Ecological 'art' and the transformation of the world

Abstract

If the modernist artwork was autonomous in the sense of being subject only to the aesthetic laws of its own distinctive being, ecological artworks cannot be understood as ‘autonomous’, but – in accordance with ecological art’s apparent ‘respect’ for, or attitude of ‘letting-be’ (Heidegger) towards the world – rather in terms of a complex interplay of heteronomy and autonomy. This claim is substantiated in the present paper through a scrutiny of the work of two ecological artists, namely Andy Goldsworthy and Bradley McCallum, and with considerable dependence on the groundbreaking work of Suzi Gablik. It is argued that ecological art marks a radical departure from traditional, modern(-ist) art, in so far as it engages society or nature as collaborator or partner, transforming it in the process, and Derrida’s notion of two types of hospitality is used to articulate the paradoxical dynamic at work in art of this kind.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.