Art Competes With Nature

The Art in Nature competition, organized by The Artist magazine, attracted many entries from artists inspired by the wonder, wildness and beauty of the natural world. Packed with inspirational ideas, this book contains 67 of the best works of art.

Dedicated to an articulation of the earth from broadly ecological perspectives, eco art is a vibrant subset of contemporary art that addresses the widespread public concern with rapid climate change and related environmental issues. In Landscape into Eco Art, Mark Cheetham systematically examines connections and divergences between contemporary eco art, land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and the historical genre of landscape painting. Through eight thematic case studies that illuminate what eco art means in practice, reception, and history, Cheetham places the form in a longer and broader art-historical context. He considers a wide range of media—from painting, sculpture, and photography to artists’ films, video, sound work, animation, and installation—and analyzes the work of internationally prominent artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Nancy Holt, Mark Dion, and Robert Smithson. In doing so, Cheetham reveals eco art to be a dynamic extension of a long tradition of landscape depiction in the West that boldly enters into today’s debates on climate science, government policy, and our collective and individual responsibility to the planet. An ambitious intervention into eco-criticism and the environmental humanities, this volume provides original ways to understand the issues and practices of eco art in the Anthropocene. Art historians, humanities scholars, and lay readers interested in contemporary art and the environment will find Cheetham’s work valuable and invigorating.

A distinguished group of scholars here probes the complex structure of aesthetic responses to nature in a discussion enriched with insights from art history, literary criticism, geography and philosophy. Exploring the interrelation among nature, beauty and art, they show that natural beauty is impregnated with concepts derived from the arts and from particular accounts of nature. The distinction and relation between art and nature are questioned, and the volume culminates in philosophical studies of the role of scientific understanding, engagement and appreciation in aesthetics.

In this book some of the world's leading economists and experts on Serra explore the enduring appeal of his 1613 Breve trattato.

With contributions from a range of expert voices within the field, this book explores the use of art therapy as a response to traumatic events. Offering rare insight into ways in which art therapists have responded to recent crises, this is a unique resource for art therapists looking to coordinate interventions for large-scale disaster and resulting trauma. Chapters address a range of environmental and manmade disasters around the world, including hurricanes, typhoons, wildfires, mass shootings and forced migration, highlighting the impact of an art therapy approach in dealing with widespread trauma. Covering both community and individual cases, it provides an in-depth view into the challenges of working in these settings, including the effects on the therapist themselves, and offers practical information on how to coordinate, fund and maintain responses in these environments. The first book to focus on disaster response in art therapy, this will be an invaluable contribution to the field in an increasingly vital area.

Since 1900, the connections between art and technology with nature have become increasingly inextricable. Through a selection of innovative readings by international scholars, this book presents the first investigation of the intersections between art, technology and nature in post-medieval times. Transdisciplinary in approach, this volume?s 14 essays explore art, technology and nature?s shifting constellations that are discernible at the micro level and as part of a larger chronological pattern. Included are subjects ranging from Renaissance wooden dolls, science in the Italian art academies, and artisanal epistemologies in the followers of Leonardo, to Surrealism and its precursors in Mannerist grotesques and the Wunderkammer, eighteenth-century plant printing, the climate and its artistic presentations from Constable to Olafur Eliasson, and the hermeneutics of bioart. In their comprehensive introduction, editors Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam and Jacob Wamberg trace the Kantian heritage of radically separating art and technology, and inserting both at a distance to nature, suggesting this was a transient chapter in history. Thus, they argue, the present renegotiation between art, technology and nature is reminiscent of the ancient and medieval periods, in which art and technology were categorized as aspects of a common area of cultivated products and their methods (the Latin ars, the Greek techne), an area moreover supposed to imitate the creative forces of nature.