Environmental ethics and land art (also earth art or earth works) began toemerge as new disciplines, philosophical and artistic, in the 1960s and 1970s.They were stimulated by social, political and economic developments, when pollution of the environment as a consequence of accelerated industrialisation could no longer be ignored. Despite the identical focus - i.e. the relationship with nature - the principles of environmental ethics and land art differ. The former operates from a clear moralistic position—it seeks to preserve nature, which is also its main goal. Land art is different, as it is not necessarily oriented towards a specific environmental goal. It focuses mainly on the formalist activation of outdoor open space and on creating with natural materials. American land art was created in deserts on a monumental scale. The question is whether spaces that are not inhabited by humans and are still unchanged natural environments, which include wilderness, deserts and the depths of the ocean, are “environments” at all, i.e. whether it is possible to address environmental issues by working in such spaces.
Unlike land art, environmental art (also known as ecological art or eco-art) is much more moderate in its use of physical natural space, which was of enormous proportions in the case of the pioneers of land art, and the projects are not created in geographically remote spaces like deserts, but in urban environments, not even necessarily in open space, as they are very often installed in enclosed public spaces, museums and galleries. Such art is socially and politically engaged from the outset, and with a greater degree of accessibility, it also has a greater chance of conveying an environmental message. This raises the question of the valuation of this art. Should we evaluate it through the prism of the social effectiveness of the environmental message? Is this aspect more important than its artistic impact? Or is there a link between the two aspects and is the artistic articulation a factor that makes the message more suggestive? The question of the relationship between the principles of environmental ethics and environmental artistic action does not offer easy answers, since it intervenes in the structure of the art system, which is changing its paradigm by undermining traditional competences.
Using the representative examples of artists Marko Pogačnik and the OHO group, Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria, Alan Sonfist and Agnes Denes, I seek to answer the question of whether artworks that take as their starting point the relationship between human beings, living beings and inanimate nature are necessarily committed to the principles
of environmental ethics, and how the ethical perspective influences the evaluation of art.
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