(P)(RE)VIEWS: Eco Art’s Challenge to Art Criticism

Linda Weintraub

Accelerations in Art, Society, and Environmentalism

Eco art is flourishing worldwide. It has fully recovered from the fallow period that followed its auspicious
inception in the 1970s. Renewed, reinvigorated, resilient, and resplendent, contemporary eco art seems
eligible to claim the title of this era’s contribution to the future history of art. It is, arguably, the cultural
site where today’s most timely forms of artistic innovation are concentrated.

Today’s eco artists are still reeling from the “Great Acceleration” of the last half of the last century. The
term applies to a simultaneous surge in human population, economic activity, resource use,
transportation, communication, scientific discoveries, cultural innovation, and technological invention.
These ‘engines of progress’ were driven by human ingenuity and ambition, and facilitated by abundant
cheap energy and liberal political economies. No previous historical accounting of human civilization
matched this speed of take-off, bulk of delivery, and scale of impact (Robin 2008; Steffen u.a. 2004).
Regrettably, evidence of environmental disruptions, contaminations, and depletions soared as well. The
environmental movement emerged to break/brake the momentum of humanity’s determination to
transgress our species’ ecosystem niche. Thus, two “Great Accelerations” occurred in the 1970s: one
celebrated the precipitous increase in humanity’s command of the planet; the other lamented the
portentous effects it imposed upon the Earth’s oceans, coastal zones, the atmosphere, and the land. The
first is characterized by the ‘take-charge’ attitudes and ‘take-over’ methodologies that generate the
comforts and conveniences we ‘take-for-granted’. The second disrupted this status quo by adding the
long-term well-being of non-humans to humanity’s agenda. Thus, in Europe and America, populations
split into two contrasting camps:
(1) ‘Culture’ is represented by industry, technology, investment, and multinational corporations that
pursue power and control. Individuals who designed their life-scenarios around enjoying the security
and affluence they provided also joined the ranks of ‘culture’. The values they shared are typically
referred to as ‘mainstream’.
(2) ‘Counter culture’ was a mélange of specialized oppositions to concentrations of authority. White
society was attacked by the civil rights movement; commercialism by a new spirituality; universities by
student protestors; rationality by psychedelic drugs; patriarchal power by the women's movement; and
sexual restraint by the availability of birth control pills.

