Art is a political statement. Why not use it for the greater good?
This dissertation will be looking into the environmental issues our planet is facing, and the artist that are creating artwork to raise awareness of these issues. I will be looking at how the environmental movement came about. And focusing on three different aspects of environmentalism; climate change, plastic pollution and deforestation. With artists that focus the practice on each aspect I will be looking at.
When the term environmentalism came around in the late 0s, there wasn’t much know about the state of the plant or what issues we were using as humans, still to this day there’s issues are still not as well-known as they should be. With 7.5 billion people living in this plant all using resources, contributing to pollution, it is affecting our climate which will have a massive impact on the future generations.
The term environmentalism is both a political and ethical movement where it is meant it for people to think in a different way, caring more for the earth and protecting it, thinking u and acting upon suggestions to contribute to the wellbeing of our planet. T means to recognise the environmental issues were facing and come up with solutions as both individuals and as the human race.
We’re living in a time where it is the norm to constantly consume. To buy and throw away. The earth is only one place and the resources we have been relying on up until now are running out with no way or refilling them. Most material we rely on such as metals and minerals and so on will only last for a few more decades.
Environmental problems were coming to our attention more so in the 50-60 then leading into the 70s as there were economic growth all around the world and companies were taking natural resources transforming them into item, they wanted wood used for paper and furniture, burn coal to generate electricity polluting the skies.
From this the most common consensuses were to get the government to step and to clean up the absolute mess the market place. At the time this was going on every environmentalism book was pointing their finger at consumption issues profits. Create pollutants and dumping them on our earth.
The term environmentalism is both a political and ethical movement that sets out to care for and protect our environment t, our earth.
Environmentalist artists have not only been recognised and appreciated for their artwork n=but also for their awareness of the environmental issues we are acing.
The term environmental art consists of many different kinds of artwork ranging from land art, earth art, sustainable art, conceptual art.
The environmental art movement came about in the 1960s made famous by people such as Nils Udo, Jean-Max Albert and Piotr Kowalski
Put an example of one of these and talk about their work and how it illustrates the discussed
Climate Change
An estimated 95% of todays current warmimg treand is said to be the result of human activity from around the mid 20th century. Todays technology has enabled us to view earth from a different perspective, visually being able to see the change in climate over the past few decades. More use of greenhouse gasses leads to the earth warmimg. Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth’s climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels. Ancient evidence can also be found in tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. From this paleoclimate evidence we can see that the current warming is arising is approximately then times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.
kkkkkkk the temperateure of the planets surface has rise around 0.9 degrees Celsius since the late 19th century
There are very few renewable energy sources like solar power wind and tidal power, the majority of energy we’ve been using comes from fossil fuels such as coal oil and natural gases these sources took hundreds of years to form on this earth and we’ve consumed the majority of these sources in a fraction of that time.
Hungarian artist Agnes Denes is usually known as the grandmother of environmental art movement, she is living and working in NYC AGNES IS INTERESTED IN THE PERCEPTIONS HUMANS HAVE OF NATURAL CYCLES AND STEWARDSHIP. Her most famous work is Wheatfield, a confrontation from 1982 this piece of work took 6 months to complete which included planting a field of golden wheat on two acres of rubble-strewn landfill near wall street Manhattan.
Denes planted and harvested wheat across two acres on the battery Park Landfill in Manhattan in the summer of 1982.
Denes took a few months to plan this piece out, then in May of 1982 a 2-acre wheat field was planted on the Battery Park Landfill in lower Manhattan, just 2 blocks from Wall Street and the world trade centre, facing the statue of liberty. 200 truckloads of soil were brought to the site and 285 furrows were hand dug and cleared of all rocks and rubbish etc. all the seeds were sown by hand and the field was kept maintained, all wheat smut and weeds cleared and fertilized and sprayed against mildew fungus and an irrigation system set up, this went on for four months. The crops were harvested on the 16th of August 1982 and yielded over 1000 pounds of healthy, golden wheat. The land Wheatfield was planted on was worth $4.5 billion needless to say that particular piece of artwork created quite a powerful paradox. Th piece of work represented food, energy, commerce, world trade and economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns it was calling concern to our misplaced priorities. All the harvested wheat was distributed across 28 cities across the world as part of the exhibition “the international art show for the end of world hunger” which was organised by the Minnesota museum of art (1987-90) the seeds were also planted across the world.
Nils-Udo who is one of the main figures of the environmental arts movement. He has been creating environmental artwork since 1960????????????? And is most well-known for creating his ‘utopias;’ in nature, in the attempt to prove that they can be real. Nil-udo explains “Even if I work parallel to nature and only intervene with the greatest possible care, a basic internal contradiction remains. It is a contradiction that underlies all of my work, which itself can’t escape the inherent fatality of our existence. It harms what it touches: the virginity of nature…To realize what is possible and latent in Nature, to literally realize what has never existed, utopia becomes reality. A second life suffices. The event has taken place. I have only animated it and made it visible.”
