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MLA Full: | "The Hidden Meanings in Nature Art: Crash Course Art History #9." YouTube, uploaded by CrashCourse, 20 June 2024, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z21elmpg-W0. |
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CrashCourse, "The Hidden Meanings in Nature Art: Crash Course Art History #9.", June 20, 2024, YouTube, 11:27, https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z21elmpg-W0. |
From sunsets to double rainbows, nature’s full of beautiful things. So it’s not surprising that artists have found inspiration in Mother Nature for millennia. What is surprising is the wide variety of human concerns that nature art has been used to convey. In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’ll learn about the ways artists use nature to make arguments about the world around us, and our place within it.
Introduction: The Nazca Plateau 00:00
The Hidden Meanings in Nature Art 01:04
Social Issues in Nature Art 03:39
Humans & the Environment 07:33
Review & Credits 10:16
Image Descriptions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ETiCxe4GrVzFii7dBhF42oHx1EUCCh5y12wbtUjsH8A/edit
Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GW2NKzhpMNMmRyAFJVhFJG9cSfUOMRL-QrcWuHcWcIA/edit?usp=sharing
***
Support us for $5/month on Patreon to keep Crash Course free for everyone forever! https://www.patreon.com/crashcourse
Or support us directly: https://complexly.com/support
Join our Crash Course email list to get the latest news and highlights: https://mailchi.mp/crashcourse/email
Get our special Crash Course Educators newsletter: http://eepurl.com/iBgMhY
Thanks to the following patrons for their generous monthly contributions that help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever:
Forrest Langseth, Emily Beazley, Neeloy Gomes, oranjeez, Rie Ohta, Jack Hart, UwU, Leah H., David Fanska, Andrew Woods, Stephen Akuffo, Ken Davidian, Toni Miles, AmyL, Steve Segreto, Kyle & Katherine Callahan, Laurel Stevens, Krystle Young, Burt Humburg, Perry Joyce, Scott Harrison, Alan Bridgeman, Mark & Susan Billian, Breanna Bosso, Matt Curls, Jennifer Killen, Jon Allen, Sarah & Nathan Catchings, Bernardo Garza, team dorsey, Trevin Beattie, Indija-ka Siriwardena, Jason Rostoker, Siobhán, Ken Penttinen, Barrett Nuzum, Nathan Taylor, Les Aker, William McGraw, Rizwan Kassim, Vaso , ClareG, Alex Hackman, Constance Urist, kelsey warren, Katie Dean, Stephen McCandless, Wai Jack Sin, Ian Dundore, Caleb Weeks
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Introduction: The Nazca Plateau 00:00
The Hidden Meanings in Nature Art 01:04
Social Issues in Nature Art 03:39
Humans & the Environment 07:33
Review & Credits 10:16
Image Descriptions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ETiCxe4GrVzFii7dBhF42oHx1EUCCh5y12wbtUjsH8A/edit
Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GW2NKzhpMNMmRyAFJVhFJG9cSfUOMRL-QrcWuHcWcIA/edit?usp=sharing
***
Support us for $5/month on Patreon to keep Crash Course free for everyone forever! https://www.patreon.com/crashcourse
Or support us directly: https://complexly.com/support
Join our Crash Course email list to get the latest news and highlights: https://mailchi.mp/crashcourse/email
Get our special Crash Course Educators newsletter: http://eepurl.com/iBgMhY
Thanks to the following patrons for their generous monthly contributions that help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever:
Forrest Langseth, Emily Beazley, Neeloy Gomes, oranjeez, Rie Ohta, Jack Hart, UwU, Leah H., David Fanska, Andrew Woods, Stephen Akuffo, Ken Davidian, Toni Miles, AmyL, Steve Segreto, Kyle & Katherine Callahan, Laurel Stevens, Krystle Young, Burt Humburg, Perry Joyce, Scott Harrison, Alan Bridgeman, Mark & Susan Billian, Breanna Bosso, Matt Curls, Jennifer Killen, Jon Allen, Sarah & Nathan Catchings, Bernardo Garza, team dorsey, Trevin Beattie, Indija-ka Siriwardena, Jason Rostoker, Siobhán, Ken Penttinen, Barrett Nuzum, Nathan Taylor, Les Aker, William McGraw, Rizwan Kassim, Vaso , ClareG, Alex Hackman, Constance Urist, kelsey warren, Katie Dean, Stephen McCandless, Wai Jack Sin, Ian Dundore, Caleb Weeks
__
Want to find Crash Course elsewhere on the internet?
