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Virtue Appreciation and Sustainability in Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch
Nicole Hall
Abstract
This paper is a case study of Olafur Eliasson’s Paris installation of Ice Watch (2014-2018) that coincided with the Climate Change COP-21 conference at the United Nations in 2015, and whose message was poignantly felt as a reminder of global warming, the melting polar regions, and the current environmental crisis. In particular, I explore how and what might we learn from this installation, to consider and rethink the relationship between aesthetic value, ethical value, and the concept of sustainability. Considering that Eliasson’s work requires relational perceptual-intellectual double awareness, it is argued that virtuous appreciation, judgment, and evaluation emerge if engaged for the right kinds of aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic reasons, even if one is left in deep sadness or discomfort regarding the work’s creation. Having responded to objections such as artistic instrumentalism, Ice Watch is vindicated by combining perceptual, multi-sensual experience, and beauty with tragedy, grief, and guilt—emotions derived from intellectual, contextual, and epistemic concerns and also ethical worries, including those that arise from the artist’s actions. I conclude that qualitative, aesthetic experience provides access to understanding nature’s fragility and our own fragility, when accompanied by the right kinds of internally motivated reasons, even in some instances of controversial artworks.
Key Words
environment; aesthetics; installation art; virtue; perception; Olafur Eliasson
1. Introduction
One of the reasons we value the natural environment is for its varieties of beauty,[1] the richness and diversity of places we increasingly know and care about, skies, space, oceans, deserts, prairies, forests, swamps, canyons, deltas, rain forests, lakes, beaches, mountains, gardens, parks, rivers, waterfalls, some built environments, ice, places of worship, creativity, and memory. It sometimes saddens and depresses us (willow trees, bleak moors, stark rockfaces, disused quarries), delights us (ladybirds, octopuses, dragonflies, fireflies, frogs), frightens us (storms, scorpions), distresses or horrifies us (death, disease, viruses), and irritates us (mosquitoes, humidity). We have learned about the natural environment and our relationship with it through art, stories, narratives, poems, and music. We have gleaned scientific theories from idealized models based on it, for example, evolutionary theories, theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, and biophotonics,[2] just as we have wanted to understand the possible objectivity and experience of time.
Whole panoplies of experiences are possible through the natural environment: from aesthetic to moral; from scientifically learned to politically learned; from brute, “real” experience to imagined fantasies and fantasy worlds; through scientific genealogies and disciplines to local history, culture, and storytelling; through cameras, telescopes, binoculars, microscopes, and increasingly sophisticated imaging technologies; and via paintbrushes, concepts, words, metaphors, and lyrics. The aesthetic dimension of experience often contributes to and permeates these experiences to greater or lesser degrees and in various forms.
Nevertheless, the importance of aesthetic value is often thought to be mitigated or limited by ethical value.[3] What at first seems like a platitude, that ethical concerns always and necessarily outweigh aesthetic concerns, is not always and necessarily as obvious as we might think.[4] Indeed, if serious, the aesthetic dimension of our experience of environments reveals simplicities and complexities of our relationship with a wide variety of places, like those mentioned above.[5] Recent discussions in aesthetics have revealed the harmonies and conflicts between aesthetic and moral value in the wider environmental context and positive and negative aesthetic value, but also carry over into environmental works of art, such as land art, earthworks, earth art, and ecological art.[6]
Land art took hold in the 1960s, with the advent of the Earth Art (1969) exhibition at the Andrew Dickson While Museum of Art and Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York.[7] Environmental artists and art include Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), on the Great Salt Lake in Utah, whose ephemeral beauty plays on the imagination and highlights the importance of our relationship with the natural environment; Nancy Holt, whose Sun Tunnels (1976), located in the Utah desert, reframes sunrises and sunsets and constellations such as Perseus and Capricorn using industrial, concrete cylinders; Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield – a Confrontation (1982), which was the growing and harvesting of over 1,000 pounds of wheat on a plot worth $4.5 billion on a two acre plot a couple of blocks away from Wall Street and the World Trade Center, facing the Statue of Liberty. As reported on Agnes Denes’ website: “The harvested grain traveled to twenty-eight cities around the world in an exhibition called ‘The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger’, organized by the Minnesota Museum of Art (1987-90). The seeds were carried away by people who planted them in many parts of the globe.” [8]
More recent examples include Bunjil Geoglyph (2006), by Andrew Rogers, a tribute to the indigenous people of Wathaurong Aboriginal people, in the form of an eagle made of local stone and whose wingspan is 100 meters; Stellar Axis: Antarctica (2006), by Lita Albuquerque, which consists of 99 blue spheres placed on a sheet of ice that matched the size and location of stars above, and whose shift in position commemorates a shift in time and space, reminding us of past and future and the expanse of the universe.
