Earth Art Pioneer Alan Sonfist on Galvanizing a New Generation of Land Artists artnet.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from artnet.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
What the exhibition aims to document are contemporary artists’ reactions to a shared, ongoing global ecological crisis and protests against it. Many of the works provide sanguine visions for a possible future marked by a symbiotic relationship between humans and “nature”—which, more often than not, is consonant with natural history and bare wilderness.
Charrière’s current ambit is diametrically opposed to the preservationist idea of nature articulated by the American Transcendentalists and neo-Luddites. This is not to say pessimism has won over. The exhibition prods at the ritualistic relationship between man and nature, veering closer to the ideas of the nineteenth-century German Romantics than those of current, activist environmentalists.