He began painting in Paris on traditional surfaces in the 1960s then later moved back to his home in Bavaria to begin planting his work and letting nature take over. His work consists of instillations and he often use natural found materials to work with.
Plastic WASTE
Waste wasn’t a huge problem until last century, we use a larger variety of materials these days and most of those materials are throw away products. Such as plastic, in the 1950s with a population of 2.5 billion, 1.5 million tons of plastic was produced. In 2016 with a population of 7 billion people, over 320million tons of plastic was produced. This figure is set to double by 2034. It is estimated that at least 8 million pieces of plastic are entering our oceans every day and two thirds of the plastic comes straight from land based sources such as litter being left on beaches or washed down rivers and drains from litter being dropped in tons and cities it also comes from industry spills badly managed landfills sites and bins near the sea or being flushed down the loo. The remainder comes from containers going overboard or fishing gear being lost at sea. And currently there’s is around 51 trillion microscopic pieces of plastic in the sea weighing around 269,000 tons which is the equivalent to around 1345 adult blue whales.
Plastic consumption is something that is completely out of control in this day and age with the material being incredibly durable and cheap to produce it is used for almost everything and anything you can think of. With this being at our disposal it is super hard to avoid it in everyday life, making it a massive contributor to our household wastes. WE WILL NEVER RECYCLE OUR WAY OUT OF THIS MESS. Most plastic we consume either ends up in landfill or in our oceans. As plastic is so durable it takes thousands of years to break down and even then, it doesn’t degrade it just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. As it is ending up in our oceans and breaking down into smaller pieces, animals in the oceans are mistaking these pieces of plastic for food, when they consume the plastic. A plastic bottle can last around 450 years in the marine environment. Every piece of plastic ever made is still on this earth today.
As you can imagine the vast amounts of plastic in our oceans have a massive impact on the wildlife in our oceans. Photographer Chris Jordan captured the shocking amounts of plastic ingested by an albatross, who had mistaken all these plastic piece’s as meals. Recently it had been documents that a Cuvier’s beaked whale was found dying from malnourishment off the coast of Norway, the animal had to be put down due to its poor conditions, but an autopsy showed a SHOCKING 30 plastic bags and a large amount of plastic packing (Danish and English writing) in its stomach and intestines causing blockages and pain.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest of 5 plastic accumulation zones in our oceans, estimated to be three times the size of France and has an estimates mass of 80,000 tonnes of plastic. It has been thought that it would take 67 ships and 1 whole year to clean up just 1% of the great pacific garbage patch. Its located between Hawaii and California.
Chris Jordan is a Seattle based artist who formally worked as a lawyer. He’s best known for his photography work, depicting rubbish and other products of consumeristic culture. His art is a reminder of how we are so effortlessly destroying our planet. One of his recent works titled Albatross shows a journey spanning from 2008-1017????????? In which he and a team of his travelled to the
8 YEAR JOURNEY
Albatross started in 2008 as a joint project between Jordan and his friend and activist Manuel Maqueda. It started to look into the ocean plastic pollution which was a fairly new arising issue at the time. it was brought to their attention that there was a little island in eh north pacific that was facing some detrimental environmental issues and in September of 2009 they took their first of 8 trips????? Out to the remote Midway island during this trip they captured footage of thousands of young deceased albatrosses on the ground, their stomachs filled with plastic. “The experience was devastating, not only for what it meant for the suffering of the birds, but also for what it reflected back to us about the destructive power of our culture of mass consumption, and humanity's damaged relationship with the living world.”
DEFORESTATION
One of the biggest things I’ve seen around this year is the use of palm oil. A human we are the most advanced species on this planet, but we are certainly not alone o here on earth, there is little to no thought put into where we build or what habitats we are invading and destroying to supply our self with materials such as palm oil.
The earth is 29% land, and 31% of that is forests. It is well known that forests produce oxygen and that it the home for much of our wildlife a lot of which are endanger. On top of this a stagger 1.6 billion people rely of these forests for fresh water, food, tradition medicines and shelter. It is also well known that deforestation is a massive issue we are facing. It comes in many different forms such as fires, clear-cutting for agriculture, ranching and development, unsustainable logging for timber, and degradation due to climate change.
This is obviously having an effect of the wildlife and the people that are relying in these forests. It is also having an effect on climate change as forests act as a carbon sink, taking in the carbon dioxide that would otherwise be exposed to the atmosphere therefore contributing to global warming. Deforestation undermines this important carbon sink function. It is estimated that 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions are the result of deforestation.
Currently we are losing 18.7 million acres of forests annually.