Ecovention

Last updated

Ecovention was a term invented by Amy Lipton and Sue Spaid in 1999 to refer to an ecological art intervention in environmental degradation. [1] The Ecovention movement in art is associated with land art, earthworks, and environmental art, and landscape architecture, but remains its own distinct category. Many ecoventions bear tendencies similar to public works projects such as sewage and waste-water treatment plants, public gardens, landfills, mines, and sustainable building projects. [2]

Contents

The term 'Ecovention' appears by the composition of the terms 'ecology' and 'innovation' or 'intervention'. The intention was to concrete a kind of art that alludes to the interventions that artists were made in degraded natural territories, pretending to generate a public consciousness, showing the existence of solutions. [3] The fact of restoring make the artists enter in a collaboration process with the nature in a social way. They help to generate a new paradigm teaching how art could help the society not only in a social or political criticism, but getting directly involved in the world. They are responsible for extending the various environmental principles and practices to the community.

Artists will focus on various aspects like: biological, cultural, political or historical. [4] At the same time, different professionals work that are fundamental; architects, botanists, zoologists, engineers, ecologists... all based on the imaginative idea of an artist [5] 4. Activism, the re-evaluation of territories, the study of diversity and the recovery of spaces will be some of its main characteristics. To carry them out, they use new techniques in order to transform that local ecology in order to reestablish natural resources and stabilize environments. His works have as a common goal to motivate the viewer to visit these spaces generating awareness and in turn encourage more interventions.

Artists associated with ecovention include: Joseph Beuys, Mel Chin, Agnes Denes, Helen and Newton Harrison, Ocean Earth, Robert Smithson, Alan Sonfist, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, among others.

Exhibitions

Ecovention is also the title of a 2002 exhibition at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center in Ohio, [6] and the title of exhibition catalog, joint published with the Greenmuseum. [7] It was considered the definitive text on ecological art for several years and the only text available for teaching the topic at the college and University level. [8] [9]

Other major exhibitions apart from the CAC's "Ecovention" exhibition include: "Earth Art" (1969) at Cornell University, "Elements of Art: Earth, Air and Fire" (1971) at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, "Earthworks: Land Reclamation as Sculpture" (1979) at the Seattle Art Museum, and "Fragile Ecologies" (1992) curated by Barbara Matilsky at the Queens Museum of Art. [10] [11]

There is a new exhibition, Ecovention Europe, planned to open in the Fall of 2017. The show is also curated by Sue Spaid, and will feature a new text furthering the conversation around what an "Ecovention" is. The show will be held at the Museum De Domijnen in Sittard, Netherlands. [12]

Related Research Articles

Land art A form of art creation

Land art, variously known as Earth art, environmental art, and Earthworks, is an art movement that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, largely associated with Great Britain and the United States but that also includes examples from many countries. As a trend, "land art" expanded boundaries of art by the materials used and the siting of the works. The materials used were often the materials of the Earth, including the soil, rocks, vegetation, and water found on-site, and the sites of the works were often distant from population centers. Though sometimes fairly inaccessible, photo documentation was commonly brought back to the urban art gallery.

Vik Muniz Brazilian artist and photographer (born 1961)

Vik Muniz is a Brazilian artist and photographer. Initially a sculptor, Muniz grew interested with the photographic representations of his work, eventually focusing completely on photography. Primarily working with unconventional materials such as tomato sauce, diamonds, magazine clippings, chocolate syrup, dust, dirt, etc., Muniz creates works of art, referencing old master's paintings and celebrity portraits, among other things, and then photographs them. His work has been met with both commercial success and critical acclaim, and has been exhibited worldwide. He is currently represented by Galeria Nara Roesler based in New York and Brazil.

Environmental art is a range of artistic practices encompassing both historical approaches to nature in art and more recent ecological and politically motivated types of works. Environmental art has evolved away from formal concerns, for example monumental earthworks using earth as a sculptural material, towards a deeper relationship to systems, processes and phenomena in relationship to social concerns. Integrated social and ecological approaches developed as an ethical, restorative stance emerged in the 1990s. Over the past ten years environmental art has become a focal point of exhibitions around the world as the social and cultural aspects of climate change come to the forefront.

