Art And The Nature Of Time Essay — страница 3
sacred. In fact, the two are not so dissimilar as Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke for many in his generation and also many in ours when he wrote that the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. The grandest achievements nineteenth American landscape painting by Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, and Albert Bierstadt sprang from this philosophical ground. Another example of this is the Thomas Moran painting of the Mountain of the Holy Cross, a peak in Colorado with deep, snow-filled crevices in the shape of a cross near its summit. In the last decade and a half the distinctions between sculpture and other forms of artistic activity have been blurred. This is particularly evident in the landscape art which only sometimes has the formally distinct character of conventional sculpture. Land art is in large measure about the landscape itself, pertaining to its scale, its vista, its essentially horizontal character, its topography, and its human and natural history. It also shows the changing characteristics that a work assumes in different conditions; diurnal or nocturnal light, winter glare or summer heart, and full sun or cloud shadow. An example of really poor environmental art and lack of intelligent engineering is a water fountain located on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Illinois. The water fountain is in a courtyard bounded by the austere, rigidly functional buildings of Miles van der Rohe. A wall of water gushes forth from this fountain and is forced four feet into the air in the shape of an inverted cone to form a chrysanthemum pattern before falling back into a pool below. The water pressure, temperature and flow rate have been carefully calculated to spew water from a specially designed circular spout that circulates it throughout the year. In subzero weather, a spectator to this art can witness the strange sight of water spouting and falling back on ice and snow encrusting the fountain. Although this fountain is a real work of architectural art that should be environmentally friendly, no one lingers about the fountain in the winter, nor do many spectators observe it in warmer weather. The students do not tarry to gaze at the fountain because its solid wall of rising water connotes power, but not contemplation, which is desirous to enjoy an object of art. The fountain does not have gentle sprays to catch sunbeams and convert them into rainbow. There is no trickling or dripping or gurgling either, only a ponderous rising and falling back into the basin. The fountain is too small to imitate the beauty of Chicago s Buckingham Fountain, several miles distant on the lakefront; it is too gross to capture the mood of the nearby Dove Girl and Turtle Boy fountains. This fountain is an example of bad art and poor engineering. It spouts forth in summer heat and winter cold, totally unattended and unwatched, as a symbol of a technology unrelated to human purpose and human aspirations. I believe that fine artists could have worked with the engineers on this fountain to help construct an environmentally friendly work of art instead of an atrocity! This report has discussed the relationship with architecture and the environment. If architecture is carefully planned with the help of artists and not just engineers, it is possible to achieve a environmentally friendly association between the structures and the environment. BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Beardsley, John, Earthworks And Beyond-Contemporary Arts In The Landscape, Cross River Press, Ltd., New York, New York, 1989 2. Hall, James B. and Barry Ulanov, Modern Culture And The Arts, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, New York, 1967 3. Lynden, Herbert, A New Language For Environment Design, New York University Press, New York, New York, 1972 4. Munro, Thomas, The Arts And Their Interrelations, Press Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, 1969 5. Robb, David M. and J. J. Garrison, Art In The Western World, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, New York, 1963 6. Schwartz, Eugene, Overskill, The Decline of Technology in Modern Civilization, Quadrangle Books, Chicago, Illinois, 1971 7. Stein, Richard G., Architecture And Energy, Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1972
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