Respect the Landscape
(reflections on installations and landscape interventions)
1. While creating a work I limit myself to the elements of the nearby environment (the only exception is my garden).
So no “strange” elements are introduced into nature. You play with the elements you see and find on the spot and shift some patterns. This shifting of things is limited to a minimum. It could have been the creations of the elements of nature itself (like the wind). Intervention by “men” is reduced to what I consider as respectful for the beauty and balance of nature.
2. The ephemeral quality is more important than a long standing testimony of my intervention. This makes the art in tune with the natural processes of the earth: ecology is more important than artistic residues. The works will be disturbed by the elements of nature, altered by nature who in the end will destroy the human interventions and regain its rights on natural patterns.
Natural decay will follow so the earth can continue to live and breathe and feed us again (in a material and spiritual sense).
Sometimes the ephemeral quality is a question of seconds!
Like when I did drawing in the sand or wrote poems on the beach near the Pacific Ocean. Only a few seconds after creation the waves washed the impressions away and so it should be!
3. You could say that the spirit of the work is more important than the work itself. It is an offering to nature and to the environment I am in. I feel blessed and want to return the blessings. By doing this (like throwing a rock in the water) I feel not only connected with nature but also with the spirits of the ancestors of human kind = the native earth cultures from we have to learn a real valuable lesson: respect the earth; if you take something from the earth, you have to give something back!
This attitude makes me (and someone like Marilyn Dammann who acts in the same spirit) very different from most installation and landscape artists.
The term Mr. Galántai uses “landscape correction” is already an indication of this difference. We don't want to “correct” the landscape at all, we don't plan interventions to last, we don't introduce “foreign” elements in the landscape. A lot of the so called landscape installation or correction I see as LANDSCAPE RAPE! It is not in tune, in harmony or in balance with nature and with ecology and as such more a translation of the western thinking of men that nature has to be submitted to men for his own pleasure of profit and that art is at the opposite of nature, art=artificial.
4. Maybe this is the main approach I have; the real beauty belongs to nature and not to men, and interventions in the landscape should only underline that beauty. Who makes the finest sculptures or drawings? Nature and not men. We should humble ourselves and give nature our thanks!