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thecrashcourse/
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/YouTubeCrashCourse
Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/TheCrashCourse
CC Kids: http://www.youtube.com/crashcoursekids
In 1917, Toribio Mejía Xesspe, a Peruvian archeologist, was flying over the Nazca Plateau, when he noticed something incredible.
Massive line drawings — known as geoglyphs — stretching 175 square miles. Turns out these artworks, which depicted a monkey, a spider, plants, and more, were created around 500 BCE.
What had compelled people thousands of years ago to work so hard to create images of the natural world? Some believe it may have been part of a spiritual practice, while others think it was functional — showing the locations of water sources. But whatever the purpose, this much is clear: human depictions of nature reveal as much about the people and the societies who made them, as they do about nature itself.
Hi! I'm Sarah Urist Green, and this is Crash Course Art History. [THEME MUSIC] We often think of art about nature as sort of…unbiased. A reflection of what is.
Often beautiful. Sometimes, clichéd. But not political, usually, or deep, or containing hidden meanings.
And yet, representations of the natural world are just that: re-presentations. Somebody had to pick which part of nature to include: what to highlight or exaggerate, and what to leave out. And usually those choices reveal something about the artist— both personally, and in the cultural context they’re coming from.
Like, let’s look at some art from the Chinese landscape tradition. These two artworks display many of the same details. This visual repetition has served as a sort of code that let people read the works across centuries almost like you’d read a poem.
And even the colors themselves were part of the code. Since as early as the 400s C. E., soft blue and green color palettes have been associated with dreamlike, magical environments, where humans live in balance with nature.
An aspirational state in the religion of Chinese Daoism. Over time, Chinese painters built on this tradition, using the blue/green color palette to create natural landscapes that, while not magical, do invoke a sense of tranquility that can feel just as dreamlike in comparison to the chaos of the modern world. While the colors’ meaning has morphed over hundreds of years, the emotions they evoke have connected the past to the present.
And this tradition is fertile ground — excuse the pun — for contemporary Chinese artists. Like, check out “Background
Story: Mount Lu,” an installation from 2015 by Xu Bing. You can already tell you’re looking at a Daoist paradise. Xu modeled it after a work by 20th-century Chinese landscape painter Zhang Daqian, who was himself known for his own skillful copies. Zhang’s Mount Lu veered from tradition by using a “splashed ink” technique, and Xu’s version innovates on a whole new level.
When you view Xu’s artwork from behind, you can see that it’s a lightbox, and the landscape is formed by the shadows of old plastic bags, dried plants, string, and other discarded bits. This world doesn’t quite vibe with the Daoist understanding of nature as an ethereal, spiritual realm, as it calls attention to our current waste-filled reality. And once you start looking closely, you’ll notice a lot of social problems highlighted in artworks that seemed to be “just” about nature.
Like, take this painting from 1840 by the British artist Joseph Mallord William Turner, titled “Slave Ship.” At first, it just looks like a stormy seascape. But as we look closer, we notice human limbs in the rough waves. Turner, who was against slavery, was deliberately calling the viewer’s attention to an abhorrent practice of the time.
Slave ship crews were sometimes ordered to throw the sick and dying overboard, since their insurance would only pay out in the event of a drowning. The painting illustrates the horrors of slavery and — as the boat turns toward a massive storm — suggests that nature itself may just get the last word. But at the same time, it highlights the neutrality of nature’s chaos, as the storm threatens to claim everyone onboard.
In other artworks, the social point is made not by what’s included — but by what’s left out. For example, many landscape artists in the 19th century U. S. painted breathtaking, untouched, unpeopled landscapes.
These representations propped up the myth of Manifest Destiny — the idea that it was Americans’ divine right to expand across the continent. Even if that meant forcefully taking land from the people who already lived there. Because the empty lands portrayed were indeed inhabited–by thousands of Indigenous people–and were sometimes cultivated by enslaved ones.
