The environmental movement set out to conceive the theoretical and formal appearance of the future world. This is not chiefly an economic, political or scientific issue, but rather primarily a cultural task. Rightly understood, the environmental movement is the cultural movement at the turn of the century. Its basic attitude is visionary, critical and keen to contradict, prospective and innovative. In order to achieve its aims, it breaks taboos and acts radically; it dismantles traditional barriers and constantly explores new, uncertain avenues; it thinks both plurally and holistically. A spectrum of basic conditions is thereby defined which, particularly in the 20th century, is associated with the production of art. It is in this parallelism of attitude and not in the orientation towards universally agreeable forms, in the use of ‘names’ suffused with propaganda and in the search for biologically substantiated aesthetic norms, that those links can be found which could facilitate a bridge between artistic and environmental strategies.

(Excerpt from the symposium report Kunst und Ökologie by Dieter Bogner, in: Kunstforum International, issue 93, Cologne 1988, p. 56)