The Japanese Society for Aesthetics

Aesthetics No.25 (2021): 50-61

Debating Ethical Issues Surrounding Environmental Art:
On “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront toNature?”*ITOH Takako
University of Toyama, Toyama

0. Introduction
Environmental Art has often been discussed in the context of recent Anglo-American
Environmental Aesthetics. Even though environmental art has developed too many different
varieties of forms of expression for a half-century to summarize them as an art movement, it isgenerally 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.1 Because the earliest examples
of monumental Earthworks, such as Double Negative by Michael Heizer (1944-) in 1969-70,
excavated using dynamite and bulldozers, they were often criticized for the lack of environmental
sensibility, and this nature-manipulative image of Earthworks remains. However, sinceenvironmental art directly made in the natural environment situates between nature and art, andreflects the relationship between humans and nature and environmental thoughts in the
background, it provides interesting themes for environmental aesthetics examining the naturalenvironment.
Inspired by Peter Humphrey’s essay, “The Ethics of Earthworks” in 1985, in the following
year, Allen Carlson published a provocative article entitled “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic
Affront to Nature?”. After that for environmental art drew renewed attention by virtue of its
exhibitions and publications, the session ‘Considering Environmental and Land Art’, where
Emily Brady presented “Aesthetic Regard for Nature in Environmental and Land Art” in response
to Carlson’s article, held at the American Society of Aesthetics Annual Meeting in 2006. Thus,
among environmental aestheticians, active debates on ethical issues surrounding environmental
art have been held.2*

This paper is based on the Japanese version printed in Bigaku 69, No. 1 (2018): 49-60, published by theJapanese Society for Aesthetics.
1
Environmental Art is not a defined term, but it is generally used to denote historically particular the shortterm American movement from1968 to1974 called Earthworks. The term ‘Land Art’ includes works of a little longer,
until about 1977, but still does not refer to a specific movement. After the1980s, eco art addressing environmental
issues in practice appeared, and recently many artists explore the possibilities of the newer relationship to landscapeand environment in their individual themes of works. Cf. Ben Tufnell, Land Art, 2007; Jeffrey Kastner, Land &Environmental Art, 2005; Linda Weintraub, To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet, 2012.
2
Peter Humphrey, “The Ethics of the Earthworks”, in Environmental Ethics, Vol.7, Spring, 1985, pp.5-21;
Donald Crawford, “Nature and Art: Some Dialectical Relationship”, in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,Debating Ethical Issues Surrounding Environmental Art

51

Although it is quite difficult to generalize environmental art, it can be defined as ‘a various
artistic activities to rearrange our responses to place, landscape, or nature by its subject
concerning with natural environment’. As long as environmental art intervenes with nature
artistically/artificially, as art and yet nature, its artistic value and its natural value can be called
into question. Therefore, environmental art cannot avoid being judged from the point of view ofenvironmental ethics.
This paper will examine the recent environmental aesthetics’ debates about ethical issues
surrounding environmental art, especially Carlson’s “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront
to Nature?” and the following debates. First, I will clarify that the appreciation of environmentalart blurs boundaries between the appreciation of nature as nature and that of art as art. Then,
examining Heizer’s Double Negative, which is frequently criticized as a representative work of‘environmental art’ in those debates in terms of the issues concerning the relationship between
the work and the history of the land, I will reveal that 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. And then, by scrutinizing theenvironmental ethical arguments between instrumental value and intrinsic value of nature,
anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, I will try to evaluate environmental art both aesthetically andethically from the viewpoint of artistic and ethical values.

1. Environmental Art is an Affront to Nature.
As Michael Auping described in “Earth Art: A study in Ecological Politics” in 1983, ‘insofar
as earth art physically interacts with the landscape, it cannot be ecologically neutral’,3 increasingawareness of environmental issues, environmental art, especially the earliest Earthworks has been
exposed to harsh ethical criticism by people with much concern to their ecological impact. In his
essay, “The Ethics of Earthworks” in 1985, Peter Humphrey addressed the possibility ofdefending environmental art from the two fundamental approaches for environmental ethics,
viewpoints of anthropocentric instrumental value and ecocentric intrinsic value. If the
instrumental value approach is taken, then the use of the environment is good if its benefits
outweigh its cost to people. According to this cost/benefit analysis, it is seemingly possible tojustify the environmental art which improves the environment and contributes to enhancing
people’s environmental awareness. However, with the intrinsic value approach he adopted, whichsees the natural environment as an end in itself and its use for human benefit as wrong, noearthworks would be permissible whatever the reason is for an infringement upon the rights ofwilderness is. That is why environmental art which ‘leaves a mark on the environment’ can only

