In 1968, the American painter Sidney Tillim wrote a review in Artforum under the title “Earthworks and the New Picturesque” about Minimalism and the recently called Earthworks. He pointed at Romanticism as the first art movement of the earth for its influence on ecological awareness and its return to nature as a source of inspiration. ² Romanticism was characterized by a subjective exploration of the landscape as a human construction, which became a place of escape from society and its early processes of urbanization.

From the twentieth century onwards, a diversity of correspondences between nature, human beings and the development of the modern machine unfolded. This gave account of a notion on industrial progress ³ . Consequently, there was a return to the subject of nature in art at the end of the sixties. Several artists rethought this relationship and began to take for granted the space of the studio and the gallery. They worked with the materiality of the earth as a new possibility for other types of works, and named these practices in diverse ways, among them Land Art or Earthworks. With the boom of photography and television, this movement gave rise to a change in the objectuality of art ⁴ and began to create aesthetic compositions in the landscape that were transferred in different ways to art spaces. Robert Smithson, Richard Long, Walter de Maria, Nancy Holt, Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Morris, among other artists, turned to nature not as a source of resources, but as a fundamental part of their work. With the heritage of Romanticism, they sought to create dialogues in which the artist should be a mediator between ecology and industry. ⁵

Robert Smithson’s artistic and philosophical contribution turned him into a key figure in the Land Art movement in the United States. In 1968, he developed the concepts of Site and Non-site, which were fundamental to create artworks in relation to the notions of time and space. While the Site was an accessible natural place where an artwork could be experienced, the Non-site referred to the abstraction of a physical place that was transferred to the interior of the gallery. The Non-site raises the possibility of the absence of the landscape, in which a place other than the gallery is the protagonist. For Smithson, between a Site and a Non-site there is a metaphorical relevance: the implications of materiality and how it is conceptually represented. In his series Upside Down Tree, Smithson explores the idea of the natural order of the world. In 1969, he published an illustrated narrative of the trip he made to Yucatán, México. In this chronicle he describes how his way of making art is to risk getting lost in the undergrowth. ⁶ Planting these trees upside down was a way of making axes of encounter with natural places and finding strange ways to travel. Smithson’s works emphasized the experience of landscape in relation to industry and places affected by human intervention.

In Europe, Richard Long was also a pioneer of the Land Art movement, which revisited the concept of nature from another point of view, showing its variable meaning for works of art. Long worked with nature as a space of encounter that did not usually exceed the human scale, in which the ideas of illusion of perspective and geometric constructions are activated. His work proposes the body as an artistic instrument and revisits his passion for solitary country walks. In the Untitled series of 2006, he painted irregular white lines on a black background to allude to how the grass opens as one walks across it, offering the spectator a first-hand view of moving from their own measurements through the natural world. ⁷

In recent decades, the work of several artists has focused on developing the notion of ecology. Thinking of nature as “systems constituted by organisms in the environments in which they live and in the energy transformations they provoke” ⁸ led to an original approach to the modes of production of scientific and artistic knowledge. The crisis between the natural and the human as the opposite inside/outside was described in the book The Poetics of Space by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard as a spatialization of thought and fragmentation of the world. ⁹

From these oppositional notions, nature art turned to conventional exhibition spaces as opportunities to create environments that would account for the connection between the natural and the artificial. A critique of this binarism is reflected in the work of Sofía Táboas and Danh Vo. Táboas reflects this tension with her 2001 work Jardín Portátil [Portable Garden], a set of living plants on a wooden podium with wheels that transports what usually exists only outdoors. This alludes to how places are transformed from that which does not belong. Her gardens cross the threshold of the human and confront the distance it assumes from nature. Danh Vo carried out a similar exercise linked to identity. In 2010 he created an installation of flowers that do not exist in the place where they are shown entitled Rhododendron Garden. The flowers that constitute this garden were introduced from Asia to Europe and America through expeditions of missionaries returning from this continent. For Vo, the exhibition space is the perfect place for the isolation of meaning, and by bringing in vegetation that the local public cannot associate with their everyday lives, he transforms an ordinary action such as observing plants into a deeply personal experience of awe.

