Outside In: Reflections of British Landscape in the Long Anthropocene

The genre of landscape, earth, and land art from the 1960s and 1970s, and more recent ecological art, are typically separated in the field of art history. While there are good reasons to distinguish these modes in terms of materials and purpose, and to avoid seeing them as superseding one another teleologically, I argue in favour of their comparison and linkage. All are practices of picturing and manipulating the Earth. All are part of the Anthropocene conceived as beginning in the Industrial Revolution. Focusing on the widespread habit of moving landscape—“the outside”—into structures, art galleries, and institutional matrices in work by Chris Drury, Simon Starling, and John Gerrard, I argue that in specific practices and as categories, eco art, land art, and landscape are active and imbricated actants in the Anthropocene