And some works that included depictions of indigenous peoples fed into this narrative. Check out “Green River Cliffs, Wyoming” from 1881 by the American artist, Thomas Moran. Here, we see a beautiful landscape occupied by Indigenous people.
Seems like an improvement! Until you realize Moran journeyed to Green River, Wyoming, on a magazine assignment to paint the American West as it was. And at the time he arrived, Green River was a bustling railroad town.
But Moran left out the schoolhouse, hotel, brewery, and even the railroad. He just mentally photoshopped the whole thing, and copy-and-pasted in a scene of imagined Native American people on wide open land. Scholars argue images like this would have resonated with white audiences at the time, who were reading popular novels about the wild American West and the allegedly “uncivilized” Native American people who lived there.
If Moran had depicted a town, it would have gotten in the way of this popular idea of the West as an open frontier, rife for expansion. Portraying Native Americans would have only added to the sense of wildness associated with Manifest Destiny. This goes to show that representations of nature in art aren’t exactly neutral.
They’re not just: look out the window and paint what you see. Like all art, these works are shaped by the perceptions, and biases, of each artist, along with the culture and time period they come from. Lurking behind pretty much any seemingly innocent 19th century landscape painting are ideas about class, race, and ethnicity.
Scratch the surface, and you’ll find them. Just not literally. Please, please do not touch the art.
But what makes art so cool is that it’s a dialogue. Where there is one type of work making one argument, there are inevitably others painting, or drawing, or sculpting a response. Take a look at these two works.
On the left, “Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite” by Albert Bierstadt, from the late 19th century. And on the right, Valerie Hegarty’s work from 2007, called “Fallen Bierstadt.” In both name and image, “Fallen Bierstadt” is a direct reference to the original, but it’s shown–yes–falling apart, decaying, almost as if nature itself had worn it down. Many see this as a pretty epic takedown of the whole idea of Manifest Destiny, and also of the entire tradition of heroic American landscape painting.
Art about nature is often really about humans. Human arguments, human progress, human religion, and so forth. And art about nature often says a lot about our relationship to the environment, too.
Take “The Wisdom of the Universe,” for example. It was painted in 2014 by Indigenous Canadian artist Christi Belcourt. She filled the canvas with images of native and endangered plant and animal species teetering on the brink of extinction.
Belcourt’s work is inspired by the intricate floral bead-work of the Métis People–and it looks like it, too–but she has rendered her designs with tiny dots of paint. For example, it’s common in traditional Métis bead-work for all the visual elements to be connected to one another by stems or tendrils. And you can see how Belcourt follows that style here.
These interlacing lines emphasize the interconnectedness of life. Which is exactly what Belcourt was going for. In her artist’s statement, she writes “All species, the lands, the waters are one beating organism that pulses like a heart.
We are all a part of a whole.” So, the work shows us not only what we risk losing due to environmental and human violence — but also our connections to each other, and to millions of beings that came before us. This last one takes us back to where we started — with land art, which really began to take root — pun intended — in the later 20th century– as a way to encourage audiences to consider their relationships to the natural world. In “Storm King Wavefield,” American artist Maya Lin took an area once neglected by humans and reclaimed it as a habitat for native grasses.
These fields of tall vegetation also provide shelter for area wildlife. This is what you could call a site-specific artwork, meaning, it was designed for a particular site, and doesn’t usually make any sense if you move it. Lin worked with a landscape designer and horticulturist to create what she calls a “living sculpture,” reshaping a gravel pit in New Windsor, New York, into these giant waves of earth.
The artwork spans 11 acres, which you can take in from a distance, or explore by climbing up and down the hills. You can stand on a ridge, or relax in a valley– surrounded by rolling swaths of green that were made to the scale of real ocean waves. Even though we’re dwarfed by nature, Lin’s artwork is a reminder that we humans still have the power to impact the natural world — for better or worse.
We can use that power to turn nature into parking lots and gravel pits. Or, we can create a thoughtful, mutually beneficial relationship with it. As we’ve seen, nature and art have been intertwined in many different ways across cultures, time periods, and from artist to artist.
And regardless of how sleepy or innocent some of it might seem, nature in art–and art made of nature–often makes arguments — whether religious, social, environmental, or all of the above. And it makes us stop and consider this thing we call “nature”. From ancient carvings to landscape paintings to living sculptures, there is so much to discover in art that’s of and about nature if you only…stop to smell the roses?
