Mother nature is finally getting the art she deserves

I guess that few would currently dispute that the world is in crisis. I’m not talking about Covid-19. Nor am I primarily addressing the issues arising from the 36 billion tonnes of carbon that the human project sends into our atmosphere every year. Climate chaos is a part of the issue, but I’m thinking principally of those things that most impact upon the biosphere as an ongoing live enterprise.

They include the additional billion humans that our planet acquires every 12 years; the four-fifths of fish populations harvested to or beyond sustainable levels; the half of all the world’s trees felled by our species; the catastrophic depletion of soils by industrialised chemical farming, and the Sixth Mass Extinction which looms in an age increasingly defined as the Anthropocene.

Is it not strange, then, that these momentous matters barely register in the realms of modern art? Scan the works of the preeminent 20th-century figures — Kahlo, Picasso, Warhol, say — and you will find precious little that even celebrates the vast otherness of the natural world. Horses and bulls may have loomed large for Picasso, just as tropical flowers did for Kahlo, but they were primarily deployed as symbols of their own respective identities. When it comes to British artists on either side of the new century — Francis Bacon, Tracey Emin, Lucian Freud — one could comfortably summarise their collective oeuvre with that firmly self-reflective phrase ‘the human condition’.

While the realm beyond humans and its current plight struggle for artistic attention in some quarters, there is nevertheless a growing creative response that we might call ‘environmental art’. Unfortunately, the art world itself is wary of such prefixes and even Britain’s most celebrated practitioner in the sphere, Richard Long, apparently dislikes his own label as ‘land artist’.