Nature, the Environment and their Uses in Art

constitution, the Environment and their Uses in ArtI pee that man an subterfugeist who creates forms I c altogether that man a inventor who reproduces forms.Malraux is talking ab by germinal persons and craftsmen, barg nonwithstanding expertness as well be talking astir(predicate) fine wileists and anatomyers. The audacity of the lowly reproducers was penalised by the iconoclasts, and perhaps we shelter the aforementioned(prenominal)(p) fundamental suspicions about designers, stack paid to build and give us dreams just as frequently as they build and swop us inglesides. save it strikes me that there atomic number 18 2 demeanors of system the suspicions of the public- the use of the imagination, and the use of spirit. If the two raise be happily get married thence this superior union ought to germinate a head game all its witness.Moreover, a taste, not to say a passion, for building must(prenominal) be engrained in the child. Mechanical toys and mechanise d entertainment kill his imagination and inaugural the feat of putting building blocks on top of each other(a) hardly taxes the brain of a monkeySo the designer presents himself as a kind of sub- lineator, and defers his symbolism to the greater origin. on that point is an individual and a to a greater extent cosmic interest at de composition at the same beat. The artist grows handle a tree, developing, spreading, the ideas rising from the mysterious soils and falling the homogeneouss of leaves. But the broader picture, a fluxing creative rhythm bridged by numbers in time, demands a grander theory of unification.Nature is as synonymous with decay as it is with growth. The ephemera of modern font sustenance is as temporary, inevit fit, prompt, as record itself. Our cities wee-wee drive descriptor of flaking, dying, layered forests, with their own dangers and rhythms of lifetime and death. Everywhere we find reminders of our own uphold on our surroundings- it is pity inge reputation, we cant help trying to clothe our smooth-faced bodies and modify everything around us to use up our lives much comfortable. But for more or less(a) this seems to be a source of al roughly biblical guilt, and pack go to uncanny lengths, for their own reasons, to cover their tracks and paint their human presence out of the landscape altogether.Hundertwassers house in Vienna , and his designs for the Eye Slit house spring immediately to mind. Are we guilty enough to try to make our tint completely invisible? There can be no contention over the point that man has a negative impact on his environment and it whitethorn be that wholeness solution is c onceal mans impact altogether, (to enfold ourselves in reputations arms, camouflaging ourselves in Her) while another might be to try to disguise our impact by turning our constructions into impersonations of Her. Is this genuine any different to the fearful icon building of ancient times, and do the uglier, mod ernist, construction-stating buildings represent a sort of iconoclasm- a return to buildings cosmos do for human functionality rather than as a fearful ac goledgement of dispositions creator as a constructor?Most of the architectural structures which argon think to jibe reputation draw attention to the similarities betwixt buildings and plants. Both ar subject to a functional rhythm, two fool access points, layers, a projectile dynamic- in other words, a smell of growth and promise. Yet plants atomic number 18 transcient, not concrete they grow and bloom and fade and die, like volume. They nourish and encourage and reproduce and crumble a panache. The contrast with sturdy, permanent building materials used for, say, gothic cathedrals, Romanesque churches, the Eden Project, the Golden Gate Bridge, presents a sense of wonder and beauty in itself. Because plants atomic number 18 not like buildings. Buildings are sturdy and static and monumental. It is a fantastic thi ng to see a grand self-generating plant-beast make of concrete, it is alien and dreamlike and mesmerising but it is all these things because it is impossible. It enchants us because its beauty comes from a fara expression, magical land, not from a world we know about but from one we would like to know- one in our dreams. Designs base on temper not only solve our problems, sate our yearnings and state our avocationions, they also create new problems, new yearnings, and new questions.1) Ecology since the s til nowteenth Century historical relationships with NatureIn the preface to The Origins of form in Art, Herbert Read references Henri Focillon, who suggested that life itself is a creator of forms, that theres no veritable distinction among art and lifeLife is form, and form is the mode of life. The relationships that bind forms together in nature cannot be pure chance, and what we cite Natural Life is in effect a relationship surrounded by forms, so inexorable that withou t it this infixed life could not exist. So it is with artconstitute an array for, and metaphor of, the entire universe.Nature is uncontrollable and unpredictable- it is an ancient metaphor for uncontrollable intervention and for everything we cant accurately forecast. There is sluice an ancient Japanese treatise on archery which details the way in which the hardest cleave of the entire sport is waiting for the ingrained release of the string- a moment of serenity and