8 - Gardens, earthworks, and environmental art

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Gardening was a fine art in eighteenth-century England, a full-fledged sister to painting and poetry. Landowners devoted great effort and expense to improving their estates, treatises on garden aesthetics abounded, and certain artists developed distinctive and recognizable gardening styles. Since that time, gardening has declined. Although a vast majority of Americans named gardening their favorite hobby in a recent Gallup survey, gardening is no longer considered a fine art. Major artists do not make statements in this medium, and our sense of gardening's kinship to painting and poetry has been lost.

Though gardening has declined, high art has not retreated from the landscape. A variety of art flourishes today in sculpture gardens, artparks, and more remote locations. In his introduction to an anthology aptly titled Art in the Land, Alan Sonfist writes of a new group of artists “whose work makes a statement about man's relation to nature.” These artists often use natural substances (earth, rocks, and plants) in their work and often construct that work outside on natural sites. My concern is the relation between these recent environmental works and the eighteenth-century landscape garden.

One author in Sonfist's anthology, Michael McDonough, claims that “The true avant garde of architecture, the adventurous, risktaking, experimenting, problem-seeking, redefining fringe, is not in architecture. It is in the jetties, towers, tunnels, walls, rooms, bridges, ramps, mounds, ziggurats, the buildings and landscapes, structures and constructions of environmental art.”