This essay is a case study of Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch, an instance of environmental art that might philosophically and critically help illuminate considerations between aesthetic and moral value, as it relates to art, the natural environment, and our relationship to both. Our guiding questions will be: What can we learn from Ice Watch regarding the development of a sustainable attitude towards environment, taking into consideration aesthetic value and ethical value? How and what might we learn from it to better understand the relationship between aesthetic value, ethical value, and the concept of sustainability?
Divided into three parts, the paper first provides a description of Eliasson’s work and its aesthetic context. One lesson to draw here is about relationality: how artworks frame our relationships with aesthetic properties and objects, on the one hand, and how we sensually experience aesthetic properties, on the other. The paper then offers an analysis of Ice Watch based on a virtues approach, which incorporates the relationality addressed in part one, perceptual-intellectual double awareness, and the importance of aesthetic value. The final section presents objections, for example, that some such artworks are “affronts,”[9] that emphasis should necessarily be on production-oriented ethical criticism, or that attitudinal flaws cause ethical flaws “in the production of such works,” as in contextual conjunctivism.[10] Epistemic reasons, such as artistic instrumentalism and the artist’s own actions, threaten the aesthetic and ethical aims of Eliasson’s installation, especially due to claims of artistic hypocrisy, that is, that the artist engages in behavior that contributes to environmental destruction.
Artistic instrumentalism and hypocrisy in the end might be enough for some to turn away from or condemn Ice Watch, since the means of production and associated environmental impact are in tension with the ecological aims of the work. It is plausible, however, that its aesthetic value, which emerges from perceptual, multi-sensual experience combines with beauty, tragedy, grief, guilt, and a collective sense of responsibility towards the natural environment. It may, furthermore, compel us to consider our own actions and hypocrisies, both collectively and individually, with an aim towards virtuous appreciation and sustainability.
2. Ice Watch
This part of the paper presents Ice Watch’s aesthetic relationality by also emphasizing the literal integration of natural aesthetic properties into Eliasson’s work. It came into existence at a time when public art,[11] site specific art,[12] environmental art,[13] and installation art[14] were already established, having challenged and changed our relationship with artworks contra the aesthetic autonomy of Modernist art.[15] After describing the work and my experience of it, I then highlight its importance by nestling its significance in a Deweyan analysis.
Ice Watch was a series of installations of twelve massive, blueishly transparent iceberg chunks from Greenland, filled with bubbles of trapped air from millennia ago, and of which the public could have situated, mutisensorial experiences and eventually see it melting, disappearing over time. They appeared in Copenhagen (2014), Paris (2015), and London (2018), each with its own particular urban backdrop. At the Copenhagen City Hall Square, Eliasson aimed to highlight the fifth IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) assessment of the United Nations and its consequences. At the Place du Panthéon in Paris, it marked the occasion of COP 21, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change. At both Bankside, outside Tate Modern, and the City of London, outside Bloomberg’s European Headquarters, it marked the occasion of COP 24 that took place in Katowice, Poland, also marking the third anniversary of the Paris Agreement.
This analysis focuses on the work as it was displayed in Paris, since this is where I had daily experience of it, but also because the physical, urban environment in which it was displayed removes it to some extent from the rarefied artworld context, bringing it closer to everyday life. In Paris, the artwork was placed in front of the Panthéon, at the heart of the cinquième arrondissement, the city’s Latin Quarter, surrounded by historical, religious, medical, legal, and prestigious education establishments, from the Lycée Henri IV to the esteemed Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Institut Marie Curie. It houses the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève, namesake of the Église Sainte Geneviève, now the Panthéon. Today, the Panthéon is a temple where grand historical figures lay in rest, including Victor Hugo, Emil Zola, Voltaire, Marie Curie, and, most recently, Josephine Baker, among others. By placing the striking blocks of ice at the heart of a culturally specific place, the artist brought attention to the importance of our engagement with the natural world, juxtaposing nature with urban civility and culture.
Eliasson, alongside geologist Minik Rosing and Kuupik Kleist, former Prime Minister of Greenland, took the twelve chunks of free-floating glacial ice from Greenland’s Nuuk Fjord, brought them to Paris via a tugboat and trucks, and placed them in a circle in front of the Panthéon. The circular pattern, in the form of a clock face, was deliberate, playing on the passing of geological time and the melting of the icebergs in real time. Eliasson wanted to tell the story of climate change to city inhabitants by enabling them to come into direct contact with the collected icebergs, stand amongst them, touch, lick, feel their relative warmth by comparison, and hear them crack and pop. As the ice melted, it released the purity of air trapped from 10,000 years ago, activating the imagination to engage with a slow and vast temporal dimension, a polar landscape, that exceeds the bounds of perception itself.