Art between Culture and Counter-Culture

The visual arts also split into factions, one supporting and the other contradicting mainstream’s cultural
values with equal measures of verve and innovation. They comprise a third Great Acceleration.
Pop artists, for example, although they deviated from art conventions, reinforced mainstream values by
appropriating the images, the strategies, and the values associated with commerce, materialism,
automation, and mass media. Andy Warhol (1928-1987) epitomized these mainstream alignments by
assuming the dissociated demeanor of a machine and renaming his studio ‘the factory’. The activities he
conducted there replicated mechanized production and assembly-line routines. Warhol then applied
these automated forms of artistic creativity to mass-produced foods like canned Campbell soup, mass-
marketed personalities like Marilyn Monroe, and mass-media news stories like the Kennedy
assassination.
Likewise, the Minimal artists violated art conventions, but affirmed the broader values of ‘culture’ by
emulating the cool detachment of the industrial landscape. Untitled (1966) by Robert Morris (*1931)
exemplified this aesthetic. It was a simple plywood box painted a pure, flat white whose dimensions, 8
feet x 8 feet x 4 feet, contribute to the work’s intentional denial of such human expression and
representation. The box is too small to serve as a shelter; too large to sit upon or use as a table; too uniform
to suggest growth or erosion; too neutral to express the personality of the artist; too perfect to be a product
of handcrafting. Such precise geometry can only be achieved by using the materials and the techniques of
industrial production.
Similarly, Earth art digressed from sculptural traditions to embody the frontier-styled audacity of
mainstream technologies. Michael Heizer (*1944) captured the era’s ambitions by asserting: „ As long as
you're going to make a sculpture, why not make one that competes with a 747, or the Empire State
Building, or the Golden Gate Bridge?“ (Heizer) Double Negative (1969), for example, is a classic work of
Earth Art. Located in the Moapa Valley near Overton, Nevada, the work consists of an enormous trench
30 feet wide, 50 feet deep, and 1500 feet long that was formed when the artist adopted heavy
machinery and dynamite as his ‘carving’ tools. The natural canyon that interrupts the trench became the
repository for the 244,000 tons of rock and dirt that were excavated to create it, significantly altering
the terrain. This work embodied the same instrumental attitude toward nature as paving asphalt, drilling
oil, damming rivers, oneand leveling forests.
The counter-culture contribution to the third ‘Great Acceleration’ was carried out by artists who were
positioned on the fringe of the mainstream that disclosed the ominous shadow that threatened to
darken the euphoria of prosperity. News reports of oil spills, dead lakes, and ozone depletions provided
irrefutable evidence that ecosystems and their populations urgently needed rescue and relief. The
artists who rallied to prevent the planet’s vulnerabilities from intensifying are now referred to as eco
artists.
The following text surveys the radical counter-culture innovations associated with eco art. This
movement’s short history begins in the 1970s among rebel artists who not only rejected conservative art
conventions; they discarded Pop art’s media and factory production, Minimal art’s industrial exactitude,
and Land art’s harnessing of Earth forces. The ‘counter’ philosophies that drive this narrative originated
in Systems Art and Happenings.
Systems Art: Emerging computer technologies bolstered ecological concerns during the 1970s. The vast
computing capacity of these new electronic devices enabled researchers to track and tabulate the
complex, continuous, chaotic, feedback loops that drive Earth functions. These technologies liberated
scientific research from the need to study isolated entities within the controllable confines of a
laboratory. Ecologists re-imagined Earth as myriad composite systems simultaneously evolving and
devolving. Attention shifted away from nouns (materials, objects, and conditions), toward verbs
(processes, events, and transformations). Artists joined this planetary reevaluation by creating real-time
systems in which energy flows and materials responded to each other within actual life contexts.
Hans Haacke (*1936) was one of the first artists to apply the principles of ‘systems’ to art. He was
inspired by the writings of Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972). This renowned Austrian biologist
developed ‘general systems theory’ that envisioned systems as sets of interrelated components, co-
existing in space-time. Haacke also studied the writings of Norbert Wiener (1894 –1964), a US-American
mathematician and founding father of cybernetics. Wiener applied cybernetic feedback to such diverse
systems as engineering, computer science, biology, philosophy, and animal behavior. The basic tenets of
systems art are articulated in a manifesto-like declaration that Haacke wrote. “Untitled Statement”
(1965) contains the following excerpts:
“….make something which experiences, reacts to its environment, changes, is non stable…
…make something indeterminate, which always looks different, the shape of which cannot be
predicted precisely…
...make something which reacts to light and temperature changes, is subject to air currents and
depends, in its functioning, on the forces of gravity…
 …articulate something Natural…” (Haacke 2004, 100)

In order to display these effects of planetary influences, Haacke selected mediums that never appear in
art supply catalogues, like the living entities because they continually register environmental conditions
by thriving or wilting. Some are identified in such formative artworks as Grass Grows (1967-1969); Ant
Co-op (1969); Chickens Hatching (1969); Ten Turtles Set Free (1970). The state-shifting characteristics of
water also suited his desire to manifest dynamic systems. Ice Stick (1966), for example, consisted of a 70
inches tall copper element from a refrigerator. When moisture in the environment came in contact with
the element, ice formed and the sculpture got bigger. Ice continued to accumulate until it became so
thick that the cooling unit could not penetrate to the surface. Then, the ice melted until it was small
enough to allow the cooling of the coil to be felt on the surface again, at which time ice began to re-
form. Haacke explains, „From the beginning, the concept of change has been the ideological basis of my
work. All the way down there’s absolutely nothing static – nothing that does not change, or instigate
real change.“ (Haacke 1971/2006, 253)

Haacke’s contribution to eco art was secured when he not only manifested the existence of systems, he
also utilized them to remove contaminants from the polluted Rhine River which flowed passed the
Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany. Rhinewater Purification Plant (1972) is a landmark
remediation art project that combines a physical system (sludge of untreated household and industrial
sewage discharged from the Krefeld sewage plant); biological system (goldfish swimming in a pond filled
with the filtered effluent from the river); and social system (museum visitors and employees, sewage
treatment employees).
Figure 1: Title: Rhinewater Purification Plant

Artist: Hans Haacke

Date of work’s creation: 1972

Location: Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany

Medium: Contaminated water, purification system, goldfish.