detachment total absence of striving. The flow of inspiration to the artist is analogous to this although it is unclear whether the creators inspiration rises from this or rises like it. Theorists relieve oneself essential been aware of this ambiguity and call for thematised it themselves. Michael Fried interprets the woods, rocks and glens in Courbets paintings as faces or symbols or metaphors. Christopher Wood finds terrifying anthropomorphised trees looming over the subjects of Altdorfers exquisite scenes. T he point is that those people who look at art, who are also interested in employ it as an expression of themselves, consistently seek reflection in the pools provided by nature, inhering tomography provides the perfect apparatus, somehow, for the admirer of human creativity to amalgamate the object into their own field of experience.When Paul Klee wrote that The founding of a work of art is compared to the growth of a tree- its spread-eagles in the earth, crown in the air. he is presenting an image of flow, as if an artist stands near the tree to susp finish the sap to rush in. This flow, though, occurs without conscious effort and the artist, crucially, experiences a transformation. The idea that art is not a mirrored reflection of a given reality, but also a transformation of one element (which has its roots underground, in the unconscious) into another (made conscious in time and space). The artist is merely a channel whose function it is to transmit the forces of nature into forms of art.Vivantes assessment that art, far from being non-conscious, is a conquest of consciousness is revealing, but wisely countered by Read, Admittedly, the artists themselves may not constantly know when they are merely exploiting the unconscious, rather than cater loose the riot of tender shootsAs nature and art are so closely related, almost counter intuitively, so words and nature and words and art, are sometimes indistinguishable. All are preserveed with abstraction, with roots, with origins, we establishour sense of reality by creating, for each experience, a clear and trance symbol- vocal sounds which were eventually stabilized as words. Every words was once an original work of art.Whenever anything becomes similarly prevalent, too integrated into our consumer vocabulary, we scarcely broadsheet it anymore and it loses its impact. In becoming range of our environment, ourselves, the clich ceases to become something desirous to us. intentional solutions res pond to an expression of particular desire or need, and so become a meta expression of the same need. While design solutions sate specific hungers, art is an expression, and not even necessarily a resolution of, thematic desires. Poetry and the visual arts dance around the clich while now and then retaining originality (Poussins Dance to the symphony of Time is a delightfully literal recitation of this)- art finds a janus-faced simultaneity, a place for both the clich of nature and the pure artistic drive of artisticness. Design, however, is trapped in the problem settlement one-dimensional rationality of the prevailing zeitgeist. Perhaps nature is a way of side-stepping the clich, but it can also present itself, maddeningly indistinguishably, as the alluring siren. perhaps there is a colligate between the mechanised work of imagination and forms and the predominance of born(p) imagery in the products and lifestyles consumed by people nowadays. There could well be a relation ship, yet unexplored, between the unnatural production of natural images and the homogeneity of the images themselves. If the origins are authentic and essential then we should count products to be more persuasive, more reflective of their origins, more transparent. Mechanisation has allowed for imagery to ride the zeitgeist and generate a new kind of language of natural iconography- perhaps where once there was apparitional iconography.In Poussins Dance to the Music of Time we find Arcadia, the natural utopia, being equated to male/female synthesis, and then, on another level, the gender synthesis standing for a synthesis of heaven and earth in the familiar conceit of rhythm. In Peter Blakes extraordinary work, The Arcadian Cipher pentagram shapes are located everywhere as a kind of unification symbol Blake is anxious to synthesise traditionally opposing forces, and make sense of illogical harmonies through and through the imposition (or uncovering, in his terms) of this particu lar hypograph. His choice of symbol is less important than his- and other donnish semiosticians impulse towards holism. I suck already suggested that artists are involved in a janus headed effort always trying to channel pure nature and represent her in a familiar language- to experience and the represent the clich at once. Blakes assessment of the Dance describes the duplicityFor where the other two pentagrams represent the deliverer figure and Pan, this definitely connects them with a female element. Through it we are able to establish a male/female partnership both in heaven and on primer and between heaven and Earth, and it is one which symbolises the poles upon which the Earth spins.The painting depicts Hermes playing his lyre music was his method of communication between two worlds- and a group of earthly figures dancing to his celestial tune. On the leftover hand side of the work is a column on which is attach a carvingof two heads facing away from each other. possibl e action of this sort, while certainly in constant danger of toppling into quasi-science, superbly exemplifies the inextricability of Nature and Geometry. Theories of Arcadia are saturated with geometric semiotics art writers constantly tie and re-trace paintings, covering them in layers and layers of mathematical justification. Whether any of these theories have any real use or even make any sense alfresco(a) of their own self-imposed rules is not my point. I am interested in the relationship between the powers of nature and the powers of men, the irresistible urge to explain the mysteries of nature, her circadian rhythms, her life giving and life stealing properties, her silent chthonic boyfriend and the threat and awe experienced by the bewildered humans that lionise her. As one of the most evocative and symbolically potent plants on the planet, the cactus has played many roles in South American tradition and folklore. As with any hostile climate, indigenous species that se em to offer solace go forth inevitably acquire mystical significance as the protection they offer is associated with promise. To the parched population of parched landscapes, cacti are life-giving, life-saving, surprising, mysterious, affright- elysian.Cacti started off on American continents, and are still most associated with these places- but they have experienced a massive geographical distribution over the centuries, and cacti have been able to trigger habitats around the world. 1 rumour says that Christopher Columbus was the first person to have re placeancen the first cactus to Europe, presenting this peculiar plant to Queen Isabella of Spain, however this is of contour apocryphal.During their explorations on the American continents, the Spanish Conquistadors found, among many other things, these strange plenty inducing plants that were utilised ceremonially by the natives as a religious sacrament and was revered as virtual gods. The native South American name for th eir spineless dense-shaped cactus (Lophophora Williamsii) was peyoti. It is a plant native to Mexican and entropy west US with button like tubercles which may be eaten freshly or dried as a narcotic. Initially, Cacti (peyoti) were employed for healing purposes, for attempting to divine the future and for generating hallucinogenic visions during scared rites. Although these hallucinations often appear to be compared to lysergic acid diethylamide trips, the peyote acid is 4000 times less potent, only briefly touching the chemical balance and activity of the brain.The Spanish chronicler, Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, claimed that natives used a certain plant to induce hallucinatory state and estimated that peyote was astray used at least 1890 years before the arrival of Europeans. The earliest European record dates from around 1635 with the first column of Historia de las Indias Occidentales by Gonzalo Hernandez de Oviedo y Valdes appeared with illustrations of what we would now clas sify as Cereus and Opuntia.In 1886 that the German pharmacologist, Louis Lewin, make the first systematic study of the cactus, to which his own name was subsequently given- Anhalonium lewinii. The cactus was already well known and loved by primitive religions and the Indians of Mexico and the American Southwest. One of the early Spanish chewors to the unseasoned World wrote, they eat a root which they call peyote, and which they venerate as though it were a deity.It became clear why this plant was venerated as a god, when such eminent psychologists as Jaensch, Havelock Ellis and Weir Mitchell began their experiments with mescalin, the energetic principle of peyote. Mescalin research has continued, and now chemists have not only quarantined the alkaloid they have learned how to synthesize it, so that the supply no nightlong depends on the sparse and infrequent crop of desert cacti. Neurologists and physiologists have worn out(p) years investigating the mechanism of mescalins action upon the central nervous system, and at everyone from philosophers to writers- notably Aldous Huxley- have taken mescalin in the hope that this mystical cactus attract may shed some light on such ancient, dissonant riddles as the place of mind in nature and the relationship between brain and consciousness.It is surely no coincidence that the peyote cactus, so ubiquitous, so loved and feared, is also identified as the solution to ancient problems of human displacement. We identify with the cactus perhaps. It projects intelligently, like an alien from the sand, while we wonder how we are supposed(p) to best relate to our surroundings. When we look at the cactus we see ourselves done interrupt. If anything on the planet holds the key to mans reconciliation with his estranged mother nature, it is surely the cactus. It is too alien to be part of our problem, we reason, so it must be part of the solution.2) Taoism and NatureHumans model themselves on earth, Earth on heaven, promised land on the Way, And the way on that which is naturally so.Lao Tse Daodejing (Tao te ching) 251This transparent but sententious dictum was delivered by an Chinese ancient sage, Lao Tse, the founder of Taoism. The saying suggests a means of building a harmonious relationship between beings and nature. Taoist ideas about conservation and ecology, with nature as the inspiration and conclusion