Imagine walking into the Place de Panthéon, at the beginning of December 2015, with the unknown expectation that you will soon encounter giant blocks of ice. You lift your head from your preoccupations only to see their grand, bright, dazzling presence on a dark, winter evening—the Panthéon has been lit up for the evening and street lamps glow orange. Out of curiosity, you approach them to take a closer look, you notice that there are twelve of them, and you’re immersed in the cool air they give off. They are large enough to hug, walk amongst, even climb on. Contrasting with the pollution of the city, the air around them seems pure, sweet, oxygenated.
You are visually attending to the blocks of ice, alternately focusing on their individual and combined features; in touching it, you feel the coolness through your gloves; you feel small by comparison with their grand stature, and perhaps slightly disturbed by their circular arrangement. This is no ordinary experience, but a continuity of aesthetic experience in which aesthetic properties emerge for you, the perceiving subject. In attending to it, your experience is aesthetic because you have attended to its perceptible, nonaesthetic properties that combine and occasion a response in you, the subject, that is mixed, both sensually pleasing and positive and also disorienting and negative. Some of the concepts and terms used to describe what I experienced are nonaesthetic, others aesthetic, and others a mixture of the two, enabling me to communicate them with you.
This relationship between me and the artwork combined in my immediate encounter with it, which was constituted by its features, my sensual experience and curiosity, and the thoughts and imagination it brought about. My happening on and experiencing the work was different in character from my more ordinary, daily walk to the metro, or from the possibility of the Panthéon being renovated, surrounded by scaffolding and construction tools, as would be the case if Ice Watch had been placed in from the Notre Dame cathedral after the fire in 2019.
‘Experience’ is a term of perception, and perception and aesthetic experience are closely tied. Our modes of perception, our senses, provide us with an opening onto the world of objects, objects that have properties perceivable by us, some of which are aesthetic, some less so. When we perceive something, we experience it: we see, hear, feel, or smell its features. Ice Watch was a work that played on all the senses, including body size, temperature, orientation, and balance. The various complex ways the senses complete and complement each other feature prominently in everyday aesthetics, aesthetics of the natural environment, and site-specific and installation works of art that have advanced artistic practice, particularly in the last century.[16] Such categorical knowledge of how perceptual properties correspond to the role of intellectual structures will be addressed in parts two and three below.
Indeed, Dewey himself celebrated aesthetic experience and value outside the cultural conventions of galleries and museums. Artworks, for him, had been deadened by conventional museum-going experience. Instead, he preferred what the senses revealed within an aesthetic realm: the combined qualities of the artwork, and those we might bring to it. Since art was part of experience in general, a more comprehensive theory of experience in everyday life might provide a richer theory of art. Recognizing aesthetic value in the world around us would contribute to reconciling art and everyday life. Dewey’s theoretical insistence on restoring art to life meant releasing it from its institutional domain[17] and towards both the incorporation of its practices and artifacts into the heart of everyday life and the internalist conception of what aesthetic experience feels like from the inside.[18] This hope for integrating art into the more general experiential flow of experience contributed the evolution both of postmodern approaches to art and creative art practice that stepped out of institutional settings. For example, Arnold Berleant resisted the idea that the aesthetic contemplation of artworks was fundamentally distinct from more widely conceived aesthetic experiences.[19] Moreover, artists turned to artistic practices that resisted, played with, or ignored institutional settings, of which Ice Watch is a descendant.
Dewey resisted the “rise of the compartmental conception of fine art,” which for him also marked Western imperialism and colonization through the reinvention of our relationship to art.[20] This entailed the forging of a new relationship with the material world: “For these [balance and proportion] can be present only when, as in the conduct that has grace or dignity, the act is controlled by an exquisite sense of the relations which the act sustains – its fitness to the occasion and situation.”[21] While for him, the crisis in art was linked to the crisis of the subject in the world, the relationality that emerged from perceiving the world affirmed the state of the surrounding world and the everyday. The idea wasn’t new: how an artist could come to represent the external world had always been a challenge.
