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Plant-Art

The Virtual and the Vegetal in Contemporary Performance and Installation Art

Bibliographic Data

ID3033625
AuthorsJ Ryan (0000-0001-5102-4561, corresponding author), John Charles Ryan (0000-0002-9432-1512)
Year2015
Volume2
Issue3
Pages40
Publication date2015-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueResilience A Journal of the Environmental Humanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2330-8117 • E-ISSN: 2330-8117
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.5250/resilience.2.3.0040
OpenAlexW2335839468
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited5

Whether as paintings, sketches, textiles, or craftwork, plants have been integral to Western art through the ages. Florilegia, herbals, botanical illustrations, pressings, and other renderings of whole plants and, very often, of their flowers comprise part of the tradition of plants in art. Closely related to these visual forms are tactile and sensory practices engaging plant materialities and involving, for example, natural dyes from roots, resins turned into adhesives, figurines sculpted from fine wood, and leaves incorporated into the texture of an artwork. A third dimension of the plants-as-art tradition regards the vegetal (the tree, herb, orchid, flower, trunk) as an intrinsically living work of art—a complete botanical form not requiring visual rendering or material manipulation by humans to become an artwork. As such, a plant is a priori a paragon of natural beauty and an expression of harmony, symmetry, color, and other aesthetic qualities in itself. This latter aspect involves the appreciation of botanical nature on its own terms-in its raw state-without the intervention of an artist. These three elements of the tradition of plants in art-let us call them 'visual plant art,' 'tactile plant art,' and 'plants-as-art'- have been transformed by the introduction of digital technologies into creative practices since the 1990s. Hence, there is presently a need to articulate a fourth element of the plants-and-art tradition-the subject of this article-which I will call 'plant-art,' with a conjoining hyphen signifying the inseparability of the two terms. Here, living plants-not necessarily the most aesthetically pleasing ones-are involved fundamentally as agents, actants, and cocreators in digitally based works

Aesthetics · Architectural engineering · Art · Visual arts · Animal and Plant Science Education · Art, Technology, and Culture · Computer Science · Engineering · Plant and Biological Electrophysiology Studies

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Unique citing works5
Citations per year0,83
Citation span2020 - 2026 (7)
Citation velocitycurrent
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 5

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Ethnos_APP • Open Source Project • MIT License • Frontend v2.0.0 • Privacy and Cookies • API Documentation: api.ethnos.app/docs • API Source Code: GitHub • DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17049435 • Frontend Source Code: GitHub • DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17050053 • cruz.rio.br • Expectantes Misericordiae