Courtesy: Paula Cooper Gallery

Art that manifests a system violates an unquestioned assumption that art is a discrete object that
maintains the most perfect form endowed by an artist’s inspired actions. The violation was not
contained within the studio. It rippled through the art profession. Critics, curators, and the public were
suddenly confronting perpetually morphing, volatile works of art that were generated by a medium’s
interactions with the planet’s feedback mechanisms – not the artist’s will, not the embodiment of
emotion, inspiration, or imagination, not a product of manual skill. These artistic acts were being carried
out by wind, water, gravity, plant growth, and other autonomous forces of the planet. Knowledge of
aesthetics and art history, keen perception and sensitivity no longer suffice to conduct critical analysis of
systems art.
Happenings: The 1970s also mark the introduction of Happenings to the menu of counter-culture art
options. Happenings are events that ensue when art viewers become art-producers by following an
artist’s loose instructions. That artist was often Alan Kaprow (19272006). A copy of the book Art as
Experience that was found in Kaprow’s library was filled with his scribbled notes, indicating he was
greatly influenced by its author, John Dewey (1859-1952). Although Dewey never addressed actual
environmental conditions, the text articulated the ‘metaphysics’ of nature as a web of relations that
pertained to growth processes, mechanical processes, and mental processes (Colwell ##, 225). In
Dewey’s writings, human behaviors were integral to the workings of non-human planetary systems.
In Easy (1972), for example, Kaprow gave the following instructions to a group of students who
assembled in a stream that had dried up due to land development:
(dry stream bed)
wetting a stone
carrying it downstream until dry
dropping it
choosing another stone there
wetting it
carrying it upstream until drydropping it. 1

By prescribing actions that were dependent upon weather and time of day, Easy manifests
environmentalists’ responsiveness to the ecology of the landscape. For example, when participants
walked until their stones dried, they replaced human-contrived measures of duration, such as hours and
minutes, with durations determined by the stone porosity, ambient temperatures, and wind velocity.
Furthermore, by devising strategies to moisten the stone, the participants symbolically reversed the
imprudent decision that caused the stream to become dry; they conducted a symbolic act of habitat
restoration by replacing the missing stream water with their own saliva, sweat, and urine. The return
walk involved carrying another stone upstream, replicating a geological process that normally requires
millennia. In all these ways, Easy activated reciprocity and cooperation with ecosystem dynamics,
behaviors that are alien to mainstream cultural values.
Happenings diverged in so many ways from conventional art that Kaprow frequently referred to them as
‘unart’. He explains, „It means casting our values (our habits) over the edge of great heights, smiling as
we hear them clatter to pieces down below like so much crockery – because now we must get up and
invent something again.“ (Kaprow 1967, 5) ‘Un-arting’ welcomed the messy unpredictability of ordinary
life that had long been banished from art. ‘Art-ifice’ and ‘art-ificiality’ vanished from art. ‘Look but don’t
touch’ protocols were ignored as participants conducted multi-sensual interactions with the material

1 http://imoralist.blogspot.com/2008/03/documentation-of-alan-kaprow-happening.html
world. No trace of what transpired in the Happening remained. Critics had to construct a whole new
operating manual. In all these ways, real world turbulence and uncertainty represented art’s new vision
of ‘reality’. Conventional criteria of art criticism were useless for evaluating art that was devoid of
measure, form, and structure.