Eliasson forced visitors of Ice Watch to encounter nature’s own properties, the very properties painting had sought to represent and abstract away from or dematerialize, with the intention of engaging “real world” properties. For now, it suffices to conclude this section by making the more general point that, in addition to the literal inclusion of natural aesthetic properties, Ice Watch also required relationality between artwork and subject, the multiple and cross-modal senses, bodily orientation, and immersion in the work. In doing so, it imaginatively simulated polar landscapes and vividly brought to bear the negative, tragic sense of sadness, and guilt, as the icebergs melted over time in the heart of the city.
3. Virtue appreciation through perceptual-intellectual awareness
Ice Watch sought the integration of art practice in everyday life that—as John Dewey would have it—seeks the affirmation of the external or surrounding world, linking it with making, shaping, and reshaping artistic production and aesthetic experience. The experience of passers-by leaves no doubt as to the surprise, wonder, and affection that emerged, in addition to sadness and guilt, as the ice melted. Ice Watch’s glacial mass, luminosity, and coolness imaginatively and positively recalled nature’s grandeur and polar landscapes. Its gradual dissolution, loss of majesty, inevitable link with climate change, loss of habitat, and rising seas negatively associated with what we know to be true, with what has been demonstrated by scientific experts in “real life.”
Whether one could veridically perceive these epistemic dimensions of Ice Watch (to include its art historical context) is a moot point. How externally oriented perception or aesthetic perception link to knowledge plays out in discussions about the extent to which perception is permeable, that is, how concepts, beliefs, expectations or other cognitive elements influence experience.[22] This is relevant to discussions about the criteria for the objectivity of aesthetic judgment in both art and nature that we turn to below.[23] I follow Stokes,[24] in thinking that general theories of perception exist to support both sides of the debate, in addition to thinking that there is no reason to assume that they are incompatible.
We might instead invoke a twofoldness of perceptual-intellectual engagement, an idea that parallels Richard Wollheim’s thought in Art and its Objects that twofoldness is illusory in the sense of the experience of the representational surface of a painting and the content represented. Gregory Currie addressed a similar thought about double perceptual-intellectual awareness, in a talk given in 2018 on literary narrative, “Agency and Cause in Stories,” about the fictional representation of a person and the truth of our experience of them in reading a novel.[25]
Perceptual-intellectual engagement is both externally directed and solicits virtues like perceptual and intellectual curiosity, openness, charitability, and honesty in the formation of judgments and beliefs that contribute to forming excellence in character. In the aesthetic context, Matthew Kieran wrote that “a true appreciator is likely, amongst other things, to possess virtues such as courage, open-mindedness, and imaginativeness.”[26]
Virtue approaches to appreciation and aesthetic experience have re-emerged in recent years. Here, I sketch out how a virtue-appreciation approach that is serious about perceptual-intellectual awareness, as it could apply to Ice Watch. My motivation is first related to the thought that one of the reasons we care about the natural environment is due to its aesthetic value; that aesthetic value, even if controversial at times, is a good that merits our attention and respect, rather than being held up as a reason for deep skepticism. My second motivation is in taking care to seriously engage with cultural, social, artistic, or human, relational interaction with environment.
Environmental Virtue Aesthetics has recently been put forward as an alternative approach to aesthetic judgments about environment. It captures the role of the aesthetic as a constitutive good, not only in terms of experience but in terms of creating a meaningful life and meaningful human-nature relationships.[27] Virtue Aesthetics had previously re-emerged in the context of art. For example, David Woodruff has written:
A complete aesthetic theory would include, among other things, an explanation of aesthetic properties and a definition of art. Starting with an aesthetically relevant motivation, a virtue aesthetic theory would give hierarchy to aesthetic virtues, relating them where applicable to intellectual and moral virtues. These virtues would be the basis for the explanation of actions relating to the objects that are appreciated. Finally, such a theory could provide the framework for defining and explaining the nature of art based on appreciation.[28]
Indeed, for Woodruff, insight, sensitivity, and vision enable the full appreciation of an artwork.[29]
Peter Goldie has argued that “the virtues of art production and art appreciation are as much genuine virtues as ethical and intellectual virtues.”[30] On motivation, Goldie supports an internalist position, by reference to John McDowell, stating that even though facts make concepts intelligible, the application of concepts is not explainable only by appeal to facts. Tom Roberts, for his part, explored the thought that “a virtue theory of aesthetics places a special emphasis upon the artist and her character traits, skills, dispositions and motivations” by “carv[ing] a taxonomic distinction among types of aesthetic virtue” and “answer[ing] the question of why artworks that are the products of aesthetic virtue matter to us.”[31] More recently, Roger Pouivet, like Roberts, placed virtue aesthetics at the crossroads of metaphysics and epistemology, arguing that “[T]he objects in this world have sensitive and intentional properties; they signify something.” [32] While products of human activity have meaning because of human intention, deriving meaning from sensitive properties, natural objects have intentional properties attributed to them through sensitive properties.
