Radical Nature might seem like an odd title for an exhibition that resembles similarly to a school Geography lesson, adopting the unique style offered by 1970s film footage; overcast, out-dated. However, there is something radical in the eccentric and obsessive explanation Richard Buckminster Fuller gives for his geodesic dome. Subversive in its resistance to the picturesque, this exhibition gives superficiality less light than might be shone on a superfluous weed, an indicative statement that suggests why figures on display have remained marginalised.

Effective use of video communicates a wide range of work: Land Art, environmental activism, experimental architecture and utopianism. Less well-known participants in this area of study, like the Centre for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), are presented next to heavyweight names from the history of art. Like Luke Fowler’s surreal portrait of the Bogman Palmjaguar: an investigation into a paranoid schizophrenics’ relationship with the wilderness of North East Scotland, the area of his retreat. Observing the social outcast amongst natural surroundings ‘normalizes’ his behaviour and unearths issues about not only mankind’s effect on nature but also its effect on itself. Documentary footage of the construction of Robert Smithson’s influential Land Art intervention, Spiral Jetty, acts as a sturdy anchor that secures the relevance of this exhibition for a broader audience and a welcome respite from more specific works. Certainly, Lara Almarcegui’s slideshow of photographed sites due to be developed for the 2012 Olympics would seem dense even to the most seasoned urban explorer!

Overall, this exhibition is an interesting retrospective of art and architecture’s interpretation of nature and natural issues from the last 40 years. Amusingly, the counter-cultural element to this topic seems just as prevalent now as it did 40 years ago and hints at how the environment as a cultural concern is still peripheral to society. However, symptomatic of presenting a cross section of such a broad topic a visitor might question how one specific piece relates to another. Nonetheless, the experience garners cohesion from its very location. The areas of water and forested conservatories that inhabit the concrete zone of the Barbican blur the display of work inside with the environment outside and contribute to the rooting of this exhibition in the real world. Thus, personifying a symbiosis between urbanity and nature, the environment and culture, that has after all been around for a while.

-- BFerguson

All Images Courtesy the Artists and Barbican Gallery

Images from Top to Bottom: (Richard Buckminster Fuller, US Pavilion for Expo 67, 1967; Mark Dion Mobile Wilderness Unit - Wolf, 2006; Joseph Beuys. Honey Pump at the Workplace (Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz), 1977.)