to all things, reflect and resemble new philosophies of industrial design, to some extent. Alongside Buddhism and Confucianism, Taoism is one of the three great religions of China. It can be roughly translated into English as highway, or the way- that is, the way of correspondence between man and nature, and the way that is a kind of path of nature the course of natural world. The term Tao describes a power that envelops and flows through all things, both living and nonliving. As such, it serves to regulate natural processes and throw out a cosmic balance of all things in the Univer se.Tao suggests that the answers to lifes problems can be found through inner meditation and outer observation. Taoist ideas and images may have nurtured or enliven a love of nature in the Chinese, so that they have traditional felt a need to protect it, and have had many ways of cultivating an affinity with it. The Chinese have always seen nature as a companion, a place of security and nourishment to which they could retreat from the cares of the world to rest or heal themselves. Nature, through Tao, is also sincerely life-affirming. Nature can be unfathomably brutal and Tao constantly reminds that the extraneous world is explicitly on-ideal in fact, according to Tao, the ideal world can only be found through a unearthly path. The only thing that might compromise ones eternal happiness, in Tao as in Buddhism, was a state of mind, an berth.Both Tao and Nature are associated with a non-materialistic attitude to life, a spiritual approach to living which many perceive as a possibl e answer to the social issues of today the problems of sustaining a structured and healthy social order. Taoists mean their religion holds the answers, as it advises its followers to copy nature, with its simpleness and relaxed, non- intellect approach to life. Tao seems to suggest that many of the environmental problems of today have arisen from a materialistic human attitude that has overwhelmed mans spiritual relationship with his natural environment. Rather than coexisting with our living space, people have begun challenging it, and it has even become a respectable achievement to be seen to conquer nature.An estimated 42 million acres of tropical rainforest are destroyed annually, an celestial sphere the size of Washington State. Around 50,000 species of plants and animals are condemned to extinction every year, an honest of about 140 species a day. There are more people than ever, and these people routinely pillage resources, destroy or change natural processes arbitraril y and are support the production of thousands of products that lead towards the destructive path of the environment contradicting the Taoist path. Increasingly materialist in their lifestyles, most people believe that only case exists, leaving no room for spiritual rulings. Our quest for pleasure corresponds to a demand placed on the Earth for immediate gain. The visible world takes precedence over any spiritual or psychological activities and ultimately a form of materialism becomes the only fairness and belief. Natures force is transcendent in its essence but observable in its manifestations. With the crisis of energy and resources, the crisis of ecology and environment, the crisis of belief and mortality we experience force in the form of natures lamenting reactions.We believe in the formless and eternal Tao, and we tell all personified deities as being mere human constructs. We reject hatred, intolerance, and superfluous violence, and embrace unity, love and learning, a s we are taught by Nature. We place our conceive and our lives in the Tao, which we may live in peace and balance with the Universe, both in this mortal life and beyond. Creed of the Western Reform Taoist CongregationThe recent revival of instinctive desires preserve the health of our planets life without compromising human comfort is the task of ecological attitudes in art and design. Those ecological design solutions that take on board Taoist philosophies link nature, culture, and technology to resituate social human requirements in an environment where the balance of nature receives precedence. Artists and designers must of course work within the constraints imposed by their clients, including the matter-of-fact and material demands made by every lay out of production.Classical Taoist philosophy, formulated in part by Laozi (the Old Master, 5th snow B.C.), in part by the editor of the Daodejing (Classic of the Way and its Power), and in part by Zhuangzi (3rd century B.C.), represented a reinterpretation and development of an ancient anonymous tradition of nature worship and divination. Laozi and Zhuangzi, living at a time of social disorder and great religious skepticism developed the idea of the Dao (Tao way, or path) as the origin of all creation and the force unknowable in its essence but observable in its manifestation that underlies the mechanisms of the natural world. These men saw in Dao, Nature, and in Nature, Dao. In both these slipway lay the secret to harmonious living. According to these early teachers, the order and harmony of nature was a model for human structures, so much more stable and enduring than either the power of the state or the school institutions constructed by human learning. The early Taoists taught the art of living and surviving by conforming with the natural way of things they called their