Environmental virtue aesthetics also promotes the importance of aesthetic value; ethical value in terms of human-nature flourishing and interdependence; the critical analysis of harmonies and tensions between aesthetic value and ethical value; and the importance of our motivations towards appreciation. Respect is central and seen as operating not only based on facts but on our capacities of perception, imagination, sympathetic attention; appreciation links importantly to what we experience both in the narrow, perceptual sense, but also to more than what we factually know. In this way, environmental virtue aesthetics ties perceptual and intellectual experience, hence the requirement for perceptual-intellectual double awareness sketched above. It also ties to motivation, whether to the appreciator’s motivation or to the indeterminate (or somewhat determinate) forces behind the appearance of natural environments. Interesting is the extent to which these virtue approaches overlap when considering environmental art, and the flexibility they afford the harmonies and conflicts between aesthetic and moral value as it relates to ecology and environment. This is because environmental art is often seen to be damaging to the natural environment, with some artists thought to be indifferent to the negative implications of their work.
4. Is Ice Watch an aesthetic and moral affront to nature?
Points of contention have emerged in the general context of ecology and environment as to the importance of scientifically informed ethical value over and above culturally informed aesthetic value. The issue of artistic and aesthetic autonomy is relevant to Ice Watch. Curious about Ice Watch in relation to artistic and aesthetic autonomy is the inclusion of “brute” natural properties that artists in the twentieth century spent time worrying about how to mimic or represent, given the desire to demarcate their work, wider social and cultural factors, and how to reconcile lived experience with artistic practice and everyday experience, to include aesthetic experience.
The point of contention regarding Ice Watch, irrespective of artistic heritage or aesthetically experiencing it, is its carbon footprint. It took 30 tons of CO2e to transport the 80 tons of ice from Nuuk Kangerlua fjord to Paris using six refrigerated containers brought by ship from Nuuk to Aalborg, Denmark, and then by truck to Paris.[33] According to the climate neutral group, this would be equivalent to driving 30 gasoline-powered cars for six months each, 30 electricity-powered cars for one year each, 1,080 Paris-Amsterdam round trips by train, or 39 Amsterdam-Rome round trip flights.[34] The executive carbon footprint and sustainability summary of Ice Watch that was prepared by Julie’s Bicycle, a non-profit organization that collaborated with Eliasson on the project, calculated that the carbon footprint was equivalent to 30 people flying return Paris to Nuuk.[35] Ice Watch, then, is a complex and problematic case because it raises questions about aesthetic and ethical judgments concerning the environment and ecology in addition to the ethical dimensions about experiencing it as “good.” It also raises questions about the moral integrity of the artist.
Allen Carlson has argued against aesthetic autonomy and that much environmental art is an affront to nature.[36] For him, viewing or appreciating nature “as art” is a mistake, since correctly judging nature aesthetically is achieved by perceiving it “as nature” and using the right scientific categories and not “as art”: we are changing an object from the kind of object it is, and therefore making an ontological mistake. Perceiving nature as art is committing a category error that leads to incorrect aesthetic judgment. In this view, then, Ice Watch is both an ethical and an aesthetic affront, since its creation is about having seen the icebergs as art. The artist and the perceiver who positively valences the work are blameworthy, since the category of art ought not be applied to natural objects. While his essay predates Ice Watch, Carlson cites such works as Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969-1970) that “displaced 240,000 tons of rhyolite and sandstone,” and Robert Smithson’s Asphalt Rundown (1969), “constructed by dumping a truckload of asphalt down the side of a quarry,” amongst other artworks that conjured up industrial operations and pollution.[37]
Others have focused on the moral dimension of the work. They see the work as ironic, paradoxical, and morally problematic, given the ends it aimed to achieve and the means that were used to achieve them. For example, Nanicelli writes: “Yet, Ice Watch’s reported thirty-ton carbon footprint is significant, and one might justifiably wonder about whether sending an expedition crew to ‘harvest’ ice blocks in Greenland was an ethically justified means by which to attempt this artistic statement.”[38] Tomas Koblizek writes: “The ethical flaw in the production of the latter [Ice Watch] was identifiable in the background of the very same attitude that it criticized, ecologically irresponsible behavior, and so made the work open to criticism concerning its attitude: it could be seen as an instantiation of hypocrisy.”[39]