Vol.42, No.1, pp.49-58; Allen Carlson, “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront to Nature?”, in Canadian Journalof Philosophy, Vol.16, No.4, 1986, pp.635-650.; Emily Brady, “Aesthetic Regard for Nature in Environmental andLand Art”, in Ethics, Place and Environment, Vol.10, No.3, 2007 (This special issue of the journal includes eight
other philosophical papers mostly presented at the session ‘Considering Environmental and Land Art’ held at theAmerican Society of Aesthetics Annual Meeting in Milwaukee in 2006), pp.287-300.
3Michael Auping, “Earth Art: A Study in Ecological Politics”, in Alan Sonfist (ed.) Art in the Land, A Critical
Anthology of Environmental Art, 1983, p.94.

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ITOH Takako

be condemned as unethical after all. His argument is so simple that just because it is art does notmean that it is permissible to use the means otherwise ethically prohibited.4
There is also an aesthetic objection against environmental art. In 1983, Donald Crawford
pointed out unusual attitudes of environmentalists addressing Valley Curtain (1970-72), Running
Fence (1972-76), Surrounded Islands (1983) by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, in “Nature and Art:
Some Dialectical Relationship”. The objections against the projects, such as Christo’s works fromthe environmentalists, usually take legal recourse by challenging the environmental impact of theconstruction. However, in fact, ‘one cannot help but think that these critics believe Christo isengaged in an aesthetic affront to nature that goes deeper than the scientific assessment ofenvironmental implications. This raises the question of whether they are destructive of the natural
setting within the aesthetic context’. 5 Because ‘Christo’s artifacts forcibly assert theirartifactuality over against nature, by their size, their engineering complexity and their synthetic
components’,6 ‘incursions on relatively pristine natural setting’7 were made. ‘This raises thequestion of whether they are destructive of the natural setting within the aesthetic context’.8
Following this essay, Carlson claims, in his paper “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront
to Nature?”. In 1986, as ‘intimate relationships between art and nature’, environmental art isregarded ‘as simple one-sided aesthetic impositions upon nature’ and an aesthetic affront tonature. As Crawford distinguishes a work’s ‘aesthetic affront to Nature’ from its ‘environmental
implications’, Carlson defines that ‘the affront is generated by the aesthetic qualities of an object,rather than by, for example, its social, moral, ecological, or other such qualities’.9 He describesthat the affront is not only concerned with the appearance of the work of art; these environmental
works constitute something like aesthetic indignities to nature, in part because of the way nature
becomes incorporated into, becomes a part of art in such works. According to him, even if nature
itself cannot recognize the affront as a man can do, it is affronted.
A distinctive feature of environmental art is that a part of nature itself is a part of theaesthetic object - the environmental site is an aspect of the work. (…) The environmentalsite this changed from being a part of nature to being a part of an artwork and with thischange the aesthetic qualities of nature are altered. Heizer, for example, says: ‘The work
is not put in a place, it is that place’. 10 And Smithson spoke of his sites as being

4
Cf. Peter Humphrey, ibid. However, Humphrey’s examples for this argument include works of notenvironmental art or not even works of art, and besides unlikely fictional works by actual artists (and they will neverimagine!), his argument is quite sloppy and distorted.
5
Donald Crawford, op.cit., p.56.
6
Ibid., p.56.
7Ibid., p.56-57.
8
Ibid.
9
Allen Carlson, “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront to Nature?”, in Aesthetic and the Environment, theAppreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture, 2000, p.151.
10
Cited by Carlson, from Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim and Robert Smithson, “Discussions with Heizer,
Oppenheim, Smithson”, in Avalanche, 1970 vol.1, pp.48-70; reprinted in Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson:
Essays with Illustrations, 1979, p.171.

