organic art

   Despite its seemingly trendy and up-to-the-minute image, the comparison of a work of art to an organism dates back to classical antiquity. In Phaedrus, for example, Plato states that a successful oration must adhere to a coherent principle of composition which should determine the order and relation of its parts. Further to this, Plato maintains that in its construction a good oration should be constructed like a living creature, and it must not lack any organ or limb that would cause it to differ from a living form.

   In modern times, organic art conjures up visions of fashionable, wholesome, politically correct works of art. It is a term that, alongside organic farming and organic gardening, has returned to carve out its cultural and political niche in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Either rejecting or criticizing post-industrial scientific advances and the manipulation of the natural world, organic art occupies territory that is devoted to a re-enchantment with natural materials and processes. A close relation to organic art is organic architecture, of which the leading exponent was Frank Lloyd Wright. Organic architecture lays special stress on close relationships between building and landscape. It was an aim that buildings should seem to grow out of the landscape rather than have the appearance of being perched on alien terrain. Three artists adhering to this cooperative approach to working practice are Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Long and David Nash. Goldsworthy has made work using ice and plant matter, Long is renowned for his works that involve the arrangement of stones, while Nash makes carvings from found wood. In all three cases, an important factor is an awareness intrinsic to the work, of ways in which materials taken originally from the environment will continue to interact and relate to the environments in which they are subsequently placed.

   Although Goldsworthy, Long and Nash have many contemporaries who share a call of sympathy with a beleaguered natural world, a new generation of artists are also concerned with organic principles. However, unlike their predecessors, artists such as Susan Derges and Daro Montag use what could be perceived as contrary technological references to, for example, photography in order to elude to natural systems and forces at work within the environment. Common to all deriva-tions of organic art, however, are qualities of truth to life and a positive, at times almost reverent, relationship to the natural world.

   See also: pop art; sculpture

   NICKY COUTTS