trees softened the Abbey’s severe, if grand, gothic vaults with the softness of nature and a celebration of spring. In somewhat of a post-modern twist, the Bishop of London in his address called for a shift from the modernist pursuit of knowledge and technology to a focus on wisdom and respect for nature – and each other.

“We stand looking forward to a century which is full of promise and full of peril. Human beings are confronting the question of how to use wisely the power that has been given to us through the discoveries of the last century. We shall not be converted to the promise of the future by more knowledge, but rather by an increase of loving wisdom and reverence, for life, for the earth and for one another.”

When nature gets invited to a Royal Wedding, maybe environmental and conservation values are truly becoming embedded in our society – at least among the newer generation. Time for celebration indeed.

Casa Batlo, Barcelona. Photo Sergio Muscat

Gaudi was a spiritual man with a great regard for nature as God’s creation. The newly consecrated Sagrada Familia “strives to compress all of earth and heaven into its structure – endless saints, biblical scenes, symbols, inscriptions, seashells, reptiles, birds, flowers and fruit.” according to Rowan Moore in The Observer. Gaudi even included in his highly decorative (if sometimes pretty ugly) sculptural details, images of the animals that were going to be displaced by the building of the huge church on the then outskirts of Barcelona. Neither are sculptural details reproducing nature limited to the Sagrada Familia – they are widespread across Gaudi’s full range of art-in-building.

Casa Batlo, Barcelona. Photo Sergio Muscat

But Gaudi also realized that nature provided more than mere decoration. His structural forms mimicked those found in nature thereby providing him with both aesthetic and functional benefits.  Columns mirroring trees or human bones, roof structures mirroring leaves, arches mirroring rib cages; all these allowed him to reduce the materials needed to build strong structures because of the supreme functionality gained from reproducing nature’s designs.

The Sagrada Familia column structures gain strength by mirroring nature's architecture

Then, of course, there is the sheer joyfulness, color and blousy expressionism of natural forms that find themselves expressed in Gaudi’s celebration of life.

A celebration of life

Gaudi transformed Barcelona into an art gallery with a celebration of life on every street. His designs were sometimes outrageous – as outrageous as the plants and creatures inhabiting a tropical rain forest. In using natural forms, Gaudi was, maybe, one of the first in what would be today called a sustainable architect. He understood that nature gives us not only beauty, recreation and joie de vivre but also wisdom – something that maybe we could all learn a bit more of today.

David Maisel’s work spans many different project over many years. One of his interests is in documenting through aerial photographs the impact that Man has on the landscape.  The image above is from “The Mining Project” where he explores the effect of mining in “undoing of the landscape, in terms of both its formal beauty and its environmental politics.” Like other artists (eg Edward Burtynsky – previously reviewed in this blog), Maisel explores how aesthetic beauty can be created out of destructive and polluting processes.

Examining landscapes from The Great Salt Lake (above) to his project “The Forest” where he examines patterns created by floating logs and clear cut forests (below), Maisel draws us into unknown (and maybe unknowable) landscapes using images that “are charged by both their profane beauty and their ethically questionable nature.”

Below: Image from The Lake Project: “the stuff of California legend: a story of engineers, politicians, and big land owners working together to divert water to the rapidly growing desert city of Los Angeles, generating a thriving agricultural industry and an environmental disaster in the process.”

“Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline”

He was the first to develop the idea of ‘social sculpture’ – an integration of sculptural work into everyday social activity and – at its extreme – the idea that society as a whole was to be regarded as one giant work of art.

In environmental terms, his best known work is ’7,000 oaks’. Starting with the planting of a single oak tree in Kassel, Germany in 1982, he initiated a project that culminated in the planting of 7,000 oak trees in that city over the following 5 years. This was a substantial artistic and ecological intervention with the goal of changing the living space of the city.

Joseph Beuys's first tree planted in front of the Museum Fridericianum

The project exemplified Beuys’s idea that social sculpture was a participatory process that could, itself, transform our social environment.  The idea of artwork that intervenes and itself becomes part of our landscape or social fabric has since been taken up by a many of today’s conceptual artists.

Beuys’s work was not universally admired.  His passion for social change and his belief in the power of art as the agent of change was described by some as ‘simple-minded utopian drivel‘.

Love him or hate him (and there are plenty of either), Beuys’s lasting influence is undeniable.  in 1988, the Dia Foundation installed 5 oaks in New York City claiming them as a ‘continuation’ of Beuys’s project. British artists Ackroyd and Harvey collected acorns from Beuys’s oaks, re-planted them and exhibited the saplings as part of “Earth: Art of a Changing World” a recent exhibition at the Royal Acedemy, London.  What these works lacks in originality they maybe make up for as a tribute to the impact of Joseph Beuys and his lasting influence on social and environmental art.

A 'continuation' of Joseph Beuys's project in NYC - Dia Foundation.