NOW OUT OF PRINT

To accompany the first phase of the Arts & Ecology programme a publication investigating aspects of ecology from different perspectives and highlighting the creative work being done in this area has been edited by Max Andrews and was launched on 12 December 2006, to coincide with the A&E conference ‘No Way Back? ’.

Land, Art: a Cultural Ecology Handbook presents a compendium of texts, dialogues and collaborations by and among ecologists, economists, cultural theorists, activists and art writers that extend from the notions of land, cultural production and the emergencies of 21st century. Reproductions of existing artworks by and original contributions from international practitioners – as well as artists on-the-page ‘studio visits’, for example – will explore art’s varied modes of response – from detached crisis commentaries to engaged activist solutions.

The publication exists within the time frame of a fragmentary genealogy of ‘land’ (and what has been understood by ‘the environment’) since the 1960s, when the term was evoked in culture through the activities of so-called ‘Land Artists’ and those working in novel ways within natural contexts. At this time too a new, popular environmental consciousness began to emerge (an axis marked by the publication of Rachel Carson’s incendiary Silent Spring (1962), through the first photograph of Earth from space (1968) to the first Earth Day in 1970).

Today’s interdisciplinary understandings of ecology, however comprehend a complex set of relations that go way beyond environmentalism and, for instance, its historical fixation with wilderness conservation. Likewise, art has radically diversified and globalised from an inherited notion of landscape, becoming concerned with, for example, areas as varied as corporate capital, politics, technology, utopian communities, industrial agriculture, tourism, ethnic and social justice in the process.

LAND, ART … proposes to test if and how our current conception of art and artists is relevant to the urgent territory of accountability and sustainability, and where, how and why art might operate – at the ‘grass roots’, at a tangent, as propaganda, as resistance, etc.

Contributions by Lara Almárcegui, Amy Balkin, James Boyle, Fernando Bryce, Susan Canney, Chu Yun, Jimmie Durham & Maria Thereza Alves, Feng Yuan, Futurefarmers & Free Soil, Tue Greenfort, Thomas Hirschhorn, Katie Holten, Jiang Jun, Jeffrey Kastner, Winona LaDuke, Learning Group, Lucy R. Lippard, Wangari Maathai, Jonathan Meuser, Jason Middlebrook, Nils Norman, David Naguib Pellow & Lisa Sun-Hee Park, PLATFORM, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Paul Schmelzer, Peter Schmelzer, Michael Shellenberger & Ted Nordhaus, Cameron Sinclair, Stephanie Smith, Bruce Sterling, Kirstine Roepstorff, Rirkrit Tiravanija, David Toop, Vitamin Creative Space, Insa Winkler, the Worldwatch Institute and Zheng Guogu. Artists’ ‘plates’ section: Claire Bishop on Francis Alÿs, Gemma Lloyd on Donna Conlon, Max Andrews on Henrik Håkansson and Insa Winkler, Diana Baldon on Marine Hugonnier, Mariana Cánepa Luna on Alfredo Jaar, Zoë Gray on Brian Jungen, Lars Bang Larsen on Aleksandra Mir, Richard Flood on Richard Prince, Alejandra Aguado on Tomás Saraceno, Francesco Manacorda on Simon Starling.

Click here for contributors' biographies.

You can purchase a copy online from Cornerhouse. Click here to be directed to their website.

Download PDF press release

Read Sarah Rich's review for Worldchanging.com

Dean Kenning, Cultural Ecology, Art Monthly, May 2007