Skidproof View, a big scale work created in 2002 by Pablo Vargas Lugo, is also a displacement of the exterior environment into the gallery space. It is made up of approximately 16,000 aligned reproductions of the pyramid of Kheops, second pharaoh of the fourth dynasty of ancient Egypt. Made from plaster and resin copies, it emphasizes the idea of reproduction. The plants inside the pyramid create a micro-ecosystem with small inhabitants and this vegetative system grows around the spaces between forms, transforming the work overtime. This idea of the natural habitat as a human construction fractures the binary division between inside and outside.

Nature in art also implies how the world is organized by the scientific thought. In this regard Sam Durant and Alicja Kwade are two artists who have rethought the classification systems and the establishment of presumed truths or beliefs of the scientific discourse.

In 2001, Sam Durant placed a fossilized tree on a mirror, alluding to the tree of life or the family tree. Tangled, Chaotic, Discontinuous, Senseless, Inverted, Rational, Uniform, Structured, Ordered, Reversed alludes to systems of classification and forms in which that which grows upward also finds its roots in the ground. This artwork is a direct reference of Smithson’s work, in which trees take up the philosophical dimension of the role of the human in nature. Durant created this tree series to invoke the history of slavery and white supremacy and question the supposed natural order of the world.

Kwade recollected a set of fossilized palms from 65 million years ago to rethink the time system. Created in 2013, Gegenwartsdauer [The duration of the present] is an invitation to reflect on how reality goes beyond its logical organization. The fossilized pieces of wood are arranged in order from largest to smallest, until they are reduced to dust. Though, Kwade’s artistic practice points out how the systems of order, beyond being linear, are similar to those found in the plant world: they trace a continuum without a clear beginning or end and are interconnected in the form of a network.

Working with materials from the earth and thinking about nature as a fundamental part of a work allows us to investigate speculative thinking about science fiction as a system for creating new worlds. Óscar Santillán’s artistic practice reveals ways to make fiction of the present, to re-think technologies and our relationship with nature. In Spacecraft (do not conquer) from 2018, Santillán places a series of vessels one after another simulating the shape of a spaceship. These vessels were made from data collected from research since 1972 by the Soviet Union, the United States and Japan that sought to recreate the chemical composition of materiality in space. Made with “extraterrestrial earth”, this work questions the limits of nature and its relationship with technology.

As mentioned by the researchers and ecologists Omar Felipe Giraldo and Ingrid Toro in their book Afectividad ambiental. ¹⁰ Sensibilidad, empatía, estéticas del habitar, [Environmental affectivity. Sensitivity, empathy, aesthetics of inhabiting] “the esthetic is the language of the earth” and “the essential ontological condition of the environmental ethics”. With the awareness of the ecological crisis facing the world, the question of nature has become increasingly relevant over the years. Creating aesthetic spaces that ease reconnections with our senses allows us to develop the ability of art’s sensitive language and to form meaning networks of appreciative listening and deep observation of nature. Nature-as-concept in art enables the construction of knowledge and the change to build plural worlds that are critical of the parameters pre-established by the mandates of reason and truth.

Text by Carolina Estrada García, Curatorial Assistant, Museo Jumex.

¹ Raymond Williams, “Ideas of Nature”, en The Cultural Studies Reader (Londres: Routledge, 2007), 283-297.
² Sydney Tillim, “Earthworks and the New Picturesque”, en Artforum, vol. 7, no. 4, 1968.
³ Yolanda Arjona, Sara González, “Land Art: Arte, Política y Naturaleza” en Estudios sobre Arte Actual (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2014), 2.
⁴ Anna María Guasch, El arte último del siglo XX (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2000), 52.
⁵ Yolanda Arjona, Sara González, idem.
⁶ Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” en Artforum, vol. 8, no. 1, 1969.
⁷ Anna María Guasch, El arte último del siglo XX (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2000),75-76.
⁸ Simón Marchán, Del arte objetual al arte del concepto. Epílogo sobre la sensibilidad “posmoderna” (Madrid: Akal, 1986), 213.
⁹ Gastón Bachelard, Gastón, La poética del espacio (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), 186.
¹⁰ Omar Felipe Giraldo, Ingrid Toro, Afectividad ambiental. Sensibilidad, empatía, estéticas del habitar (Veracruz: ECOSUR Universidad Veracruzana, 2020), 156.