Carlson, Nanicelli, and Koblizek bring into focus the issue of the moral responsibility of the artist. Indeed, Eliasson, Heizer, and Smithson present difficult cases. Regardless of how one adjudicates the works, it ought not be said that they have displayed indifference to the negative implications of their work. Eliasson and his collaborators have gone some way to provide information about their carbon footprint and impact; Heizer had grown up in the Nevada desert and was anti-materialist and, wishing “to restore art to pure aesthetics,” resisted the artworld’s market forces in his desire to create a 30-foot wide and 50-foot deep “cut” or “negative space” in the desert sandstone.[40] Smithson’s writings demonstrated a desire to shore up the metaphysical and imaginative dimension of engaging with the natural world away from abstractions and concepts, and decried the excesses of industry and the pouring of asphalt to create roads. (It should relatedly be noted that the work exists on a brownfield site).[41]
There are at least three differences that set Ice Watch apart from Double Negative and Asphalt Rundown: 1) the displacement of natural objects to a different location, 2) a difference in the aesthetic properties of ice rather than sandstone or asphalt, and 3) an explicit desire to make an eco-environmental statement about climate change. What unites the three of them, however, is that they point to what hurts: consumerism, commercialism, the tenacity of industrial power, and a collective responsibility that concerns these aspects of human life. Their work is in keeping with Arnold Berleant’s discussion of the moral status of the artist: that they have a unique obligation to be faithful to the capacities of their art, which includes their integrity of intent over that of the community that judges their work. For Berleant, to untangle the motives or dishonesty of artists is difficult and should be addressed on a case-by-case basis.[42]
Eliasson and Rosing wanted to provide the Parisian community with immediate access to the natural aesthetic properties of Greenlandic iceberg chunks. The Guardian reported that they wanted to “bring the effects of climate change closer to home,” that “in order to create the massive behavioural change needed [to tackle climate change] we have to emotionalise that data, make it physically tangible.” Instead of “fear-based narratives,” Eliasson wanted a “positive narrative to make people change their behaviour” and “provide a glimpse of hope” that “[w]e understand what’s happening, we know exactly what needs to be done and we actually have the means to fix it.” The Guardian article also reports that Eliasson and Rosing point out the fact that 10,000 blocks of ice, like those displayed in the London installation, are falling from the ice sheet every single second.[43]
The largesse of spirit in the perceiver of these works should apply in the adjudication of artworks and artists: the virtues mentioned above in part two apply to both. How are we to discern their integrity, when it seems their intent, or their attitude, has laudable aspects and should not necessarily be taken cynically? It is unclear to me that we should be going after the artists, at least in these cases, given the 37.12 billion metric tons (GtCO2) we emit from fossil fuels and industry that were predicted to have risen 0.9 percent to 37.5 GtCO2 in 2022.[44] One final point we can make is that Ice Watch (and also Double Negative, and Asphalt Rundown) calls our attention to better respecting not only ecology, or the natural environment, but our own individual and collective activities and practices. If we criticize artists for their ethical flaws, we had better mind our own actions and their implications for the natural environment.
5. Conclusions
What can we learn from Ice Watch regarding the development of a sustainable attitude towards environment, taking into consideration aesthetic value and ethical value? How and what might we learn from it to better understand the relationship between aesthetic value, ethical value, and the concept of sustainability? Sheila Lintott wrote that “the highest perception of our time is found in environmentalism, that is, in the awareness that our well-being, in the present and for future generations, individual and collective, lies in the growth of and understanding and respect for nature and a harmonious relationship between humans and nature.”[45] The relationality of art to world, of world to us, affords aesthetic experiences that are complex and sometimes transcendental. Ice Watch offered such complexity and possibility for transcendence. That very complexity and transcendence is cause for assessing our externally directed and internal motivations, not only in our judgment of it as an artwork or Eliasson as an artist, but of our own behavior. My own experience of the work was positive and negative. It was one of beauty and guilt that combined with knowledge of its art-historical trajectory and ecological and environmental knowledge. The interaction between moral and aesthetic values, according to a virtue appreciation approach, shows our regard for the natural environment and its embeddedness with how we live and the decisions we take, also to promote sustainability. Indeed, virtue appreciation is about broadening a moral stance with regard to artworks like Ice Watch, rather than immediate moral condemnation, thinking through artistic intention within its historical, cultural, and environmental context.
