West End Exhibition: Radical Nature | Barbican Art Gallery | Joseph Beuys | Agnes Denes | Hans Haacke | Robert Smithson | Simon Starling | Heather and Ivan Morison

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The Review - EXHIBITION
Published: 17 July 2009

Ant Farm's 'House of the Century'

Radically altering the natural order

RADICAL NATURE
Barbican

ART and nature have been bedfellows ever since cavemen discovered charcoal. But with the passing of time, humankind’s relationship with nature has changed.
The Barbican’s latest exhibition explores the response of the art world to climate change and the increasing degradation of the natural world – a kind of call-to-arms with humans as public enemy number one. Rather than a kind of wake-up message, of which there have been many from the art world, Radical Nature is more of an anthology of the nature/canvas relationship since the 1960s.
So what do we learn? Well, what becomes apparent is how the conception of nature has changed, from the sublime and pre-existing, to a cause – something that needs to be argued and fought for.
Environmentalism has been alive since the 1960s but its mission statement has changed.
Among the exhibits, a vegetable plot, a patch of rainforest and even some rhododendrons on a floating island. Nothing natural about that kind of nature in a whitewashed gallery.
Maybe that is the point – nature has been transformed so much that it can no longer be natural.
The exhibition features such names as Joseph Beuys, Agnes Denes, Hans Haacke and Robert Smithson, alongside pieces from the younger generation: Simon Starling, Heather and Ivan Morison and Phlippe Rahm.

* Radical Nature is at the Barbican Art Gallery until October 19. www.barbican.org.uk

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