Debating Ethical Issues Surrounding Environmental Art

53‘redefined in terms of Art’11.12
According to Carlson, every change where the aesthetic qualities of nature are altered involves
an aesthetic affront. If the natural environment is redefined in terms of art, as Smithson said, thechange that the aesthetic qualities of nature altered into the aesthetic qualities of art constitutes
an aesthetic affront of nature.
Perhaps ‘defile’ is too strong a word to characterize most environmental art. Nonetheless,the general way in which environmental artists alter nature’s aesthetic qualities by turning
nature into art does seem to support its being an affront to nature. This is illustrated byHeizer’s works such as Displaced-Replaced Mass (1969) in which a fifty-two-ton granite
boulder is ‘messed with’ by placing it in an excavated depression. It is also evident inworks such as Christo’s Surrounded Islands described earlier and Valley Curtain (197172), 200,000 square feet of bright orange nylon polyamide spanning a Colorado valley,or Oppenheim’s Branded Hillside (1969), a ‘branding’ of the land executed by killing thevegetation with hot tar. In such cases nature is ‘redefined in terms of art’ at a cost to its
aesthetic qualities such that to speak of an affront, if not a ‘denigration,’ is quite
appropriate.13
Carlson’s claim that ‘environmental art constitutes an aesthetic affront to nature’ postulates theidea of the correct appreciation of nature which sees nature as nature. For environmental art
directly created in the natural environment is between nature and art, there is a kind of torsion in
its appreciation between the appreciation of nature as nature and the appreciation of art as art, andblurs their boundaries. Wherever should be the correct appreciation of environmental art?
I will address this issue, exemplifying Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in the following
section.

2. Appreciation of Nature as Nature, Appreciation of Art as Art, or Appreciationof Nature as Art, Appreciation of Art as Nature
A monumental work of environmental art created from 1969 to 1970, Double Negative, inthe Mormon Mesa, Nevada, consists of two artificial cuts in the mesa surface facing each other,
excavated the thirty-foot wide cuts to a depth of fifty feet, a total length of 1,500 feet by dynamite
and bulldozers, and the displacement of 244,000 tons of rhyolite and sandstone. Its vast andmagnificent scale appeals to spectators even by the photographic image. The work itself createdin the remote desert far away from the city (but also not so far from the underground nuclear testsite) has become a new artificial landscape and a new art form. It also expresses an opposition

11
Cited by Carlson, Robert Smithson, quoted in Lawrence Alloway, “Robert Smithson’s Development”, in
Artforum, vol.11, 1972, pp.52-61; Sonfist, op.cit., p.131.
12
Allen Carlson, op.cit., p.155.
13
Ibid.

ITOH Takako

54

against environmental destruction and enhances environmental awareness in some way, as one
which refuses to be transported to anywhere or to be possessed by anybody. At least, while it
opened up an entirely new art form, it might reveal an attitude with melancholic conflict towards
the natural environment dominated by a kind of eschatological view that the fragile earth wasdoomed to be collapsed at the time. Be that as it may, as long as it scarred landscape andmanipulated nature, criticism of environmental destruction is inevitable.
Carlson suggests Double Negative’s similarity of appearance of actual disruption to ‘theeyesore’14 that ‘is reminiscent of the result of mining operations, in particular the highway cutsand skyline notches produced by Appalachian coal mining’15. Nevertheless, at the same time, heclaims, ‘the aesthetic qualities an object has are only those it appears to have when it appropriately
appreciated and moreover that such appreciation must involve appreciation of that object as thekind of thing it is. Consequently, if two different objects are different kinds of things, they canhave very different aesthetic qualities even if they are identical in appearance’.16 He recognizes
the need to appreciate an environmental work of art as art.
It reveals Carlson’s cognitivism in his aesthetics, his view that appropriate aesthetic
appreciation should be informed by appropriate knowledge about the object to be appreciated.
This means that there is an appreciation of nature as nature and also an appreciation of art as art.
Malcolm Budd also claims that the aesthetic appreciation of nature should be the appreciationof ‘nature as nature.’ For instance, the colour of a flower or snowfield shining in the rays of thesetting sun etc., if we contemplate it in abstraction from whatever kind it is seen to be and focus
on its shape, textures, and colouring, it is not understood as the aesthetic appreciation of nature‘as nature’.17 Furthermore, ‘given that a work of art is an artefact- it requires that it does notessentially involve perceiving or imagining nature as a work of art’. Hence, he claims that as theappreciation of nature as looking like a beautiful picture of nature-nature as picturesque- if an
observer adopts toward nature an attitude appropriate to a work of art, regarding it as if it weresuch a work, is different from the aesthetic appreciation of nature as nature.18
Do we ever appreciate nature or art (or artefact) by strictly classifying and distinguishing
between them? Furthermore, can we ever appreciate it in such a manner? First of all, the conceptof ‘nature’ includes extremely various and complex meanings. The nature-artefact dichotomy is
not simple; between polar contraries of ‘pure nature’ and ‘pure artefact’, there are contradictoriesof ‘nature’ and ‘artefact’ with a fuzzy boundary between them, artificial nature (nature intervened
by a human) and artefacts made by nature with different degrees are prevalent in our world.19
Actually, it is not an exaggeration to say that nature not as artificial, untouched nature without

