This website is an introduction essay to the group of articles written about art and the environment in Tate Papers 17.
The group of articles devoted to the theme of art and environment in Tate Papers no.17 aims to explore new research frontiers between visual art and the material environment. The papers arise from a conference held at Tate Britain in June 2010 at which a range of practitioners and scholars – artists, writers, curators, theorists, historians and geographers – presented case studies of artworks addressing specific sites, spaces, places and landscapes in a variety of media, including film, photography, painting, sculpture and installation. The conference considered relations between artistic approaches to the environment and other forms of knowledge and practice, including scientific knowledge and social activism. The papers addressed cultural questions of weather and climate, ruin and waste, dwelling and movement, boundary and journey, and reflected on the way the environment is experienced and imagined and on the place of art in the material world. The ‘Art & Environment’ conference was organised by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Landscape and Environment programme. This is one of a set of AHRC thematic programmes supporting research fields of wide cultural and public value as well as academic scholarship and creative practice. The ‘Art & Environment’ conference was intended to be exploratory and to further research on art and environment in terms of methods and perspectives as well as subject matter, and in terms of research process and practice as well as product and outcomes.
Acknowledgements
Articles relating to ‘Art & Environment’ have been brought together in Tate Papers no.17 by Stephen Daniels and Nicholas Alfrey, following the ‘Art & Environment’ conference held at TateBritain in June 2010. The editorial team is grateful to both for their vision for this issue and their varied contributions.
Other papers relating to this theme can be found in Tate Papers no.17.
Nicholas Alfrey is Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Nottingham.
Stephen Daniels is Professor of Cultural Geography in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Nottingham and Director AHRC Landscape and Environment programme.
Joy Sleeman is Senior Lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art, London.
How to cite
Nicholas Alfrey, Stephen Daniels and Joy Sleeman, ‘To the Ends of the Earth: Art and Environment: Art & Environment’, in Tate Papers, no.17, Spring 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/17/to-the-ends-of-the-earth-art-and-environment, accessed 17 March 2019.
Tate Papers (ISSN 1753-9854) is a peer-reviewed research journal that publishes articles on British and modern international art, and on museum practice today.
Layered Land: Andy Goldsworthy at Yorkshire Sculpture ParkArt & Environment
HELEN PHEBY
(Helen Pheby is an international curator with the role of Head of Curatorial Programme at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Dr Pheby is Vice Chair of the Civic art gallery and theatre in Barnsley; a trustee of UP Projects, London; curatorial advisor to ArtRole in Iraqi Kurdistan and NIROX in South Africa, WIKIPEDIA)
Andy Goldsworthy creates and documents ephemeral work made using naturally available materials, site-specific installations for galleries that respond to their architecture and fabric, and semi-permanent interventions in the open air that reference the layers of activity on the land, such as changing ownerships and agriculture.
Goldsworthy first worked on the Bretton Estate in 1983 as a participant in the International Sculpture Centre Symposium where he created a number of ephemeral works, including a performance in which he physically entered the earth beneath a tree, documented through photographs and the title:
Climbed into rotten hollow.At the base of a sycamore tree.Just enough room in which to turn.And crawl back out.After which, I worked the edge with mud.To make a black hole.Yorkshire Sculpture Park.September 1983.
In 1987 Goldsworthy returned to YSP for a year-long residency during which he made temporary works for a week each season, documented in the publication Parkland.17 During this time Goldsworthy came to know the landscape of YSP as a participant rather than as an observer.