Greenmuseum.org Defunct online art museum via website

Greenmuseum.org was a nonprofit online museum of environmental art. Since its launch in 2001, greenmuseum.org had become a source for information about this global art movement, which includes ecoart, land art, art in nature and related terms. It was formed by a group of artists in the San Francisco Bay Area who were interested in ecology who had observed that a museum did not exist that was dedicated to the history art and ecology.

Maja and Reuben Fowkes are London-based curators, critics and art historians specialised in East European art history and contemporary art and ecology.

Nicolás García Uriburu

Nicolás García Uriburu was an Argentine contemporary artist, landscape architect, and ecologist. His work in land art was aimed at raising consciousness about environmental issues such as water pollution.

Patricia Johanson American artist

Patricia Johanson is an American artist. Johanson is known for her large-scale art projects that create aesthetic and practical habitats for humans and wildlife. She designs her functional art projects, created with and in the natural landscape, to solve infrastructure and environmental problems, but also to reconnect city-dwellers with nature and with the history of a place. These project designs date from 1969, making her a pioneer in the field of ecological-art Johanson's work has also been classified as Land Art, Environmental Art, Site-specific Art and Garden Art. Her early paintings and sculptures are part of Minimalism.

Ecoarttech

Ecoarttech is an experimental, postdisciplinary, mixed media environmental art collaborative founded in 2005 by artist Cary Peppermint and literary writer/critic Leila Christine Nadir. The collaborative explores the complex relationships between modernity, technologies, networks, and concepts of nature and culture. Merging primitive with emergent technologies, ecoarttech’s work investigates the overlapping terrain between “nature,” built environments, mobility, and electronic spaces. In furtherfield.org, Sophia Kosmaoglou writes, "Refusing to regard technology merely as a tool, Ecoarttech expand the uses of mobile technology and digital networks revealing them to be fundamental components of the way we experience our environment... By drawing our attention to the increasing replacement or mediation of physical experiences by technology, Ecoarttech challenge the widely reproduced distinction between nature and culture." In visualMAG, Teresa de Andrés describes the artists as "determined to blur the frontiers between city and countryside by using technologies in a creative way... they invite us to lose ourselves in unexplored lands, sinuous urban alleys and arid mountains to the south of the Earth.

Ecological art is an art genre and artistic practice that seeks to preserve, remediate and/or vitalize the life forms, resources and ecology of Earth. Ecological art practitioners do this by applying the principles of ecosystems to living species and their habitats throughout the lithosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere, including wilderness, rural, suburban and urban locations. Ecological art is a distinct genre from Environmental art in that it involves functional ecological systems-restoration, as well as socially engaged, activist, community-based interventions. Ecological art also addresses politics, culture, economics, ethics and aesthetics as they impact the conditions of ecosystems. Ecological art practitioners include artists, scientists, philosophers and activists who often collaborate on restoration, remediation and public awareness projects.

Sue Spaid is an American curator and philosopher, currently based in Belgium.

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga is an American new media artist who approaches art as a social practice that establishes dialogue in public spaces. Themes such as immigration, discrimination, gentrification and the effects of globalization extend from his experience and observations into works that tactically engage viewers through populist metaphors while maintaining criticality. He has said, "I have always felt very strongly that for art to matter its need to be socially relevant and exist outside of the gallery and museum amongst people at large."

Keri Rosebraugh American artist and art administrator

Keri Rosebraugh is an American artist and art administrator. Her artworks often deal with ecological themes and focus on human being’s relationship with nature.

Andrea Polli

Andrea Polli is an environmental artist and writer. Polli blends art and science to create widely varied media and technology artworks related to environmental issues. Her works are presented in various forms, she uses interactive websites, digital broadcasting, mobile applications, and performances, which allows her to reach a wider audience.

Linda Weintraub is an American art writer, educator and curator. She has written several books on contemporary art. Her most recent works address environmental consciousness that defines the ways cultures approach art, science, ethics, philosophy, politics, manufacturing, and architecture.