(Eco) Art Criticism’s new descriptive adjectives

The fourth Great Acceleration hasn’t yet occurred. It is awaiting eco art’s release from the cultural
periphery and its welcome from an environmentally conscious society. This promotion does not depend
upon artists; artists have been introducing brilliant ecological innovations without the support of
significant critical attention since the 1970s. It depends upon art critics.
Abandoning the ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ that has been providing the criteria of merit in art since the 19 th
century is fundamental to this shift. This maxim automatically excludes eco artists who collaborate with
progressive politicians, engineers, scientists, educators, and philosophers; who insert non-art principles
and practices into art; and who strive to reverse society’s pattern of environmental abuse and neglect.
The following text identifies five themes and strategies that are recent additions to the repertoire of
contemporary eco art. Each breaches the rarified art-for-art’s-sake tenets that insist on art’s purity. Each
introduces a new descriptive adjective into the vocabulary of art criticism.
1. Functional: Artists whose work performs a pragmatic function select, as their mode of operation, non-
compliance with critical norms and popular expectations about art. Objectors believe that when art
conducts the labors of necessity, it forfeits its righteous role communing with the divine, envisioning
utopia, epitomizing beauty, etc. Defenders, however, believe that functional art perpetuates an honored
pattern of art innovations inspired by timely events. The Cubist manner of depicting the visual world, for
example, visualized the atomic nature of matter that physicists had just discovered. Likewise, the
contemporary artists who intervene in the afflictions that beset our planet are aligned with current
environmental predicaments. Functional eco artists remediate soils, preserve habitat, recycle wastes,
cultivate food, produce energy, etc. The task of eco critics is first, to accept these practices as art, and
then evaluate the effectiveness of each intervention.

SUPERFLEX, a Danish artist collaborative formed in 1993, created SUPERGAS (1997-ongoing), a work of
art that fulfills the unglamorous functions of a furnace, oil tank, septic tank, sewage treatment plant,
and energy generator. This public art project utilizes biological wastes to produce electrical energy for
poor rural communities that exist beyond the reach of the energy grid. It substitutes art-for-art’s sake
with art-as-a-service-industry.
The project was undertaken in collaboration with Danish and African engineers. Together they designed,
constructed, and promoted simple biogas units that rely upon three renewable and nonpolluting
sources of energy: animal dung, human waste, and sunlight. Beyond supplying households with energy
for cooking and light, SUPERGAS decreases erosion (trees are no longer cut for firewood); diminishes
water contamination (by managing human and animal wastes); increases food production (compost is
the by-product of the biogas plants); and improves human health (by eliminating the smoke from
cooking fires inside homes). SUPERFLEX established an actual business to mass-produce the units so
they could be offered to inhabitants of remote villages at affordable prices. The unit has been
introduced in Tanzania, Cambodia, Thailand, and Zanzibar. Aesthetic acuity was combined with
pragmatic utility. The artists decided to paint the units a dazzling orange color in order to invest these
unglamorous units with the appeal of luxury items. This artistic device convinced several owners to
install the devices in their front yards as status symbols.

Figure 2:
Title: SUPERGAS Cambodia, 2001

Artist: SUPERFLEX

Rasmus Nielsen, Jakob Fenger, and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen with Jan Mallan
2
SUPERGAS

1996–present

Installation photo from “The Land” in Chaing Mai, Thailand

Biogas system running on organic materials

Dimensions: variable

Photo: SUPERFLEX

Courtesy SUPERFLEX and Peter Blum Gallery, New York

2. Didactic: The Environmental Health Clinic3 at NYU is an ongoing art project of Natalie Jeremijenko who
is a professor there. It disseminates information instead of producing a material object. Anyone seeking
treatment for an environmental malady can make an appointment at the clinic. The ‘clinician’ dispenses
‘prescriptions’ for treating like smog, spilled oil, underwater noise, etc. Visitors to the clinic are referred
to as ‘impatients’ because they are not willing to wait for legislators to solve these problems. The work’s
website advocates personal activism in treating these maladies, “…you bear the costs and benefits of
changing environmental health.” (http://www.environmentalhealthclinic.net/environmental-health-
clinic) The EHC clinician also provides ‘referrals’ to environmental, governmental, or civil organizations
capable of facilitating the remedial actions proposed by the clinic. ‘Follow up’ visits are voluntary.
Jeremijenko’s extensive qualifications for diagnosing and treating the environment include advanced
studies in biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering. In this work, ‘health’ is not
merely a metaphor to awaken consciousness of environmental ills. In addition to instructions, the clinic
dispenses information about the disturbing correlation between environmental contaminants with
bacterial and viral diseases, asthma, developmental delays, cancers, obesity, etc.