approach to action wuwei (wu-wei lit. no-action), action modelled on nature. As one writer explains,Their sages were wise, bu t not in the way the Confucian teacher was wise, learned and a moral paragon. Zhuangzis sages were often artisans, butchers or woodcarvers. The lowly artisans understood the secret of art and the art of living. To be dear and creative, they had to have inner spiritual concentration and put aside concern with externals, such as monetary rewards, fame, and praise. Art, like life, followed the creative path of nature, not the values of human society.Chinese history is dense with stories of people who have grown tired of the pretensions and desperation of social activism increasingly aware of the dainty of human achievements, and whose reaction has been to retire from the world and turn to nature. Such people have traditionally retreated to a countryside or mountain lay to commune with natural beauty, often composing poetry about nature , or painting interpretations of the scenes surrounding them, as they attempted to capture the creative forces at the heart of Natures vitality. Such people might share their excursions with friends or family, drinking a bite of wine, enjoying the autumn leaves or the evening skies.The writings of Chinese utopians often had a Taoist slant Tao Qians famous prattle Blossom Spring told of a fisherman who happened across an idyllic Chinese community who had fled a war-torn land centuries earlier, and lived in perfect simplicity and harmony ever since, blissfully oblivious to the turmoil of history beyond their idyll. While the inhabitants urged him to stay, the fisherman departed and shared his discovery with a local anaesthetic official. However hard he tried, he never found a path back to the grove. The fisherman never found a travel plan back because he had failed to understand that he had discovered an abstracted, ideal, world and one which was to be found not via an external path, but a spiritual one. The utopia was a state of mind, a unique attitude.Laozi and Zhuangzi had reinterpreted nature worship and belief in esoteric magical arts as something both more abstract and more tangible, but the ancient methods and beliefs crept back into the tradition as ways of using knowledge of the Dao to enhance and prolong life. Despite its pragmatism, for some Taoism would always go hand in hand with magical belief. near Taoists poured their energies into a search for isles of the immortals, or for herbs that could unlock the secrets of immortal life. Many Taoists were interested in health and carried out many studies of herbal medicine and pharmacology, in fact entailing significant advancements in these arts. Taoists even worked out the principles of macrobiotic prep and other supposedly new and healthy diets. Sensitive to natural processes, they record gymnastic mechanisms and studied the effects of massage on keeping the corpse strong and youthful.Taoists were, then, both magicians and of proto-scientists they represented the sector of Chinese culture that most closely studied and communed with nature. So me Taoists held that nature was filled with spirits however, theosophically, such spirits were simply many manifestations of the one Dao, something impossible to represent as a single image or in one discerning form.The Tao of Heaven operates mysteriously and secretly it has no fixed shape it follows no definite rules it is so great that you can never come to the end of it, it is so deep that you can never fathom it.The Huai Nau TzuThe central base of operations of Taoism is a relationship, and as such contradicts the general western attitude to nature. Nature should not be considered as something passive, awaiting mans masterful control, but as an touch on or even superior partner be mastered in a relationship. The aim of the Taiost is to rediscover and eventually merge with the ordered origin of the universe and the only way to do so is the Tao the path shown to us by nature.Early Taoist philosophers set out from their civilised worlds to take expeditions into the natural wor ld, where they hoped to learn from primitive people living in removed(p) mountain villages. Initially they aimed to introduce the benefits of human civilization to the mysteriously rhythmed order of nature. According to the Tao, nature isinfinitely wise, infinitely compound, and infinitely irrational. One must take a yielding stance and abandon all intellectual preconceptions. The oddment is wu wei, doing nothing contrary to nature. Nature does not need to be perfected or im arised. It is we who need to change we need to come into accord. strange to one possible interpretation of Yin/Yang, Taoists rejected all dichotomies, including the fundamental innovation/non existence one, since it is their belief that both stem from the same source, Athe deep and the profound. Rather, Taoisms goal is to use consciousness of duality and wisdom about it to reach the stage before any dualities existed. There is only one path to this source, then the observation of nature. As one writer expla ins,The Tao is a divine chaos, not a random accident. It is fertile, undifferentiated, and teeming with unrealized creation. It is the mother of everything in nature it is a great darkness that operates spontaneously to give birth and life to all things.3) Ecological thinking in contemporary art and designAre we really moving towards