Radical Nature: Art & Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009

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Radical Nature: art & architecture for a changing planet 1969-2009

Barbican Art Gallery London 19 June to 18 October

Just what was it that 'Radical Nature' aimed to achieve? This exhibition, the first significant display of recent artistic engagements with ecological issues within a major UK gallery, was disappointingly muddled. Conflicting artistic approaches, strategies and ideologies were presented shoulder-to-shoulder, effectively trivialising their various standpoints. There were messianic mythmakers (Joseph Beuys, Buckminster Fuller), hippie survivalists (Newton Harrison and Helen Mayer Harrison, Ant Farm), dialectic conceptualists Hans Haacke, Robert Smithson) and tinkering contemporaries (Tue Greenfort, Simon Starling). Where conceptual unities collapsed, topological similarities abounded. On the gallery's lower floor a dense installation of artworks incorporated living plant life: Hans Haacke's mound of fecund earth, Grass Grows, 1969; Henrik Hakansson's hunk of horizontal rainforest imported into the gallery and kept alive with artificial lighting and water pumps, Fallen Forest, 2006; the Harrisons' …