No? I’ll workshop it. In our next episode, we take a look at the ways that art has created and strengthened community through the years.
I’ll see you there. Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Art History which was filmed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.
Massive line drawings — known as geoglyphs — stretching 175 square miles. Turns out these artworks, which depicted a monkey, a spider, plants, and more, were created around 500 BCE.
What had compelled people thousands of years ago to work so hard to create images of the natural world? Some believe it may have been part of a spiritual practice, while others think it was functional — showing the locations of water sources. But whatever the purpose, this much is clear: human depictions of nature reveal as much about the people and the societies who made them, as they do about nature itself.
Hi! I'm Sarah Urist Green, and this is Crash Course Art History. [THEME MUSIC] We often think of art about nature as sort of…unbiased. A reflection of what is.
Often beautiful. Sometimes, clichéd. But not political, usually, or deep, or containing hidden meanings.
And yet, representations of the natural world are just that: re-presentations. Somebody had to pick which part of nature to include: what to highlight or exaggerate, and what to leave out. And usually those choices reveal something about the artist— both personally, and in the cultural context they’re coming from.
Like, let’s look at some art from the Chinese landscape tradition. These two artworks display many of the same details. This visual repetition has served as a sort of code that let people read the works across centuries almost like you’d read a poem.
And even the colors themselves were part of the code. Since as early as the 400s C. E., soft blue and green color palettes have been associated with dreamlike, magical environments, where humans live in balance with nature.
An aspirational state in the religion of Chinese Daoism. Over time, Chinese painters built on this tradition, using the blue/green color palette to create natural landscapes that, while not magical, do invoke a sense of tranquility that can feel just as dreamlike in comparison to the chaos of the modern world. While the colors’ meaning has morphed over hundreds of years, the emotions they evoke have connected the past to the present.
And this tradition is fertile ground — excuse the pun — for contemporary Chinese artists. Like, check out “Background
Story: Mount Lu,” an installation from 2015 by Xu Bing. You can already tell you’re looking at a Daoist paradise. Xu modeled it after a work by 20th-century Chinese landscape painter Zhang Daqian, who was himself known for his own skillful copies. Zhang’s Mount Lu veered from tradition by using a “splashed ink” technique, and Xu’s version innovates on a whole new level.
When you view Xu’s artwork from behind, you can see that it’s a lightbox, and the landscape is formed by the shadows of old plastic bags, dried plants, string, and other discarded bits. This world doesn’t quite vibe with the Daoist understanding of nature as an ethereal, spiritual realm, as it calls attention to our current waste-filled reality. And once you start looking closely, you’ll notice a lot of social problems highlighted in artworks that seemed to be “just” about nature.
Like, take this painting from 1840 by the British artist Joseph Mallord William Turner, titled “Slave Ship.” At first, it just looks like a stormy seascape. But as we look closer, we notice human limbs in the rough waves. Turner, who was against slavery, was deliberately calling the viewer’s attention to an abhorrent practice of the time.
Slave ship crews were sometimes ordered to throw the sick and dying overboard, since their insurance would only pay out in the event of a drowning. The painting illustrates the horrors of slavery and — as the boat turns toward a massive storm — suggests that nature itself may just get the last word. But at the same time, it highlights the neutrality of nature’s chaos, as the storm threatens to claim everyone onboard.
In other artworks, the social point is made not by what’s included — but by what’s left out. For example, many landscape artists in the 19th century U. S. painted breathtaking, untouched, unpeopled landscapes.
These representations propped up the myth of Manifest Destiny — the idea that it was Americans’ divine right to expand across the continent. Even if that meant forcefully taking land from the people who already lived there. Because the empty lands portrayed were indeed inhabited–by thousands of Indigenous people–and were sometimes cultivated by enslaved ones.
And some works that included depictions of indigenous peoples fed into this narrative. Check out “Green River Cliffs, Wyoming” from 1881 by the American artist, Thomas Moran. Here, we see a beautiful landscape occupied by Indigenous people.
Seems like an improvement! Until you realize Moran journeyed to Green River, Wyoming, on a magazine assignment to paint the American West as it was. And at the time he arrived, Green River was a bustling railroad town.