Nicole Hall
nicole.annette.hall@gmail.com
Nicole A. Hall writes philosophy as an independent scholar, having completed her PhD under the supervision of Emily Brady at the University of Edinburgh. She has held postdocs at the Institut Jean Nicod, Texas A&M University, the Institut Paul Bocuse, with numerous publications, including in the British Journal of Aesthetics, the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, and in two anthologies, one on 18th century aesthetics and a second on artificial intelligence. She has a particular interest in value theory (aesthetics and ethics), environmental philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of mind and perception and the philosophy of technology. She is currently working on developing a virtues approach to environmental aesthetics and ethics that extends to the everyday, ecological, environmental, and social justice within the context of everyday life and experience. To that end, she uses the virtues approach to analyze human, cultural, engagements with ecology, environment, non-human and other human entities. This approach is diverse and pluralistic, with particular concern for local communities, place, and tradition. This approach is also concerned to focus on mixed, urban and artistic spaces, and the impact of advanced technologies.
Published on July 13, 2024.
Cite this article: Nicole Hall, “Virtue Appreciation and Sustainability in Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 11 (2024), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] See, for example, Emily Brady’s inaugural lecture, “Natural Beauty: a Philosophical Approach,” Edinburgh (2015): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3a74sqn564.
[2] For example, Nancy Cartwright presents the view that fundamental explanatory laws of science describe idealized objects in models rather than reality, in How the Laws of Physics Lie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). In recent years, philosophers have turned their attention to the aesthetics of science, for example, in Milena Ivanova and Steven French (eds.) The Aesthetics of Science: Beauty, Imagination and Understanding (New York: Routledge, 2020).
[3] Cheryl Foster, “Aesthetic Disillusionment: Environment, Ethics, Art,” Environmental Values 1 (1992), 205-215; Marcia Eaton, “Aesthetics, the Mother of Ethics?,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55 (1997), 355-364. See also: Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism, eds. Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2008); Allen Carlson, “Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Requirements for Environmentalism,” Environmental Values 19, 289-314); Glenn Parsons, “Nature Aesthetics and the Respect Argument,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 76 (2018), 411-418.
[4] Maria Alcarez Leon, “Morally Wrong Beauty as a Source of Value,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 40-41(2010), 37-52 and “The Aesthetic Value of Damaged Environments,” Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics 4 (2012), 56-69; Robert Stecker, “The Correct and the Appropriate in the Aesthetic appreciation of Nature,” British Journal of Aesthetics 37 (1997), 393-402, “Epistemic Norms, Moral Norms and Nature Appreciation,” Environmental Ethics 34 (2012), 247-264, Intersections of Value: Art, Nature, and the Everyday (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
[5] Ronald Hepburn, “Trivial and Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 65-80).
[6] Allen Carlson, “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront to Nature?,” Aesthetics and the Environment: the Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2000), 150-163; Emily Brady, “Aesthetic Regard for Nature in Environmental and Land Art,” Ethics, Place & Environment 10/3 (2007), 287-300; Sheila Lintott, “Ethically Evaluating Land Art: Is It Worth It?,” Ethics, Place & Environment 10/3 (2007), 263-278; John Andrew Fisher, “Is It Worth It? Lintott and Ethically Evaluating Environmental Art,” Ethics, Place & Environment 10/3 (2007), 279-286.
[7] In 2019, Cornell University held a 50th anniversary symposium of the 1969 exhibition, titled “Earth: Projections 50 Years after Earth Art”: https://aap.cornell.edu/news-events/earth-projections-50-years-after-earth-art.
[8] http://www.agnesdenesstudio.com/works7.html
[9] Allen Carlson, “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront to Nature?,” 150-163
[10] Ted Nanicelli, “The Interaction of Ethics and Aesthetics in Environmental Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 76/4 Special Issue: The Good, Beautiful, the Green: Environmentalism and Aesthetics, eds. Sandra Shapshay and Levi Tenen (2018), 497-506; Tomas Koblizek, “Ethical Flaws in Artworks, An Argument for Contextual Conjunctivism,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20 (2022), 1-11.
[11] Hilde Hein, “What is Public Art?: Time, Place, and Meaning,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54/1 (1996), 1-7.
[12] Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004); Jason Gaiger, “Dismantling the Frame: Site-Specific Art and Aesthetic Autonomy,” British Journal of Aesthetics 49/1 (2009), 43-58.
[13] See citations in endnotes 8 and 9 above.
[14] See the Symposium Article in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism: Gemma Argüello Manresa, “Towards a Philosophy of Installation Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Criticism 78/3 (2020), 333-338, Elisa Caldarola, “On Experiencing Installation Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78/3 (2020), 339-343; Eleen M. Deprez, “Installation Art and Exhibitions: Sharing Ground,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78/3 (2020), 345-350; Ken Wilder, “Installation Art and the Question of Autonomy: Juliane Rebentisch and the Beholder’s Share,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78/3 (2020), 351-356.