14

Ibid., p.154.
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
17
Cf. Malcolm Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature, 2006, p.2.
18
Cf. ibid., p.5.
19‘Die Tatsche, daß der Unterschied zwischen Natur und Kultur oder zwischen artifizieller und naturhafter
Gegebenheit in der heutigen Welt eine durch und durch graduelle Unterscheidung ist, ändert daran nichts’. Martin
Seel, “Ästhetische und moralische Anerkennung der Natur”, in Angelika Krebs (Hg.), Naturethik, Frankfurt am Mein,
1997, p.315.
15

Debating Ethical Issues Surrounding Environmental Art

55

any intervention of human agency exists no more.20
Nevertheless, Carlson says the following about the place called desert where Double
Negative was made:The desert, for example, has a subtle, quiet beauty of its own, and altering that beauty
can be as great an aesthetic affront to nature as altering the aesthetic qualities of
conventionally scenic landscapes. In fact I suggest that none of virgin nature iscomparable to the work of a third rate hack -the virgin nature by and large has positive
aesthetic qualities.21
Although Carlson throws harsh criticism against Double Negative as ‘the work of a third rate
hack’, as Jason Simus rightly points out in “Environmental Art and Ecological Citizenship,” there
are no affronts of nature itself, but the ‘idea’ of nature is being aesthetically affronted. That is theidea of nature as primordially innocent wilderness, the old ecological paradigm. The desert isregarded as having positive aesthetic qualities as wilderness, and like common criticism against
earthworks, it is seen as virgin land raped by the brutality traditionally having been symbolized
as machismo. Simus explains the following:
Heizer’s piece surely offends the idea of nature as paradigmatically pristine. But the ideaof nature as primordially innocent or paradigmatically pristine may no longer be an
accurate characterization of the natural world. Contemporary ecology now tells us thatnatural systems are better characterized as being in a dynamic state of flux, where
disturbances are the norm and humans play an integral role in ecosystem structure andfunction. Nature, or our idea of nature, then, is anything but primordially innocent andparadigmatically pristine according to current science. In this view, environmental
artworks are not aesthetic affronts to nature, and this can be illustrated by drawing ananalogy with avant-garde art. Carlson explains that in the same way Marcel Duchamp’s
L.H.O.O.Q. is an aesthetic affront to art, some environmental artworks are aesthetic
affronts to nature. Note, however, that Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. is only considered an
20
Budd, who emphasize nature as nature is also quite cautious about wilderness. ‘Although it would be
mistaken to think of nature as that part of the world that has been unchanged or not significantly affected by humanagency, much of terrestrial nature has not remained in its natural condition but has been subjected to humaninterference. Wild animals have been domesticated, new strains of plant developed by selective breeding, species
native to one area have been transplanted to other parts of the world, rivers have been dammed, land reclaimed fromthe sea, hillsides terraced, seas polluted, forests felled, and so on indefinitely... In any case, much of our naturalenvironment displays, for better or worse, the influence of humanity, having been shaped, to a greater or lesser extent,
and in a variety of ways, by human purposes, so that little of the world’s landscape is in a natural condition. If somesegment of the natural environment has been affected by humanity it can still be appreciated aesthetically as nature,
but appreciation of it by one who is aware of its non-pristine character is liable to be appreciation of it as nature
affected by humanity. Accordingly, our aesthetic experience of the natural world is often mixed- a mixture of theaesthetic appreciation of nature as nature with an additional element, of a variable character, based on human design
or purpose or activity.’ Malcolm Budd, ibid., p.7. In this argument, see in Takako Itoh, “Historicization of Nature andNarrative of Environmental Art (3) (Shizen no Rekishisei to Kankyo-Geijutu no Monogatarisei(3))”, in GEIBUN008,
Bulletin for Faculty of Art and Design, University of Toyama, vol.8, 2013.
21
Allen Carlson, ibid., p.157.