as well as providing information relating to his artistic education and his experience as a farm labourer. Goldsworthy wrote:
Landscape is beautiful to look at, but as anybody who works with animals, on a farm, or with the land knows, it is also raw and harsh. I think that my art has suffered from the same misreading. The land, for many, is a pastoral backdrop to the weekend, an antidote to the nitty-gritty of urban life – the ‘real’ life. Obviously when you work outside and live in the countryside, it is not a pastoral retreat. Ultimately, it is a place where life, death, and decay occur in a potent and powerful way. It is the toughest place to work as far as I’m concerned. It is not some sort of idyll – it is often physically and psychologically uncomfortable and is at times severe and disturbing.19
Goldsworthy responded to the challenge posed by the large Underground and Longside galleries at YSP by constructing installations that connected directly to the architecture of the buildings and their context. Clay Room, for example, visually blurred the distinction between the building and the earth, a characteristic embodied by the Underground Gallery itself, which is built into a hillside like a modern day ha-ha, maintaining the uninterrupted views across the Estate. Inside, the walls of the gallery were plastered with twenty tonnes of clay dug from the Estate, mixed with three hundred litres of human hair (fig.1). As an extension of the cracked earth floors and walls that Goldsworthy has made since 1991, Clay Room intentionally evoked the sensation of walking into the earth itself. It was also significant that the clay was returned to the Estate, along with the DNA of the people who had been part of its facture, adding another layer to the landscape and also perhaps acknowledging that we are part of nature, our cycle its own.
Fig.2 Andy Goldsworthy Installation shot of Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 31 March 2007 to 6 January 2008
Making reference to his previous employment as a farm labourer, Goldsworthy’s Longside Gallery installation acknowledged the fact that YSP has three tenant farmers whose agricultural activity coexists (but rarely interacts) with the organisation. In obscuring the picture windows of the space, with their carefully designed views and vistas of the Estate, with cow shit (fig.2), Goldsworthy drew attention to the tacit realities of a green and pleasant land.
Throughout his career, Goldsworthy has sought to understand the world by making art through physical contact. This has required access to land that in turn has posed issues around land ownership. This is demonstrated by Outclosure, an eight-feet high circular wall that was built within, and echoed, the wall of the eighteenth-century round wood (figs.4–5). The wood was not owned by YSP and permission had to be given by the private landowner. Dry stone walls are a significant, traditional feature of the English landscape, especially in the north. They are evidence of human control of the land and their appearance has been both the cause and the result of centuries of social conflict, particularly the repercussions of the Inclosure Consolidation Act of 1801.23Outclosure, however, frustrates attempts to see inside, thus allowing nature to regain dominance over the space within.
Fig.4 Andy Goldsworthy Outclosure Round Wood Yorkshire sandstone Quarried by Johnson’s Wellfield, Huddersfield Sited with permission of Job Earnshaw and Bros Ltd Yorkshire Sculpture Park2007
Goldsworthy’s art seeks not to lament the fragility of human life or futility of its efforts, but to understand it within natural processes
The Importance of Art Criticism to Practice-Based Research and Questioning “…there is a level at which art speaks directly to all of us and piques our intuitive critical sensibilities. We’re entitled to hold both informed and uninformed opinions, since once the art is out in the world, it belongs equally to everyone. Sometimes we have to risk being wrong, but must at least make a valiant argument. ” https://brooklynrail.org/2012/12/artseen/whats-so-important-about-criticism-macadam art criticism and the art critic: • Art criticism, the analysis and evaluation of works of art. More subtly, art criticism is often tied to theory; it is interpretive, involving the effort to understand a particular work of art from a theoretical perspective and to establish its significance in the history of art. • The critic is “minimally required to be a connoisseur,” which means he must have a “sound knowledge” of the history of art, as Philip Weissman wrote...
MICHAEL TUFFERY http://micheltuffery.co.nz/product/e-for-eels-enviro-woodcut-font-series/ Valu Pili Pili Pili Pili Pili Pili (1994) Rotation Woodcut on Tapa Cloth http://micheltuffery.co.nz/portfolio/works-on-paper/ https://www.thebigidea.nz/events/216118-mark-making-to-printmaking-with-michel-tuffery-summer-school-2018
Art History homework is going to the resource drive and finding images for the different maori terms in the word document art history intro maoridictionary.co.nz find the definitions Iwi http://evolvingnewsroom.co.nz/map-of-new-zealands-maori-iwi-tribes/ Hapu https://teara.govt.nz/en/tribal-organisation WHANAU EATING TOGETHER The importance of older people within the whānau (extended family), especially their role in nurturing the young, is conveyed in this early 20th-century painting, ‘The time of kai’, by Gottfried Lindauer. All generations, from elders to young children and babies, gather near the hāngī (earth oven) to partake of eel, kūmara and shellfish. https://teara.govt.nz/en/artwork/978/whanau-eating-together Roadworks Unearth Possible Fortifi...
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