Functional solutions remain hypothetical unless reasons are supplied to justify them. Didactic artists
accomplish this task by conveying information. They document the severity of environmental conditions,
expose the perpetrators of environmental offenses, and transmit strategies to resolve them. Such
didactic eco artists impose daunting demands on art critic because the artistic output consists of
statistical evidence, strategic designs, and tactical interventions, not material objects. Even the creative

3 http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/
process is reformulated. Rigorous research replaces spontaneous expression and soulful
contemplations.
While didacticism in art may alienate those who are devoted to time-honored forms of art, it ultimately
expands the audience. Unlike many other vanguard art movements, didactic eco art can be understood
by people who have little knowledge of art history and art theory, who may not seek encounters with
contemporary art, and who may not realize that the instruction they are encountering is a work of art.

3. Ethical: Terike Haapoja (*1974) is a Finish artist who is extending the democratic ideals of equality by
creating elaborate ethnographic museum installations that interpret past events from non-human
perspectives. The first in an intended series constructed the history of one of humanity's most ancient
companion species – cattle.

Within the Museum of the History of Cattle 4 (2013), historic events like the theory of evolution, the
advent of the Industrial Revolution, and the expanse of urbanization cease to be great markers of
human progress. Instead, they represent a sorrowful pattern of oppression for cattle. Haapoja explains,
“Seeing cattle as instruments that produce meat, milk and leather was a consequence of the production
structure in which the individual’s body, characteristics and entire life span from insemination to death
was dissected and synchronized to the requirements of industrial efficiency.” The guilt-inducing impact
of these historic accounts is augmented by documenting how the cow’s entire life is spent in shackles,
and text describing the ‘mournful mooing’ of a cow whose infant has been taken away so that humans
can drink her milk.
The proliferation of environmental laws and treaties designed to curb humanity’s conquering march
across the biosphere is accompanied by a growing sense of guilt and regret regarding the desolation it
has left in its wake. Ethics, as a psychological state and a formal discipline, has officially entered the
environmental discourse. A new civil rights movement is emerging to demand rights and protections for
rivers, mountains, trees, and wildlife. Haapoja applies it to a domesticated animal. Advocates for the
rights of nature hope to replicate the historic liberation of women and slaves who were only valued as
an economic asset. Ultimately, each was granted protections and privileges because of their intrinsic
worth.
The bovine museum fulfills this ethic by expanding the meaning of artistic representation. Haapoja
explains, “…there is another aspect built into the idea of representation, which is to speak for another.

4 (http://www.historyofothers.org/how-to-write-a-history-according-to-cattle/)
This aspect connects humans with nature, not as an epistemological crossing but in a political power
structure.” (http://www.historyofothers.org/how-to-write-a-history-according-to-cattle/)

