ITOH Takako

Recently, environmental art is often discussed in the context of Anglo-American environmental aesthetics. Even though environmental art has developed varieties of forms of expression, it is generally known as ‘Land Art’ and ‘Earthworks’, large-scale “artwork used natural environment itself as its material”, which emerged in the late 1960s in the USA. The earliest examples of Earthworks, especially such as Double Negative by Michael Heizer in 1969, excavated using dynamites and bulldozers, were often criticized for the lack of environmental sensibility and its ethical flaw. 

This paper examines the recent environmental aesthetics’ debates about ethical issues surrounding environmental art, especially on Allen Carlson’s “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront to Nature?” and the following debates. I clarify that the appreciation of environmental art blurs boundaries between the appreciation of nature as nature and that of art as art. Environmental art expresses the very complicated contemporary natural environment where the dichotomy between nature and art or the natural and the artificial has already been annihilated. I will try to evaluate environmental art both aesthetically and ethically, from the viewpoints of artistic and ethical value based on arguments of environmental ethics.