[15] See note 11 above and Ken Wilder citation in note 13.
[16] For more on the relationship between the senses, and the senses and aesthetics, see for example Carolyn Korsmeyer, “A Tour of the Senses,” British Journal of Aesthetics 59(4), 357-371; Dustin Stokes, “Aesthetics and Cognitive Science,” Philosophy Compass 4/5 (2009), 715-733; Dustin Stokes, Mohan Matthen, and Stephen Biggs (eds.), Perception and its Modalities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Dustin Stokes, “Rich Perceptual Content and Aesthetic Properties,” Evaluative Perception, eds. Anna Bergquist and Robert Cowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, 177-193).
[17] Tom Leddy and Kalle Puolakka, “Dewey’s Aesthetics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds).
[18] James Shelley, “The Concept of the Aesthetic,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed).
[19] Arnold Berleant, “L’art de connaître un paysage,” Diogène 2011(1-2), 74-90.
[20] Ibid., 8.
[21] Ibid., 49.
[22] John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972); Arthur C. Danto, “The Pigeon Within Us: a Reply to Three Critics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59/1 (2001), 39-44; Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York: Phaidon Press, 1960); Sam Rose and Bence Nanay, “Danto on Perception,” eds. Jonathan Gilmore and Lydia Goehr, Blackwell Companion to Arthur Danto (Oxford: Blackwell, 2022, 92-101); Dustin Stokes, “Aesthetics and Cognitive Science,” Philosophy Compass (2009) 4/5, 715-733; Nick Zangwill, “In Defence of Moderate Aesthetic Formalism,” The Philosophical Quarterly 50/201 (2000), 476-493.
[23] Kendall Walton, “Categories of Art,” The Philosophical Review 79/3 (1970), 334-367; Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment: the Appreciation of Nature, Art, and Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2000).
[24] Dustin Stokes, “Aesthetics and Cognitive Science,” Philosophy Compass (2009) 4/5, 715-733.
[25] Gregory Curie, “Agency and Cause in Stories,” talk on 04/12/2018 recorded here: https://soundcloud.com/user-897145586/agency-and-cause-in-stories-gregory-currie; Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (London: Penguin Books, 1968).
[26] Matthew Kieran, “The Vice of Snobbery: Aesthetic Knowledge, Justification and Virtue in Art Appreciation,” The Philosophical Quarterly 50 (2009), 255.
[27] Jennifer Welchman, “Aesthetics of Nature, constitutive Goods, and Environmental Conservation: a Defense of Moderate Formalist Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 76, 419-428.
[28] David M. Woodruff, “A Virtue Theory of Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 35/3, 25.
[29] Ibid., 27.
[30] Peter Goldie, “Virtues of Art and Human Well-Being,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 82 (2008), 179.
[31] Tom Roberts, “Aesthetic Virtues: Traits and Faculties,” Philosophical Studies: an International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 175/2 (2018), 430.
[32] Roger Pouivet, “From Virtue Epistemology to Virtue Aesthetics,” The Journal of Value Inquiry 52/3 (2018), 374.
[33] https://icewatchparis.com/.
[34] https://www.climateneutralgroup.com/en/news/what-exactly-is-1-tonne-of-co2/.
[35] https://res.cloudinary.com/olafureliasson-net/image/upload/img/static/icewatch/paris/press/Ice_Watch_Carbon_Footprint.pdf.
[36] Allen Carlson, “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront to Nature?,” Aesthetics and the Environment: the Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2000, 150-163).
[37] Ibid., 152.
[38] Ted Nanicelli, “The Interaction of Ethics and Aesthetics in Environmental Art,” 497.
[39] Tomas Koblizek, “Ethical Flaws in Artworks,” 6.
[40] https://www.moca.org/visit/double-negative, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-12-10-ca-15620-story.html.
[41] Nicole A. Hall, “On the Cusp of the Sublime: Environmental and Artistic Sublimity”, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 43/2 (2020), 15.
[42] Arnold Berleant, “Artists and Morality: Towards an Ethics of Art,” Leonardo 10/3 (1977), 199-202.
[43] Ref.: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/dec/11/icebergs-ahead-olafur-eliasson-brings-the-frozen-fjord-to-britain-ice-watch-london-climate-change.
[44] Ref.: https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissions/#:~:text=Global%20carbon%20dioxide%20emissions%20from,by%20more%20than%2060%20percent.
[45] Sheila Lintott, “Ethically Evaluating Land Art: Is It Worth It?,” Ethics, Place and Environment 10/3 (2007), 277.