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‘Naturalism' as a referent seems to connote some degree of pristine honesty - a frankness of representation. It also hints at the subject, 'the natural'. With the infiltration of modernity into all spheres of existence, its infection of the concept of 'the natural' was inevitable. So what could we mean by 'natural' today?
Art, the narcissus of life and nature in its intense gaze, observation and reflection, has seen the need for a reclarification of this concept in flux. Today, 'the natural' would refer just as much to traffic lights, government institutions and commodities as it would to grass, leaves and forests. In Sydney, buildings, not nature, dominate the view.
Eight Sydney artists harnessed this dynamic and ever-changing conundrum of "what constitutes nature?" into a comprehensive documentation of modern day nature in the exhibition The New Naturalism which was recently shown at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. Curated by John Young, the exhibition displayed the talents of a wide spectrum of three generations of Sydney artists, all of whom take different approaches to the question "what is nature?".
New Naturalism, in the words of John Young, is more of a 'sensibility' or an 'attitude' than a style, and the new nature is the nature of the city, of the constructed, the fabricated, and not that of the organic. This is not to say, however, that the New Naturalists attempted to figuratively conceptualise the city; rather, they have endeavoured to acknowledge some immanent force of change or process as itself 'natural'.
In their work the New Naturalists use a method of quotation, but quotation in the most subtle sense of the word. The works do not make specific references... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline