Book Review: Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental Aesthetics

Abstract

Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental AestheticsArnold Berleant (ed.) Aldershot and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2002 ISBN 0-7546-0543-4 £45.00 (HB). xii + 192pp.The prejudices of some aestheticians notwithstanding, modes of aesthetic engagement need not be directed exclusively or even primarily towards art objects. Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in treating the environment (natural and otherwise) as an aesthetic object, the appreciation of which need not be derivative of art appreciation. The thirteen pieces in Environment and the Arts, though at times of uneven quality, treat a variety of theoretical and applied issues central to environmental aesthetics, while at the same time relating these issues to fundamental problems in the philosophy of art. This book will interest anyone seeking a broad overview of topics in environmental aesthetics and would serve well in upper-division undergraduate aesthetics courses.Any discussion of environmental aesthetics presupposes a conception of what constitutes the environment. Yet, as Arnold Berleant notes in his introductory essay, such a concept is not readily forthcoming. Rejecting such conceptions of the environment as an entity, a container, one's physical surroundings, or a world 'external to our thoughts, feelings and desires,' Berleant suggests that it be understood as 'the physical-cultural realm in which people engage in all the activities and responses that compose the weave of human life in its many historical and social patterns' (p. 9). So understood, the environment is something we engage aesthetically with all of our sense modalities, thus distinguishing it from traditional artworks.Assuming we have a more or less clear notion of the environment, the question arises how our conception of it influences aesthetic experience and appreciation. A number of essays explore this topic. Speaking to the issue of the aesthetic understanding of art and the environment, Ronald Hepburn argues that art appreciation differs fundamentally from environmental appreciation, since only in the former do we have bodies of criticism to guide us. Yrjö Sepänmaa, on the other hand, suggests that there is a close relation between art and environmental understanding, in that both occur against the backdrop of institutional structures (comprised of objects of appreciation, their makers, and an audience). But, while artists are generally consciously aware of the art institution and often act to subvert it, they are less aware of the environmental institution. Further, ecological considerations protect the environmental institution from the sort of radical transformations to which the art institution is subject.Appealing to Heidegger's notion of the life world, Arto Haapala suggests that art and nature influence one another bi-directionally. While much representational art has nature as its object (hence, nature influences art), Haapala suggests that art is just as able to influence our conception of nature. Drawing on examples from Finnish and English literat...