Explicit environmental art—works addressing man-made threats to local and global ecologies—appeared only after the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” the famous disclosure of chemical pesticides, which made pollution a pressing national cause. Images of burning rivers, oil spills and animal casualties prompted 20 million Americans—then one-tenth of the U.S. population—to demonstrate on April 22, 1970, in cities across the country for clean water and air. The artist Robert Rauschenberg, who grew up loathing the foul odors of the oil refinery in his heavily polluted hometown of Port Arthur, Texas, responded that same year with “Earth Day,” a poster benefiting the American Environmental Foundation: Black- white photos of landscapes with pits, factories, garbage and an endangered gorilla surround a nicotine brown image of a bald eagle. Nature was no longer a pure and timeless muse for artists, but became something vulnerable that people had abused. In 1974, photographer Robert Adams published “The New West,” a book depicting man-made landscapes in Colorado: suburbs, malls, and land for sale on the fringes of towns and villages, areas where the natural and the manufactured collide and compromise. Close. each other. This period also saw the rise of land art – huge outdoor projects that interacted with nature – some of which were actively environmentally conscious, most notably the work of Agnes Denes, whose most iconic works include an entire forest that has been in Finland between 1992 and 1996. planted.
More recently, artists have made these fraught borderlands their canvas. Mary Mattingly, who grew up in a Connecticut farming town where drinking water was polluted, has focused on public works that often involve entire communities. Haunted by an age-old ordinance that made it illegal to forage on public land, Mattingly planted a yard on a barge and established it in sites around New York City, including in the South Bronx. People who don’t have easy access to supermarkets could come and get as much fresh produce as they wanted. With massive crop failures and famines predicted by climate scientists, the work speaks to the future as much as the food access problems that haunt the present.
‘Limnal Lacrimosa’, Mattingly’s new project, is currently on display in a former brewery in Kalispell, Mont. Melting snow on the roof is led inside, where it drips into tearing vats — containers that ancient Roman mourners used to collect their tears. The water overflows and spills onto the floor before being pumped back up. The space echoes with droplets that maintain “a kind of abstract ice age,” she said: slower when cold, faster when warm. Inspired by the accelerating melt cycles in nearby Glacier National Park, the piece is an oblique way of dealing with global warming in a state where, Mattingly said, “it doesn’t seem realistic to always talk about climate change on a way that Maybe in New York, where it’s fairly accepted.’ Still, the work has become a means of building common ground. “The political layer comes last,” she said. “Usually I walk people through it and at the end of the conversation I tell how quickly the cycles of rain and melt change. And people totally agree. But if I start with climate change or if I even say ‘climate change’… you can see that people are brisk, and they’re not really ready for that.”
Mattingly’s is part of a group of works that encourages the kinds of behaviors essential to fighting climate change: cooperation and cooperation between strangers. What the artists behind these works have in common is their incessant self-examination: how do they contribute to the disaster with their art? In 2019, the painter Gary Hume (whose canvases do not portray a particular environmental theme) asked his studio manager to investigate the emissions associated with sending his works from London, where he partly lives, to New York, where he had an exhibition. . at Matthew Marks gallery. Danny Chivers, a climate change researcher, found that ocean freight would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 96 percent compared to air freight. “There was no downside,” Hume said. Shipping the work by sea was also significantly cheaper. “I was ashamed of myself that it had taken so long,” he said.