4. Technological: Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A), initiated in 1996 by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, is
partaking in current high tech biological explorations. The couples’ on-going artistic research and
development project utilizes living cells and tissue as mediums for artistic expression. Their sculptures
are created by cutting degradable polymer structures into desired shapes, coating them with living cells,
and then placing them inside an incubator that provides the nutrients and conditions to replicate. Zurr
and Catts learned this technology at the Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory at
Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School.
Genetic engineering, cloning, tissue engineering, organ transplants etc. represent embryonic stages of a
new technological revolution, but impassioned arguments about their implications are already ensuing.
Some are confident that biological engineering will ensure survival in the 21 st century. Others fret that
such tinkering with the elemental forms of life will only guarantee our demise. TC&A created The Semi-
Living Worry Dolls (2000) to generate public discussion about this controversy.
This project was inspired by worry dolls that are given to Guatemalan children. They are told that if they
whisper their worries and concerns to the doll at bedtime, overnight the doll will solve them. The
version created by TC&A involved degradable polymers and surgical sutures that were seeded with living
cells and placed in a micro-gravity bioreactor that functioned like a surrogate uterus. As the cells grew,
they gradually replaced the polymers and took the form of rather ungainly versions of the worry dolls.
The artists refer to them as ‘semi-living’ because they are totally dependent upon care-givers. The artists
explain, “These semi-living dolls represent the current stage of cultural limbo, characterized by childlike
innocence and a mixture of wonder and fear of technology. This work invites you to whisper your
worries to the worry dolls—will they take your concerns away?”
(https://dublin.sciencegallery.com/visceral/semi-living-worry-dolls/) 5

5
 6

Figure 3 The Semi-Living Worry Dolls

Artist: Tissue Culture & Art

Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts

Date: 2000

Medium: Degradable polymers (PGA and P4HB), surgical sutures, living cells, micro-gravity bioreactor
Dimensions: variable

Photo: ?

Courtesy: Ionat Zurr and Tissue Culture & Art

6 https://www.google.com/search?q=tissue+culture+%26+art,+worry+dolls&client=firefox-
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%253BAJd03x5kJuJNzM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fartandsciencemeeting.pl%25252F%25253Fpage_id
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%252C_&usg=__vHbqKI_GtGKXwYiqg_tqaHtnJFc%3D&sa=X&ei=QooIVNnJKIP3yQT-
hIDICA&ved=0CCYQ9QEwAg&biw=1012&bih=856#facrc=_&imgdii=0I3FV9gNljBa5M%3A%3BjME9uCe-Luq5LM
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%252Flaznia.nazwa.pl%252Fartandscience_wp%252Fwp-content%252Fuploads%252F2012%252F03%252F01-
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Great markers of biological innovation include the publication of The Theory of Evolution about150 years
ago and the discovery of DNA about 50 years ago. Both collapsed species barriers. We may be in the
throes of a comparable biological revolution. Engineering new conglomerate forms of life catapulted
human engagements with biological process from ‘discovery’ to ‘creation’. Today’s biological engineers
mimic, modify, control, replace, and augment the chemical and mechanical processes that occur in living
systems. Their manipulations are producing bizarre deviations from evolutionary norms.
Art that incorporates these laboratory processes confront critics with the bioethical dilemmas
associated with the production and engineering of new life. Eco art critics are obliged to wrestle with the
following dilemmas: Are these contrived entities monsters or marvels of human ingenuity? Should limits
be placed upon the human imagination and capabilities? Are the care-givers providing maintenance or
performing art? Are such actions nurturing or exploiting? Should terminating the life of the semi-living
sculptures be punishable as murder? Do aesthetics matter to bio art? These crucial questions are at the
core of the bio-ethical dilemmas that distinguish the last few decades..

