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.