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ITOH Takako

aesthetic affront under a theory of art that takes the classic beauty of Leonardo’s Mona
Lisa as its paradigm example. Just as Duchamp’s works force us to question ourassumptions about art, many environmental artworks force us to question ourassumptions about nature. And just as beauty is no longer the paradigm of artistic
achievement, neither is primordial innocence the paradigm characteristic of the natural
world.22
According to contemporary ecology, ecosystems are regarded as ‘dynamic systems
controlled by heterogeneity and variability’,23 and nature is understood as varying over time,
subject to disturbances. However, there is a big difference between natural disturbance as aprocess and human disturbance as an intervention by human agency. Whereas the appropriate
disturbances that happened with some frequencies are required to sustain healthy ecosystems,
human interventions sometimes can utterly transform ecosystems. ‘Many animals and plants intheir long-established habitats often cannot persevere or survive against human intervensions. In
that case, a few newly-arrived invasive species introduced from outside, become stronger andoutcompete native species and bring about simple ecosystems which are completely altered fromthe more complex ones they used to be.’24 Therefore, there are now many endangered species on
the planet, even though many are not originally rare, but were commonly seen animals and plants
in everyday surroundings. Especially in terms of biodiversity among various ecosystems, theirchanges are irreversible and once a species is lost, can never be reproduced.25 When a loss of
biodiversity happens, ‘maintaining the status quo’ or ‘exclusion of human intervention’ once
aimed at maintaining Nature Reserves cannot be adequate to sustain the healthy status of theecosystems anymore. Proper human interventions are instead required in ecosystems to maintainor restore ecosystems and biodiversity.
Perhaps for contemporary ‘nature with historicity’,26 it is difficult to distinguish between
artificial/cultural nature and also nature and artefact cannot be regarded as a simple dichotomy,
so that both can only explore the possibilities of a sustainable coexistence. When you consider
the natural environment addressed in environmental art, it is unreasonable to appreciate it aspristine nature, and also, it is quite difficult to appreciate it only as art and avoid looking at thenatural environment.

22
Jason B. Simus, “Environmental Art and Ecological Citizenship”, in Martin Drenthen and Jozef Keulartz(eds.), Environmental Aesthetics. Crossing Divides and Breaking Ground, 2014, pp.104-105.
23
See Izumi Washitani, Seitaikei wo Yomigaeraseru (To Restore the Ecosystems), 2001, p.141.
24
Ibid., p.118.
25‘Using knowledge of conservation ecology, to facilitate the functional restoration in order to achieve a more
appropriate function is the only viable way to strengthen the health of ecosystems’. Izumi Washitani, ibid., p.141.
The appropriate intervention of humans enables to restore the intrinsic value of nature.
26
About contemporary nature with historicity, see in Takako Itoh, ibid.

Debating Ethical Issues Surrounding Environmental Art

57

3. On Intrinsic Value of Nature: Is It Always Given Priority over Intrinsic Value ofArt?
In the argument in environmental ethics, the value of nature is often considered making a
distinction between instrumental and intrinsic value and applying the former to anthropocentristic
and the latter to physiocentristic attitude towards nature. Just like arguments about the opposition:
nature versus artefact, it involves a too simple reduction to anthropocentrism = instrumental valueof nature and physiocentrism = intrinsic value of nature. Persistent and seemingly justifiableclaims such as criticism against anthropocentrism and advocacy of physiocentrism aremisunderstandings derived from a confused argument, the simplistic identification of‘anthropocentrism’ with ‘instrumental value of nature’.27
However, the arguments of ‘intrinsic value of nature’ are quite persuasive, and indeed they
have acted as a kind of barometer for bringing our attention to human duties and responsibilities
for nature, and concerning the conservation of nature, setting ethical behaviour criteria of humans
and society based on rights of nature beyond environmental ethics centred human interests or
wellbeing. As with that, the first concept of ‘nature’ in the argument of appreciation of nature as
nature is vague; that of the intrinsic value of nature is still unclear. This is well known inarguments in environmental ethics. In the usual arguments confusing intrinsic value as noninstrumental value with objective or absolute intrinsic value, any natural environment becomesthe inviolable quasi-wilderness so that no artificial intervention can be allowed and art has to be
excluded as a natural consequence. Indeed, as with a nuclear power plant built on a coastline, thebehaviour of making artificial cuts by dynamite and bulldozers on the mesa in the desert area of
the American West should be held liable for breach of duties with respect to intrinsic value ofnature from the standpoint of recognizing the rights of nature. However, that natural environment
should have its own rights does not automatically mean that it should have any rights one canthink of. But then, the intrinsic value of nature is often discussed as the value beyond utilities fora human being in parallel with the intrinsic value of art. Nevertheless, in the discussion on thevalue of the environmental artwork, obviously, the intrinsic value of nature has priority over thatof art, as it were, automatically.
Humphrey claims, even if environmental art can emphasize the intrinsic value of nature, ‘onecannot justify bulldozed earthworks simply by saying that they reharmonize people with nature.
According to the intrinsic value approach, it does not make sense to save the environment by
27
We as a human being, can think about nature only from the human point of view, and aesthetics examines
aesthetic experience of nature, for its epistemic character, has no way other than perceiving nature for us, because it
speaks about what human beings can perceive as nature physically- sensorily. Moreover, nature is not a valuer. As
long as aesthetics is the study on the judgement of value, ‘values come into the world with human beings who
evaluate’. Because of the structure of cognition, we cannot give away the human point of view, and this shows that
also in terms of ethics only human standards can be the standard for ourselves. However, this does not mean thathuman beings are in the centre of all beings, or everything can be understood for human beings or to be prepared forthem. Avoiding to let human criteria be the measure of all things as anthropocentrism, but also avoiding theanthropomorphism into which often physiocentrism fell, based on ‘extensionalist physiocentrism’, we can consider
not only direct responsibility for humans and animals, but also responsibility for plants and minerals, and othernatural things and artificial objects. See Angelika Kreps, Ethics of Nature 1999. The outlines of these arguments andtheir criticisms are precisely described in this excellent book.

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58

destroying parts of it, unless the nondestructive approaches do not work.’28 Or according toCarlson, as long as environmental art intervenes artificially in the natural environment, even if itmakes people much more aware of the intrinsic value of nature, it is dismissed as an aesthetic
affront to nature whenever the natural environment is seen as art.29
While on the other hand, Brady appraises some art forms in which the artistic relationship tonature is more intimate and the intrinsic value of nature is emphasized, as showing aesthetic
regard for nature in environmental art. In her discussion, she pointed out the problems with theposition of Carlson’s positive aesthetics, which regards nature unconditionally as being beautiful,in her distinctive manner. According to her, Carlson concludes that even the artworks highlightnature’s quality, it may be seen as causing an aesthetic affront of another kind, ‘the affront implicitin the idea that for the aesthetic interest and merit of nature to be recognized it must first be
considered works of art.’30 In addition, he makes the further claim that because such works ‘dolittle if anything to alter nature’s aesthetic qualities…there are adequate grounds for considering
these natural pieces not to be work of art.’31 That is, then these works of environmental art are
seen as nature.
Positive aesthetics, which argues that pristine or wild nature is always beautiful or wild nature
as it is always ‘aesthetically good’ or the approach from the intrinsic value of nature, at least
keeps environmental art out.32 Brady correctly points out that ‘the problem is that the thesis
places the aesthetic value of wild environments over cultural ones simply in virtue of naturalvalue. Wild nature is just always more beautiful than humanly modified nature, and only the lattercan ever have negative aesthetic value.’33 Although Humphrey also realizes that ‘natural andartistic aesthetic qualities are not interchangeable, 34 he attends to nature exclusively andeliminates art when he questions ethical issues.

4. Desert Is Not Wilderness: Is It possible to Appreciate Environmental Art
Properly?
Whereas large-scale earthworks made from 1969 to 70 are generally understood as a lack ofenvironmental conservation awareness, recent research indicates that they were within the generalenvironmentalism at that time. 35 Appreciation of art is ‘emotionally and cognitively richengagement with a cultural artifact, intentionally created by a designing intellect, informed byboth art-historical traditions and art-critical practices, and deeply embedded in a complex, many-

28

Peter Humphrey, op.cit., p.20.
cf. Allen Carlson, op.cit.
30
Ibid., p.161.
31
Ibid., pp.160-161.
32
Kiyokazu Nishimura also points out the problems of arguments on environmental art of Carlson andHumphrey in his book. See Kiyokazu Nishimura, Plastic no Ki de Nani ga Warui noka? (What Is Wrong with Plastic
Trees?), 2011.
33
Emily Brady, “Aesthetic Regard for Nature in Environmental and Land Art”, p.294.
34
Peter Humphrey, op.cit., p.13.
35
cf. Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, Ends of Earth: Land Art to 1974, 2012; Ben Tufnell, Land Art, 2006.
29

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faceted art world’,36 as Carlson defined, so that the creation of art is inevitably situated within
the historical development of art and culture and therefore art has to be appreciated correctly as
art within its context.
Double Negative is a monumental work representing Earthworks that was one of many new
genres in the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, Happenings, Performance, Installation, Conceptual
Art, Video Art and so on, by their reimagining of what art could be, that can open up new
possibilities for art and literally new horizons of art. As the site of the work was the land owned
jointly by Heizer and his New York art dealer Virginia Dwan and isolated about 130 kilometres
northeast of Las Vegas on a barren mesa outside the small town of Overton, special legal
permission to create the work of art was not required. Indeed ‘the National Environmental Policy
Act came into force while this work was in process, on January 1, 1970, and the ensuing agency
was not established (with the requirement for environmental impact statement in the future) until
the following September, after the Negative’s completion’.37 In fact, the art world did not raisequestions about the artists’ interventions in the landscape. Rather, like Philip Leider’s review, it
was favourably received. ‘The [Double Negative] is huge, but its scale is not. It took its place innature in the most modest and unassuming manner - the quiet participation of a man-made shadein a particular configuration of valley, ravine, mesa and sky. The piece is a new place in nature’38.
The artist’s large-scale manipulations of terrain were considered heroic as paralleled to theAmerican pioneer spirit. ‘Not only the art world, but mass media news and pictorial magazines
were inspired by the image of New York artists going into wilderness to move sometimes
thousands of tons of earth to create extraordinary sculptural spectacles that few would experience’.
However, as Roderick Nash explains in the Introduction of Wilderness and the American Mind,
wilderness is the concept made by civilization, and the Americans regarded the wilderness as ‘amoral and physical wasteland fit only for conquest and transformation in the name of progress,
civilization, and Christianity’. 39 For the colonialists, the native Americans living in thewilderness was ‘savages’, and they and their wild habitat, the ‘frontier’ have to be conquered andtransformed. This idea has taken a firm hold in the tradition of frontier spirit and one of the crucial
factors that formed the American national character. The desert area of the American West is
exceptionally the place which includes such contradictions of its complex history. There, railways
were laid, many facilities of US forces were built, the first experiment of the atomic bomb in New
Mexico was executed in 1945, and Yucca Flat of the nuclear testing site in Nevada wasconstructed in 1950; these all occurred under the American myth of national identity formed in
the wild western frontier.
The site of Double Negative is close to a reservoir by Hoover Dam, which is not so far fromthe Nevada Test Site and in the Pueblo Indian reservation. In the USA, exhausted by the36
Allen Carlson, “Environmental Aesthetics”, in Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (eds.), The Routledge
Companion to Aesthetics, 2001, p.425.
37
Cf. Suzaan Boettger, “Earthworks‘ Contingencies”, in Elaine A. King and Gail Levin, Ethics and the VisualArts, 2006.
38
Philip Leider, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation or, Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco
and Utah”, in Artforum 9, no.1 (September 1970), p.42.
39
Roderick F. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, p.xxii.