(P)(RE)VIEWS: Eco Art’s Challenge to Art Criticism

Although no surveys, polls, or models exist that chart the course of eco art from ‘then’ to ‘now’,
personal observation indicates the following: (i) The challenges confronted by the originators of eco art
are still occupying artists’ creative imaginations. (ii) The schemes they devised are still confounding art
historians. (iii) The principles they manifested are not yet integrated into critical analysis of art. (iv) The
works they produced still belong to the counter-culture. Even well-ensconced technological innovations
seem ‘counter’ when they are presented as art.
Anthropocentrism has been fueling art’s producers and critics for over four hundred years. It is credited
with inspiring acclaimed masterworks throughout history. But this energy source may be declining since
its ‘peak’ in the 1970s, which is when the search for alternative sources of energy began in earnest.
Some alternatives were intended to power the economy. Others powered the creative contributions of
artists. Among them are those who rejected the anthropocentric principle of human sovereignty on
Earth. They adopted an ecocentric world view and became eco artists.
Despite growing concerns about environmental conditions, ecocentrism and eco art are still minority
initiatives representing destabilizing maverick incursions. Ecocentrism is likely to remain within the
‘counter-culture’ until the resources and ingenuity that currently privilege humans are redirected to
support all forms of life. Eco art is likely to remain there too until there is a consensus that ecocentric art
themes, processes, and mediums represent culturally meaningful art. And this transition may depend
upon persuasive intermediaries between artists and the public who publicly condone its forms and
explain its meanings. Thus, mainstreaming eco art seems to be the job of art critics.
Thus, this essay concludes with a challenge to art critics to flex their professional muscles by affirming
the following eco art qualifiers:
The material components (medium, tools, energy use, display, storage, transportation, packing, etc.) are
selected to minimize their past, present, and future disruptions of ecosystem functions. Extra points are
given if the production of art actually vitalizes, replenishes, or remediates a condition or entity.The
immaterial components (expressive means, theme, attitude, etc.) reveal the intention to facilitate the
long-term resilience of environmental conditions by halting humanity’s concerted efforts to escape the
constraints of our species’ niche. As the new adjectives identified in this essay reveal, eco art is
contributing to this effort by the problems we address, the information we choose as pertinent, the
ethical dilemmas we need to resolve, the social interactions we sanction, and the technologies defined
as progress.

Literaturverzeichnis
Tom Colwell: The Ecological Perspective in John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education, Educational
Theory,Volume 35, Issue 3, pages 255–266, September 1985

Haacke, Hans: Untitled Statement quoted in Exhibition announcement, Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf,
1965. in: Hans Haacke, Walter Grasskamp, Molly Nesbit, Jon Bird, Phaidon Press Limited. London,
2004
Hans Haacke Interview with by Jeanne Siegel, Arts Magazine 45, no.7 (May 1971): p 18-21. Reprinted in
Hans Haacke for real: Works 1959-2006, Edited by Matthias Flugge and Robert Fleck. Düsseldorf
2006.
Kaprow, Allan: Untitled Essay and other works [1958]. In: ders. Great Bear Pamphlet. New Brunswick
1967, no page
Robin, L. (2008). "The 'Big Here and the Long Now': agendas for history and sustainability." Fenner
School of Environment and Society, Australian National University/Centre for Historical Research,
National Museum of Australia. Retrieved on: 2009-03-16.
http://www.histecon.magd.cam.ac.uk/history-sust/files/Big_Here_and_Long_Now-presentation.pdf
Steffen, Will and Susannah Eliott, editors., Global Change and the Earth System, 2004 International
Geosphere/Biosphere Programme. IGBP Secretariat, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm
2004.
Michael Heizer website. http://doublenegative.tarasen.net/city.html (accessed ##)
Weintraub, Linda: To Life! Eco art in pursuit of a sustainable planet. Berkeley, CA et al. 2012.

Internetressourcen:

http://www.igbp.net/globalchange/greatacceleration.4.1b8ae20512db692f2a680001630.html

Abbildungsverzeichnis

Addendum: The following selection of eco art books offers diverse perspectives and approaches that this
sprawling topic invites. Some texts focus on illustrations, such as Art in Action: Nature, Creativity, and
Our Collective Future (2007) with an introduction by Achim Steiner, and Art & Ecology Now (2014) by
Andrew Brown. The opposite approach is taken in the theoretical texts by Jeffrey Kastner who edited
Nature (2012) and Ecological Aesthetics: Art in Environmental Design: Theory and Practice (2004) edited
by Heike Strelow, Herman Prigann. The artists provide the text for Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews
With Environmental Artists by John K. Grande and Edward Lucie-Smith (2004). In Ecovention: Current
Art to Transform Ecologies (2002), Sue Spaid and Amy Lipton explore the works of activist eco art they
included in an exhibition that originated at The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati (2002). My own
books focus on eco art pedagogy. They include Avant-Guadians: Textlets in Art and Ecology (2006 and
2007) and TO LIFE! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Future (2012).