Recuperating Relational Aesthetics: Environmental Art and Civil Relationality

Abstract

The relationship between nature and contemporary visual art has been a source of critical interest since conceptualist earthworks projects by Smithson and others in the sixties, and the formalist terms of conversation that emerged then have dominated the way we talk about environmental art. On the other extreme, activist art makes explicit political and pedagogical appeals for ecological causes. However, a third case of environmental artists that make public encounter a powerful aspect and catalyst of real changes in understanding our relationship to nature – exemplified here by Andy Goldsworthy  and David Nash – work in a mode that creates an aesthetics and rhetoric of relation between artist, work, and public. There has yet to be a unified and sustained vocabulary with which to talk about this work, but two contemporary theorists of aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud and Ariella Azoulay, each provide fruitful beginnings for a new vocabulary of this body of contemporary environmental art. Bourriaud’s controversial term “relational aesthetics” – a call to art that works as a space of reconfiguring social relations — and what Ariella Azoulay calls a “civil contract” way of seeing both provide an entry into describing this work. Combining these ideas, the resulting concept of “civil relationality” can then be applied to this “third case” of environmental art, used to recuperate Bourriaud’s much-criticized ideas, and expanded to larger currents in contemporary art.