a common lexicon of human creation and natural creation? Alan Power cites Steiners galvanise prediction, Buildings will scram to speak. They will speak a language of which people have as yet not even an inkling,Yet I wonder how startling this really is. Buildings are indeed more scientific, more complex with less obvious evidence of human intervention. Many buildings nowadays appear to have been designed and built by aliens, no longer made to be lived in but impenetrable to our rational human minds. Again, they resemble complex organisms in their initially baffling structure, their illogical shapes and apparent gustatory sensation of shape and form t o practicality. But they are still made by humans, albeit humans employing a dozen layers of technology to translate abstract geometry into audaciously confusing formulae. They are still constructed by and for humans to use, and to that extent are utterly comprehensible, at least to the humans that use them. Where there is room for gratuitous aesthetic treatment in a design, designers, consciously or not, grasp the zeitgeist, construct from fashionable and available materials, and exploit their artistic license as far as their unconscious notions of the aesthetic will allow them to. These notions, I am attempting to argue, are controlled by biologically ingrained forms of the organic. It doesnt matter if a building is technically accomplished to exhibit skeletal forms, as with the giant domes of the Eden Complex in Cornwall, the Brooklyn Bridge in New York and the Mildred Cooper chapel in Arkansas or swollen like the pregnant belly of the Guggenheim, NY . Nature can be found in all design, both rational and irrational, and the more we try to escape it, to exclude mimicking it, the more we are forced to study its base rules, its gravity and its ebb down and flow, the tensile strength of its spider-webs, the effects of its uncontrollable eruptions and tidal waves and tornados. Nature is absolutely full of potential metaphors for ways in which we can improve our lives. Today, apple peels are being used by scientists at the University of Clemson as a metaphor for edible bundles disolvable pouches like boil in the bags that add protein to a macaroni and cheese dinner, or packages that act as a booster for washing detergent. Theres certainly a human instinct to perceive products inspired in obvious ways by nature, as being somehow level-headed for us, or good in a moral sense. Of course, human instincts are not to be trusted blindly, and it doesnt follow that because a kind of box is inspired by an apple core it is environmentally friendly, inspirational, be autiful, or better for us or the world. But I suppose it has a fairly higher chance of being one or more of these things, our instincts are not too wide of the mark and do control the things we want to buy and sell.A study entitled Trees in Small city Business Districts Comparing Responses of Residents Potential Visitors begins,This study tested whether public response to trees in the downtown business districts of smaller cities is comparable. Research methods included interviews and mail-out surveys. discipline respondents prefer having large trees in retail streetscapes. Trees are also associated with report increases in patronage behavior (such as travel distance and visit frequency), and willingness to pay more for products. Few differences in response were detected between small city residents and potential visitors who reside in large cities.What is it about natural organisms that make us want to part with our money? market strategies state such things as fact, using ca reful example to prove what we intuitively want to believe is true that good product and package designers have known for centuries- that the best inspiration for new products comes from nature. The camera mimics the human eye. Helicopters, like hummingbirds, can hover and fly backwards. Velcro brand fasteners were inspired by prickily burrs attached to a Scottish inventors boot. They get away with this because nature is, and has always been, such an alien force to us humans, as we have seen. Like an alien from another planets, we hope it will be freehearted and, through its own irrepressible character, its mysterious and enviable immortality, hold the secrets to our own improved lifestyles and lifespans. Of course our relationship with nature has changed slightly as we have changed, as a race, but our view of Her remains essentially the same as ever. We still need to imitate and control what we see outside us, in the hope that we can sypher off a little of the magic and mystery f or ourselves. In the developed world these harmless, yet irrepressible rhythms are increasingly invisible. It is possible to spend months in a city dwelling, never seeing a dead animal, a nesting bird, a tree in blossom. Nature has become more promising, more mysterious, more magical, and more frightening through its real invisibility, but nature is not wilfully knobbed or coy, this is an invisibility we that have imposed. Inevitably, the packages and products that are environmentally superior that are kind to nature also resemble it they might be inherently efficient, easily recycable, and often they use recycled materials made from renewable resources. One administration creating such products, back in their 1990s heyday, was Zerosm, and they identified several techniques fo