But Moran left out the schoolhouse, hotel, brewery, and even the railroad. He just mentally photoshopped the whole thing, and copy-and-pasted in a scene of imagined Native American people on wide open land. Scholars argue images like this would have resonated with white audiences at the time, who were reading popular novels about the wild American West and the allegedly “uncivilized” Native American people who lived there.
If Moran had depicted a town, it would have gotten in the way of this popular idea of the West as an open frontier, rife for expansion. Portraying Native Americans would have only added to the sense of wildness associated with Manifest Destiny. This goes to show that representations of nature in art aren’t exactly neutral.
They’re not just: look out the window and paint what you see. Like all art, these works are shaped by the perceptions, and biases, of each artist, along with the culture and time period they come from. Lurking behind pretty much any seemingly innocent 19th century landscape painting are ideas about class, race, and ethnicity.
Scratch the surface, and you’ll find them. Just not literally. Please, please do not touch the art.
But what makes art so cool is that it’s a dialogue. Where there is one type of work making one argument, there are inevitably others painting, or drawing, or sculpting a response. Take a look at these two works.
On the left, “Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite” by Albert Bierstadt, from the late 19th century. And on the right, Valerie Hegarty’s work from 2007, called “Fallen Bierstadt.” In both name and image, “Fallen Bierstadt” is a direct reference to the original, but it’s shown–yes–falling apart, decaying, almost as if nature itself had worn it down. Many see this as a pretty epic takedown of the whole idea of Manifest Destiny, and also of the entire tradition of heroic American landscape painting.
Art about nature is often really about humans. Human arguments, human progress, human religion, and so forth. And art about nature often says a lot about our relationship to the environment, too.
Take “The Wisdom of the Universe,” for example. It was painted in 2014 by Indigenous Canadian artist Christi Belcourt. She filled the canvas with images of native and endangered plant and animal species teetering on the brink of extinction.
Belcourt’s work is inspired by the intricate floral bead-work of the Métis People–and it looks like it, too–but she has rendered her designs with tiny dots of paint. For example, it’s common in traditional Métis bead-work for all the visual elements to be connected to one another by stems or tendrils. And you can see how Belcourt follows that style here.
These interlacing lines emphasize the interconnectedness of life. Which is exactly what Belcourt was going for. In her artist’s statement, she writes “All species, the lands, the waters are one beating organism that pulses like a heart.
We are all a part of a whole.” So, the work shows us not only what we risk losing due to environmental and human violence — but also our connections to each other, and to millions of beings that came before us. This last one takes us back to where we started — with land art, which really began to take root — pun intended — in the later 20th century– as a way to encourage audiences to consider their relationships to the natural world. In “Storm King Wavefield,” American artist Maya Lin took an area once neglected by humans and reclaimed it as a habitat for native grasses.
These fields of tall vegetation also provide shelter for area wildlife. This is what you could call a site-specific artwork, meaning, it was designed for a particular site, and doesn’t usually make any sense if you move it. Lin worked with a landscape designer and horticulturist to create what she calls a “living sculpture,” reshaping a gravel pit in New Windsor, New York, into these giant waves of earth.
The artwork spans 11 acres, which you can take in from a distance, or explore by climbing up and down the hills. You can stand on a ridge, or relax in a valley– surrounded by rolling swaths of green that were made to the scale of real ocean waves. Even though we’re dwarfed by nature, Lin’s artwork is a reminder that we humans still have the power to impact the natural world — for better or worse.
We can use that power to turn nature into parking lots and gravel pits. Or, we can create a thoughtful, mutually beneficial relationship with it. As we’ve seen, nature and art have been intertwined in many different ways across cultures, time periods, and from artist to artist.
And regardless of how sleepy or innocent some of it might seem, nature in art–and art made of nature–often makes arguments — whether religious, social, environmental, or all of the above. And it makes us stop and consider this thing we call “nature”. From ancient carvings to landscape paintings to living sculptures, there is so much to discover in art that’s of and about nature if you only…stop to smell the roses?
No? I’ll workshop it. In our next episode, we take a look at the ways that art has created and strengthened community through the years.
I’ll see you there. Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Art History which was filmed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.