Aviva Rahmani

Aviva Rahmani is an Ecological artist whose public and ecological art projects have involved collaborative interdisciplinary community teams with scientists, planners, environmentalists and other artists. Her projects range from complete landscape restorations to museum venues that reference painting, sound and photography.

Bonnie Ora Sherk (1945-2021) was an American landscape planner, educator, international artist, and founder of The Farm and A Living Library. Sherk was a professional artist who exhibited her work in museums and galleries around the world. Her work has also been published in art books, journals, and magazines. Her work is considered a pioneering contribution to Eco Art.

Eugenio Viola Italian art critic and curator (born 1975)

Eugenio Viola is an Italian art critic and curator. He got his Ph.D. in “Methods and Methodologies of Archaeological and Historical-Artistic Research” at the University of Salerno. He is the current Senior Curator at PICA – Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, which is one of the leading Australian institutions

Grazia Toderi is an Italian artist working primarily in the medium of video art. Born in Padua, and trained in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Bologna, Toderi began working in the medium of media and video art in the 1990s. Currently working out of Milan and Turin, the MIT Museum describes her as "one of the most recognized visual artists working in Italy today". Toderi is inspired in part by Giotto and other early 14th-century painters, but "draws more heavily on contemporary experience, from distant views of cities glowing at night to the zero-gravity ballets of the U.S. space programs". Latvia's NOASS has described Toderi as first gaining critical attention in 1993 after participating in the 45th Venice Biennale, and "often referred to as one of the most important contemporary artists, working in fields of video projection and installation art and is recognized for her iconic use of aerial images of nighttime metropolitan cities." Much of Toderi's video art involves visualizations of the infinite, and Toderi credits this to a "formative moment in her childhood—watching the simulcast of the first moonwalk."

Carlos Rolón American painter

Carlos Rolón, also known professionally under the pseudonym Dzine, is an American contemporary visual artist of Puerto Rican descent. Rolón's work has been shown at museums and galleries internationally, including the Bass Museum of Art, Miami, Marta Herford Museum, Germany, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico and the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Torkwase Dyson is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York, United States. Her work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. She describes the themes of her work as "architecture, infrastructure, environmental justice, and abstract drawing." In 1999 she received a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and her MFA from Yale School of Art in painting/printmaking in 2003. In 2016, Dyson was elected to the board of the Architectural League of New York as Vice President of Visual Arts. In 2017, she was on the faculty of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is a visiting critic at Yale School of Art.

References

  1. ↑ http://www.eyebeam.org/ecovention-current-art-to-transform-ecologies Archived 2014-02-21 at the Wayback Machine Eyebeam "Current Art to Transform Ecologies."
  2. ↑ http://greenmuseum.org/c/ecovention/sect1.html#landart Archived 2015-09-24 at the Wayback Machine Greenmuseum.org Ecoventions
  3. ↑ MARÍN RUIZ, Carmen (2014). 'Arte medioambiental y ecología. Elementos para una reflexión crítica.'. p. 42.
  4. ↑ "Ecovention: current art to transform ecologies". Greenmuseum. Archived from the original on 2016-03-09. Retrieved 2017-12-19.
  5. ↑ MARÍN RUIZ, Carmen (2014). 'Arte medioambiental y ecología. Elementos para una reflexión crítica.'. p. 98.
  6. ↑ Ground works : environmental collaboration in contemporary art. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University. 2005. p. 21. ISBN   978-0-9772053-1-8.
  7. ↑ http://greenmuseum.org/c/ecovention/intro_frame.html Archived 2014-02-21 at the Wayback Machine Greenmuseum.org. Contemporary Arts Center.
  8. ↑ editor, Kim Kennedy White, editor ; Leslie A. Duram, contributing (2013). America goes green : an encyclopedia of eco-friendly culture in the United States. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. p. 67. ISBN   978-1-59884-657-7.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
  9. ↑ Kagan, Sacha "Art and Sustainability; Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2011."
  10. ↑ Green acres. Artist farming fields, greenhouses and abandoned lots. 2012. Ithaca: Worldwide Books.
  11. ↑ Song, Young Imm Kang. 2009. "Community Participatory Ecological Art and Education". International Journal of Art & Design Education. 28 (1): 4-13.
  12. ↑ "Ecovention Europe".

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.