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protracted Vietnam War, amid the Cold War era, nuclear war was a real possibility andpopularized the image of Spaceship Earth enhanced by the Apollo 8 Earthrise photograph; there
was a growing environmental awareness because of environmental hazards caused by pollution
and pesticides. Double Negative implicates this negative American history and becoming anegative sculpture of sculpture - ‘there is nothing there, yet it is still a sculpture’-40 has been an
extraordinary landmark of art, and still is today.
However, Double Negative must be held liable for any possible ecological damage bycontemporary standards of environmental ethics, no matter how important it is. Rhyolite andsandstone were dynamited and then removed by bulldozers and pushed into the chasm between
the cuts, which then contained a huge mound as if generated by an avalanche. Suzaan Boettger,a researcher of Earthworks, counters, ‘it has not been shown that any Earthworks actually harmed
the “biotic community”’.41 In fact, within the art world, no one denounces Earthworks as having
harmed the ecological environment. 42 Retrospective criticism could be possible, but she
describes, ‘their right to such aggressive acts no longer seems that it would be so easily given at least not without prior research into the potential environmental impact. Another characteristicof a free society is the recognition that no one has the right to radically alter the public heritageof nature without substantial public benefit’43. Such large-scale Earthworks like Double Negative
were rarely constructed after the early 1970s because the sharp economic recession underway
constrained private and public funding. That was due to the Organization of Petroleum ExportingCountries’ (OPEC) dramatic increase in the world price of petroleum and the United States’
phased withdrawal from Vietnam. The environmental concerns associated with humanmanipulation of the natural environment uncreased after that. By contrast, after more than a halfcentury since its construction, in Double Negative, its original sharp artificial edges of the cuts
were weathered, deteriorated and became vague, and merged into natural and organic
irregularities of surroundings. Instead, a new argument has been developed that the work needs
additional alteration or reinforcement to restore and conserve it. Nevertheless, already in 1985,
when the work was donated to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Heizer made afinal decision to allow the work to decay.
Carlson condemned environmental art unilaterally in his essay, ‘Is Environmental Art an
Aesthetic Affront to Nature?’, from the points of view of the environmentalist after 1985, throughdealing with only the earliest Earthworks of the late 1960s under the name of environmental art,
without fully considering or understanding its value as a work of art, and furthermore, under his
illusion of wilderness. This kind of attitude would have to be described as provincial andintolerant anachronism. However, within the layered structure of growing awareness ofenvironmentalism every day and evolving environmental art as contemporary art by reflecting
ever-improving environmentalism, it is also a fact that it is complicated to evaluate the ethics of40
Julia Brown, Interview with Michael Heizer, in Julia Brown (ed.), Michael Heizer: Sculpture in Reverse,
1984, p.16.
41
See Boettger, ibid., p.223
42
Ibid., p.223. Subsequently, Boettger refers to Humphrey’s and Carlson’s condemnations of environmental
art, dismissing it as having no impact in the art world.
43
Ibid., p.221.

Debating Ethical Issues Surrounding Environmental Art

61

environmental art accurately at a particular point in time.
Sheila Lintott asks the question of the Earthwork, whether it is worth the ecological andenvironmental costs incurred in its creation.44 As already noted, current environmental aesthetics
debate whether an environmental ethical flaw diminishes the aesthetic value as art. Let us not
subordinate artistic value to natural value automatically as before or be forced to choose between
autonomism and moralism. For the artistic value, in order to measure the excellence of an
outstanding work of art, there are very complex interwoven mixtures of different elements andcannot be measured by a kind of ethical standard; good-bad. Then, consistently evaluating
environmental art within the framework of art, and based on the premise that environmental art
is not a moral expression of emotion, in order to suggest that there is still the possibility to weighthe environmental ethical value, I would like to conclude this paper with the following thought
experiment. This is because I think this can finally be the starting point to consider the value ofart as an equivalent to that of nature in environmental aesthetics.
If we could discover new technology to restore and regenerate the ecosystem completely inthe preferred form, should we use it to destroy Double Negative and restore the original shape ofthe Mesa?

44

cf. Sheila Lintott, “Is It Worth It?”, in Ethics, Place and Environment, Vol.10, No.3, 2007, pp.263-277.